MANIFESTATIONS WHICH ASSIST THE AUDITOR

A lecture given on 21 July 1950

Somatic Strip and File Clerk at Work

It may surprise you to learn that there are mechanisms and manifestations within and without the human being which assist the auditor.

According to an occasional sad letter I get out of Podunk or somewhere, John Jones in auditing Richard Row has found Richard Row stuck in present time.

The publisher left some quotation marks out of the Handbook. The words should have read: stuck in "present time." It is impossible to get stuck in present time. A person could be stuck in an engram which had the words "present time" in it, he could be stuck somewhere on the track, but he could never be stuck in present time.

Sometimes you will find a person stuck in an engram which has a bouncer telling him to go forward, get away as far as he can get and stay there and keep on going, and it will give the manifestation of being "stuck in present time."

Some of these people have even moved into the future some distance on this. The person is actually 22. You give him an age flash and he says "49."

If you ask the person, "Well, what’s going on?" and get him to close his eyes, sometimes he gets an illusion of the future or his actual vision of the future.

In one place they were going to move down by the sea shore and there was going to be a certain kind of tree there. But he was merely there in the future reporting that he lived by the sea shore with a certain kind of tree growing, and that they had a child that was 4 months of age, and so on.

He also said that a certain thing had happened with regard to a business and that such- and- such a thing had happened with regard to a car, all the time protesting, "This isn’t true, I’m not trying to tell you anything."

I merely said, "Well, all right. Let’s go through it again," and simply jotted things down. And in their wide generalities these things came true! When you are dealing with the mind, you have to be open- minded.

In Dianetics there is a very good motto for anyone to follow: Be surprised at nothing. That happens to be the motto of an old southern family, which shows this big bold rook sitting on top of a tiny castle, and the scroll underneath it in old English says, "Be surprised at nothing." That could very well be adapted for Dianetics.

There are several things that you, as an auditor, can expect in a preclear These things exist in everybody, but in various ways become occluded or go on strike. The first one is what we are calling, in Dianetics, the somatic strip.

The idea of the somatic strip came, in the early days of Dianetics, from motor strip. But when we used the words motor strip we got the person into too many automobile accidents. It is a restimulative word; somatic is not.

What connection this has with the switchboards or the little men who, according to neurology texts, hang by their heels on either side of the brain, I’m not prepared to say. But we postulate that these switchboards contain the motor mechanisms which register various parts of the time track.

All we mean when we say "somatic strip" is that portion of the organism or that appendage to the organism, interior, exterior or wherever, which locates moments in time for the individual. This means strictly that it is under the orders of the auditor ordinarily, and that under such orders it can relocate incidents.

It is a time traveling mechanism, and in addition to that will pick up pains and synthesize other perceptics.

In a man, the tongue and hands are very exaggerated, and one can find this diagram in books on neurology.

However, that is structure. We are not interested in structure. I’m passing by it as a datum which is about as important as the number of whales killed off the coast of Newfoundland in the year 1802. But the genesis of its name was the thought that the muscular strip had a contact with time. So we call it the somatic strip. It will move in time under the command of the auditor. Everybody has got one of these unless it has been cut out of him by accident and even then he might have one. You should always expect to find one.

This thing happens to work whether the person consents to have it work or not. As an auditor, you can tell it to go somewhere and it will go, and then the preclear is quite surprised to find himself at the age of 4 with Mama pulling his hair out by the roots or something of the sort.

It will go in terms of time. If the auditor says, "The somatic strip will now go to February the 16th, 1914," and the somatic strip is working well, under the auditor’s complete control, it will wind up on that date. Sometimes, due to the inability of people to contact reality, it misses. Often it won’t move. Sometimes it gets mixed up with a holder or a bouncer and every time it tries to move in on the engram it holds or bounces.

We can see this much more clearly by postulating the fact that the bulk of the attention units of "I" come under the direction of the auditor. When an engram is restimulated, the somatic strip has hooked in some sort of muscular activity into the moment of the engram.

It is a multiple pointer, when it’s working at its optimum it will only go to one place at one time. We differentiate this very sharply. If we tell a patient to go somewhere and address him directly and say, "You will now go to such- and- such," there is something of a confusion there.

The patient is trying to go some place but stay on the couch, so we simply say, "The somatic strip will now go . . ." and we get better results. And because he will wind up in these places, he suddenly perceives, if he is working well, that the somatic strip is under the auditor’s control, which is a matter of surprise to a great many people. It’s as though he himself had nothing to do with it.

In fact on an uncleared "I," the somatic strip just wanders according to restimulation of this and that. It goes up and down the time track. It isn’t stable. But in the hands of an auditor it should go exactly where it is supposed to go. Once it goes there and starts to sweep through an engram, it is equally insentient and irrational.

The somatic strip is something which you guide and order and treat as though you were driving a car. You drive the car down the street, and after you have leaned on the wheel of the car to turn a corner, if you don’t straighten the wheel out, the car keeps right on going in a circle. It’s the same way with a somatic strip. You start it through something and it will keep right on going.

A somatic strip which is really working well can be started at the beginning of one year and can sweep right on through the days of that year just on a single order and wind up at New Year’s Day of the next year without recognition of any single moment by the preclear

Similarly, a somatic strip can be started through one end of birth and can be requested to go right on through birth, which it will proceed to do. But it will do so best if you count the time for it. It will go right on through birth and all the somatics will turn on and off and do everything they are supposed to do.

If the person perceives no part of the perceptic of birth beyond the fact that its various somatics are turning on, he won’t get stuck in the incident.

You want to be very cautious as you do this. Don’t keep calling the preclear’s attention to things in the incident. Don’t try to pick up any of these somatics. You can send the person through a tonsillectomy, or through any operation. You can send him through late life moments of unconsciousness that he has no contact with whatsoever. His somatic strip will go right straight on through and he will get the moment that the knife went into the appendix, the somatics, the movements, kinesthesia, and so on. The somatic strip will just swing right on through.

This goes through minute by minute and will even happen in a person who normally has everything shut off, who doesn’t believe anything is happening in his case and who thinks himself incapable of experiencing any strange phenomena.

