RELATION OF AFFINITY, COMMUNICATION AND REALITY

A lecture given on 4 August 1950

The General Direction of Auditing

Firstly, I want to talk about the co- relationship of three things which one would not ordinarily consider to be related: affinity, communication and reality. They may seem to be three different things. Actually, they are not. They are three entities which at least in some part of their existence are coexistent.

Once upon a time there was a school of philosophy originated in the world. I say "Once upon a time . . ." because it has been reoriginated time after time. There was a book published recently by Bertrand Russell on the same subject, "What is reality?"

This seems to have worried people for a long time and it will probably worry them for a long time to come. I’m not going to make any effort to tell you what reality is, but I will try to show you that it is not quite what you think it is.

Reality has a very interesting quality of being something one doesn’t nail down. What is reality? When you start to bat along the line of philosophy on this, you come immediately to a log jam.

Very few philosophers ever run into this log jam without getting log jammed right there for the rest of their natural lives. There have probably been upwards of three or four hundred billion words spilled in philosophic texts concerning the question of what is reality, and not one of them answers it.

Few of them have gone to the extent of mentioning the fact that we are aware of reality. To metaphysics, reality is not absolute, but it transcends all human experience. In that way they simply put the subject on a side rail by saying, "If you want to know about reality, just look over on the side track and find that string of empty cars that says it is reality." That is about as far as they have gone.

Reality is not absolute. We perceive it. Bertrand Russell, in his last book, is quite interested in the fact that we perceive it. So was Descartes and others. However, it doesn’t require a hundred thousand words to say that people perceive reality.

You know you perceive something, and I know I perceive something, and actually there is not much more to know about it. But there is a great deal to be known about the perception of reality.

So let’s just walk around the log jam and go on down the stream. There is no reason to make a log jam out of it by saying that reality must be an absolute. To demonstrate what I mean by the unreality of reality or the "What is it?" of reality, take a table, for instance, which consists of space and energy. Probably if it was taken apart into its component units of energy, it could not be viewed by a very good microscope. This is a section of reality. It is space and energy.

The whole thing seems to be motion, but nobody knows quite what space is. There isn’t any really good definition of space.

I figured out a geometry one time which was based upon eight dimensions in space. It was a very beautiful piece of work, it made sense, but there wasn’t any use for it. It considered the fact that space went in all directions. And then there was three- dimensional time in space, and the three- dimensional time coexisted in such a way that in each one of these dimensions of time there was another eight dimensions of space.

If you have ever looked at a package of Quaker Oats, you can see the person holding a package of Quaker Oats on which there is a person holding a package of Quaker Oats, and so on. That is a concept of mathematics.

But let’s look at reality. Take an ashtray, for instance, which appears to be extremely solid and yet would reduce down to nothing as far as its actual mass of the energy units which compose it.

In fact, if reduced down, the whole universe could probably be stood upon the head of a pin as far as the actual mass is concerned, although nobody is likely to make the experiment.

Then there is space, and we say there is something in space called matter, if we don’t look too hard.

Then comes time. We can explain time as a continuum of consecutive moments. But what are moments? They are units of time. Well, what is time?

You can go around in this way, and no matter how learned or scholastic your terms may be, it still boils down to the fact that time is a continuum of consecutive moments. And what are moments? They are units of time.

The antonym of reality is unreality and the antonym of unreality is of course reality, so that gets us nowhere. Then there is thought. Thought is no more an imponderable than time. We can see thought taking place.

So we have time, space, thought, and we have energy. I have already said that if you take all these energy units in the universe and reduce them down into one mass, that mass could sit on the head of a pin. Of course the pin would have to be part of the mass, so this is a difficult experiment!

So, when we get through with this nonsense, we see that we are not dealing with absolutes.

The energy itself evidently has, as one of its actions, motion. Motion requires time and space. What is motion?

Actually, most things are here because of particles of energy which are in motion. Theoretically one could set up a giant tuning fork in space, lean on one side of it, let go of it, and if it sent out the right wavelength, energy would occur.

The very scientific science of physics deals with entities which refuse in any way to be nailed down. Of course, if you set it up as an equation reductio ad absurdum, the science of physics doesn’t exist, and we could say that you and I don’t exist. But you know that I exist, and I know that you exist. So that must be through a medium of thought. This can become very confusing, and I was confused for some years on this subject until I decided that all of that consists of one log jam that is standing in the center of thought, and by bypassing the whole log jam we could take a look at what we get in front of it.

To exist there has to be time, and obviously there is no such thing as that, so not even a definition exists for it.

