INTRODUCING DIANETICS - PUBLIC LECTURE GIVEN AT SHRINE AUDITORIUM, LOS ANGELES

A lecture given on 10 August 1950

Summing Up the Subject

The word Dianetics can be found in any unabridged Merriam Webster’s dictionary spelled with an "O". The word has been waiting for a long time to be worked over and formulated.

The actual work was begun around 1935 and the first philosophic tenets of it were delineated in 1938. A book was written at that time and the present Dianetic Handbook is one chapter out of the original philosophic dissertation on the subject. That original dissertation is on a jaw- breaking subject called epistemology, the science of knowledge.

We are not too interested in the science of knowledge, but with Dianetics we are interested in what we can do about man’s activities which at the present time are not running at optimum.

The work was kept under wraps until last year.

Dianetics is, according to a gentleman who never investigated the subject, a very dangerous subject. It is a very dangerous subject if one were not to publish to the society at large the antidote for what can be done with a man’s mind. Dianetics suppressed might place into the hands of some power group a very grim grip on men, but generally circulated, it is very safe.

We have had now, out of the 50,000 copies of the book sold, a great many reports from the field. Only two of those reports demonstrated any injury that might possibly be traced to Dianetics, which is a very remarkable record. One of these was immediately traceable to a beating a person received which made him irrational for a week or so, and the other one was traceable to ineptitude. Somebody was treating her husband up in the Northwest, and the gentleman was running engrams on this line: His wife would send him back to the engram and say, "Now, what’s it all about?" And he would say, "Well, here I am lying on the football field and I have just had my head kicked in."

And she would say, "That’s fine; now let’s go to another incident."

The psychiatrists who have examined and who have used Dianetics are rather enthusiastic about it. Psychologists who have examined the subject have written us many complimentary letters about it, as have medical doctors too. There is one hold- out, however, in the field of the United States right now and that is the press.

For instance, a pastoral psychologist wrote a book review in the New York Times and said that Dianetics says man is a machine! I looked up some of this gentleman’s work and he states that the machine is the cause of all the evils of man, so it appears to me that his engrams are hanging out. But this poor man is more to be pitied than censured because people who have been using Dianetics have practically buried him under a landslide of mail. The New York Times didn’t mention it specifically, but on their letters page (which was all devoted to Dianetics) a famous political scientist at Williams College took occasion to write in and make things uncomfortable for this revlewer.

All in all, the picture of Dianetics in the society is a very heartening one. We feel very good about it and we haven’t anything to do now but work hard.

Our research is going along at a very great rate. Our Foundation was formed this last spring and we have working for us now the former Director of Research of Bloch Chemical. We also have some graduate psychologists who are doing psychometry. We have a considerable

research program that is going along very swiftly, and the Foundation itself is not too short of money at the moment; it is getting all the book royalties for use on research.

There have been many requests in the field for documented cases in Dianetics. It has been pointed out that there are no case histories available in the Dianetic Handbook. The Handbook got a little bit out of hand. The president of Hermitage House had committed himself to a $4.00 price tag. I said, "I think I can write it in maybe 100,000 words; I’ll try."

"Well," he said, "you hold it down to that." So I gave him the 180,000 words and he said faintly, "We will have to do something about it."

I said, "You had better not! Because it might play hob with the whole subject if you start taking bricks out of the middle of it." Nevertheless he took out of it the chapter on the mathematical derivations of the philosophy because he said that nobody would be interested in that. And I have been rather bitterly criticized for saying it’s mathematics and then not demonstrating any mathematics! He also took out the acknowledgments, and I have been criticized for not having acknowledged various people. After all, Dianetics owes a great many acknowledgments: It owes acknowledgments to Freud and his co- workers, to Herbert Spencer, Francis Bacon, Aristotle, and a long list of names that he really didn’t care to set up in type for fear it would add too many pages. So when the book came out I said, "Well, we are all set now," and opened it up; I looked at the back and said, "Where are the case histories?"

"Well," he said, "those three case histories were extremely long, look at the amount of type they would have taken up!"

I said, "People are going to want to see authentic case histories on this."

