THE ANATOMY OF THE DEMON CIRCUIT

A lecture given on 22 July 1950

The Factor of Control

In this lecture I will cover the anatomy of the demon circuit.

The demon circuit is installed as a part of an engram which requires, by its statement, computation. It is installed on a "you" basis by some "I." The "you" does not then enter into a part of the being, but stands off with a separateness from the actual "I," although it dictates to it.

In times when that engram is very much restimulated, the whole engram can be redramatized and at that time the person who is dramatizing it creates a demon circuit in somebody else— a common contagion.

"You’ve got to learn to control yourself. You’ve got to get a grip on yourself"— that sort of a demon circuit is "you" addressing "I." Actually it postulates the picture that there is an "I" separate from "I" in the mind which is talking to the actual "I."

There can be a lot of these circuits in the mind. That is what is peculiar about the mind, it has got so much space! Here apparently is just a few cubic centimeters of cranial content, but when you start looking at the amount of equipment that is in this thing you start to get very suspicious of where thought and the mechanisms of thought are really located. So, all of this is pure analogy.

The reason the control demon circuit is important is that it alone makes it possible for the engrams to cause a person to squirm out of the control of the auditor. The existence of a "control yourself" circuit establishes a pseudo- auditor over "I" that is not part of "I." So, when the auditor says to the person, "All right. Let’s go back to the earliest moment of pain or discomfort," and the preclear says, "Well, I’m up here in present time, and I just can’t seem to get back," the auditor immediately suspects a demon circuit.

If there weren’t any pseudo- auditor in there, if the auditor simply said, "The file clerk will now give us the earliest moment of pain or discomfort available to resolve the case. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of the incident. When I count from one to five and snap my fingers, you will give me the first words in the engram. One- two- three- four- five (snap!)," he would get the first words, get them repeated a few times, and the preclear would be able to go on through the incident. There would be nothing else to it, it would just work that way, because basic personality is strong enough that even "I" can’t buck the auditor who wants somebody’s engrams, unless there is a pseudo- auditor.

If you call these demon circuits pseudo- auditors, you might get a much clearer picture of what is happening. In actual fact these things have nothing to do with "I." They have blocked off a part of the analyzer and they actually use it. The person says, "My goodness, what am I going to do today? Let me see, let me think about it. Well, I don’t think I had better go swimming because...." That is a typical stream of consciousness caused by demon circuitry.

There are not only internal appearing demon circuits, there are actually demon circuits which pretend to be external. People who have these external circuits have somebody walking around with them talking to them, which perhaps they have never noticed until it is called to their attention. Then the person thinks about it for a moment and says, "Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I get all my advice from out here." There’s an audio circuit existing in thin air.

For instance, a typical circuit from a mother to a child might be "I’ve got to do all of your thinking for you, I’ve got to tell you what to do, for heaven’s sake," or "I have to do everything around here. You are always making a mess. I’ve got to tell you what to do," which creates a demon circuit which then sits out as a "pseudo- I" and says to "I," "Now the thing for you to do is to go down to the corner and get two loaves of bread." Sometimes they do very accurate thinking, such as, "Go down and get this and then I think you had better go over and get some gas in the car."

I have seen people all of a sudden stand for a moment blank and then march off. You expect them to turn around and salute!

Another one is a demon circuit with a song. A song starts going through a person’s mind and it just keeps wheeling through, over and over, and he says, "Well, I’m going to stop thinking about this song now. I’ll concentrate on something else." So he does, and it will stop the song for a moment. And then he relaxes suddenly, and it immediately goes on, "Be kind to your webfooted friends...."

I even know a person who would have a single song running through his head for about two days at a stretch! The circuit on this was to the effect, "Well, whether you like it or not you’ve got to listen to it. I’m going to sing it, I’m going to keep on singing anyhow." It was an audio- vocal circuit, and a popular song would get in there and it would just start wheeling— an inexhaustible record.

There are several classifications. There is the aberration which is simply "I have a bad time of it," that has a tendency to match up with "I."