But you know that I exist and I know that you exist. We have a tacit consent around this whole thing. You and I agree that a wooden table is made of matter, that it is sitting in space, that it was manufactured or grown at a certain period in time and that it arrived in front of us, as reality. We also know that when we knock on it, we hear an impact which is carried, we both agree, by sound waves. And then we come down to why you and I agree about this. We agree about it because our perceptions tell us— as far as we can discover— that it is the same story.

This table may actually look purple to some people and green to others but because they have had an object held up which somebody has said is brown, it is now recorded by these people to whom it’s really purple, as brown. So purple is brown to some of these people and green to others, although they have all agreed that it is brown.

It doesn’t mean that if we had a disagreement about the color, it would make it a different color.

For instance, there is a table which is occupying a certain space, and we have agreed that it is there and that it has certain characteristics, and we have also agreed that when we knock our knuckles on it we hear a sound, because we have agreed that there is such a thing as hearing.

That is tacit consent, but don’t challenge it too strongly, because you can actually, philosophically, prove completely that there is no such thing as hearing.

The conversion units of the brain are structurally very complex. I have read several books on neurology and hearing systems and so forth. They explain a lot but they don’t quite explain what converts electrical or mechanical energy to nerve energy.

But whatever that system is, it is still hearing. We can describe its function in some new fashion, we can listen to different sounds, but we still agree that that is hearing, and so long as a majority of us agree that we are hearing, we will continue to hear. No majority has ever said, "People can’t hear," unless it was the kingdom of the people who couldn’t hear, which we probably wouldn’t know about.

Therefore there is such a thing as hearing, and if you put it on that basis, you are on a sound basis of reality.

Sound is transmitted. It hits an ear and is recorded.

I say the word alphabet. You may be recording it zings but you know that alphabet and zings mean the same thing, so you are in agreement with me and this is reality.

It is the same way with sight. For instance, a cat walks in and sits down. The majority say, "Cat." Someone in the corner says, "Dog," and everybody looks at him and says, "There’s something wrong with him. Be careful of him." That is because he doesn’t agree with the majority. To this degree majority rule is quite correct. But that is majority rule of perceptics.

A practical example would be a young sailor who is arrested and charged with being drunk and disorderly. He has just been picked up by the shore patrol. He was found fighting and mouthing foul language outside a bar, and when they tried to extricate him, he turned on the shore patrol, beat up the two of them, and went down the street screaming, "I am Genghis Khan." He is deposited aboard ship, and obviously to the shore patrol, the commandant of the naval district and all the civilians of that area, this man is crazy.

Now we take him to sea. He is the trainer on number one gun and during target practice or in action, every shell from number one gun goes straight through its intended target. Furthermore, every time the action gets very hot, you look around and find this person right in there pitching, cool, calm and collected and everybody during action agrees that this man is completely sane.

Now we pick up off the beach another young fellow. He is very nice, he wears his neckerchief just so, his records are in excellent condition, he has passed all his examinations with honors, he comes aboard ship and naturally because he is such a nicely dressed, well- drilled young man and he is so pleasant, polite and efficient, and very good, let us say, at getting the mail off the ship, and he keeps his bunk neat, everybody on the beach including the commandant and the shore patrol are in total agreement that he is completely sane.

Then we put to sea and this young man’s station is the pointer on gun one. We get into target practice, this gun goes boom just once and he screams faintly and shudders. We get into real action and we can’t find him on the gunner seat, he’s off the ledge entirely and hiding down in number one gun’s magazine where all of the heavy ammunition is stored because he is afraid of getting blown up! And everybody on the ship says, "This guy’s crazy." Well, who is right? Actually, if the environment changes, the majority opinion changes in that environment.

Americans are needed in Korea right now who will shoot up North Koreans. But we don’t want somebody who will walk down the local boulevard and kill every civilian. There obviously has to be environmental observation which is definitely aligned with perceptics.

It is the majority opinion in the environment. And evidently man through that majority opinion has to some degree naturally selected himself up to have a fairly uniform perceptic system.

I have noticed that in packs of wolves, gray wolves will quite normally turn on and kill black wolves. They try to keep the sports out to some degree, because if they don’t, the second stage breaks down, and so does the third stage.

The second stage is communication. If one member of a species cannot communicate to another member of the species, they aren’t members of the same species to that degree, unless they are members of the same species and the communication is merely patterned by something.

So, in this society of ours today, we have all agreed on perceptics. There are 51 separate perceptics— 26 actual perceptics and 25 imaginative perceptics. The missing imaginative perceptic is pain. One cannot imagine a pain, therefore pain is a reality perceptic instead of an imaginative perceptic. It is interesting that one cannot imagine that he has a pain when he has a pain. He either has a pain or he hasn’t.

If you don’t believe this, get somebody who you know has had a broken right arm, and say, "Well now, can you imagine that your left arm has been broken?"

"Sure I can."

"Now imagine you feel some pain in it."