Tell the person to close his eyes and then tell the somatic strip to go to the beginning of his last operation at the moment they are putting the mask over his face. Then say, "Now, it is 1 minute after the mask is over the face, 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 4 minutes, 5 minutes," and you will see him start breathing heavily and going through all the muscular reactions. Then he feels the first stab of something and the straps holding him down as you sweep him on through.

But don’t stop that somatic strip or suddenly neglect it once you have started the somatic strip going through this person’s operation. He is getting somatics on it, and you can even time how long the operation takes.

A surgeon who is not schooled in Dianetics can stand by and he will become so fascinated in watching this patient that he will run off the time to himself and give you comments afterwards about what kind of an operation it must have been and the skill of the person operating.

So you run the somatic strip right on through, remembering to bring the preclear to the moment he woke up out of the operation and then up to the time when he was happy and cheerful, and then bring it back up to present time.

Like the automobile that turns when the wheel is turned, it will just keep on going. The moment that you let go the controls of it, it will do what it has been doing. The patient himself can’t grab control of this somatic strip until it is thrown up someplace in the vicinity of present time. Then of course it will move right on as it is intended to move with present time, diving as things become restimulated. That is the action of the somatic strip.

You ought to experiment with it sometime. You will see some very interesting manifestations. Take a patient whose operation you have never been able to reach and run him through the operation. Of course, if he is very seriously frozen up on the track, the somatic strip is not working well. But if he is even slightly free, this sort of thing will take place and it is quite startling to him.

This is the actual power of the auditor. Many people, when they are auditing, just halfway believe what’s happening, so they don’t think it makes any difference what they say, or what they do, "because it isn’t going to work anyway."

Go out through the land and start looking over patients who are being branded failures or very tough cases and you will find an auditor who "didn’t think it happened," and who says, "The somatic strip will go" someplace or other and then says, "We are not getting anyplace," and starts talking to the preclear about the time he had a birthday when he was 5.

Of course, the somatic strip has gone sweeping down, and now without telling it to do anything, without guiding it, all of a sudden one starts the person into something else. Maybe he says, "Well, what happened to you when you were 5?" and the fellow tries to tell him and he says, "Oh, that’s nothing very important, let’s try for some prenatals. All right, let’s go to the first time...." Now maybe the somatic strip is back under his control again and maybe it isn’t. He is not controlling anything particularly because he doesn’t think he has any control.

Actually, his ability to control the patient analytically is very slight. But the ability to control the mechanisms which handle engrams is very great. If he neglects his own power and neglects to know the extent of his own power when auditing, he is going to get bad cases.

Now, that is the somatic strip. If you want to make a test on this, go right ahead. It’s a good test to find out how solidly frozen the somatic strip can be in a patient.

The somatic strip can go through and through and through and through an incident and it won’t erase. It is "I" contacting the perceptics, it is the pain being re- experienced, it is the whole thing that erases the engram.

Actually, if you just tell the person to start repeating something, the somatic strip will start following down anyway. Of course, if you are telling him to repeat something, you are throwing in the whole mechanism, you are not just telling the somatic strip to go.

That’s why using repeater technique from present time is something you have to do rather gingerly. You start using repeater technique on holders and you are liable to stir up five or six holders in the bank, whereas he was only in one to begin with.

If you run through a pleasure incident that is really thoroughly contacted all at once, it will very often shuck off the somatic.

The somatic strip then is under your orders. You send it where you want it to go. A somatic strip is normally not under an outsider’s orders. It is under the orders of that portion of basic personality which is designated the file clerk. This is the second mechanism which assists the auditor.

The file clerk is a strange phenomenon that aids us a great deal. It is not a thinking thing, but it is an answering thing so long as the data is present. Don’t ask the file clerk to predict, but you can ask the file clerk to count and you can ask the file clerk for yes/ no answers and normally you will get them.

If you ask the file clerk, "How many times do we have to go through this engram again to erase it?" he may say eight or nine, but he’s guessing, because you are asking him something he has to think about and he is not a thinking mechanism. He does very well but he doesn’t know his Dianetics. You can ask him, "How many engrams of this type are earlier than this in the bank?" and the flash is five. That file clerk is working well this time. But after all, he can count them: one, two, three, four, five. That’s fine.

You can actually give him a flash on this order—" A yes or no will flash into your mind when I ask you this question: Is basic- basic out (snap. 1)?" and there will be a flash response. The file clerk is the author of flash responses. Actually, it is his business in the thinking apparatus to forward through the answers to computations which are being run on the hidden circuits, and there are plenty of hidden circuits in the mind. They are hidden as far as "I" is concerned, not from the fact that they have to hide, they are simply massive circuits.

When you stop and think of the number of computers which are busily going in the mind, and how many computations are being formed, it becomes an astonishing picture. The file clerk forwards the data to "I." His smooth operation is to tell "I" the answers. He does not tell "I" the answers vocally, but merely forwards up the data and the conclusions.

He can work on multiple circuits and with many computers. You might better consider him a file clerk who is chief of the file clerks, because there are a lot of information furnishers. They use their communication systems.

They are actual attention units which are down next to the standard banks. That’s the easiest way to understand them. And the master attention unit of them all, unless the mind is all clouded up with circuitry, will shoot through the information, and he will shoot through accurate information.

A good navigator takes his sight, he does all of his computations and is very careful with the whole thing. He adds it all up, and just before he finishes adding it, he knows whether that computation is right or wrong. And he knows more or less down the columns when it goes wrong. If he cannot do that, he is actually a liability to the ship he’s navigating. That principle has been well established in navigation since the days of Columbus that there is an instinctive yea or nay coming up there.

It works this way in many things. We have what is known as intuition. It is immediately presumed when someone is talking about intuition that he is reading minds or going into the future or getting some sort of a telepathic answer. Perhaps telepathy may be some part of the computation. But to name any one of these as the whole process would be a mistake.

Actually, when one begins to check up on the mind and find out how many things it observes, how many data have been assembled on any one subject at any one moment, one finds out that an enormous amount of observation has taken place.

