CIRCUITRY

A lecture given on 14 July 1950

Picking the Locks

By addressing the subject of circuitry, one is trying to get the suppressors out of the case which turn off the individual’s ability to re- express his emotions and somatics and to generally conduct himself as he should as a preclear

Therefore it is of very definite importance to an auditor to know everything he can know about this, because the speed of resolution of the case depends in a large measure upon his ability to pick the locks on circuits and valences. If he can pick those locks rapidly, difficult cases are going to resolve much more swiftly.

It is very important that they do so. If a man has got a demon circuit which says, "Control yourself, don’t lose your temper, now get a grip on yourself, those emotions are going to run away with you, you must shut them down," how is one going to get painful emotion off this case? Also how is one going to get any auditor control over this person?

All the psychotics I have inspected to date had this type of incident as their worst engram, and the demon circuit suppressed them into psychosis. We don’t have to go into psychosis, however, to discover severe demon circuits. We can go into mild neurosis and we can find some very fine ones. A large percentage of the people who are passing for normal in this society today have circuitry of this character.

The index of psychosis is still missing. What is the difference between a normal person, a neurotic person, and a psychotic person? Is it a basic weakness of personality or mentality? Is it that variable from individual to individual? Or can we finally bracket with a good, solid observation one factor?

With "control yourself" we are very close, if not there, and the severity of this command in the case could be a determining factor in psychosis. That still requires a lot of investigation before becoming definite.

But ever since I have been watching this particular point in cases, I have noticed that the real rough psychotic had this installed, plus painful emotion, to a point where the person was no longer in control of himself; the demon circuit had substituted itself for "I."

So, in potshooting at demon circuitry, the auditor is hitting at the core, possibly, of psychosis. The only datum that is missing is that the psychotic quite often has painful emotion ready to bleed immediately. The moment one asks for it, it is there. The psychotic might have a very selective mechanism which is merely "control yourself" which didn’t apply to the "control your emotion," and "I" gets transplanted, giving a complex picture.

The auditor must realize that a case has numbers of people as the dramatic personnel in the engram bank. He must keep these in mind when he is going for circuitry. It is possible to do too fast a job of diagnosis and to find lying there, much too accessible, Papa saying, "Control yourself," and then to shoot for Papa saying, "Control yourself," and finding nothing.

As a result a person just goes on controlling himself. It isn’t just the circuits that are set up on some other set of words but the fact that they are in somebody else’s mouth; so the auditor has not broken out of the case the most aberrative command that leads this person to control himself.

There is Papa and Mama and the child, and one also has Grandpa and Grandma, and so on. Some of these people, Mama, for instance, have to be present during the prenatal area, but all the rest of these people may be present too.

Great- grandparents are not uncommon. Great- grandparents get occluded because Grandpa’s and Grandma’s father and mother are the allies of Papa and the allies of Mama, so that when a great- grandparent dies it leaves an occlusion.

Ask a preclear’s father whether his great- grandparents were alive during the period of gestation and he will often say, "Oh, no, they died years before." That is not good data because there might be an occlusion of it which has been passed on to the child about it. They probably told the child, "Why, your great- grandparents were all dead by the time you arrived in the world. Oh, long before you were even conceived they were all dead."

I have had many patients tell me, "Well, they died when I was 4, no, not 4, they died when I was 12. No, I think they died when I was about 19. No, it must have been 4...."

So, one can have a condition where Papa or Mama has an occlusion, and the great- grandparent picture is very erroneous. But don’t just abandon great- grandparents. They may be there. One must realize that these people may be the allies of Mama and Papa, and Grandpa and Grandma may be the allies of the preclear.

They are the most likely candidates for allies when we have a history of violence of family life. These people may be very cross and mean and gruff, but they do have this: age has slowed them down. A lot of their engrams have been laid aside by decay. The violence and red- hotness of their passions has long gone far into darkness.

So, one finds a milder scene for the child; even though they are quite strict with it, they also mean life and death for it. Just because Grandpa and Grandma are the preclear’s allies is no need to suppose that they weren’t hell on wheels with this child, but one will find the preclear will much more easily contact the kind ambivalence which will undoubtedly be there.