"All right, I’m imagining I feel some pain."

"Okay. Now let’s imagine that your right arm has been broken. Can you imagine that you have some pain in your right arm?"

"Well, yes."

"Now let’s imagine that you can really feel this pain."

"Ouch!" He will actually pick up the pain out of that arm. The imaginary pain didn’t turn on, but real pain is actually stored in the location of that arm.

So the reactive mind records one more thing than the analytical mind. The analytical mind records everything but pain, and the reactive mind records everything including pain.

Therefore, we have perceptics at work. We agree amongst us that these perceptics perceive things as they perceive things, and by tacit consent amongst us all we agree that we are perceiving what we are perceiving and this becomes reality.

For instance, you walk into a dark room you have never been in before and there is a chair sitting in the middle of it. You bark your shins on it, and it hurts abominably. A chair has just communicated to you. You have received a communication from reality that there is a chair there. Of course this is a rather violent way to receive the communication, so you turn on the light and get a visio on the subject of the chair.

Now supposing someone were fixed up so that when he walked across the room he would not perceive there was a chair there even though the lights were on in full, and if he bumped into it, he would not perceive the halt in the kinesthesia or the tactile of the contact, nor the pain. We would all eventually agree that he was crazy.

His communications system has been cut to the degree of interrupting his perception of a chair on pain, sight and tactile. Therefore, he has been put just that much out of contact with reality.

The reverse of this problem would be a person whose communication system and perceptics were fixed up in such a way that he would see light in the dark room, and although there was nothing in the center of the floor, his communications system was so arranged that he would know a chair was in the room. Then if he was sent walking directly across this room, when he got to the center of the room, he would side- step and if asked, "Why did you do that?" he would say, "Because I’d run into the chair of course!"

"What would happen if you ran into the chair?"

"It would hurt me."

Supposing that he had bumped into chairs before in his life and there was a real perceptic cached there in the imagination for the imagination to pick up. If he were finally forced to walk into this thing, he would feel the tactile, he would feel the pain and he would see the chair. That can be done to a person with narcosynthesis and amnesia trance. Either an erroneous communication can be substituted, or one can inhibit the receipt of a communication, and this is actually the heart and soul of aberration.

Aberration has as a part of its definition the interruption of, or substitution for, these things which we have all agreed to call reality. Someone receives too much communication or he receives too little communication. What we want him to receive is the optimum amount.

Note that people who receive too much communication or too little communication, or who think that what they do receive is something else, are removed from the society and put in a sanitarium someplace. In that way, we are right there separating from the society the fellow who doesn’t agree with us. So, the gray wolves kill the black wolves.

Earlier, it was thought that people merely miscommunicated. They didn’t know there was a reactive mind bank filled by a weird kind of experience below the ordinary perceptic level, causing dub- in communication. But the reactive mind does more than that, it deletes communication, and furthermore it installs things that misinterpret communication.

For instance, a cat walks in and everybody but one agrees it’s a black cat. This person says, "It’s a yellow cat, obviously." That is a misinterpretation of communication and so we have agreement that he is crazy.

When you throw a person out of communication, his affinity with existence is broken. Affinity is that cohesive force which they call love. Of course, love is a dual word; in this interpretation affinity is a word which was brought out of the ancient days of magic— the affinity of existence.

In hypnosis when the operator hypnotizes a subject, they say a rapport is established. Actually they seem to dream it up as a special condition, but it is not a very special condition. It is something of affinity.

Affinity is that thing that keeps us all together. We have been very busy developing things that destroy atoms by knocking them apart in various directions, and we are very proud of ourselves. Science has really advanced to the forefront with this atom. But the interesting thing is what held it together in the first place? Why is it held together? Why does energy cohese? Why does a like atom cohese to a like atom?

It is a very tough problem which nobody has even really started to solve in the whole society, yet we are up against the exact problem when we are up against love amongst human beings for one’s fellow man.

What holds this race together? I wish I knew. I wish I had some good, solid equation that after we put down A+ B= C7rR2, we have got affinity, which we could then put on a scale and weigh. Then we would know and could say, "X units of affinity were found to be flowing on Tuesday last between John Jones and Bill Stubbs."

It was no misnomer that people used the word "love" in a dual sense of sexual affection and the brotherhood of man. Actually affinity covers both of those things easily.

If you didn’t have affinity with the future which is to be, you wouldn’t bother to create it. Almost anybody can be sent forward up the time track right past present time.

