APPLICATION OF PROCEDUREA Lecture given on 5 July 1950Gaining Experience The field of application is one which in any science has a variability. If people made ammeters from year to year exactly the same as they did the year before, very soon the ammeter would be obsolete, although the basic laws regarding ammeters and their sensitivity would not have changed. We are dealing with an entity, an engram, the anatomy of which we know, and we are dealing with axioms and basic applications which we know pretty well. In the higher field of application we can’t help but get improvements. Things keep getting found out. In the past we had a situation, early in therapy particularly, where the auditor just kept slugging; and if he kept asking for it long enough eventually the case would open, various types of engrams would start to erase and he would have a release and then a clear. Now we are trying to open a case in about five hours with relatively little skill on the part of an auditor. An auditor at this time still has to know too much to audit, but I will not agree with anybody who says that they cannot in a few weeks of training and a very few months of experience quite adequately handle patients. Quite a bit of it has had to depend upon the auditor’s experience. That is why I encourage auditors from time to time to take on cases other than the one they are currently working, to try to get their hands into other cases, so that they get a generalized picture, not a single picture of one case. Those people who are working one case only may have a difficult case to work and, having it, they know the principles but they can’t see them in action. This puzzles them. It makes them feel as though something has slipped past them or they aren’t doing something right. They can feel no self- confidence or sureness of themselves because they don’t see the principles working. A good analogy for this would be that they know how to build a radio set but they have never looked at a piece of wire. So their skill does not increase; it deteriorates because they have concentrated on just one computation on the part of one patient and he is difficult. After a while the case by being worked and worked and worked will eventually open. But by the auditor not seeing what he is working in the first place the case has less and less chance of being opened. On the other hand, an auditor who takes a case which is moving on the time track and clips out an engram has personally seen an engram reduce in another human being and he feels very good about it. This auditor, never having seen a difficult patient, is apt to swing to the other extreme and say, "Well, Dianetics is very, very simple. There’s nothing to it. All you do is so- and- so, and the next thing you know the case comes right up and erases and you get all the painful emotion off it and you’ve got a clear and he’s a remarkable looking specimen. It’s a wonderful thing. I can’t understand why you people are having any trouble." But this other poor auditor who is working a dub- in asks the preclear for the engram in which he is stuck and the person says, "Oh, I’m stuck, I’m stuck, I’m stuck, I’m stuck." "Have you got any somatics?" "No." "Well, go over ‘Stay here." ’ "All right. ‘Stay here, stay here, stay here." ’ "Have you got a somatic?" "No." "Well, let’s go to the earliest moment of pain or unconsciousness." "All right. ‘I’m killed, I’m killed, I’m killed." "Have you got a somatic?" "No." So this auditor then has to adjudicate whether or not he is working a pain shut- off case or a dub- in, or maybe he thinks he is working a dub- in that is merely a pain shut- off. In short, it still requires judgment and experienced observation. Then there’s the case where the auditor has run a preclear through an engram. The preclear has obviously had a somatic and been agitated and the engramic content adequately explains why he has been aberrated on the subject of airplanes. Then the auditor brings him up to present time and says brightly, "Now, how did you like that?" And the preclear says, "What engram?" "Well, that thing you were running through." "I don’t know whether that was an engram or not." And the auditor says, "Well now, please, you ran it. Did you feel the pain?" "Oh, yah, but I often have pains in my back!" So, the adequacy of one’s auditing depends upon experience. But it also depends on another factor: my ability to communicate to you what you need in order to do your job. And I am pitching at that with everything I’ve got. It is up to me to give you the information; it’s also up to you to absorb it and keep it in a flexible state where you can use it without being rote. I take this responsibility somewhat along in this line: "Well, let’s see, this is the number of people I have trained to audit. I’ve trained them right up close with personal instruction over a certain period of time. They audited pretty well, and they had a lot of troubles." Then I think, "It’s a funny thing but they’ve always asked me about a certain kind of a case." So I try to make it a point to explain that kind of case. In communicating to you, what I find out very often is that I can synthesize