Then there are valence shifters where "I" gets mixed up with the "I" of another valence, giving a deluded "I" very close in— a carbon copy. That is "I" comparing with "I." Demon circuits are "you," but they have an "I" with them. But the demon circuit gets set up on this level: "I am the boss around here, you’ve got to do what I tell you to do." That is a typical demon circuit and that is a "control yourself" demon circuit causing people to do various things.

A valence is a whole carbon copy of an individual. A person has to have a valence shifter to get him over thoroughly into such a valence. Otherwise he merely fluctuates into that valence as the winning one.

But if it has got a shifter in it somewhere in the bank, he may be in Papa’s valence, then the part of the track which he dramatizes is Papa’s track and "I" in this case is Papa. Only he can be shifted into Papa’s and Mama’s valences simultaneously and have both valences working for him as a double shift.

This is not very complicated if you take two people talking to each other, and one says, "You’ve got to do it, I’m going to make you do it if it’s the last thing I ever do."

And the other person says, "Well, I am not going to do it no matter what you tell me. I don’t like you," and so on.

In between these two people the baby—" it"— may be listening in on this and getting an engram out of it, so there are three valences present.

Now if the person is the baby, and if anybody breaks down his dramatizations and breaks him into this baby valence, it has an age tab on it that can spoil his build; it has got pain in it, so it gives him psychosomatic illnesses and so on. So, he will fluctuate ordinarily over from one valence to the other unless he has a strong valence shifting mechanism.

The auditor may get him into Mama’s valence by saying, "Well, let’s go back to that engram that we were running last."

"I’m not going to do it."

And the auditor says, "Well, please now, why not go back to this?"

"I’m not going to do it."

The auditor could suspect immediately that he is listening to a demon circuit and that somebody is saying, "You’ve got to do it," and that he as the auditor has stepped into Papa’s boots in some way.

The auditor can do a phony shift on this sometimes. If he were suddenly to say, "I won’t, I won’t," the patient will sometimes catch himself up on the impulse to say, "But you’ve got to." The auditor can also, when a preclear is doing this sort of thing, say, "What were some of your papa’s mannerisms?"

The preclear replies in a deep, masculine voice, "I don’t know."

"And what were some of your mama’s mannerisms?"

"Well, I really don’t know," he answers in a high- pitched voice.

There will be an automatic shift and the person will shift all the way through these things that way. If a person has a bad stomachache one can just ask that person casually after figuring out maybe that was Mama’s morning sickness, "Well, how did your father used to look at people?"

"Oh, kind of mean," the person says gruffly.

One then immediately says, "How’s your stomachache?"

"It’s gone."

This will work unless a person is really locked up in the valence with a lot of commands like "You’re just like your father and I hate you" from Mama, which makes him try to occupy the winning valence and crowds him over into Papa’s valence where he sticks to such a degree that he is Papa all the way up and down the track and he becomes very difficult to shift in valence.

There is the real "I" of the individual. But as this person shifts valences, if he gets into Papa’s valence, Mama is now a demon circuit talking to Papa. If he gets into Mama’s valence, Papa is now a demon circuit talking to Mama. Unluckily for him if he is aberrated, if he is in his own valence, he has both Papa and Mama talking to him.

This is the Holy Trinity of Papa, Mama, Baby— the famous triangle of India. It has been used in the eastern world and in the Middle East to represent various things.

People get quite an aberrated idea of God sometimes, because naturally God is on a high plane, and there is maybe a goddess alongside him, with poor, shivering "I" way down below. But that would be in the womb, of course, so there is a strange setup of Papa, Mama, Baby, and that is the Holy Trinity at work.

So, where there is Papa and Mama one has various control circuits.

The person who is in his own valence may get a double circuit if there are a lot of commands in the bank. For instance, Mama has been fond of redramatizing Papa. Papa has been fond of dramatizing the fact that he is the boss. Papa beats this into Mama very early. The child arrives, and because Mama has it by contagion, she uses it on the child.