It’s a nice trick keeping centered in present time, and most people do a pretty good job of it. The person who doesn’t do too good a job of it is put into a sanitarium and his experience and genetic line are eliminated from the society. That is someone who is sure that he is living in the year 2500 A. D. or the fellow who is living consistently in the fetal position in 1913; they are not straight on their time tracks. By natural selection, we have brought this thing forward to a point where everybody is nicely balanced in present time, whatever that is, recording more or less simultaneously. Affinity does not depend upon this time factor evidently, but seems to go back into the past, and we have an affinity with the past just as we have an affinity for the future and an affinity for each other. When anybody interrupts communication, they interrupt affinity. And when anybody interrupts affinity, they interrupt communication.

For example, Doakes walks in and says, "You know, it’s a funny thing, I was just down on the street and I saw a black panther."

You say, "For heaven’s sake, there’s no black panther down on the street."

He says, "Yes, there is!"

"No, there isn’t. You know there isn’t one."

He mutters, "Get me out of here."

The next time he sees a black panther, he has got just a little bit less communication with it, and he walks in again and says determinedly, "I saw this black panther again."

And you say, "You’re crazy, you couldn’t have seen a black panther, there is no black panther down on the street."

"I tell you there is."

"I know very well there isn’t and you know it too!"

So, he goes down and finds this black panther sitting right there, and says, "Delusion."

Taking that below the analytical perceptic level, that person wanted to confide in someone and communicate about it. And if you say, "All communication is off," you have taken the wires and thrown them back in his face. His affinity and communication have been interrupted and he will start to get a reverse action emotionally toward you.

He has been placed just a little bit out of the circle. This has gone on for a long time and we have a lot of individuals who are really a single unit in a large pack, considering themselves as one unit, and the rest of the pack as a unit, which is a wonderful aberration. I don’t think in this society today there is a single human being that does not consider himself in this great teeming mass of America as being one unit and the rest of the people as being various organisms or one big, solid organism.

You hear people talking grandly about the masses, but every one unit in those masses is also talking about the masses. Nobody has got this one pinned down. The masses consist of units.

So, each one becomes more and more insistent. This is not rugged individualism; it does not get created this way. This is the way misanthropy is created. This is the way the normal person is created. He draws back as a unit, he is unable to communicate on certain things because there are people within the group who will not back that communication and affinity.

For instance, one is trying to buy a sack of potatoes and one trustingly puts up one’s pittance and the fellow has added up the whole bill wrong, knowingly, and after that one doesn’t trust authority. So, affinity having been broken, communication then breaks down. One does not talk to people he doesn’t like because there is no affinity, or one talks roughly enough to further break the affinity. Affinity might be said to have a charge that reverses; it is a positive/ negative affair.

You might consider somebody to have a completely repelling charge. There could be a human being who would simply repel everything in the line of communication. Of course his own communication lines would have to be in pretty bad shape before he could do that. But there is a definite parallel in these things.

The research department may take this up one of these days when they transcribe these records and figure it all out. I certainly hope so, because somewhere in this triad is a big answer.

So, you are dealing with several types of therapy every time you process a person in Dianetics. You are trying to rehabilitate his contact with reality. But to do that you have to repair his communications with reality and you have to demonstrate to him an affinity which really doesn’t take place very well until his sense of reality is rehabilitated. There is always that trio.

It is much more difficult to work on a person who has become inaccessible. He is out of communication. It is like trying to call a radio station parked on some desert island someplace, where the antenna is down and the power has been out for a long time and somebody shot the operator. It is pretty tough.

Your first job is to get the person in communication again. They usually go out of communication because of the breaking of affinity lines.

The greatest aberrative force of which I know is the breaking down of the closest of affinities, the ally relationship. When that breaks you get a grief charge.

The rehabilitation of any preclear then, involves working with these factors. The fellow who just sits and glowers, and will not say anything, he won’t agree with you, he won’t do anything, has been pressed so thoroughly out of communication with existence that you can’t communicate with him enough to do anything for him right away. And if we only had the tool of sending him back to basic- basic and reducing it, we would be in pretty bad shape.

Fortunately, we also have the tool of affinity. Affinity is not something you can measure on a meter, but it is there. There is the old adage, you’ve got to like people to have them like you. Therefore, the more mechanically a person treats a case, the less chance he has of success.

You have to treat the case as a human being, not because it is the thing to do, but because there is actual thetal there, and an affinity line. Simply getting a human being into communication is in itself enormously therapeutic.

You have already broken down one point of the holdup, and although they will work against you as a trio, the moment that you can re- establish one of them, the rest will follow. So we have got three points of attack. We have affinity, and the auditor needs to form a certain affinity and demonstrate an interest in the preclear’s affairs.

Sometimes affinity can be best transmitted by walking up and giving the person a hearty whack on the back and saying, "How are you, you son of a gun?" That is not sympathetic, but that is the way they used to do it out West. Tough people.

Next, we have reality, and then we have communication. You will find that on this triangle you can enter any one of the three points and you will improve the other two, just as any one of these three points, when interfered with, will aberrate the other two.