"Well, this subject’s good, it will ride over anything." But I have been quite severely criticized on that. Then when I opened up the first page of the book, what did I see at the top of it but the words "Dianetics is the greatest thing since the invention of fire." That’s a quote from Walter Winchell in the publisher’s synopsis and is probably the reason why the book reviewers pick on me; they consider it egotistical.

But we have gotten over even those hurdles and right now we are setting up a long series of case histories. We have some graduate psychologists working with us using psychometry. And these people are tagging preclearsl and sending them out to a big medical clinic which couldn’t be bought or sold by Dianetics, and there they are being examined with laboratory work and x- ray plates and so on. Then they are being sent over to a psychiatrist who doesn’t know where they come from, and from there they go to either Columbia University psychometric section or to the Rorschach Institute psychometric section. So, there is going to be this long list of evidence.

Then we take the preclear, process him for 50 hours and send him back to the same clinics, after which we assemble the evidence and the graduate psychologists there compile it into statistics. We have a series of 3,000 cases set up in this fashion. They have really gotten it streamlined down, and these people are getting well.

This material is going to be published in part in a book: Dianetics, Do’s and Don’ts with Case Histories, a review of auditor technique giving a new Standard Procedure.

The bulk of these cases are going to be run through statistics and presented in a university text of Dianetics. Unfortunately it is going to take us almost two years to completely compile and edit this university text because I have guaranteed that it is going to be so incomprehensible, so completely obtuse and abstract, that it will be utterly exhausting!

Someone in the Doctorate School at Columbia is going back over all the basic philosophic mathematics of Dianetics and has been putting her nose in the door regularly and saying,

"Now, how did you get across this and what has it to do with that?" And the result of her work is going to be published in about two months for those who are interested in the mathematics of Dianetics, which consists of symbolic logic with transfinite cardinals and topology and a few other things. It will be quite unrecognizable.

The beautiful thing about Dianetics is that it doesn’t happen to need all this. I have found by experience that I can sit down and carefully explain the subject to a high school boy and he will get it. When I try to become very academic with him he often doesn’t get it. But the people working on this at the present time are doing an excellent job.

Then there are the people who are working in the field with Dianetics, using the book alone. The book has now been supplemented and anyone who sends in a card to the Foundation will receive in the next few days "Bulletin No. 1" of the Foundation which contains the new Standard Procedure not yet perfected at the time that the Handbook was put out.

Dianetics is very interesting. For the last few years at any point along the line there has been a workable technique, but it is continually being refined. It won’t stand still.

It was the bane of the Auditor School’s existence because I would come in in the morning and give them a talk and say, "We have just had an idea down in Research and it goes this way...." So instead of studying Standard Procedure, all the students would be trying out the new technique.

What we are trying to do is cut down the length of time it takes to clear a human being. And we are cutting it down.

For instance, we have found out what causes dub- in and we can cure it. We have also found out a couple of new things that influence sonic and we have been using them to turn on sonic.

The bulletin on Standard Procedure contains a chart which gives specific directions, so at no point in the case are you going to break down with nothing to do. With Standard Procedure, we have been able to start any case that was bogged down.

Did you know that you could shift a person over into a valence and let him deintensify what Mama said, and then shift him over and deintensify what Papa said? We have found out that people can stay out of valence and continue to say what Papa or Mama said all of their lives.

When someone is out of valence he is not being himself, therefore he does not have perceptics. It is very hard for a person who is being somebody else to get any perceptics as himself. This is one of the mechanisms behind sonic shut- off.

In the past we would trip a lot of these things accidentally without knowing exactly what was causing them. All of the work that we have done has been aimed toward using less auditor skill to achieve greater speed in the case.

There are many questions that have come up regarding Dianetics, some of which I will answer here.