So, the poor child gets it going and coming. When he finally gets up along the line he has got to obey, he has got to mind. By this time you can thoroughly expect him to have a lot of circuitry.

The circuits that we are really interested in are those good, strong, solid ones which state specifically on a command level, "You’ve got to control yourself," or "Stop and think," where the person will go along just so far and then all of a sudden stop and think about it. Actually, if you looked into that person’s mind, he is not thinking about anything at all. He merely has a command that says that he has to stop and think. "Think twice before speaking once," is another one. So a person will obligingly run it through twice, only that wasn’t what he was thinking at all.

On a relatively unaberrated mind it is a problem of feeding a computing machine, but with a command phrase like "Think twice before speaking once," there are people who make a great to- do of being very thoughtful. There is a whole art of social aberration on this of being very judicious about what is thought. And after they do all of this thinking over this situation, then they come up with some legal opinion or something of the sort, and things become very complex.

When working on tough control circuitry, we have to shoot full of holes that thing which is becoming a pseudo- auditor. If Papa in this case has a habit of telling people what they have got to do, you have got somebody else present doing the auditing. For instance, if he says, "Calm down. Now calm down," or an old line which was in vogue around 1912, "Go way back and sit down," or you have Mama who is saying, "Stay there," you have got another "auditor" at work.

It is your job as an auditor to undo that sort of thing; specifically, phrases like, "You’ve got to control yourself," "You’ve got to think what you’re doing," "You’ve got to hold on to yourself," "You’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that...." Or, "I wear the pants in this family. You’re going to do what I tell you to do."

If Mama was the dominant member of the family in that fashion, of course you have this circuitry on her side. You try to work him in Papa’s valence and you have a pseudo- auditor to end all pseudo- auditors. Mama is the dominant personality and she is telling him what to do. She told the boy what to do, she told Papa what to do. If the child is then crowded over into Papa’s valence the handiest way you can break him out of it is simply by knocking off all the valence shifters that made him like Papa. That would be the first step you would take in undoing the circuitry in this case.

Because Mama is the pseudo- auditor she is going to tell him what to do. So when he, as "I," is crowded over into Papa’s valence, you are bucking on a command basis all the bossing that Mama did.

A good working rule on this is: That thing which a person won’t do in Dianetics is that thing you have got to crack first if you expect this case to resolve. It goes exactly parallel.

If this person can’t believe Dianetics, you could actually go so far (don’t do this but keep it as a back model for your conversation) as saying to a patient, "Well, what don’t you like about Dianetics?" and the person will probably come up with what is bothering him analytically.

You never get quite as thorough a scream out of an individual as you do on the subject that you must get to in order to resolve his case. Somebody who has bad emotional shut- offs was told he must never have any emotion. "You can’t have any emotion. You are not supposed to be emotional. You’ve got to be cool. You’ve got to keep calmed down about this sort of thing. Calm down," and so on.

That individual now arrives for auditing and the auditor says, "Well, I don’t know. Now let’s see, what are we going to go into here? I don’t know what to get to in your case. Let’s go over the various elements of this thing. We could try for some painful emotion ."

"Ho- oh, there’s nothing like that wrong with me!"

"Well, we could try for some valences"— no reaction. "We could try for some attempted abortions"— no reaction. "We could try to find Mama’s lover"— no reaction. "Or we could try some painful emotion ."

"You’re not going to do that to me! I don’t believe painful emotion actually exists. That won’t further a case at all." And the preclear goes on to explain some terrific rationale about why painful emotion isn’t necessary. One can watch people reacting along this line and use it for instant diagnosis.

Find out what facets of living the person objects to, and one will find reasons below it.

It is not correct in a case which has lots of this circuitry to try to get the preclear to tell you what he wants to do next, because the case won’t go toward what it is supposed to go toward. If it could, the person would not be aberrated.

Of course, after someone has been in Dianetics for a short time he very often has quite an accurate computation of what is going on, and he may say, "There’s a terrific charge bubbling and I know it. But I just feel awful. Let’s see if we can’t do something about it." In that case one can tell that he is not doing an avoid. One can see it leaking out of his eyes!

