THE TONE SCALE IN ACTION

A lecture given on 14 July 1950

On the Way to Clear

Anything that an engram can do can be done only because the analytical mind has ways and means of doing it and does it naturally anyway. The engram exaggerates and punches in all the abilities, and renders certain abilities in the analytical mind chronic. A person can have a manic saying, "I’m going to write the great play," or "You’ve got to write the greatest book in the world. I know you can write it," but if his analytical mind is not capable of writing the greatest book, trouble occurs because it keeps what ability there is to write the greatest book continually soldered into the connectors. So now he has to write the great book, he has no choice in it, the engram says so.

In the past, people have made a psychological error in believing that people did things only because they had neuroses and psychoses. They watched the analytical mind in action, they saw that sometimes it went out of alignment, and then they assumed because something had pushed it out of alignment that that was the only way it could think, which was a short way of looking at it because the mind normally goes all the way up and down the tone scale in the business of living.

If a person can do something but happens to have an engram that coincides with it, this gives that person a compulsion to do what he can do and cuts down the ability to do it because an engram has unconsciousness in it. Knock out the engram and the analytical mind can and will do it, if it is necessary to do.

Then we have the endocrine system. The endocrine system is a very interesting gimmick. It has this mechanism of turning on certain endocrine responses in order to encourage the body to do what it ought to do at that moment, or during that period.

Now, if a Kodiak bear suddenly walks forward and slaps the hunter, the hunter who gets up again and starts to box with sixteen hundred pounds of carnivorous bear is not likely to live to fight another day. Right away we get a tone zero as the natural solution, which is "I’m dead."

He lies still, the bear sniffs at him and maybe the bear goes away. If the bear goes away, he lives to fight another day. If the bear doesn’t, he’s just out of luck. He should have been a better shot in the first place. But this is a natural computation— the natural mechanism of apathy.

There are the tone levels of apathy, anger, boredom, and above it general cheerfulness. As the scale goes up, this reaction is quite natural. For instance, he is on the field of battle, fighting to preserve the world for the corn sellers of America, or some such, and the bullets are flying thick and fast and all around his head they are whizzing and slamming. He doesn’t happen to have paid any attention to all the propaganda stories which tell him that war is glorious and that the ultimate goal for any man is to go out and murder his fellow man and then lie down in the mud and die, having accomplished the wreckage of a few trees.

So, he lies down in the mud before he is shot and the bullets go by overhead. He is smart. He doesn’t get any posthumous Congressional Medals of Honor, but here he is, in apathy. He clicks it in. Now if the person has an engram which says that he must be very apathetic, then fear paralysis, instead of being a natural, useful mechanism, will immediately turn on and stay on because the engram is soldered in right there and it says this guy is now dead.

So, the person is lying in apathy on the tone scale. But right on the top of this part of the tone scale, and what drives him down into it, is the fear reaction, an endocrine reaction and so forth.

The person who hasn’t got sense enough to be afraid some time or other in his life just hasn’t got any good sense.

There are a lot of social aberrations in which the thing to do is to be brave. Now suppose the person feels fear but the engram says, "Be brave," he may go on and drink the bottle of poison, or stand up and let the machine gun cut him down. That man is being completely aberrated.

As a person’s tone rises actually and naturally, there are times to feel brave. The body can turn on mechanisms and he feels brave. Then he is depressed out of this, he meets too much force, he is being suppressed too much by the factors he is meeting and so on, and he comes down the tone scale and starts to turn on adrenalin.

That is a pretty solid mechanism. A person can run a hundred yard dash with a shot of adrenalin in him and practically beat the world’s record. The only trouble is that the endocrine system has got a delayed reaction, and when too much of it is turned on, it seems to react later to kill the organism due to toxic action. Perhaps he overcomes the obstacle, but later, when he meets another obstacle, he drops on the tone scale because the force is too much and he maybe starts to propitiate although he is still fighting back.

Then he drops to covert hostility and makes comments like, "Oh dear, what a lovely hat that is. I’ve liked it since last year!" When he comes down into this range, his dramatization in regular life gets broken to a point where he starts computing, "Hey, this is dangerous." This tells him he had better be afraid and flee quickly, or do something about it because he is scared. He will survive if he gets scared at that point because rationally he sees that he can’t win.

Now, if he gets very scared, he can drop down into the apathy range which is a counterfeit of death. Also, when Mr. Kodiak Bear goes away he might live to fight another day. So these are all good survival mechanisms.

Any time these things become pushed in too hard with an engram, the person can be chronically held on the tone scale at some point.