These are people, not symbols. They may have dramatizations which are despicable and which are very rough on the child; but they, in this valence, are so necessary to the child’s survival that the child accepts all of it. These people getting along in life suddenly get the idea, "Well, I don’t have to have this child live with me. It’s no pain to me, and it’s nothing out of my pocketbook, so this kid is just wonderful, he is the grandest kid in the world and we want to see our life go on"; whereas they were saying to the parent, "Oh, we don’t want any children. How are we going to get rid of this? We can’t afford it." It makes a big difference.

The question of who aberrated Papa and Mama is a very interesting one. The parents are the most likely candidates. Papa saying, "Control yourself, you must learn to control yourself," came from somewhere, and the chances are that he got it from Grandpa or Grandma.

Now, as we come along the line, we are looking for demon circuitry in a preclear As a child we find Papa saying, "Control yourself," and Mama saying, "You must get a grip on yourself, you must learn to control your emotions." And we say, "Aha, now let’s shoot for it, we’ve got it now."

Only we probably don’t have it. Possibly the grandparents may have been around Mother during the prenatal period, and this should be checked. In the majority of cases one finds out that they were to some degree. They hear that Liza is pregnant and they will come all the way from Keokuk. They know all about this.

And then they may find out that Liza doesn’t want the child, and they will raise hell with Liza because, after all, it is no sweat or pain to them. That’s the way Liza will ordinarily sum it up, anyway. And right at that point there will be a great big ally computation.

When an auditor runs into that sort of thing, he has a tough case, because here is the "control yourself" mechanism he is shooting for. This is not a standard case, but is brought up to show that this chain exists.

Let’s say there is a great deal of aberration on the phrase "Control yourself" in a case. We’ve got a preclear, we trace some of it to Mama, and it can also perhaps go to Papa. So we start saying, " ‘Control yourself. ’ Now let’s see, who taught Daddy to say, ‘Control yourself’? How did this person feel toward this grandparent?"

The person may tell the auditor, "Oh, I hated my grandparents, they were no good," yet the auditor goes back and finds these big ally computations with them. They were no good, but just the same he is obeying the "control yourself" mechanism received from an ally.

The auditor should look over this picture carefully before he dives. He wants the center, the most aberrative circuit in the whole bank. And it will be found, usually, out of the mouth of an ally. In picking apart these circuits, then, it is not good enough just to find somebody saying, "Control yourself, you’ve got to get a grip on yourself," one must find the most aberrative moment when this occurred.

Here’s a minor case history on this subject. A preclear used to have a dramatization after he got married of wanting to go away because nobody cared whether he lived or died. This thing used to come on about every six or eight months, and after it was over he would sit back and look at himself in horror wondering what had gone on. There was much smoke and foment around this thing, and often he was intrigued by his sudden and unpredictable irrationality. Well, it wasn’t unpredictable. There were various triggers to it.

In going back down the bank, who did we find but his great- grandfather who was actually being kicked out by his children. The old man was quite a guy. He played the fiddle and so forth. He used to sit around and take care of the preclear as a baby. He was alive until the preclear was 8 months of age. His death was occluded in the preclear’s mother and in all of her sisters because he was the person who made much of them. He was a thoroughly nice person but he did have some of these dramatizations.

He would get very sorry for himself. So in hot, miserable weather down south, a little baby would have the colic, and get bitten by insects and be uncomfortable and get sick; and the old man would come around and, besides the history of the Civil War, he would explain to the child as his only confidant how nobody loved him, that he had to get out of there, he was going to go away, it wouldn’t do them any good to follow him because he was going to go out and get himself lost somewhere on the rims of the world.

As he was explaining this, the baby would look at him very solemnly. Well, that dramatization skipped a generation, all the way across, because he had never been around when the preclear’s mother was a little girl, so that dramatization was never transplanted there.

The preclear’s grandfather on his mother’s side had never taken any stock in the old man at all, and as a matter of fact was quite ordinarily cross with him. So he had never picked up the dramatization either. In order to find this thing, we had to go way out on it. We didn’t have to work on it very hard, because the thing showed up.