One can interfere with affinity. For instance, Mama says to the little baby, "I don’t love you, go away. I don’t know why I ever had a child anyway. Get out of here. " The child gets to be 3 or 4 years of age, and Mama tells him, "Go away. Get out of sight. I haven’t the time to play with you."

Then Papa comes home and says, "I’ve had a hard day at the office, shut that kid up."

So, affinity goes by the boards. I am not inferring that affinity broken down all by itself will aberrate a person very badly. But it certainly adds an educational line.

If the child didn’t have engrams up to that moment, he would be able to differentiate to the point of realizing that there was no affinity in that household, without extending it to the whole world.

Nevertheless, because he is in that household things could get pretty bad. But this child does have engrams, inevitably. So, when the child comes in and says, "Mama, I had an awful good time in school today, all the little boys and girls ," and Mama says, "Go away," she is now breaking down communication and affinity.

Later, he comes in and says, "There’s a big, beautiful flower out in the yard. It’s that big."

And the grownup says, "Go away, don’t bother me. Don’t talk to me now. You’re wrong. Flowers are never that big."

After this has been done a few thousand times, we arrive at a total breakdown of affinity, reality and communication.

A child has a right to be an accepted member of the household. He is entitled to his opinion, he is entitled to his idea about flowers that big, and entitled to be loved. Evidently the arrangement with Mama is constructed to be like this. But that can be interrupted.

For example, a child says excitedly that she went out for a ride in the neighbor’s car, and she is informed very crossly that the people next door do not have a car so that they couldn’t possibly have taken her riding that afternoon.

There will be an immediate reversal of polarity if a person is giving all out and then is suddenly blunted. It seems to develop more force and entanglement if the child is very excited and very enthused and he gets knocked back, or very loving and he gets cut. It seems to be a much bigger break of the communication line. In this one case, nobody had ever bothered to untangle it for this particular child. The child was about 10 when I picked her up, and rather uncommunicative, particularly on the subject of having been anyplace.

We found this one incident concerning the car. It turned up that she had blanked out on the fact that the neighbors did not have a car. What had actually happened was that they had bought one that afternoon and had taken her for a ride in it.

When you deal with pain, you will find out that painful sources are unfriendly sources. The source a person considers the most unfriendly of course is the source which is liable to give him the most pain. Of course, if it gives him a lot of pleasure along with some pain too, the thing is all deluded.

Pleasure is terrifically strong, unlike pain which is very weak and transient.

A person has a repulsion toward a source of actual physical pain. Pain is something one steers away from.

Aristotle was very interested in why people were so intrigued by ugly and horrible statues and works of art which were so unpleasant to look at. Apparently, in a person’s attempt not to break down communication with a source of pain, he makes statues of it, and because it is not really a source of pain up there, he can keep an eye on it.

Don’t break down communication with pain.

Take, for instance, the forgetter mechanism in an engram. Someone says, "It hurts."

"Well, forget about it. You’ll forget about it in a little while." That says that one should break the communication source with pain, and of course it breaks the communication source with the engram.

So an engram can be very light, but if the person’s communication to it is broken by a forgetter mechanism, it then develops the quality of being an unknown source of pain and can thereby extend itself all over. It becomes a much more valued type than it really is because one can’t communicate with it. It is the unknown which terrifies.

Pain, then, is not the single break- off. As long as a person’s analyzer is on full, he can differentiate.

He is thinking in terms of minute degrees of difference, and he is measuring the minuteness of the degree, something carefully called similarity, whereby although a person says, "Every cigarette is like every cigarette is like . . ." he is still differentiating cigarette from cigarette.

But if he says, "Every cigarette is every cigarette," he is not differentiating at all.

As long as his analyzer is on full, he can handle any problem he can see. How full does an analyzer have to be on? One engram will slightly attenuate the analyzer, because it carries as one of its commands the cut- down of analytical power. That was the way the analyzer was when the engram went in.

Supposing we have 5,000 engrams, or we have 2,000 or 3,000. When one keys in, it restimulates another 50, let’s say, because the analyzer starts to shut down causing a chain reaction.

Due to the fact that the analyzer was off when the engram was Srst received, one of its perceptics was that fact, so when it restimulates, it turns on this perceptic as its own and the analyzer goes off to that degree. The body is trying to duplicate the engram situation, and this fact acts to some slight degree as a restimulator for the identical tabs which occur in other engrams.

So, engram 301 turns the analyzer off slightly, and because the analyzer is off slightly, it kicks back into the engram bank and turns on engrams 625 and 307.

These things in restimulation have paths of their own which say, "Analyzer is off just this much when we were received. Now kick it back through into the analyzer and shut it down that much more," and 12 engrams go into slight restimulation on the analytical level.