The results with psychotics at the present time are pretty fair. Of course, psychotics are definitely in the hands of psychiatry— they are actually wards of the state— and we are trying very hard to keep those psychotics in the hands of psychiatry where they belong. After all, psychiatry is organized to handle that problem. Psychiatrists have been open- minded about Dianetics for quite a while, but recently I was over at the state institution in St. Louis and the chief of the institution was running a young lady. I pitched in and gave him a hand. She had been schizophrenic for a number of years and she lay down on the couch insane; we worked

on her for about two hours, hit the key engram in the case and she got off the couch sane. So the psychiatrists are no longer open- minded at Missouri State.

We have been receiving a great many letters from persons of the Catholic faith. I know of a Catholic priest who has been having excellent success with Dianetics, and there are many others. The Catholic Church in many of its locales seems to be using Dianetics and finding no evidence that it questions the Catholic religion.

Atheism is rooted in engrams, and people who have had such engrams run out of them are no longer atheists. It does not mean that they suddenly have an abiding faith in religion. But a man who has no faith, even if it is only faith in himself, has no purpose.

The ministers and priests who have been working with Dianetics have been espousing it, and I have had no single letter from any church organization which condemned Dianetics. There is no conflict. After all, it says right in one of the tenets of Dianetics that a man seeks his potential immortality as a spirit.

Dianetics does not take into consideration such a thing as a belief. A science can’t believe in something. For instance, physics never believed in Einstein, and as a result there is no conflict between the two. You will find, however, occasionally an aberrated person will feel assaulted by Dianetics and he will become very protective of his own engrams and will find some excuse to take it up. But so far there is nothing between Dianetics and religion and I hope it so continues.

An engram is a unit. An engram would not result from a chain of experiences. If there had been a chain of periods of unconsciousness, each one of them would be an engram, so you would have a chain of engrams and this would add up to a whole series of engrams which would have to be lifted one by one from the earliest to latest as a chain. An engram does not result from incidents but is an incident in itself.

I don’t know, I never talked to one; but I have talked to a lot of people who have been back there being one, and they seem to object to being unconscious when they get knocked so.

It is thorough. As a matter of fact, we are using it right now because we haven’t got anything else. And we have a couple of graduate psychologists who are experts in psychometry beating their brains out trying to adapt TAT and Rorschachl and so forth so that they can show us material in a hurry. Rorschach has the beautiful faculty of doing one thing on which we can rely absolutely, and that is to show up a paranoiac. When we get a paranoiac diagnosis from Rorschach, we know exactly that the engram to go for is "They are all against me." Every paranoiac on Rorschach has had this "against me" engram, and when the engram itself was contacted and deintensified, the individual ceased being a paranoiac.

There are undoubtedly many psychometric tests which will lead to that type of diagnosis. People in the Research Department are trying hard to get correlations on psychometry and engrams, and they are doing a good job.

"Hasn’t psychometry fought with Dianetics?"

I would hardly take over psychometry; after all, it has belonged for a long time to psychology. But when you are covering the field of the mind, anything which is known about that field must come under examination. We have a crew we call a "salvage crew," who are going through all the old- time methods of healing. For instance, they turned up the fact the other day that shock therapy was in use in the days of the Aesculapians— the early Greeks. They used a drug, hellebore, with which they produced a convulsive shock. They were trying to cure or alleviate distress that far back.

We are finding quite a bit of material of that kind, and we are trying to find out how it ties into Dianetics or how Dianetics ties into it, and we are gathering an enormous amount of very valuable information in this way.

Not worth a nickel. Actually, I know of someone who had a hole on the back of one molar that was right up in the gum, and the hole has progressed down about a quarter of an inch and is almost to the end of the tooth; it seems to be growing out. The head of a dental association in New York City is making some very interesting studies on this and they are going to be part of a bulletin in the near future, "Can Teeth Grow Themselves Whole Again?" Dentists have noticed occasionally that a tooth would fill itself up. It is possibly an engram key- out. They are trying to prove this. That is in the field of dentistry. Anybody who will take Dianetics and see what it does in his own field will certainly get every cooperation from us.

A person who would do this Doesn’t care what happens to himself. In the first place, there is too much repeater technique being used currently. Some auditors are entering cases with repeater technique. They find somebody stuck somewhere on the track so they say, "Give me a holder. Let’s repeat a holder."

The preclear says, "Stay there, stay there, stay there."