information which I already have and that makes it easier for me. This is inevitable in trying to teach anything. There are a lot of people in Dianetics who are practicing it as an art, and it is an art. The application of any science is an art. They are applying it very nicely, by ear. If somebody wants to know what they are doing, they say, "Well, that was easy. That was an engram and it had a bouncer." The first person may ask, "But how did you know it had a bouncer in it?" "Oh, I don’t know. It’s just obvious when someone gets a bouncer." It may look like pure magic to the first person, because the second one has called the bouncer before the preclear got there. What told him whether the bouncer was there or not was actually his perception of it. It is obvious to him. It depends on his experience with it. But now let’s pin him down, what exactly does he observe that tells him there’s a bouncer there? Well, in trying to explain it, he not only finds out what he is looking at but he also finds out that he has got a better method of locating a bouncer, if he is worth anything at all as a practitioner. In the matter of a bouncer, one factor is the observation that most of the people who are doing topnotch auditing have had experience in writing. Suddenly we try to communicate this procedure to people who don’t write and we discover that they have no dialogue sense. The subject of dialogue sense is something that should have been mentioned long ago. It should be in the textbook but was overlooked. It was taken for granted that human beings know how human beings talk; however, we find out on examination that human beings don’t know how human beings talk. The only obvious reason a recent case was upset is that his auditor had never been told about dialogue. Evidently she had run out one half of a convulsive engram, and then she had run out several halves of convulsive engrams in the case without ever realizing that there must have been another half talking. I worked on the case and found out that there was obviously somebody else talking in the incident because we suddenly picked up a concatenation of speech, and were in communication with another valence which had been blank previously. So there is a plot sense and a dialogue sense at work that says, "This must have gone on before and continued afterwards, and this is about a subject which must have been discussed often. There is also something here which implies a great deal of chronic emotional stress, so what is the subject of it?" We look it over from the standpoint of a plot. Itb a few lines out of a play, now let’s dub in the rest of the play. Recognizing what it is, and playing ball with the file clerk, not asking for a specific aberration but asking for the mechanical reason why this case won’t resolve, we can contact a lot of information which will assist in the case. This doesn’t mean you have to be a fiction writer, but it does mean that you had better sharpen up your senses a little bit. When somebody says, "Get out, get out, get out, get out, I hate you, I hate you," don’t say, "Well, that’s fine, that’s an engram." Find out how much dialogue occurs before the "Get out, get out." Why did he have to get out? What was the upset? Develop a sense of looking at the patient and listening to what he is running and realizing what has gone before and what goes afterwards, knowing more or less who is there. You could also ask the file clerk who is there and you will get an answer, or you can send the somatic strip to the earliest part of the engram and you will get some sort of an answer. You can get aid this way, but you have got to help out by knowing and understanding what you are running because you might be able to send him back two phrases earlier than the somatic strip can reach. You know instinctively there must be earlier phrases. You don’t pick up a coitus at its end, you pick it up at the beginning. Furthermore, there may be more on the beginning of it, and there might even be another coitus right before that which you could judge by the context of the coitus which is here. It takes plot sense. The type of plot sense required is not very extensive, but this is what makes it look so mysterious sometimes. One sees the auditor working and all of a sudden he says, "All right, go to the bouncer." He knows, having looked over the pattern and diagnosis of these particular human beings, that these quarrels wind up with a fight and Mama kicks somebody out. That is usually the kind of action that she takes. So he just says, "Well, go to the bouncer," and of course it’s there. Some auditors have had the experience of having people accuse them of telepathy, but it is simply because of a developed sense of dialogue from watching engrams and guessing what is coming next. For instance, there is the phrase "That’s all I’ve got to say on the subject," and the engram stops there. But one finds out later that there was an hour and a half of talk after that— not realizing that human beings, when they are quarreling, say such ridiculous things as, "That’s all I’ve got to say, I am through, I’m not going to mention it again, there is no more to it," and