So the file clerk, running off the computers, has usually already received conclusions on various things. And one suddenly knows intuitively that something is amiss. It is a conclusion which has come forward. The best and most reliable of these is when a person has asked a question of existence which can be answered in terms of yes and no. "Will number 36, Hot Biscuits, win?" And you sometimes get a feeble "Well, maybe," but no data to amount to anything. Once in a while somebody gets what he calls a hunch. A great big yes will come through on some question of that sort and he will put his money on it and sometimes he will win.

This sort of thing is what drives gamblers crazy because they start to listen to voices after a while. They don’t realize that they have data on what they are doing.

One day I was down in Tijuana, and my wife was telling me to bet on number so- and- so on a roulette wheel. Every time I did, one of those numbers would come up. I thought, "This is peculiar. What have we got here, a seer? All right, I’ll keep betting."

It was only a dime roulette wheel and yet suddenly we had stacked up about fifty dollars in chips. At that moment everybody else, noticing this luck, started to ride the numbers with me, and I started looking at the wheel wondering why it was doing this.

My wife had done some sort of a computation along in this order: The wheel was out of balance. The ball was being thrown in the same way each time. She had watched it for about five or six spins and had noticed that it would tip and throw the ball onto three numbers on one side, and then it would go to the matching three numbers over on the other side. The wheel was warped, and without knowing why it was happening she was getting "hunches."

But, this shows the complexity of computation which the mind will do.

The mind has been very grossly maligned. One is taught arithmetic in school and he is taught that he does it all on the front board. Education is most magnificent in its consistent belief that everything is done on the front board, or if one stores the memory banks sufficiently full, that one can then think.

Neither one of these beliefs is true.

Computation is done in milliseconds. There are all kinds of conclusions going on, and when a person is taught to distrust his own conclusions with regard to things then he really starts to make big mistakes. The mind is pretty well designed to run on automatic.

There is a mechanism which forwards data. This is a very simple mechanism you can postulate as an analogy. It comes up from standard banks, it comes up from conclusions and the engrams that are available to the file clerk.

If you can get down against the standard banks with a person who is in amnesia trance, you will find he has full somatics, full sonic, he is full on. Of course you can’t get him there if you are just dropping him into an operation. He simply goes unconscious.

But if he is fluid on the track and you can get him into present time and then drop him back down into amnesia trance, you will find that he has got everything available. It is very hard to get a person into that position, however. You have to use drugs and other things in order to bring the person into this situation, and the amount of therapy which this will deliver is very, very small.

The attention units down against the standard banks are quite able to contact all these things anyway, but what they are not able to do is get through to "I" with them. So naturally, with amnesia trance, you are just working back of "I," and you are not getting anything that is therapeutic.

You can run engrams, but it has the added disadvantage that these units are very few and although they are probably the same units as in any other part of the mind, they are weak. In short, they don’t push well into the early parts of the bank, they don’t undo computations well, the person doesn’t think well, and the chances of restimulation are enormous. When restimulated in this fashion, an engram does not die out in three days.

Also, when you do this kind of work, you have to do it perfectly every time and that’s impossible. As a consequence it sounds fine to say there is a part of the mind which has full sonic, full somatics and so on, but "I" is out of contact then.

You can run a person in amnesia trance and then run him wide awake back down to the same incident and it will be loosened up so that you can run it off. It sounds easy to locate incidents that way, but it isn’t. They come up in the order they are supposed to come up, but they run off very slowly. You go through one engram where Mama is a monologist, for instance, and it takes you two hours to get through it once. But the actual time of the engram was five minutes. This is very common in hypnotism. The slowness of recounting is peculiar to the early part of the prenatal area. The earlier you go, the slower it gets, usually.

Time moves very, very slowly for the embryo and it moves quite swiftly for the man of 70.

"I" of the standard banks, basic personality, has likes, dislikes, ambitions and so on. Sometimes a person has so many engrams that the file clerk units are overloaded. You can still get down there, and you can still ask him questions, but don’t ask him to do any predicting, because he has got too few units to do much computing, and he doesn’t have enough concourse with circuits because you have shut off all the circuits above him. Although he can’t do any thinking, he can do a lot of personalizing. That is to say, he can tell you what he likes, what his ambitions are and so on. That is one of the ways you find basic purpose.

All this data is from research. We not only frown on but stamp on the idea of hypnotizing people for therapy for the excellent reason that any time you enter the bank this way and go on down the time track, you have smothered a lot of material.

The file clerk flashes data through to "I," wherever "I" happens to be on the time track.

In addition to everything in the standard banks, the file clerk has potentially under his control every engram in the bank. But the only engrams he can reach in the bank are those which are uppermost.

Now, as the file clerk looks at the bank, he sees that thing which was principally blocking him from obtaining material. And he will look it over and see this higgledy- piggledy pile of something or other and he will pull something off the top of it or off the bottom of it that is ready to go.

He can get this one separate, so he will look it over and throw it forward in time. He is quite smart about selection and delivery of answers. Nothing keeps him from selecting the engram, but the only thing which can keep him from operating is being frozen at an age level, with all its information coming forward out of this engram.

A conclusion that the person has on file says something requires thought and computation. He starts to forward this thing through, but it goes into a circuit and when it gets over to "I" it is somewhat modified. No thought has occurred on it but there has been a great deal of reaction.

The flash that you get through from the file clerk when he gives you a yes or a no should come through on a straight flash wherever a person is in the bank. The concentration of attention units carries this flash forward.

A lot of things can interrupt this in the way of circuitry, such as, "I can’t tell you. I am afraid to tell you." But this isn’t the file clerk going on strike, this is the file clerk forwarding the data as asked for and then going up against the occlusion demon. The data doesn’t come through even though he is trying to put it through.

Now, it can be postulated that the file clerk will stop working with an auditor. If the auditor breaks the Auditor’s Code, the file clerk can cease working with him.

But if you work the patient for a short time in straight line memory, the file clerk gets more or less reassured about the fact that he is perfectly willing to put out the data and he will start working again. I have never seen one stop permanently although I have seen one sag in his activities.