Each one of those 12 has a little tab on it that says, "The analyzer is off." They busily go to work and it shuts down further, causing a logarithmic effect. An analyzer will turn down fast in that fashion. One engram couldn’t turn the analyzer off that way, because the analyzer is a pretty strong, tough organism, but if they all close in on it, it will go off. This is called the descending spiral.

For instance, a person gets a pain in his right foot. He also has an engram that has in it the command "I have a pain in my right foot," so this reinforces the pain he already has in his right foot. All this time the analyzer is turning on and off, and back and forth it goes.

For example, somebody comes in and says, "I have an awful headache."

Someone says to him, "Aw, don’t give that to me."

The person has 62 engrams that say, "It’s all in your imagination," but they haven’t turned on very strongly yet, and he says, "But I really do have a headache."

"Oh, the hell you do, it’s your imagination, you know it is."

"But I really do have one!" So he can be piled into a dramatization, and simply by insisting that he doesn’t and by using the proper push- button words he can be sent down the dwindling spiral.

This situation is very deadly and inhibitive to survival. Any time this descending spiral can occur without being picked up again, a person is going to get in very bad shape.

So, something was built in called necessity level. When the analytical mind starts turning off, necessity level tries to turn it back on, and necessity level can fight right back as long as it is able to make a try. The catatonic schizophrenic is a person whose necessity level has gone all the way down to saturation point. It tried to make the upsurge, couldn’t make it, and the spiral went down to the point where the necessity level couldn’t build up any more, so there he is.

This can be explained by the fact that everybody agrees there is such a thing as reality. Necessity level can resurge against a downsurge, so there is something that automatically reports.

This fourth factor of necessity level lies behind all of the others. So, there is survival, then there is reality, communication and affinity, not necessarily in that order, and when a person’s resurgence to survive goes out, he is practically as good as dead.

We have this quantity which stands in back of us as auditors, there is always the last ditch of turning a person’s necessity level up. I told a psychotic once that his children were starving and nobody was caring for them, and that police were contesting his house. He got frantic. I was building necessity level and by the time he found that out he had been built back up the spiral again.

You can enter any case in an effort to rehabilitate these things. Homer Lane got the idea that he could cure people of psychosis. So he walked into the biggest institution in England and said, "Give me your most dangerous patient."

And the person said, "We couldn’t possibly do that because he would tear you to bits."

"Well, give him to me anyway. After all, my blood isn’t on your head."

"Well, I know, but you might injure the patient."

"Give me somebody that’s really hopeless."

So, they gave him a rough, raw paranoid schiz, a huge man about six foot six, walking around naked in a padded cell. And Lane walked in the door and said, "I understand you can help me."

And the man replied, "How did you know?"

Lane had very signal successes throughout England. He was known as the miracle man, and he was actually cracking people out of institutions using reality, communication and affinity in that way.

Knowing that in the background of everybody is a relatively unreachable collection of things called engrams, we can see that reality, communication and affinity are being turned off artificially beyond a person’s power to recall analytically. Not even the analyzer knows it’s there. So you and the analytical mind have to team up. (He can’t get it by himself.) And by doing this you will rehabilitate his sense of reality.

It is somewhat astonishing to know that the illusion of being in amnesia trance is mostly arbitrary— the illusion that the person dreams and anything that happens when he is asleep is imaginary. That makes a complete blackout. The conviction that things are imaginary will black them out, naturally. You step behind that blackout, and that’s amnesia trance. Those are completely dislocated attention units. We have, then, rehabilitation of reality. "Who told you that was imaginary? Who said you couldn’t remember things? Who said things weren’t real?"

We can actually go into a case and with just a little bit of reverie start to heighten the person’s sense of reality. You will find the surface reasons (not the engramic reasons, because the real reasons are in the engrams) for an interrupted sense of reality. For instance, the little boy has seen A do something that was very unsocial. Then the little boy tells B and, little boys being rather garrulous, probably tells C, D, E, F and G. And then the little boy is forced to eat his words. He is not only discredited with B. C, D, E and F. but he is made to admit that he lied when he knows it was true.

He puts the cap on it if at that moment he says, "Yes, I know I told the truth, but I will admit this just because...." He’s done for. He begins moving out of that moment and his resistance against the fact is not there any more. He starts on up the line and becomes occluded entirely. A chunk of his reality is really gone.

Every time you can find one of those incidents in light reverie or straight memory, you turn on some reality. You can fish around and ask questions like, "Who said it was imaginary?" "Who told you that you lied?" and you will eventually pull material up into view and thereby give the person a greater sense of reality.

To enter a case, we try to rehabilitate reality. Or we can enter through the line of communication. The way we do that is very simple. We convince the person that the world of "reality" has communicated with him at a time in the past.