The person can become set into a period of chronic fear. He can also become set in chronic apathy, which is the catatonic way down the tone scale. So there is fear, but fear is also computational because fear is a natural analytical mind mechanism. It says in the engram bank, "I am afraid." The restimulator for this is a dropped fork or the smell of apple pie. So, he hears a dropped fork and somehow or other he feels afraid and has an endocrine reaction turn on at that level.

The general tone of the individual as engrams are deintensified and erased normally starts upwards, and he will go through an anger range; and sometimes when the person started out angry, he will be angry at things more or less all the time and then he will come up tone. He has a shorter distance to go actually, as a general manifestation. Just as an engram will recount up the tone scale through stages to boredom until a person is even cheerful or flippant about it, so can the whole general tone of a person go from apathy and fear up through anger at the things that have been done to him, up through boredom and then into a cheerful state of mind, and reach the state of clear.

The key factors in an engram are pain and unconsciousness if they aren’t the same thing. The chemistry of that is the holdup. A conversion occurs because of emotion.

For instance, although the dramatization contains the word Isabel, the wife’s name is not Isabel, but Gertrude. And if you have ever listened to a dramatization running off that has to have words changed in it, there is a little choke just ahead of the moment when the change has to occur.

Maybe the scolding is about not putting the buggy whip back, and the dramatization may come on and one has to substitute the word frying pan. Something wasn’t put back so he is called forward to scold his wife about something but it can’t be a buggy whip, so it will get this much check. The analyzer will sit there and listen to this stuff rolling out, because when an engram goes into a dramatization it goes straight into the voice and muscles that way. Of course, the more solidly the dramatization turns on, the more restimulated the engram is, the less "I" one has got to observe. But a shadow of "I" is still sitting there watching this thing carry forward, saying, "What is going on here? Here is this person murdering somebody!" So, "I" has to think, "Now let me see, I’ll have to think of a good idea because I can never be wrong, I’ve got to be right. Oh, yes, he was about to rob me."

He has to find a big, fancy explanation. The analytical mind is supposed to dream up computations in relationship to survival. This is a whole analytical mind devoted to explaining why the dramatization happened. It doesn’t know that this happened because an engram was restimulated and went into action.

Now we can say, "Well, an engram went into restimulation, I wish I could get rid of it." But "I" says, "I tell you, it’s like this."

This engram, let us say, has a circuit in it that says, "You can’t get sick." But "You can’t get sick" dramatized would be "I," or this person as an organism, telling somebody else, "You can’t get sick."

Any time somebody is pulling a dramatization on you, you can be absolutely certain that the "I" in that body is also subject to that dramatization. In chronic psychosis, we get this as the demon circuit, and "I" becomes to a large degree the whole circuit. "I" has to mind the demon circuit. Then when he flies into a dramatization he simply swamps the whole thing temporarily and tells somebody else, "You’ve got to mind me," in a high state of rage. Or, in a lower state of restimulation he merely feels that people have to mind him.

"I have a headache" means I have a headache. It can’t be dramatized except by having a headache. If the person says, "I have a headache," and somebody else says to him, "No, you don’t have a headache, you know darn well you don’t have a headache. It’s all in your mind," the headache is going to get worse, every time. Sometimes if one says, "Yes, of course you have a headache, you poor thing," it goes away. That is faith healing.

There are, of course, many frontiers in Dianetics which are not exploited. We don’t know about structure. There are many things we don’t know even about one person’s life span. But as far as aberrations and psychosomatic illnesses are concerned, and clearing the individual, we kflow what we need to know.

Here are some necessary definitions:

An aberrated individual is one who has engrams which are susceptible to restimulation.

A release, technically, is a person from whom the chronic psychosomatic illness has been taken, and from whom painful emotion has been removed. You can count on him as a solid release.

Next is a clear. People tend to interpret the word clear as an absolute term. But the definition of a clear is simply this: All the engrams from basic- basic forward have been removed and all their locks have been blown. The person is clear of engrams.

I’m sorry that there isn’t a better test besides taking a person three months after the date of clearing and checking the bank to see if anything has jumped into view and then checking the person in another three months to find out once more if anything has jumped into view.

One can get a deceptive condition in a clear and one which undoubtedly exists in a certain percentage of the people I have cleared. I heard from one the other day who was only considering himself three- quarters cleared. I suppose he had found an engram someplace. He was aware of it and it hadn’t been swept out.

The last time I saw him I considered him a very good release, probably a clear, because I couldn’t find anything else in his bank.

"I" in a clear is in command of all his attention units and he can send them down the bank, or pick up every memory in that bank. He can use them to compute or to inspect and he is not affected by psychosomatic illnesses.

For example, on 1,000 units, there would be a certain amount of horsepower. There could still be 50 units tied up in this bank, but they wouldn’t be enough to turn on a psychosomatic illness. It would require some study to free those units.