Regarding circuitry and valences, "I" should be in control of the whole brain area, but isn’t. There is also negative circuitry where Mama says, "I just won’t do this," or, "I just can’t do anything about it," and this is her continual talk.

A person could very adventurously be Papa and be strong and beat his chest. But then there is Mama that can’t do it and is so sad and so sorry. Or, we’ll take Papa being so sad and sorry, and when the person gets into these valences, he gets despondent. There isn’t any dictation going forward, he merely becomes unable.

But if there is circuitry with it, the circuitry may go: "You can’t do anything about this, you always fail, you know nobody in your family ever succeeded anyway." Let’s say that is a demon circuit setup of Mama and Papa.

When he gets into Papa’s valence he always fails. Everything makes sure that he does, that’s survival. So, as Papa, then, he is going through this type of a computation because it is being dictated by Mama, and sometimes that circuit is audio. "You’re going to listen to me. I know you hate the sound of my voice but you’re going to listen, damn you." I ran that out of someone one time who had a demon circuit in him. And he often wondered why he had a fixation on plugging up his ears. He would go to bed at night and put plugs in his ears. One day I asked him why he had his hands over his ears.

"Well," he said, "lt’s just a habit I have." On further inquiry I discovered that he had a voice going on inside his head of a very high sound level variety. He had listened to it so long that it made him a little bit nervous to think about it. If you can imagine anybody living in a barn where there is a loudspeaker going day and night, that was this person.

There is a failure demon circuit which will sometimes interfere with auditing. The person will be over in Papa’s valence, and saying, "Well, well, yes, well, I’ve tried, it wouldn’t do any good though, I won’t be able to reach any engrams...." He is actually right in an engram, and that engram is about all that is in sight.

Sometimes you can shift his valence and get the most remarkable reaction. He will sit bolt upright on the couch and start telling you what to do!

Now, supposing he sticks out of his own valence and is not obeying commands, but is caught between valences; he will be getting all of these things passing on through his head in audio circuit. Maybe he is not believing it and is trying not to listen to it, exercising his own judgment as best he can and not being heavily influenced by these things when they arrive, but letting them pass by. Then something may happen to that person, such as a death, which will get him over into one of the valences, and after that he will be subject to one or the other of the command series that is going on.

When a person is young, he is right dead center anyway. There is Papa but he is not Papa, and there is Mama but he is not Mama. He is listening to them all the time, they are going on in his internal world and they are going on in the external world simultaneously. He is trying to avoid them in both places, and he can get along pretty well as long as he does avoid them in both places.

You will find people struggling along in life doing things although their parents were both unable. But, let that person get sick sometime and let him run into an identical situation and he will suddenly identify himself with his father or mother.

I saw one boy go into the navy during the war and promptly go into a spin the second he stepped into uniform. He was in the navy about three months. They were very short of men so they were pushing him on through. He arrived on board as part of a draft, I picked up his seabag, threw it over his shoulder for him and ran him down to the psychopathic ward because he was in such terrible shape. They put him under observation down there and he got free meals for a month or two and then they sent him home. I know what was wrong with that boy because I inquired a little bit into his history as I was talking to him. His father was in the navy. The boy had been perfectly all right as an apprentice seaman. But his father during his gestation period was a seaman second class, and the moment that he became a seaman second class he was identified. Somebody walked up to him and said an exact line. Here he was in the uniform. He was all squared away, there was an immediate valence shift and he stayed shifted.

This data is of vast interest all through the society. It isn’t just a gimmick that you can startle people with by shifting them over from one valence to the other by asking about mannerisms; it is something that is an operating mechanism of aberration. When the phrase contains the word "you" and has a command in it, or contains a statement, particularly if it says to think, talk or control, it can pick up part of the analyzer and think with it.

As a person goes into valences, he drags over a little bit of "I" into a valence, or he drags it over into a "pseudo- I."