The reason I bring this up is because you are going to see it sometimes when you get a patient that somebody has worked for many, many hours, where the file clerk has quit. It is up to you to reassure this patient and work with him until at last you have the confidence of the file clerk.

The patient may appear to you to have every confidence in the world in you, but the file clerk has quit. If you go over it you will find out something like someone got the file clerk into birth once and never got him out!

So, the file clerk functions to assist the auditor. The auditor must not let him down. The file clerk gives the auditor an engram, he gives it to him in the confidence that the thing is going to be treated in some fashion. Sometimes he has to be reassured of the fact that the thing is going to be treated.

So you run the patient through the time he cut his finger a few times and soon he will give you the time he practically cut his hand off. And then he gives you the time he practically cut his arm off. Then he will give you the time he practically died.

We have led up to this. The file clerk, however, doesn’t know this about Dianetics. He thinks Dianetics is wonderful. He tracks right along with it. As a matter of fact, the principles of Dianetics have been built as a parallel to the behavior of the file clerk and the behavior of the somatic strip and the filing system.

So, of course they agree with it, because that is the system they use all the time. We are not using anything very strange or something that we have just invented. We are using something that works all the time.

If the file clerk and the somatic strip won’t work— we will take the usual case where they are stuck on the time track— it’s as if the file clerk had already offered up an engram to be recalled or something to be done about it and then nothing was done. It is as if in the absence of an auditor something was flung forward.

Quite often such an incident is there so thoroughly that it has sonic on the moment of the holder in it. Or it has a sense of smell of the moment of the holder in the engram. The engram is right there ready to be run, or it is the top of a series of engrams and you have to get the first one in order to run all of them.

But they are all being handed to you. Sometimes you are handed a whole chain of engrams, sometimes just one engram. You tell the file clerk what you want, he has got an idea of what you are doing. You have run through some pleasure moments and given the patient some practice.

The file clerk all of a sudden says, "Here we go. At last we get this thing out of here," and he can be channeled through and really starts to work. "I" may be in such a highly aberrated state through circuitry and so on that he hardly knows what is going on. And yet the file clerk knows what is going on and will work with you.

Something that spooks people occasionally if they stop to think about it is that they are working with the file clerk, and they say, "Now let us have the next moment of pain or discomfort required to resolve this case," and the file clerk will give them the precise moment that is required. He will select the one which has the greatest aberrative value as far as the case is concerned at that moment.

He will start to clear out the engram bank for the auditor and the auditor can just let him go on pitching engrams out as long as he will sit there and do so.

It so happens that as he throws these engrams out, the auditor’s role is to make sure that the somatic strip does what it is supposed to do, and make the somatic strip go to the front part of the engram, go through and reduce it. The file clerk sometimes has various problems, such as five engrams all latched up on one somatic, and will offer the whole bundle. He can’t do anything else. He wants to be unchained and the auditor is supposed to run out those things.

The only real trouble an auditor gets into is when he ignores the file clerk’s offer. Then he starts to get in trouble from two sources: material which gets restimulated so it will freeze up the track, and the fact that the file clerk is liable to quit. That is the danger of repeater technique.

The file clerk doesn’t know that you have to get the first engram. He will keep on offering you late engrams as long as you ask for late engrams. And as long as you make no criticism he will just keep trying to unburden anything after the age of 4, 5, 10.

It’s as though a lot of the prenatal material is buried from sight. As soon as he becomes aware of the fact that it’s there, he will get started all over again, pitching that material out. If you just use the phrase "Go earlier" or "the earliest moment now available," coaxing him early, you will eventually turn up with the earliest material he can give you.

He is quite well aware of material down to postspeech. Evidently the nervous system or the contacts before speech are not too good, and they are seldom used on the circuit which he uses.

It is all back on the early part of the track in the prenatal engram bank that goes up to speech, and contains birth and so forth. The file clerk is below the level of attention units which he uses ordinarily. He is trying, but he is sitting over on one side with things misfiled. His attention has to be called more or less to the existence of prenatal

Society as a whole is practicing tacit consent. But you coax him, and eventually he will start in and you find the sperm sequence. "I’s" usual reaction is "Holy smoke!" The file clerk’s reaction is "Oh, so that’s what it was!"

This is an analogy, and the sperm sequence is not necessarily the bottom of the time track. It never has been as far as I am concerned because when I was researching, a long time ago, I was contacting material well before conception.

The file clerk will give you the engram if the engram is sitting right there. But if you suddenly start to run this thing and say, "Now, what are the words that occur to you?" the person is liable to start into the middle of the engram. Or he will start into the tail end of the engram, and you don’t want him in there before you get to the beginning of it.

So the optimum is, you ask the file clerk to furnish you with the engram. You ask the somatic strip to go to the first part of the engram, and it will go to the part of the engram it can reach. There might be more engram earlier than the somatic strip can get and because of the depth of unconsciousness which exists at the first part of an engram or at the center of an engram, the somatic strip gets lost and its attention units fall to pieces. So you send the somatic strip to the first part of the engram, get a flash phrase, make the preclear repeat it two or three times, and in a case that is running normally, the somatic will start to turn on. Part of "I" can get held in an engram. "I" is the pure unadulterated personality plus demon circuits, valences, aberrative commands and psychosomatic illnesses. So when a person gets cleared, you are actually seeing "I" reinforced, minus all of this excess baggage, and you get a very strong, marked personality. But the way it changes in the individual is ordinarily not instantly perceivable. I have seen some basic personalities that were tough, mean characters just on their own hooks, people that had a fairly tough attitude toward life.

"I" is as well the product of education, viewpoint and environment. You can’t take somebody who was raised over on the docks at West Avenue in New York and expect that person’s educational background will mellow him down to a point where he will have a great appreciation for, for instance, somebody who won’t stand up and fight. You could erase all the engrams out of his bank and he would still have very strong decided opinions on it. There are several factors involved here, such as genetic personality and other personalities.

"I" wants to be clear, solidly and unmistakably. Never make the mistake of thinking that he doesn’t.