Most people would say that it has, and will agree because that’s the thing to do, although they really don’t think so.

You can do something about that by taking the person back and running him through a moment of pleasure, and if he can be run through one— and lots of cases can be— you would be absolutely amazed how a person will brighten up after something like that has happened to him. So, that is a useful technique. The other one is to have the person go back into his past with straight line memory and clean up the times when he was told that he hadn’t seen something or done something, and that he didn’t know.

You will find in some women the astonishing fact that they are living with husbands who have the standard dramatization, "No, you’re wrong. It wasn’t like that."

Or you find men living with women who say, "No, it’s wrong, it wasn’t like that, you don’t understand, dear. That wasn’t what that man said, he said something else." Start swamping these things up out of the case and communication will be rehabilitated sooner or later on this one fact that you are willing to work upon the person, to help him out, not in a do- gooder sense— it’s not the ladies’ aid sewing circle set of helping the poor people down the street— but in the fact that you consider him a live, breathing, living human being who doesn’t necessarily need a hand but he could sure use one.

I have had a patient working so thoroughly on this that he would occasionally make the remarkable error of saying something like, "Well, we’re standing right here and I see this automobile coming around the corner, what’s the license plate number? I can’t read it," thinking I was inside his head looking too!

Or I would say, "Well, what kind of a dress has she got on?"

And he would say rather impatiently, "A red dress, of course, can’t you see?" I had been included on his time track.

Affinity is very important. Dianetics has a lot of bonuses in it. They are busily alleviating a small percentage of psychotics in some institutions by what they call group therapy, group education and so on. It’s very interesting because these people get together and start talking something over and they begin to work it out.

Group therapy works. Dianetics carries that as an automatic bonus. Did you ever have a group of people working in Dianetics, and there is a lot of data about engrams and they get very excited about the whole thing and then suddenly the morale plane starts going up? That occurs because they are working together toward a common goal.

That is the one action which has carried man as far as he has come. People are capable of working together toward a common goal. That’s why cats don’t rule the world. They don’t work together for a common goal.

Group therapy in this gregarious animal called man is actually just being built up. Actually, somebody out in Keokuk ought to be warned about the contagiousness of the science of Dianetics and in particular of group therapy and affinity, because it starts to swirl, and even hiding is no good. Once it starts to work, it begins to gather momentum and it brings people together so that they can communicate about a new and stronger reality.

There are many other bonuses. In fact, there are as many bonuses in Dianetics as there are in man’s activities.

There is Preventive Dianetics all by itself, completely aside from Dianetic therapy, and the fact that with it one tries to hold down the number of engrams which are created in society and attempts to keep the ones which do exist from being too restimulative.

The internal world and the external world are the same as far as the analytical mind is concerned, as long as that analytical mind is in an aberrated state and these engrams are hidden. There is an unknown factor telling somebody to do something. So, the analytical mind tries to react against the engram bank and says that it is the outside world and it reacts in the same way.

One of the ways to convince a person of the reality of what he is doing is to throw him back into the middle of birth and then bring him up to present time with a headache. Let him feel it, then take him back down again and run it out. There is a person who will now work with you. One time I ran somebody’s somatic strip through a tonsillectomy. All the somatics turned on. The person was out of contact with the tonsillectomy, but he sure hurt!

Then I brought his somatic strip up to a moment when he was all well and then up to a later pleasant moment, and on up to present time. After that he ran engrams beautifully.

The toughest engram is always the first one. Some people will contact it right away, but the toughest end of the case is always the front end and that is going to discourage a lot of auditors.

You go into a case and you may work it for many hours without contacting anything. But, learn to think your way through a case and these three things can be used in derivation.

Every time I have examined the subject of being emotional and being reasonable, in relationship to each other, I have found the distinction that where one has the more pleasant emotions, reason had to exist through the area before they could be experienced, but that at the lower end of the tone scale the emotional levels were unreasonable. So we are evidently using one word to mean two or two thousand or two thousand to the tenth power different things. The word emotional is not easily definable and has caused a great deal of confusion.

The pleasure emotions are best expressed as affinity. If we make a spectrum we can arbitrarily cut halfway through it and say everything above the center is an assist to survival and everything below it is a detriment to survival and would sever communications on reality.

So, we could have A+ above the line and A— below it. Under A- would be such emotions as fear, rage, apathy, grief and so on, and under the A+ emotions we would include the emotion of pleasure and perhaps sex.

The emotion of pleasure has several different sides, but it is pretty much the same side and one is really dealing with affinity itself. It is the interconnector and the experience of that inter- connector amongst thee and me and they which has been erroneously called an emotion.

We talk about the emotion of pain, but pain is pain. I pinch my hand and I feel pain. There is a certain chemistry of pain and there is no doubt about what I felt.