If one has got a lot of valence shifters in the case, one gets a carbon copy of the individual. For instance, my mother used to come in every time I had been caught fighting and get very mad at me, and my grandfather would try to take up for me, so we had a big ally computation. Then my mother would say, "You’re just like your grandfather." I started this when I was about 2 l/ 2, and it was in the bank about 79 times, at least. In consequence, there was a big shift over to Grandfather.

But those battles didn’t really key in until many years had gone by and I shifted over into my grandfather’s valence. I started to be fond of the same rattletrap cars that he was fond of. I would go and watch running horses rather than do anything else; I was picking up all of his likes and dislikes, and all of his political beliefs, in other words becoming a nice carbon copy. I was riding over in his valence.

As I came up the line I suddenly found out that I peculiarly detest running horses. I think they’re dull. Of course that’s also a matter of educational experience. When I was small they used to step on me!

Handling valences is a vital mechanism in the case.

Circuitry can be shot to pieces, but supposing Mama was the dominant party and Mama was continually saying to Papa, "You’ve got to control yourself, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that." And, "You’ve got to get a grip on yourself and get ahead in the world." Even with such a setup, the auditor has to control certain portions of the patient, his file clerk, his somatic strip. Unless those things are in his hands it is like driving a 20- horse team without any reins.

So, the first thing he has to do is remove that circuitry. One can actually work with a case on a valence shifter proposition that will make the case much more amenable to therapy without getting out any control mechanisms. It is pretty hard to shift a whole valence without getting anything else out of the case, but one can try. That’s one of the good things about the basic area. Get a person down into basic area and he will shift through valences easily even though there are a lot of valence shifters in the upper part of the case.

That is one of the reasons why sonic turns on so often in the basic area and doesn’t turn on anywhere else. Sometimes the circuitry is so great that one has to come clear down to the sperm sequence before one gets anything like sonic, and then run out the sperm sequence and one can get sonic to turn on.

Sometimes, three or four engrams ahead of it there will be sonic. It is pretty hard to distinguish what those engrams are or where they are. But if the sperm sequence won’t reduce, it’s computable that the next coitus engrams that you get are below it.

I ran across a preclear one time that had two germ cells attacking the sperm as they came out, and he got nicked by one of them. His description of this would have raised the hair of the most hardened science fiction reader.

It is a strange thing but the sperm also seems to be a bit cat- eyed. Start picking up the sperm sequence out of people who haven’t been in contact with anybody and you will find pretty much the same thing.

There is an equation that a person is affected by the engram nearest to him plus the composite of all the engrams prior to that engram. So, as we go down the track we have less and less engrams prior to the moment until we get down to the bottom and there are no further engrams.

If you have got the patient back to the age of 2 l/ 2, a bouncer at the age of 3 will not affect him. But if a bouncer happens to be, lucklessly for the case, in the sperm sequence, the case is affected all the way down the line by it. Now if you have one of these somatics riding in one place and the words in another, start suspecting one of these contrivances in the basic area which is lifting the person off engrams. It is an additive effect as you come up the bank, engram after engram.

That is not a law. That is merely a rough observation of what happens.

The first thing you want out of a case is painful emotion off the top and basic engrams. A bouncer is important only when it raises its ugly head and makes it impossible for you to handle anything else. Get a few of these off down in the early part of the bank, together with some unconsciousness, and the whole case loosens up, and that is actually the target.

Handling circuitry is trouble- shooting a case. There are various mechanisms of running a dramatization of the parents fighting, let us say, and then running into the early part of the bank and getting the first on the fight chain, or settling a person in a dramatization, letting him run through it three or four times and then trying to get the same lock the earliest time he can get it.

Then there is the mechanism of putting a person into a pleasurable sexual moment such as when he or she is courting, getting the person settled into that incident and then throwing the person into the early part of the bank.

When someone is not moving on his track, run off some dramatizations and get into the early part of the bank; then run off some more dramatizations and try for the early part of the bank again, and by doing so, the preclear will finally start doing what he is supposed to do.