then they continue with, "And furthermore I think...." So, you can get an idea of the dramatic personnel that you get in a diagnosis just by asking the person to tell you about his family, and you suddenly spot: "Here’s a woman who is mean to children. She’s probably frigid sexually. Aha! Non- coitus chain." Or, here is somebody who is terribly occluded as to anything his mother did anywhere, all up and down the bank. But he has this lurking suspicion that his wife is always playing around, and the evidence is quite contrary. So, you conclude from this little piece of evidence, "Well, the odds are in favor of the fact that Mama might not have been the soul of virtue that some people thought she was." You don’t want to get carried away with such a thing and push the computation down his throat, because he is liable to resent the idea that you have called his mother something derogatory. But you want to keep your eye open for it. Or if the case stops running well, you might have to take a shot in the dark. Let’s say that the husband’s name is Bill, you could say something like, "If Bill knew about this he would die." Or if you are working a Junior case, "If Bill knew about this I would just die," and sometimes the patient will jump two inches off the couch if you hit the right one. It appears as if you have just plucked this thing out of the air. Only you haven’t done that, you have looked around the bank and decided that Mama was pretty aberrated sexually. Women who are aberrated sexually are quite often promiscuous. It doesn’t follow automatically but it is an indicator, and if she is mean to children that is another indicator. Maybe there was a lover, it belongs in that field. The second dynamics has two divisions, and you will find out that people who violently dislike children are quite often upset in their own sexual activity. It does not follow absolutely, but it is an indicator. The second dynamic can be blocked selectively. It can be blocked on not liking children but being very normal about sex apparently. But that fact does have an indicator value. You are looking for hints about this case, so plot the person’s life. Try to figure out what Mama and Papa did. You know they were divorced when the baby was 6 months of age, let’s say. Well, why were they divorced? Here’s the young boy, now what did Mama tell him about women? We find that the cant in this case is that "Women are no good, don’t have anything to do with them." And let’s say we have found out definitely that she was very jealous of this boy. She didn’t like to have other people like him. We go back to the divorce when he was 6 months old. Why were they divorced? It has never been mentioned in the family. It’s probably jealousy, and particularly if it is confirmed by the fact that the patient has himself been jealous. There may be a lot of drama in there about Mama accusing Papa of having gone around with some other woman, and if this is the case you will have the plot of the prenatal bank. It is not absolutely necessary to plot. It is simply an indicator. It is what makes sense at the moment. If somebody says, "Who are you, I would like to know?" you know that something has just been said to that person. It is as simple as that. It is a fortunate thing that engrams behave in the following fashion: The first time a word is spoken in the bank is usually the most aberrative moment, or the first time a pan is dropped, and so on, forms the beginning of a chain. Take the word "the" and find the earliest times it appeared in the bank. Most of the "the’s" in the case are lighter locks although they are still in engrams, but by the time you have gotten the first six or eight off a case, "the" has a tendency to be nonaberrative, and it is actually lucky that an aberree says the same thing over and over and over, because the first four times you run it out will kill the next ninety. Sometimes you have an engram floating up above the bank, all by itself, such as birth or a tonsillectomy, and it will come off by itself with yawns, but normally you have to be very early in the basic area to get yawns off. An engram can, of course, reduce without yawns with the unconsciousness still on the engram. The words are still there, but the engram is no longer aberrative if that engram has actually reduced and not been beaten into recession. The reason basic- basic is so important is because it contains the lowest common denominator of all engrams, which is unconsciousness. Once a preclear is in his own valence in the basic area and you have clipped his own unconsciousness out of it, you have to some degree reduced the unconsciousness all the way up the line. And it’s unconsciousness which is holding the material down as well as pain. The reason you go into the early part of the bank is to clip out the unconsciousness. Once you get the patient yawning, the unconsciousness is coming off. It’s very important to get the unconsciousness off as early as you can in a case. Then after a while with basic- basic out, you will be able to hit almost any engram anyplace in the bank and reduce it. So, realize that you will occasionally encounter an engram floating