"That isn’t it. Give me another holder."

"Hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it." (There are now two engrams in restimulation. ) "Try ‘Get down, get down." ’

"All right, ‘Get down, get down, get down, get down." ’ Three engrams are now in restimulation, and that is very bad because once these engrams go into restimulation they are very hard to handle and it takes about three or four days for these incidents to die down.

On a person using repeater technique on himself, he usually does this because he has a commands or demon circuit which says, "I have to do it myself," or "Only I can do this," and so on.

He starts to repeat a phrase which he believes is in an engram. The analytical mind starts shutting down as he nears that engram because one of the things that an engram does is shut down the analyzer. For instance, he starts repeating the words "Don’t stop." So he says, "Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop . . ." and gets restimulated, at which moment the attention units blank out and he forgets what he has been saying. Then he says, "Well, let me try another one." And he could stack his case up in this way.

However, a person can use direct memory on himself.

"How may a person determine whether he possesses the required degree of intelligence to participate in Dianetic therapy?"

That is a tough one. Nobody seems willing to admit he is dumb. That is a rather hard question to answer, but if one did want to know the answer himself, he could very certainly have a psychometry done. If his IQ on the Army Alpha were to fall below 90 or 85, he probably shouldn’t attempt it. But normal IQ is quite well above that.

It would be one of those things that you would have to judge. Actually a person who is too dull to work generally won’t.

Heaven help any auditor who doesn’t enter himself as a preclean because sooner or later he is going to find himself running a duplicate of one of his own engrams out of the preclean For instance, he has an engram that says, "I’m dying! I’m dying! I’m dying! Oh, why was I ever born?" This is the way his own engram runs but he doesn’t know about it. So his preclear runs an engram which says, "I’m dying! I’m dying! I’m just dying!" and all of a sudden he doesn’t feel good. An auditor should be a preclear or a clear.

Stalin hasn’t written me any information about it to date, although I expect momentarily to get a release from Russia saying that they have now invented Dianetics.

Outside of therapy as well. The only very certain way we have seen therapy interrupted is by the auditor invalidating the data of the preclean This is very bad. This spoils the preclear’s sense of reality and is one way therapy can really be slowed to a walk.

If the auditor suddenly says, "Hm, that doesn’t sound like it fits in there," or "You know, it’s a funny thing but I don’t think your father would have done that," or if the preclear suddenly writes home to Mother, "You know that terrible time you had with Uncle Frank back there when I was on the way . . ." and Mama writes back (because it seems to be discreditable to her), "Oh, that never happened!" the preclear will really take a spin on such invalidation of data. Telling a preclear that what he is saying is delusion is almost a certain way to make him very uncomfortable and very unhappy.

Yes, providing that psychopathic personality is not caused by iatrogenic psychosis or brain tumors which is sometimes the case. About 30 percent of psychosis is physiological; it has to do with such things as paresis, missing parts of the brain and so forth. Dianetics can’t grow a new spine for you.

It is awake. There is some small portion of it still monitoring and still alert. If you want to test this, all you have to do is time shift the preclear back to a moment when he was asleep, and if you work at it for a very short time you will start picking up the things he recorded. He is not unconscious in that the analyzer is not shut off completely during sleep. He doesn’t receive engrams during sleep.

You come up the time track engram after engram erasing up the line. One should erase from the bottom of the track, right on up the line, every engram one can reach and erase.

An engram is a recording done by the body when the analytical mind (that is to say, the conscious mind) is unconscious. As you know, the conscious mind can become unconscious in accidents, severe illness, surgery, anesthesia and so on. Although the conscious mind shuts down, there is still some part of the organism which is recording. That recording, complete with pain, is an engram.

At the present time Plan A has been accomplished. We have a place in Elizabeth and we are getting a large training center near Morristown in New Jersey. This is also the Research Center. We are placing departments in the major cities of the country. One of these is now in New York at 55 East 82nd Street; one is in Washington, D. C., at the Parklane; one is being set up in Chicago at this time; and one is being set up here in Los Angeles.

[A 15- minute intermission in the lecture was taken here.]