It was a blank period of about eight months of the preclear’s life which one day all of a sudden was cracked through by somebody playing on a fiddle, and here was an old man playing on a fiddle. We ran into an engram where the child was being rescued from some girls by the old man, with him shouting, "You horrible, vicious girls, you get away from that baby."

That shows you how far you can trace one of these things. Now, a "control yourself" demon came in from the grandfather (who was the most solid ally after his great- grandfather) telling his great- grandfather to control himself over these things. But, of course, his grandfather’s statement about control was picked up and echoed by his mother and it came through fairly strongly. Once we had all of these circuits out, we then found that the grandmother, who up to this time had been the angel of mercy, the Red Cross nurse on the battlefield, had a nasty dramatization whereby she was saying to him continually, "Tommy, you will have to learn to control your temper. Now control your temper. Now you mustn’t get angry, you mustn’t get mad."

She had dozens of these phrases and she used them practically every day, but they had all dropped out of sight as far as he was concerned. This is given as a case history merely because the concatenation happens to fit the point being illustrated.

So, circuitry sometimes goes out much further than one would suspect and one should pick up the most aberrative circuit one can as the first run.

The auditor will find "control yourself" in lots of forms. Let’s say we start into a case and the first thing that comes to light in this case is the "control yourself" mechanism, "You’ve got to keep a good grip on yourself, you mustn’t let yourself go." This will stick someone all the way up and down the track. It is also a beautiful grouper and a demon circuit.

Start to follow this one down, and every time one hits it in the bank the person sticks in an engram. That is a holder to beat all holders and yet it is a demon circuit.

So, "Let’s get a grip on yourself" and "Get ahold of yourself" and so forth are hard to deal with, and one must not restimulate them where they are not already restimulated. Before diving down such a line, the auditor must be sure he has the most aberrative moment, and then try to get the earliest moment of it as fast as possible.

It won’t do the auditor any good to have the preclear recount one of these incidents 500 times if it isn’t lifting. If it was recounted 12 times and doesn’t lift, he can be pretty sure the intention is going to stay on it. He could start going back down the bank with one of these things, but be unable to take the tension out of it. He could also get the person stuck in it and then try to go earlier.

There is a way to solve a case with a "control yourself" mechanism, together with a holder. The auditor can try to resolve it by brute force, coaxing, persuasion, and erasing conception. He can get some yawns off this case if he can’t get any painful emotion. He can also try to get some unconsciousness off. After he has done that, the case is much easier to work.

It is a good rule in shooting for circuitry to use judgment at all times. One must be careful about it and plan one’s campaign very carefully, asking the questions, "What are we going to do? What are we going to shoot for?" It isn’t enough to know that a man has a "control yourself" mechanism. One should know, of all the people who might have used this same mechanism, which one is the most likely candidate for its most aberrative effect, and will the case resolve anything in the basic area before one tries for it?

One may find that he can actually produce faster results by taking the unconsciousness off the case. If one can do that, that is the target. It isn’t just to take circuits out of a case. The "control yourself" mechanism will not necessarily inhibit taking unconsciousness off the case.

So that is why these steps are written up in this sequence. If one gets emotion off the case, the person is going to feel better. Then, if one can get into the basic area and get conception or some early incident out and erased, one is way ahead.

Maybe the person is out of valence, with a "control yourself" mechanism and dub- in, but one has gotten down to the basic end of the case and erased some of the unconsciousness. Now, when one shoots for circuitry and starts down the line, every engram all the way up the track is looser than it was and the chances of springing those circuits out are much better.

So, when going in there, one must not pull up short and say, "Oh, well, we’ve got a ‘control yourself’ mechanism in this case and we have probably got a valence shift and that’s just tough, we’ll have to shoot for circuitry"; one must make a good, solid effort to get the earliest part of the case resolved, not just a light dab.

One gets out some early moment like conception, with lots of yawns off it, and the case will start to resolve, even if the person had non- sonic, few somatics and emotional shut- off.