If you work with any patient long enough, no matter how recalcitrant he is, you will find out that as basic personality starts to strengthen up, more and more units free up until he is clear and his concourse between the bank and the front part of his mind is straight, positive and quick.

It is the duty of the units up against the standard bank to forward information and conclusions to "I," and if they can’t get them through, to try to get them through in some other fashion.

They sometimes strike engrams or go into demon circuits, but they are trying to get through with information. They are also trying to get cleared.

The "I" is aware of being aware, and wants to be cleared and to have free concourse, so he will do a great deal. He will use almost anything possible in order to get cleared. He will even use engrams to get cleared. After all he has got his hands on all earlier data.

When there is one auditor around who has more skill than other auditors, "I" will start toughening up for every other auditor in the place except this one, and waiting until this one will run him. It is no great problem, you just let other people run him until someone persuades "I" to have confidence in him, and then the person will run for him and will drop this other computation.

But if you as an auditor kick the patient out of therapy for some reason or other because this aberrated "I" was so mean and so vicious that it was a great strain on you to run him, there will be trouble! This person has pleaded and begged, "Now, please stop this therapy because, you know, I don’t want to get rid of this thing. After all, I’m happy as I am. I’m sane after all. I’m perfectly cheerful. I get along fine in life, you understand? I’m calm, and I don’t want to have any more therapy." And you say, "All right. You win," and let it go a few days.

The next thing that happens is that "I" is liable to go around the neighborhood saying, "You know, the last time he had me on the couch he tried to...."

So eventually you will get hold of this patient and say, "What’s the idea?"

And the patient will say, "Well, I don’t know what’s going on."

You say, "Well, do you want to come back into therapy again?"

"Yes. I get kind of mad when you don’t work on me."

So you take him back in and straight out of the Handbook, practically, the patient will sit right down and be just as vicious, just as mean, just as ornery as before.

But, basic personality suddenly picked up the circuitry and wound it forward and made the auditor go to work. "I" will do this, and is obviously the source of it, because it has such great sentience. The engram tries extremely hard to protect itself, if you can consider the engram as having any personality.

"I" is trying to kick engrams out, but he will choose some weird and peculiar ways to do so sometimes, as though a computation had been done on this level.

If the auditor is auditing well and all of a sudden the case bogs down, the engram bank has suddenly gotten something into restimulation which says, "No more therapy." A demon circuit has started talking about, "If I get rid of it I’ll lose my mind. This treatment doesn’t work, I know it doesn’t work. I’ll just go crazy if you take it away from me."

The auditor is kicking something into view. If you watch the case over a period of time, you will find out that whereas the person may not have been in therapy, he was keeping a very close reach on the auditor.

If the auditor had moved out of town, that patient would have been on the phone making sure he knew exactly where the auditor was going. And the auditor might find out a short time later that the patient had gotten a job in the new town.

That happened to me with two cases where patients worked sporadically. They would work fine for three or four days, then they would suddenly say, "Well, no more therapy," and I wouldn’t touch them for a week or so and they would wander in kind of sore because I hadn’t called them. Basic personality gets very unhappy if the auditor doesn’t move through to kick out those objections. He is not a vicious character in terms of his four dynamics. He will not try to destroy this or destroy that unless, let us say, he is from Bongo Bongo, and has been educated to believe that everything outside the world of Bongo Bongo is a savage monster.

His four dynamics will come forward. But remember that although there are people in the world who think that the world ends at the end of the plain, the instant you show them a wider horizon they will accept it. Don’t expect that the process of clearing is a process of re- educating. It is a refiling of existing education, and you have to have a new education if you are going to change a clear’s viewpoint.

A communist will probably still be a communist but I don’t know how he would conduct communism. He would probably conduct it in a very different fashion and he certainly wouldn’t indulge in atom bombs, unless he figured out that the end of the world would occur if he didn’t. There could still be an aberrated set of data taking place in the standard banks.

Realize that in working a case you have somebody working with you. Don’t ever feel lonely, even when you are working with a raving maniac. There is somebody else present.

The file clerk and the somatic strip will obey you. The file clerk will work with you. It’s up to you to keep the somatic strip mobile so it can continue to obey you, and to keep the file clerk happy with you. Neglect those two points and you are going to miss out on some therapy on somebody.

If you aren’t aware of the fact that those two factors are in existence, the case is going to stall down on you and you are not going to get anyplace.

There are other things which assist the auditor. Once in a while you get an accidental engramic phrase which assists you. One time I ran across a very long engram which had on its end, "All right. Go through it again."

The person was running down to the end of the engram and wasn’t running this last piece of it, but was going back through it again and again.

I found a fight engram one time which did the same thing, and the preclear would start at the exact beginning of it and run through it, over and over. It didn’t require any effort on my part whatsoever.

You will have one which will occasionally say, "I’ve got to get rid of it, I’ve got to get rid of it, I’ll lose my mind if I don’t," or something like that. And when that runs as the basic computation on the case, the case will run like wildfire!

After you knock that out you might think that the person won’t keep on working with you, but that isn’t the case. Then he really works fast.

So, there are various computations which work with you, but that is no reason to preserve any of them. The case works better when such computations are out, but they will assist you as long as they are in. The engram accidently is headed your way, and the file clerk will push it forward, feed it through and it will keep right on rolling out.

But never mistake this next one for the engramic assist computation. You needn’t pay much attention to auditor assists out of engrams, but you had better pay attention to the case that is helping you too much.

Get wary of it if he is being very anxious about what is going on and trying to give you this and that and writing you lengthy notes. One case that we were treating twice a week was walking in with sheaves of notes. He was doing nothing all day at the office but write notes. He had a stenographer and she would occasionally type them, and the auditor would have this enormous amount of data continually presented to him.

At any moment that the auditor became sufficiently dimwitted to pick up and use any part of that information, he was at that moment being guilty of an auditor ineptitude. Don’t use conscious level information the preclear gives you. One time in a hundred it will be correct, but you can’t tell which is the one time in a hundred. So you are going to make ninety- nine mistakes.