We have found that the source of aberration and psychosomatic illness stems from recordings laid down in the organism at times when the conscious mind is unconscious through injury, anesthesia or for other reasons. The recording laid down at that moment is then buried below the level of the conscious mind and it reactivates against the conscious mind as though the exterior world had gotten inside and under the conscious mind. The conscious mind, unaware of this, behaves toward these hidden commands in a highly exact fashion.

The moment of unconsciousness is called an engram. The literalness of an engram is very remarkable. It is like Simple Simon who is ordered to be careful about stepping in pies so he uses a great deal of care to step in pies. It makes no difference in an engram in the reactive mind (that mind which contains these engrams below the conscious level) whether or not you say "He rode a horse" or "He rowed a horse." It is a mind full of puns.

We had an airline pilot at the Foundation one day and we looked over his engrams and ran him back in reverie. l This man had failed at owning and running a garage and he had failed at farming, but he was a great success as a pilot. Then we found this phrase in his engrams, "He’s no earthly good."

Dianetics is the delineation of these entities in the mind and the processes of application by which one gets them out.

Dianetic therapy could be summed up in this fashion: By taking all the moments of physical pain out of the organism one restores to that organism complete rationality.

One attains these engrams (no matter how early they appear) with a standard technique. The person is returned; that is to say, he is brought back to a point where he will reexperience the incident. He reexperiences these very early incidents several times. And if he is back at the earliest part of his time track (the consecutive moments of consciousness of his life) then that early engram when reexperienced a few times with tactile, pain and so on becomes reduced or actually erased. And then by proceeding forward up the time track and finding these various moments of unconsciousness, and by reducing or erasing them, one eventually attains the goal of Dianetic therapy, which is the clear.

One attains a release long before one attains a clear. Clear is a deaberrated state. It doesn’t change the educational level of the person, but such things as psychosis, neurosis, compulsions, obsessions and so on disappear leaving the person strong and capable, and this is fairly easily demonstrated. The goal of Dianetic therapy then is discovering these engrams in the person and eradicating them by this technique.

There is something new since the Handbook on the thought that if psychoanalysis can attain alleviation by never returning the human being, but merely keeping him in present time and letting him free- associate, then certainly in Dianetics, since we know the source, we should be able to do more in less time than one can do in psychoanalysis. We have discovered that those things which a person is worried about have been told to him, usually in the exact words of his concern. So when he tells you his worry, he is making a statement which has been made to him. That statement is contained in his engrams but it has been keyed in somewhere along the line. The engram, originally laid down very early in life, later reactivated after which he was uncomfortable or anxious about something. By straight memory we can locate these key- ins and very often key out an engram. This technique, which is merely diagnostic, is quite therapeutic. And one discovers some interesting material.

If one discovers, for instance, that Papa habitually said, "Forget it," one will then find that he can first key out some locksl that say "Forget it" by making the person remember them by straight memory. And then he can take the person back down the track and start to find the engrams, because he knows that the words "Forget it" will appear in those engrams.

If an aberrated person dramatizes an engram once, he will dramatize it many times, which accounts for habit patterns. If a person says habitually "Oh, can it," or "Forget it," or "You’ve got to do what I tell you," that is usually in his engram bank and as such you find out that Papa was in the habit of saying, "You do as I tell you." You can find it in conscious memory, and it appears lower in the engrams, too. But by straight memory we can recover these dramatizations and we can recover their exact wording; as such it has therapeutic value although it is usually used simply as a diagnosis.

This is a demonstration of the line of questioning an auditor should follow:

LRH:

What have you been worried about lately?

PC:

My little girl, mostly.

LRH:

What’s the matter with your little girl?

PC:

Well, Ifeel that she is not getting as much attention as she should.

LRH:

All right. Now, how is your therapy going?

PC:

Well, I haven’t had any for about a month, but before that it was going very well.

LRH:

Tell me, do you have good sonic recall?

PC:

No, none at all.

LRH:

You don’t have very good sonic recall?

PC:

None at all.

LRH:

Aha, and who used to say you were like somebody?