free which when run will erase and will come off with yawns and unconsciousness. Quite often you will find the patient is stuck in one of these things. You knock it out and start down into basic- basic and now you will find that basic- basic is there, that it has unconsciousness on it and the case runs as usual. I have had several cases where birth was latched on to a prenatal, and birth would not erase without this prenatal being erased first, after which you could get down to the rest of the case and run that. That is not a variable. That is a phenomenon. There is no accounting for it, but I have seen it often. Sooner or later if you ask the file clerk for the incident which has to be reached in order to resolve this case, suddenly the file clerk hands you birth. You start to run birth and it runs and runs, then the person starts yawning and you say, "What’s happening?" Don’t think now that your case is going to be an easy case to take over. I have seen a case start in like this, get birth out with no trouble, get one engram out of the prenatal area just like that, get two operations out further up the track, and then settle down to be a solid dub- in! Here’s a demonstration of a type of technique that has very possibly been overlooked in handling cases in trouble.
The general aspect of the reactive bank in this case shows that there is a computation in there that says, "Don’t touch it," or, "I’m not going to touch it. There’s no one who can possibly convince me of it." Here’s another demonstration of working someone who hasn’t been getting on too well.
[aside to pc’s auditor] Does she have prenatal visio? Aud: Ron, she’s had practically no auditing. She works pretty long hours and we were the most peace- loving couple you ever met in your life on close to 11 years. Suddenly along comes Dianetics, and all we have to do is have enough time for a Dianetic session, and there’s an argument that chokes it off. I believe it is as much my fault as hers.
It happens occasionally that husbands and wives the instant they start into therapy mutually get the horrible reaction of kicking into restimulation the reactive mind partner, who heretofore has not been wholly out of sight but not much in restimulation. It is quite unusual though for anybody to live in peace and then have something like that happen. However, we will straighten that out shortly. Okay. Here’s another demonstration.
By running that "control yourself" out of the bank this preclear will go where she is supposed to on the time track and do what she is supposed to do. Until that is done, she won’t get many results. The matter of diagnosis has been to some degree overlooked in all these cases. In most cases that are difficult, the "control yourself" mechanism is laid in with a club. There is enough of it to upset the situation considerably. "Control yourself" seems to do a very odd thing. It jumps in between the file clerk and "I." For instance, it was known to investigators in the field for a long time that a schizophrenic got weird illusions about how he was thinking. In Dianetics we don’t have to go to a schizophrenic to find oddities. We could take almost anybody walking down the street and find demon circuits. I was working a gentleman recently who was answering flash yes/ no questions with playing cards. I would ask him for a flash reply and he would look at a playing card to see if it had a yes or a no written on it. You will also find cases where the engram is written on tape like a teletype, and it will go clickity- click across the line and the person will read the engrams off the tape. Sometimes a demon circuit will set up pictures instead of words. Somebody fed a preclear some oxygen one day and he started seeing iceboxes and so forth! Evidently it had some effect upon a late circuit and must have brought it forward. You would be amazed and appalled to look inside the head of some psychotic to find out that this is what he is looking at all the time. Then there are vocal circuits. Somebody may have a vocal circuit which both the auditor and the preclear mistakenly think is the file clerk. It may not be working very well, but the auditor gets this flash answer saying yes or no. Or, for example, "Who’s your ally?" "Aunt Mabel." And he says, "That’s funny, I never had an Aunt Mabel." Or the auditor says, "Name an incident." "Horseback riding." "Did you fall off a horse?" "No." "Where is the horse?" "Right there. I see this horse! A horse just got handed to me!" This phenomenon even occurs in people who are quite normal. One also gets circuits set up which give the person prenatal visio, or circuits that will take the engram circuit, bend it around three corners and hand it back, and by the time it gets back it is fully and completely edited and altered. Engrams don’t reduce, somatics don’t turn on right; occasionally the engram rides in one location and the somatic is someplace else, if at all, and it’s a very confused picture. This does not mean that these cases are dub- ins, but this phenomenon does occur with a lot of people who are dub- ins. They give the auditor all kinds of pictures and information that the auditor thinks