This means specifically that basic personality is not satisfied with the computation the auditor has gotten on the case. The moment the proper computation on this case is entered, these notes will stop. The patient will cease to be anxious about his therapy and will go along with you easily, quietly, efficiently.

That is something for you to know and remember. It’s very important. An example would be a case where the somatic strip and the file clerk had both stalled. By a great deal of persuasion with the auditor working hard against demon circuits, the preclear could be persuaded to go into an engram.

But actually what one was doing was battering right into the teeth of an engram to get anything out of the case. You will have to do that some time to break circuitry, but it isn’t very easy going. It means that there are a flock of demon circuits interrupting your address to the case. For instance, there was a case with conception prior to marriage. In the most aberrative area, the basic area, were a number of family get- togethers and pronunciamentos, and "Oh dear, this poor girl, what is she going to do?"

This was a very confusing case. Everybody was loopy in the case, the whole family. And they all talked in negatives. Instead of saying, "You can be sure," they would say, "Well, you can’t be sure," in a sarcastic tone of voice. Everything was reversed all the way up through the case, which makes backwards engrams because the sarcasm is missed.

Later in the prenatal area there is a very nasty accident of Mama slamming into the table. By this time she had made up her mind the child was going to be born and there was nothing she could do about it, and was feeling very sad about the whole thing.

Later there was birth, then there was a dental operation (nitrous oxide) at the age of about 3 years. The child was stuck in the nitrous oxide and had gone on being stuck in it from there on out. Here he was at 45 years of age still stuck in the nitrous oxide. He had lost all of his teeth and so forth, they had more or less rotted out as a consequence, but the mouth somatics continued.

This was an experimental case and the nitrous oxide engram was eventually broken with Charcot mirrors.

Charcot mirrors consist of four lady’s handbag mirrors mounted on a phonograph record with a candle stuck in the side of a portable phonograph. A piece of cardboard is placed behind the candle. Then, as the patient sits there, he isn’t seeing the light of the candle but the candle reflected in these four mirrors in the form of a four- sided plane as the phonograph record spins. The record is at different slants, so the effect is a crude approximation of that of a Koenig photometers

Don’t make any great practice of using it because it is very hard on the auditor who is there listening to information with this flashing light going all around the room. Actually, somebody should build a little rig that has got two filaments in the form of a covered mask which goes over the ears and lights which flash intermittently; that would do the same thing.

The case above watched these mirrors, and all of a sudden began to shriek. When a patient is caught badly on the track and he is quite close to a psychotic break, if you start penetrating the engram in which he is held, you will sometimes get some remarkable pyrotechnics. And he will dredge up a phrase or two each time he does. It’s just as though this thing is pulling him in. He will come out with another phrase, and finally he will desensitize the engram.

So, that was the first engram in which he was held. When that engram was released, we went immediately to birth, because he was also latched up in birth to some degree. We started birth at the beginning and ran it through to the end, beginning to end. Nothing much happened in birth, but we had to free it.

Then a prenatal appeared of Mama running into the table. He went into this, ran it out and it erased because it was floating clear of the rest of the bank. (You will occasionally find an engram doing this.) It erased clean. Unconsciousness came off it and so on.

Obviously, however, it was a very late prenatal because Mama was complaining that she might have hurt or even killed the baby. She was quite upset and alarmed. Once this was erased, birth erased in the case and then the nitrous oxide incident erased.

This case wasn’t very usual. But you will find a case where occasionally the file clerk has got three engrams sitting more or less tied on to each other, floating free of the rest of the engram bank. Don’t be too amazed if in every few patients you run into one of these floating engrams. Run it. Sometimes it erases. Don’t ever make the very foolish error of supposing that there isn’t anything ahead of it, because you will find the main bank ahead of it, earlier.

We erased the birth out of a lady recently. The incident was floating off the bank. It wasn’t latched on to anything earlier, and had no cross connections.

We got a false four line charge2 off the nitrous oxide case all the way up and down. The patient laughed his sides sore for about seven hours. Everything was funny. He had been living with all this terror all of his life and here we had eased the terror.

After this happens the case will run fairly well and you are not liable to get a psychotic break. It’s actually as good as a grief discharge.

This particular case would never be psychotic again, but in trying to run down the bank and run off the rest of the engrams, we started into real trouble. Now we were running into the main bank, and it was just like having the enemy’s skirmishing forces suddenly wiped out in front of you. Just about the time you are congratulating yourself that you have won the action, suddenly the main command, the right wing, and the left wing all show up. Only they have got howitzers, and there you are sitting with a broken tommygun. That was about the way it looked on this case because this case was really tough.

Here was a nitrous oxide lasting about five hours, including a total exodontistry at one sitting. What butcher did this I don’t know because his name was not in the bank. The case eventually came up to a release.

But that was a gruesome operation, full of talk, with everybody standing around talking about politics, the maternity ward, how nasty children are, about the various automobiles in the street, whether they like them or not, have they been to the movies lately, and so on.

The dentist had a vicious temper and the whole temper valence out of this incident was the temper valence this person was manifesting afterwards. It was a tough engram and this was the one that was holding him.

I could occasionally erase an engram off this case, but the case continued to write me endless notes full of all kinds of computations. "The reason I think this is happening is because.... And after all, my little brother was awfully mean to me and my family did punish me. But I think it was the swimming accident I had. I’m not sure but I think I was drowned. Why don’t we go into the swimming accident where I was drowned. Maybe birth didn’t erase after all. Let’s go back and check birth. I’m sure it’s in the prenatal area. Now let’s go after some painful emotion late."

I didn’t yet know about the existence of the nitrous oxide incident as an aberrative engram. But this engram had to be stripped, phrase by phrase for five hours’ worth, all the way through. It took two months.

We would pick up the first phrase out of this exodontistry and go over it two or three times. Then we would run the phrase back down early to get it into the early part of the bank, wind up in the basic area, erase the phrase in the basic area, come back up to the top and run over the phrase again as we came up. It wouldn’t erase but it did reduce.

Now we would go to the next phrase and do exactly the same thing with it. This is known as stripping an engram of phrases. To do this, you do not run the engram all the way through at one sitting. You shoot it full of holes if you have to, to get holders out of it.