Furthermore, in the process of clearing, after a while one may have, let us say, 600 or 500 units free, and this person will feel so good, he will be doing so much and getting along so well, it is sometimes pretty hard to pin him down to get the rest of the 500 units cleaned up and cleared. And it takes a little push on somebody else’s part at that time.

It is almost a continuous gain proposition. As one starts knocking out attention units on engrams and freeing them, the curve gets steeper and steeper.

The more units that are freed, the easier it is to free units. The more mind the person has, the more mind he can free from engrams, until he gets up along the level of the last 50 units.

It is a wonderful thing when one starts back down the track and looks these things over. One looks at an engram, starts to recount it, and in some cases it disappears right there. There is so little left on it.

An auditor will notice as he progresses on an erasure that by the time he gets up to the third or fourth month in a case, if an incident isn’t going by one recounting, he has missed a very big engram someplace back down the track.

In such a way, we can also postulate how clear is clear. There may be some other way that these units get latched up of which we are not aware, but the definition of clear is that one just frees all the units out of the engrams in one lifetime and one has a clear. It is not an absolute term, we may find some way to free some more units someplace else.

The way to start a case is to free the maximum number of units in the shortest possible time at the beginning of the case. That can best be done by knocking out painful emotion. Painful emotion really ties up units. And the next thing is to knock the unconsciousness off the case which glues the unit in place, and start an erasure. During the first part of a case, when we need the most units we have the least. That is why cases are a bit rough to start.

As one gets them going and starts knocking out units, be satisfied to knock out a unit here and a unit there, taking a little tension off each time and getting him remembering something else and so forth. Ability goes up on almost a logarithmic curve of increasing strength.

On the subject of pregnancy, I am at present advising known cases of pregnancy against Dianetics during the pregnancy, because I have seen some heavy emotional discharges come off so suddenly that I have no doubt whatsoever that they transplanted. And of course, when the incident starts running, the patient thinks of nothing but that discharge.

However, there would be this dividing line: If Mama is so morning sick, so miserable and so nervous about it that birth is going to be a very difficult affair, the transplanting of a few engrams into that child by Dianetics wouldn’t begin to match the number of engrams that the child is going to get in real life. So there is a break point in this line and we are working forward to get better and better methods of discharging emotion off a case.

On a whole case, if one can discharge the painful emotion from it, the case will work easier. But that painful emotion is lying in engrams all by themselves up the bank which are dependent for their force on physical pain engrams, and one can unlock emotion off the case by running the physical pain engram first and the emotion second, or the emotion first and the physical pain second.

The case shows its most marked improvement when a great deal of grief is discharged from the bank.

When the somatic has disappeared, when unconsciousness has come off, one can call it a good, safe reduction. When the somatic has disappeared utterly, but the words tend to remain on two or three additional runs and no unconsciousness has come off, one can still call it reduced.

The best reductions are those where the words remain, the unconsciousness comes off and no further somatic is present. But just on running an engram over and over, they vary greatly. Some engrams reduce in 15 runs, some reduce in 3 runs. It’s up to the auditor’s judgment.

Never ask the file clerk if something is reduced, or "Is it safe to leave this now?" The file clerk won’t have a chance, "I" will get in there and say, "Yes, that’s a fine idea, let’s get out of here," and he may protest about going through it again. That is the very time one must go through it again. One will get real material off the engram.

If the preclear suddenly says, "No, let’s not go through this again, it’s all reduced and after all I’m perfectly fine, and I just can’t go through this again," the auditor can’t adopt the attitude that this is a perfectly reasonable statement, because it is not. It is an effort to avoid the next run which is the run that is wanted.

If all of a sudden the preclear stops yawning and he has yawned about halfway a couple of times, realize there is a bouncer in the incident.

I must warn you against one type of engram. This is the stretchercontractor engram. It is a little jim- dandy magnetic engram which has a bouncer in it which throws the person off it, such as, "Get out of here" and "Come back here." He says, "I’ve got to get out of here," and Papa in a fight sequence says, "Come back here." Now when the preclear runs this engram, he can’t get rid of it, so he bounces off it, which means that he is running the incident with the words appearing in one place and the somatic in another.

The best way to cure that is to say by standard technique, if the file clerk and somatic strip are working, "Bouncer (snap!)?"

"Yes."

"Call- back?"

"Yes."

Knock the bouncer out, then the call- back, and it will operate easily and smoothly.

The whole bank can be stretched out of shape with the words in one place and the somatics in another. In the basic area somebody says, "I’m going to come," and it seems to stretch all the words up out of the engram because this thing is aberrative down there, below it, and the somatics are somewhere else. So, a person is trying to run the words and the somatics, back and forth, which is very confusing.

That completes this lecture. I wish you lots of happy hunting with this information and a very early clear.