PC:

Well, I used to be very aggravated when people would say I was like my Aunt Gladys, whom I thought was a little crazy.

LRH:

Okay, but who used to say this?

PC:

Principally my mother.

LRH:

Your mother.

PC:

My aunt’s sister.

LRH:

Your aunt’s sister. Can you remember a specific moment when this was being said?

PC:

Yes, I think I can. Let’s see.

LRH:

You can remember this.

PC:

I’m returning to it.

LRH:

Don’t worry about returning.

PC:

Well, it was something to do with papering the wall; I must hare been about 8 or 9 years old and I wanted to help my Aunt Gladys paper the wall in the living room. My Aunt Gladys was known among family circles as the "expert" because she always knew everything. So I was telling everybody at the supper table how I knew everything about wallpapering, and my mother turned around to me and said, "You’re acting just like your Aunt Gladys," or words to that effect.

LRH:

You remember this?

PC:

Yes.

LRH:

Okay. Did your mother ever say that at any other time?

PC:

Well, that’s one specific incident that I remember.

LRH:

That’s one specific time.

PC:

Yes.

LRH:

Who else did she think was like somebody? Who did she think your father was like?

PC:

I don’t remember her thinking that he was like anybody.

LRH:

Did he ever say "You’re just like your mother" or "just like your father"?

PC:

I don’t think so, no.

LRH:

What was some time in your life when your mother became very angry at you, extremely angry at you?

PC:

Oh, it’s a little hard to think of a definite incident. I wasn’t with my mother a great deal of the time.

LRH:

Hm- hm. Who did she used to get angry at principally?

PC:

My sister.

LRH:

And what did she say to your sister?

PC:

Um . . . For a non- sonic case this is very hard.

LRH:

Hm- hm. What did she used to say to your sister? "You never listen to me," or anything like that?

PC:

Um.

LRH:

Something like "You don’t pay any attention to what I tell you"?

PC:

No, I think she used to say "You sit right down there on that stool until you can behave yourself."

LRH:

Hm- hm. Did she ever tell you this?

PC:

No, I think that most of the period when I was living at home with her she gave me the impression of being a little frightened of me.

LRH:

Who do you think you’re most like in your family?

PC:

Well, probably my father.

LRH:

Did anybody ever say you were like your father?

PC:

Well, Iguess they did. I can’t remember that they did.

LRH:

All right, I’ll give you some homework. Tell me tomorrow who used to tell you you were like your father, will you?

PC:

All right.

LRH:

Okay, thank you.

At first glance it may look to you as if these questions are a bit random. We are looking here for a habitual command on the part of somebody that would command the preclear out of a valence.

For instance, the phrase "You’re just like your mother" has a tendency to shift valence, and the person will stay in the shifted valence because there might have been other people around to whom Mother also said, "You’re just like your mother." It may be in the engram bankl somewhere. This is a valence shifter.

Another type of valence shifter is "I have to pretend I am somebody else; I can’t be myself around you," which puts a person in another valence. That is to say, he is not himself; he thinks of himself as his father, for example; It is a complete identification with another human being. By straight line memory we can sometimes part that identification so that a person comes off from being just like Father and is himself, and at that moment he will attain a greater perceptic range in that he will be able to hear, see and feel better as he returns on the track to old incidents.

Some people have sonic— they can hear things which have been said to them in the past. Some people cannot do that, and the valence is one of the reasons why they can’t. We are trying to discover what valence people are in. We want to know what made the person feel he was like somebody else, on the one hand, and what the "control yourself" circuits are, on the other.

Dub- in, imaginary recall (one might say delusion), stems from the "control yourself" type of engram. One can generally discover the source of this by straight line questioning, asking things like "Who was the most controlled individual in the family?"

Here is a demonstration of straight line memory. It is important as a diagnostic technique. We are trying to discover the dramatization of somebody in the family on the theory that that dramatization will appear in an engram. Once you know the words in the dramatization, it is very easy to find the engram. So in straight memory we get the person, by various questions, to recover memory of one of these dramatizations.

For instance:

LRH:

Did your father used to get angry?