In this case, right in the engram was "Control yourself, you’ve got to control yourself. You’ve got to get a grip on yourself. Now get hold of yourself. "

Three teeth came out with each one of these self- control phrases. So we had demon circuitry all over the case out of this. Fortunately it stripped after two months and all of a sudden with the circuitry out, we went back down into the basic area and erased something there as well as knocking some painful emotion off the case.

The process of stripping an engram is one which you will very rarely have to employ. But it is a last resort and usually left for nitrous oxide exodontistry.

If you have got a late nitrous oxide exodontistry, and the case absolutely refuses to resolve in any way you can think of, you will have to start in at the beginning of it and start stripping it. Sometimes you can deintensify some part of that engram. You may not have to go through that much trouble, but it is something that you learn by judgment.

The peculiarity of the above case was: Here he was writing notes, writing notes, writing notes, worrying, walking around continually trying to run his own engrams, and the only time he stopped was the first time that I said, "Let’s go to the beginning of your total exodontistry."

At that moment BP said, "Well, at last." The person became comfortable, calm, perfectly willing to go through sessions and be worked on in spite of the fact he had something closer in restimulation.

Basic personality was so pleased, and in such agreement with the whole thing, it was willing to settle down. Up to that time it was raising hell, saying, "I want out and you haven’t got the right computation on the case." As soon as you get the right computation on the case, that manifestation will settle down.

So, when the case starts giving you advice and wasting time, do your very best by direct memory to find out what has really happened with this case with a minimum waste of time. Don’t let a patient keep running off a long dissertation on all the things that have happened to him in his life, because it’s not going to do anybody a bit of good.

Once in a while running off a grief engram, you will find the patient wili try to give you the concept of it, and you had better let him give you the concept. Don’t interrupt him. But if he starts to say, "Well, this was the reason why I felt so awfully bad when my dog Bosco died," and he starts to drift off in some other direction, get him right back on the beam again.

Sometimes they will run through a grief engram once and tell you why they felt so desperately about it in just a few words, which extends maybe to five minutes, crying and talking to you about it. You had better let them, because those are the conclusions coming out, evidently made at that time.

But normally, when the patient starts to go on and on and on, and tell you what’s wrong with him, and what’s latched up, and starts to use his own repeater technique, off with his head as far as that is concerned. You have to get in there and run it.

The patient that will pick up these repeaters and start repeating them himself is invariably running on control circuitry. Now, that is not an assist to the auditor. The notes which the patient writes you are an assist only to this degree: They show that you have not hit upon the right computation. The amount of detecting which you can do by watching what a patient writes in his stories, watching phrases used in letters, or even watching illustrations he gives somebody else of an engram, is of very little use.

If you have a number of letters from this person, and if you wish to save some of this material, you may want to use it at the end of the case to check whether or not you have got this material clean. When you are clearing him, it may save you a little searching, but it is of no great value.

These are the things then that are assisting you, and fragmentarily the ways those things get blocked.

On a higher philosophic level on engrams, you could say that engrams are aberrative because they are communication blockers. Free communication with existence seems to be one of the prime requisites of man— perception and communication. The outside world communicates with "I" through the channels of perception, and "I" communicates with the outside world through the channels of communication.

Those cases seem to be most seriously aberrated who have had their communication interrupted. In working with children, using Child Dianetics, you will find out that simply by knocking out what they can’t communicate about, you will produce a very marked alleviation in the anxiety of the child.

Those engrams which say, "I can’t see, can’t feel, can’t hear," are bad enough in themselves but they are also blocks between the exterior world and "I." Those engrams which inhibit communication to the exterior world are very aberrative.

But remember that the exterior world and the interior world run on the same process. It is just as though, when you are in the engram bank, the exterior world has become interior in the head, and that attention units look to the engram bank instead of the exterior world sometimes and fuse the two.

The reaction of the individual to the exterior world and the reaction of the attention units to the engram are the same thing. They both act in the same way. This is peculiarly evident in the behavior of the file clerk. Here is the standard bank again, the file clerk, and here is various circuitry.

"I" is out of communication. This is the basis of the Freudian concept that full recall equals full sanity. Freud never said that but we will give him credit for it.

He might have been better off had he said, "Full communication equals full sanity." "I" has to be able to communicate back into the standard banks to pick up what he wants out of the standard banks. The units of "I" which are trapped are not aware of being aware, they are merely aware.

These units and the awareness of awareness units have to be fully in communication for a person to be fully sane. This is what you are establishing. As you clear the patient, you remove more and more of these blocks to communication; and the more engrams you pick up, the more file clerk there is and the stronger and more accurate the person’s response.

By this time the file clerk is so strong that he overrides the rest of the engram bank. That is what is happening when at first it takes nine recountings to erase an engram, then it takes five, then it takes two, and then you do it in one. And then the person starts blowing out when you look at him.

These units get so strong that they ride over the engram bank. There is a point in clearing where the person appears to be clear, because nothing is in restimulation.

People bounce worse when they are in other valences, although a psychotic in a charged valence where "I" is completely out of communication doesn’t bounce at all.

The file clerk, as clearing progresses, is more and more in communication with "I," and becomes stronger and stronger and has more and more units, more and more power, until at last it’s just like playing a phonograph record with the volume turned all the way up.

I have seen sonic come on with the person still out of valence, with sonic shut off. The sonic may not be very clear and it may click off occasionally, but it’s still on. It’s not that the computation is constantly shutting off sonic around the case, and it’s not that the person is completely in his own valence all the time, it’s just blasting through by the strength of basic personality, and the file clerk.

Therefore, in starting a case we can say that we are trying to free all possible attention units as fast as possible. Direct circuit memory will sometimes free up attention units just by blowing out locks.

After the patient feels better, he has more attention units available and he is better able to move on the track. After a while, you may not have freed him, actually, from the engram in which he is latched up, but you will have given him enough attention units so that he has some part of "I" which can move. And, having that, he can now start contacting engrams.

