RUNNING FORMER LIVES

A lecture given on 22 July 1950

Investigation

I like to give people a taste of what is happening on research, not so much that they get dizzy, but enough to keep them interested in how far this thing can go.

I took a hard- boiled, hardheaded, sonic shut- off, somatic shut- off, reality shut- off case and had him pretend he was dead, in the hope that he would swing into the dead person in whose valence he was, and then he could tell us all about the funeral.

So I said, "Go to the time when you were dead." So he obligingly went to 1797 in Sicily, when he was in a farmhouse dying. He died with full somatics.

I thought this was very interesting, so I brought him up to present time and thought about it a little more, and took another case.

This one was a very rough case, and I said, "Let’s go back to the last time you died," and he landed up around the 14th or 15th century and started to run off a death with a head somatic. But it wouldn’t reduce.

So I said, "The file clerk will now give us the death necessary to resolve this case." And he did! He gave us another death later, and we ran it several times. It had a head somatic, only it was in a slightly different position. And the two somatics were latched on to each other. We ran it out, it reduced and evidently made the earlier one ready.

So, it was effective in doing something about the case. These incidents were more valid to both of these people than any of the data they had run so far in Dianetics. But, I have been working with phenomena never before observed by human eyes long enough now, so that my hair has lost all its starch, it doesn’t stand up on end anymore.

If somebody is willing to run walking up the steps with a knife in his back saying, "Et tu, Brute?" let him run it!

In checking over standard bank material early in my own therapy I went back into several of these incidents. I had sonic and somatic shut- off. I guess I didn’t even have any confidence in whether or not I was alive. I went back and went through some of this material. I had brilliant color, threedimensional visio and so forth. On an imagination level, I had never had this before.

I wrote most of my stories and motion pictures by watching a black frame on the wall. I would project the black frame on the wall as an imagination visio. But it was flat— obviously imagination.

I went back into this material and it was really full- bodied. And then the data got invalidated on me, but not for long. I said, "Well, one of these days, Ronnie, you will just have to go back and find out what did happen at Shiloh."

Standard bank material was also present in these other cases. There was an incident of someone signing the ship’s log, the last party before sailing, kissing the barmaid, and the long- stemmed clay pipe, as well as the olfactory on the tobacco smoke and so on.

We have a piece of phenomena. We have to investigate it. This is not standard technique, and it won’t be standard technique until it has been very thoroughly processed and tested.

That is the status of it in present time. When we observe phenomena not before observed, it is perfectly valid to investigate it and find out what it is, and what is happening, and in that way we learn. By interpreting it properly, by finding something else, we are cutting the time of clearing shorter and shorter, to the point where one of these super turned off, super dub- in cases will resolve without slugging in and tearing yourself to pieces trying to get at one life when you can clear him by hitting another one.

Nobody knows anything about how memory is transmitted, or what the time span is, or what time is. One of the reasons I started back on this is that it is impossible to store memory as it is reputed to be stored. There is too much of it. By computing it out carefully, one discovers one has enough memory to last three months.

I conducted some tests on this in 1932 in the George Washington University physics lab. Dr. William Alanson White was quite interested in this, and said," Your figures have just invalidated neurology."

They have since had five or six theories and still don’t come close to those figures, because there is no way to store memory in the quantity that memory exists, unless you postulate something else outside the nervous system, or are working with some form of bio- electronics of which we are not even faintly aware. If this time span proposition turns out, we will have a better idea.

But if one can reach these incidents, and if these are aberrated, then it means that one could go back to actual basic- basic. And if that actual basic- basic is two thousand years ago, the thing ought to lift, and if you come up to the next lifetime and run the engrams out of that, they ought to lift as well and continue on up to present time engrams.

There isn’t anything very harmful about the phenomenon of death and former lives. For a long time there have been theories on transmigration of the soul and reincarnation. Our statement is "We have found phenomena for which we have no adequate explanation."

The objective reality of this material has not been tested. However, the subjective reality of it is very great and it even works on people who start out by saying, "Oh, no, nothing like this ever happened to me."

"All right, let’s go back to the last time you died."

"What are you talking about?"

"Well, let’s go back to the last time you died. What do you think happened?"

Immediately the person gets peculiarly interested. I have done this quite a few times with people, in the process of erasing the case. I have told them to go back to the earliest moment of pain or unconsciousness. And each time this has happened, I have chalked it up in my little book and said to myself, "One of these days I’m really going to have to get down and investigate this."

Sometimes a person would say, "Well, here I am standing in the road and I’ll be a son of a gun, that must be a coach! " And he stands there and all of a sudden gets run over.

Before that, when I ran someone back to anything like this, I would say, "It’s a wonderful thing what you can do with a person’s mind," and bring the person close into the prenatal bank and continue the erasure. Erasure proceeded very nicely and it didn’t seem necessary to get anything else.

Then once in a while I would hit one of these tough ringtail snorter cases. So naturally I am looking for additional phenomena that might occasionally explain a very tough case.

Going through on the research level telling people, "Let’s go early," it was inevitable that we would run into this phenomenon if it was there, and it is there and I have run into it.

Because it startles people, I wasn’t ready to investigate it completely, but there certainly is enough investigation on it now to find out that you get somatics and unconsciousness off, and cases very often feel very much better for having run such incidents.

You have to handle these things like engrams. If you hit an engram along the line, run it. And if it won’t reduce, go to the earlier one that is necessary to reduce it and find another death or something of the sort and reduce that. You get yawns off it. It reduces. Then you can go back and get the other one and it will reduce. The somatics lie across each other in chains.

The society works on the proposition that somewhere back along the line an amoeba originated out of the sea and it developed gradually and came on up to present time and then through some necromancy, without any prompting, the sperm and ovum got together and started developing. Then the soul develops at the age of 3 months after conception and the embryo brain suddenly joins up with the regular brain; around birth myelin sheathing appears and the person becomes slightly analytical. At the age of 2/ 2 they suddenly and miraculously start to think.

This is the social aberration today. You can’t call it scientific fact because it is based on tenets, such as the theory of evolution, which are full of holes, and which look like somebody worked them over with a shotgun once a mathematician goes to work on them.

There is no reason to accept any of these tenets, even the one we are working with, which is the possibility that there is a continuous time span recorded. The time span goes back. But does it go back one lifetime or fifty lifetimes? And would it be the same individual running on the time span? There is no reason why that theory isn’t just as good as the theory of evolution.

We are discovering incidents back there. I never investigated them before, although I probably should have. We don’t currently know much about them except that people feel better when they are run. This is not part of the standard technique of Dianetics at present although I have known this material was there for some time.

Don’t blame me for the fact that there is this sort of thing in life. People have a tendency to do this. I come up with something that I have observed, and I immediately say, "You know, I was out there the other day and I was standing on the edge of the frontier, I looked over that way and I saw a funny orange light."

And somebody says, "What the heck did you put it there for?"

Or I come along and say, "I have taken patients back of conception and very often discovered that they had some material in there and I’m going to investigate it someday."

And someone says, "You shouldn’t investigate that, because after all it’s incredible and Dianetics would become incredible."

A young lady told me that today. I replied, "What’s more incredible than complete memory at conception?" That is incredible because you are postulating that a sperm, which is microscopic, can retain memory recordings.

Perhaps as a person goes back, there may be a much better electronic explanation of memory storage. If there is, I hope very much to lay my hands on it.