may be valid, so he tries to run them. In the past we used to simply run these people and sooner or later their mechanisms fell apart and they went right on through. Recently I made a series of tests on dub- ins and found that the reason one can’t work a lot of people is the self- control mechanism. A demon circuit that says, "You control yourself," sets it up in circuitry so that the person has a portion of the analyzer devoted to the regulation of the individual. A heavy "control yourself" sets up an interposition between the real file clerk and "I." A circuit is dropped between the two of them. As a result the flashes which such a person gets are often quite unreliable and this type of circuitry is responsible for the strange behavior of the file clerk on occasion. Another thing that is responsible for a file clerk’s strange behavior is the auditor’s demand that the Sle clerk predict and compute, which the file clerk does not do. The file clerk will answer yes/ no questions which he has in the files, and he will give names, numbers and phrases out of engrams. He is pretty accurate, and when he is really working he does very well. The question of altitude is very critical on those patients who have a "control yourself" mechanism. The auditor has got to have lots of altitude to work this kind of a patient to bypass such a "control yourself" mechanism. But he doesn’t have to have a lot of altitude to get the circuit and knock it out. The analytical mind is potentially in control of the organism. It needs a circuit which says "Control yourself" about the same as a monocycle needs a fifth wheel. The "control yourself" mechanism is very definitely there as an inherent part of the analyzer. But a circuit can be set up with it which reinforces it completely out of proportion so that it shoves "I" out of control of the body and takes over as a parasitic control. An engram can do nothing to the human body unless a proper slot and circuit exists for it first in the human mind allowing the engram to come forward against fluid control switchboards or valences and throw them out of line. A person learns by mimicry, therefore mimicry is a natural mechanism. However, if an engram comes forward and moves the person way out of line, there is a valence now in the place of "I" where there should actually be a mimicry. That the human mind consists of nothing but a composite of insanities is a very clumsy, unworkable and untrue statement. However, the analytical mind contains the potentialities which when exaggerated become insanities. Insanity is always a superexaggeration of some natural ability. The ability is there whether the engram is there or not. The engram exaggerates the abilities of the analytical mind by setting up a normal circuit into a permanent soldered- in connection which can no longer be kicked in and out, a necessary action if a person were to behave rationally. In this way a "control yourself" circuit sets itself up permanently, so that the patient, particularly a dub- in case, has the ability to travel back down the time track all by himself, and talk in terms of "I’d like to do autotherapy on myself." That is a species of "control yourself" that goes along the lines of "I have to handle this myself, I have to do everything myself." This "control yourself" mechanism is so aberrative as far as smooth therapy is concerned, completely aside from what it may do to an individual himself, that it either requires an enormous amount of altitude to get past, or it has to be tackled as a specific aberration. And this is the one exception whereby one tackles a specific aberration, because it comes so close to being a mechanical arrangement that it has to be tackled. Get a dub- in case that won’t move easily, that one is having altitude trouble with, that doesn’t work smoothly or roll on the track, knock out the self- control mechanism as an engram, and the case will then be able to reassume as "I" that portion of the analytical mind which has been usurped, and will be able to run smoothly in therapy and be a lot happier. If there are dozens of similar incidents, one always gets the first incident. One gets the wording of it, usually, somewhat in the way that I was questioning the preclears earlier in this lecture. I didn’t question them for the length of time an auditor would, it was merely a demonstration of the direction one takes in finding out who was controlled, who had to becontrolled, and so on. In this way the auditor will usually find what the dramatization is early in the bank which makes the self- control mechanism set itself up to usurp the mind. All the above cases had a "control yourself" circuit that was probably put in with considerable pain. Take that out and the file clerk will start handing out material, the somatic strip will start running, and the case will go along rather smoothly. The rough part of the case is getting the self- control mechanism out of the early part of the case. An "I must control myself" may be in the bank with the line of "You must control yourself." And, "You must control yourself" will fasten on to a piece of "I must control myself" in the analytical