You start by moving him through pleasure moments. Pleasure has very high survival value. The mind is trying to obtain pleasure, trying to escape from pain. This demonstrates to him that there is pleasure in the past. Therefore attention units are willing to go back along the track; there’s pleasure back there.

More and more of them will go back until finally you may get the person’s perceptics turned on by that alone. Demonstrate to him that life wasn’t too horrible and the attention units will start picking up and "I" will

. .

Crease ln power.

At first in a case, the file clerk may be pretty weak. The things which are mainly holding him up are communications circuitry and control circuitry. The first thing you have to hit, because Dianetics is Dianetics and you have to have an auditor, is control circuitry, because "I’? is trying to get data from the file clerk but there is a demon circuit in operation which has a balked file clerk in it. "I am going to tell you what to do. You are going to listen to me. I am the boss around here. I wear the pants." That kind of statement in an engram walls off a piece of analyzer. Data starts in on a flash answer, "I’m going to tell you what to do," and it acts like a ghost that has taken over control.

That’s the first thing to work on, and if you can knock that out of the case at the beginning, aberrated entity is no longer resisting you because you have taken the control mechanisms out of the engram bank.

A person wide awake with his analyzer on can be told to control himself and he will, but if he has got demon circuitry to take control of himself, it goes into restimulation and this may throw him into a screaming fit as part of the act of controlling himself.

The demon circuit is an interposition between the file clerk and "I." Now you start to get communication shut- offs. That is an identity shut- off. Of course it’s actually true that a person is seeking his own identity as one of the first things he wants to do in therapy.

Then there are curtain demons, such as, "You never pay any attention to me," or "You never pay any attention to anything that’s said."

In the absence of valences, you can still get the answers through it, faint, uncertain, sometimes derailed, but nevertheless there. These occlusion circuits interrupt communication. They are always thinner down toward the bottom of the bank, and as a result you can get through at these points.

One of the things you have got to do is establish communication between the file clerk and "I." You are also trying to establish communication between "I" and his own identity so that "I" becomes his own identity and is no longer out of valence.

You could do those two things, deleting of course any further entities that have set themselves up in the bank on a control mechanism. If you have free communication in this case, the case will start to roll in such a way that you can work it along the following lines:

"The file clerk will now give us the earliest engram we have to have to resolve the case. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of this engram." You don’t question that it’s there. You know it’s there.

Don’t invalidate the person’s somatic strip. Don’t invalidate his file clerk. Don’t invalidate the data. Don’t invalidate him. You assume that it’s there, so you say, "When I count from one to five, the first phrase is going to flash into your mind. One- two- three- four- five (snaps)."

Even in a sonic case, because of the occlusion of unconsciousness and pain, those first phrases are not liable to come through unless you give this booster to the file clerk. On a sonic case, sound on the phrase will come through and then we can run it because the person is fixed in the incident.

That is optimum procedure. That is the way you want a case to run. You open up, you start into a case with a diagnosis, you find out if he has any painful emotion. You try to get that off. If you can’t get any right away, test whether or not he is moving on the track.

Tune up his perceptics a little bit. Start working with this file clerk and somatic strip. If they work, keep right on working with them. When they stop working, go into more diagnosis trying to knock out circuitry and occlusions.

You assume they are working until it is very obvious to you that they are not working, and you try not to tell the file clerk what he’s got in his bank any more than you would try to give advice to somebody on the subject of his engrams.

Treat the file clerk as an entity. Don’t invalidate him. He will give you data. Cases that were very simple at first in therapy have sometimes bogged down just because the auditor does not have confidence in the file clerk, and his lack of confidence has a tendency to invalidate the file clerk’s data, snarl up the circuitry, give it more power and slow the case down enormously.

If you are going to work with the file clerk, you have got to work with him, and if you are going to work with him, trust him. He is still there. Even if he might be just banging up against all sorts of demon circuits, you are trying to get him through these. You can even talk him through to you sometimes. You can ask the preclear not to pay any attention to what you say by telling him, "I’m going to talk to your file clerk," then by saying to the file clerk, "Now you can come through. You can tell me what this is all about. I want you to give me flash answers. When I snap my fingers I want you to shoot the flash answer through and maybe we can get this thing resolved." Pay no attention to the preclear as "I." It sometimes baffles him, because the next moment after you have asked the file clerk for something, it rides through at express train speed and gives you the data.

You want the case to become a pianola. As long as it is working perfectly, don’t fool with it. Don’t go in after special aberrations or get weird ideas about what you are doing. Don’t evaluate for the file clerk to the degree of telling him what he has to give you next. Don’t drag up a computation out of thin air and say, "I wonder if this is wrong with this person. It must be his tonsillectomy. The file clerk will now give us the tonsillectomy."

Once in a great while you will note a person bouncing in and out of birth. Birth may be ready to run. Maybe the file clerk is not working too well in the case. Maybe there is a tough engram that you can spot. But that is only if the file clerk isn’t working. Now and only now can you use your computation. But your computations are not as good as those of the file clerk.

One thing the file clerk doesn’t know is how early you can get. He also doesn’t understand that as you get to the basic end of the case and start running it, you will get erasures.

The preclear will be as happy as a clam when he finds this out. He will feed you data, data, data. He will go right on up the scale and give you everything you need.

At that moment you start telling him to give you the next earliest moment, the next earliest incident, the next earliest incident, next earliest incident, and so on. I’ve run out 30 engrams an hour on a person on the road to clear just on that basis, working very closely with the file clerk but insisting he give me the next earliest moment. Otherwise he is liable to get too happy about the whole thing and give something later in the bank, which if deintensified would make the preclear feel much better, but you don’t want to slam it that fast.

I have for three years been playing tag from time to time with some kind of an early memory. I could slug cases into clearing. Sonic would turn on and the person would feel a lot better than he had ever felt in his life before. But we are trying to make it work smoother and faster, and in research we are having an interesting time running out preconception engrams.

We have a series that is being set up to find out how far it will go. If this thing improves cases and shortens the length of time it takes to run a case, it will turn on somatics that have never been turned on before and will become part of Standard Procedure.