Finally, after the auditor has erased some incidents out of the early part of the track, he will discover that the preclear can hit practically any engram in the bank without severe consequences. The preclear may get nervous, but he can grind it out and move on the track better, and knock out holders, and so forth.

Some cases will refuse to go into the basic area in spite of all of the auditor’s coaxing or emotional restimulation, like finding a late moment of sexual pleasure in order to reach conception. The preclear might not be able to find any moment of sexual pleasure. If he does, the auditor should settle him in it no matter how well.

If he can’t get conception or early engrams out of the case, if he is blocked at every turn, then he should try for circuits and be well aware of the fact that in doing so he is handing himself a problem.

He is going to have to handle the problem with judgment to get the most aberrative command, and run it down with the greatest of skill. The intention is not to scare anyone, but to make an auditor careful and thoughtful before he dives into a case which has no unconsciousness out of it, in order to pull a demon circuit.

Although a demon circuit is powerful, once a computation is known to exist it loses considerable power. In tracing down such a computation, it should now be reachable. How much more hopeless people have been in the past about dub- in when there was no immediate remedy for it.

Sometimes people would much rather run locks than engrams. They will also run each other’s engrams. But every engram which lies on somebody else’s track has right under it and just adjacent to it a real engram of the person.

Individuals do not transplant engrams uniformly. For instance, if one has five people who are working together, only two of them might suddenly pick up a certain engram that one or the other has been talking about.

Whenever an engram is stuck that was run out of somebody else, that secondhand engram is stuck on a very similar engram.

It also works beautifully in diagnosis. I have told people of engrams, and then watched them very intently, noticing if they have gotten nervous on a certain subject, and then put them back down the track to see if a similar one was stuck anyplace. If it was, I dived for the engram right under it and perhaps found Mama’s lover if it was in the bank. If I couldn’t find the engram anywhere in the bank, it didn’t completely invalidate the fact there was a lover there but it certainly had a tendency to allay my suspicions.

One does a diagnosis by making a person remember. In this way one discovers the existence of circuits and their probable wording so that they can be plowed up by repeater technique.

At present, we don’t know too much about what thought is. It may be a sentient energy form which is everywhere existent. But however it is, the anatomy of thought is quite as valid as checking back on the physiology of people. There is no reason to fall into the error of yesterday when people considered God was all thought or that there was a thought and that this thought was something very supernatural which could never be contacted.

In Dianetics, we are carrying along on the prenlise that the anatomy of thought is thoroughly as valid as the anatomy of matter.

Notice how hazy the very best medical knowledge is of basic physiological processes.

Similarly, as we track back thought we get such hazy spots. We do have ways to help it, just as medicine has ways to bring about fertilization.

Let’s consider that there is a thing called life energy. Maybe this is just the elan vital of Bergson, but it behaves for our purposes a little more usably. So here we have this life energy. Where it comes from, what motivates it and so forth, of that we are not aware. One of these days I intend to conduit it and perhaps look at it under a microscope. But it has two branches: thought and structure. Structure is a vessel of thought. Thought is what brings about and regulates structure. There is an interactive principal at work here.

There is evidence that this thought- structure interrelationship is an energy which in some way or other is able to enter into matter and make out of it something which is mobile and sentient. The theory of evolution from a mathematician’s point of view has more holes in it than Swiss cheese, so this is a nice, clean, clear concept.

Most of the principles along this line are held in place by precedent. And precedent, after all, is merely the admission that the person who lived before one was smarter, and yet one has more data than he had.

What would be incredible would be to accept the postulate that there was no sentient energy anywhere in the vicinity of any cell and it would be even worse to try to postulate, as far as nervous energy recording is concerned, that a cell did not have a nervous system.

Walking along trying to track down God is pretty tough sometimes.

What we are following here has a very definite purpose: it is trying to make the processes of Dianetics work faster and more easily. And part of the success of the process depends upon the auditor’s ability to follow the process or to work with it.

I work very hard in an effort to communicate to auditors, for their use and application, certain techniques and processes and I will continue that line. But if an auditor is not getting good results, he should re- examine his technique in the light of standard procedures that now exist to find out if there are any holes in his application of it.