mind. These things may cross up. If anybody has ideas that people ought to be self- controlled in the family and insists on them very hard, sooner or later the auditor is going to get this type of circuitry. Another way an auditor can spot a "control yourself" mechanism is not by memory at all, but merely by working the preclear and asking the file clerk. The person may not have dub- in, and he may not have other symptoms, but when the auditor asks the file clerk for a bouncer, he may be handed a denyer. And when he asks for August he may get July. And when the auditor asks the preclear whether or not he had ice cream for dinner, the auditor may be given the answer no, although he sat there and ate with the preclear and knows very well that he had ice cream for dinner. But that’s the file flash. The auditor is working with circuits which are not capable of upsetting the file clerk’s answers except under an extremely live, restimulated "control yourself" type of engram. When that engram gets thoroughly enough stirred up, you then have a dub- in. And that is a probable basis of dub- in. If further testing substantiates this, we will have dub- in handled. A dub- in case will very often get very strange substitutions for things. His visio goes off along with other things, causing an imaginary switch, and the reason the auditor can’t get to it is because "control himself" is in there. Dub- in runs in a peculiarly recognizable way. Phrases transpose and then they go back together again. Then the person runs one part of an engram and thinks it’s something else, or he runs one beginning and five endings. (However, I have run people who maintained that everything they were running was dub- in, but the incidents had a somatic and all the requisites, the contents of them were aberrative and the aberration was manifested in the case.) That is one aspect of dub- in. But one can’t group all the tricks which a human mind, that fantastically capable article, can do into one bundle. A dub- in is liable to go off in any direction. It can easily be seen. Don’t worry about a case that is running off something that has got sequence, it’s got somatic, it reduces, it follows the behavior of engrams and so on, no matter if the preclear has pictures or he’s reading it off a tape. I want to cover one other subject in this lecture and that is the subject of being commanded into a valence. It is of interest because, for instance, there is Grandma telling the little baby all the time, "Oh, you’re just like me, aren’t you?" and then Grandma ups and dies. And there he is, parked in the valence strip with an emotional charge hanging over it. These things can start out in the prenatal bank like, "I’ve got to pretend I’m somebody else," or, "I’m just beside myself," "I can’t be myself," "You’re just like everybody else." Such commands are the foundation for a valence command. Later on it takes a relatively light statement from allies such as, "You’re just like your father," "You’re just like me," or "You’re just like your mother." For instance, in the earlier demonstration one of the preclears had a double on that. Mama had said that when she was bad she was like her father, and when she was good she was like her. Mother had shifted her over into these two valences, and she was manifesting a somatic because she wasn’t able to dramatize it properly. She dramatized it one way which is what the engram said she had to do, so when she went out of that valence, that broke the dramatization and she got sick at her stomach. The pain tried to keep her in. That computation was going on because she had been commanded into two valences, therefore she was out of her own valence. There are patients who will take the valence of everyone to whom they speak. Certain types of commands command them to be in the valence of whomever is sitting in front of them, such as, "You’re just like me," or "You’re just like your father," said while the parents were quarreling. Another one is the in- law trouble engram: "You’re just like your father, he was always a drunken bum, he is no good whatsoever," or, "You’re just like your mother, always picking on people," which sometimes causes a person to move over into his grandmother’s valence, and also slightly into his mother’s valence, and start picking on people. Valence walls have bouncers in them. The person can bounce out of his own valence. An example of this could be something like, " You are a bad boy, why aren’t you like Charlie Jones?" He resists it, but he has nevertheless got a bouncer. Another one would be, "You’re never like me, I don’t like you." It is perfectly valid to erase material, but it doesn’t do a lot of good to deintensify a valence. The best thing to do is to try to get the person out of it. To do this one has to get him early, and get basic- basic out. Erase the commands that order him into those valences and generally deintensify the valence on the computation of valences rather than upon deintensification of the valence itself. This is because one can run for hundreds of hours deintensifying a valence, but one may only have to rlln for 10- 15 hours to get a person into his own valence. |