If someone says, " Somebody has just run your car off the roadside out in Colorado," being fond of my car, I feel pain. But that’s not physical pain. That’s an emotion of loss which would actually be just plain grief.

When one starts up the survival scale he is increasing his survival potential. Going down the survival scale he is decreasing his survival potential and the more he goes down, the more disconnection occurs.

In general, when affinity has been badly mauled, the communication line is severed.

So a little boy tries to tell somebody that his dog has been lost, and they say, "Well, huhf, you’re sure a sissy to cry about a dog," and the communication line is knocked out and he gets more and more inhibited. He can’t express himself and let the discharge spill. Tears and grief are a very valid mechanism because they run together with affinity and reality. The loss is real.

Then somebody tries to diminish the fact that the loss is real or to knock the analyzer out of communication with that loss by saying, "Oh well, I’ll get you another one, dear. It didn’t matter," and that knocks out reality.

Or someone says, "What are you crying for? You’re just a baby to cry." That knocks out communication, and then because they don’t have any feeling for the person’s feeling, that knocks out reality and gives an encysted charge which won’t then recommunicate easily.

There may be a grief charge at the age of 10, but affinity, reality and communication having all been knocked out on the subject right up the line, by the time you get the person to the age of 10 the charge is firmly entrenched. Tears don’t get spilled any more. If they could be spilled on the site, the incoming and the outgoing would balance up somehow. The English society is famous for being able to demonstrate that they don’t care, so they just walk by, and they do a pretty good job of it.

But just because we are a tough race to begin with, there is no reason to say that it is because of that equation that we got tougher.

If we define affinity as love, a feeling of oneness with the universe, we find out that it has very little to do with emotion itself. But the trio actually has a lot to do with it.

You can’t do anything to a person without hitting all three. You can’t hit one without hitting the other two, in dealing with people.

There is an interesting case history of a family of seven where six of them were hopeless psychotics. They could do nothing. They all had the same background. One of those people was a little bit older and was thrown into the breech at the moment when everything went bad in the family and had to take care of the others. It is an interesting fact that continuous affinity has a great deal to do with longevity. Every one of that family is now dead except that one.

She was not crazy. She had to take care of the rest of them. She was very sensible. Her necessity level was riding way up high and she has outlived the whole family. But once the last one of them died, she started rapidly down the dwindling spiral herself.

For instance, an interesting fact that has impressed me several times when I have looked over the Florist’s Guide is that the obituary column always carries little items like, "So- and- so died at Spring Lake or Floral Manor, of a fall down the hillside with a wheelbarrow at age 97." Or, "So- and- so died of some automobile accident, age 105."

Here are people who are growing things, and these people seem to live forever. I have seen some of these old people and they are quite remarkable.

The quickest way to make a person old is to put him where he is of no use. Take him away from new growth. For some reason or other, affinity goes in that direction. There is something to be known from this if one is looking it over to try to find out why.

On that person who becomes unnecessary, affinity breaks down. Check up a couple of years later on the man who goes to the old soldiers’ home. One would think with all the rest and quiet that he would be in good shape, but this is not the case. He really looks old. But put such a person in charge of writing advice to the lovelorn in the county and this person would probably do very well, because that is real communication.

I had a couple of neurotic people step aboard a yacht of mine once, for a weekend party. Unfortunately a yacht has lines to be pulled and dishes to be washed and various things that have to be done. The kid who was usually my crew wasn’t there. So these people really had to work, because we ran into a blow and it was a killer. The yacht stayed together, everything went along fine, we didn’t go down anyplace, but after about 24 hours standing to a rain- lashed wheel and fighting canvas that took off one’s fingernails, they were suddenly acquainted with reality.

Man who coops himself up in his hothouse cities tends to go far from reality, because reality is after all most intimately contained in knowingness. Communication with the solitude of the desert all by itself includes factors, not the least of them to do with reality.

The first thing you do if someone has a broken back is mend it. If you can’t mend it, you make him as comfortable as you can. And if you can’t do either of those two things, give him sympathy. Hold his hand, make him feel better. But sympathy is way down at the bottom of the scale.

I once saw a little boy at Belleview Hospital who was trying to commit suicide. He was only 11 months of age and he was batting his head against the top of the crib and cutting it to ribbons.

They even tried to tie him down, but he would squirm out of wherever they had him and butt his head again. I found out that his mother was a prostitute. She had never given him any affection at all and he had found out that if he hurt himself he got affection. So the nurses who were trying to keep this child from bashing his brains in arranged a watch whereby they could run in and see and talk to him and that was all it took, but it shows that this is really built into the organism.

I hope that this data will help you to look at cases you work on and make them happier that you have worked on them.