PC:

Very.

LRH:

What did he used to say?

PC:

He used to tell my mother to hold her mouth.

LRH:

Yes, "Hold your mouth"?

PC:

Yes, in German.

LRH:

How did he say it?

PC:

Halt deinen mund!"

LRH:

"Halt deinen mund"?

PC:

Yes.

LRH:

My German is not so good. Did he ever punish you very much?

PC:

Oh, extensively.

LRH:

What did he say to you when he punished you?

PC:

"Dummhopf."

LRH:

Hm- hm, "Dummkopf." Did he ever tell you to control yourself?

PC:

No, he figured that the punishment would do the job.

LRH:

Hm- hm, did anyone ever say you were like your father?

PC:

My wife.

LRH:

Your wife said you were like your father?

PC:

Yes.

LRH:

Have you been happy about this?

PC:

No.

LRH:

Now, let’s remember a specific moment.

PC:

Right.

LRH:

Can you remember a moment when she said this? Not reverie, just remember it straight. Remember a moment when she said "You’re just like your father."

PC:

I was very angry.

LRH:

Hm- hm. Do you remember when she said it?

PC:

Yes.

LRH:

Where was she standing?

PC:

She was standing next to me in the kitchen.

LRH:

Hm- hm, and what did she say?

PC:

She said, "You’re just like your father!"

LRH:

Hm- hm. How do you feel when you contact that?

PC:

Well, Iget a mingled emotion. I feel a little elated and strange and a little disappointed.

LRH:

Why?

PC:

Well, I don’t admire my father too much.

LRH:

You don’t admire him too much.

PC:

Not too much.

LRH:

Did your mother ever say you were like your father?

PC:

Neuer!

LRH:

Who does your wife remind you of?

PC:

Well, she’s unlike any other person that I’ve ever met before.

LRH:

She is completely?

PC:

Yes.

LRH:

You get along well with her though?

PC:

After therapy.

LRH:

All right. Now, tell me this then, was your mother well self- controlled?

PC:

Quite self- controlled.

LRH:

Did she ever tell you to control yourself?

PC:

No.

LRH:

She never did?

PC:

No.

LRH:

All right. Did your father punish you very often?

PC:

Yes.

LRH:

Did you have an elder brother?

PC:

No.

LRH:

Only child?

PC:

No, I was the only male child.

LRH:

Was there an older sister?

PC:

Elder sister, yes.

LRH:

Did he ever call her a "dummkopf"?

PC:

Yes.

LRH:

Yes?

PC:

A great deal.

LRH:

A great deal. How much older?

PC:

A year and a half.

LRH:

A year and a half older. When she was a little baby would he have called her a "dummkopf"?

PC:

Would he hare?

LRH:

Yes, would he have?

PC:

I don’t think so, he’s partial towards the girls.

LRH:

Partial?

PC:

Yes.

LRH:

When did he say he was partial toward girls?

PC:

He never said so.

LRH:

He just acts that way?

PC:

Yes.

LRH:

All right. What would your mother say if she were very angry with you?

PC:

She would say, "Why?"

LRH:

And what else?

PC:

That is not right!"

LRH:

She would say what?

PC:

That is not right."

LRH:

How would she say this?

PC:

Well, she’d say it in English.

LRH:

She’d say, "That is not right"?

PC:

Yes, "That is not right."

LRH:

Hm- hm. Would she tell the daughter this, your elder sister?

PC:

Yes, she would say that.

LRH:

"That is not right."

PC:

That is not right."

LRH:

What are you doing in therapy?

PC:

Auditing and being audited.

LRH:

Yes, but in your auditing do you ever have trouble with your data?

PC:

Sometimes.

LRH:

Do you change it sometimes as you’re running it?

PC:

Yes. Geeezz!

LRH:

Thank you.

PC:

Thank you very much.

Those are the mechanics of this. They are very simple. First we try to establish whether the preclear has control circuitry.

You have probably had trouble with "altitude" with some preclears where the preclear says, "You know, I think I ought to go to so- and- so."

And you as the auditor say, "Well, no, let’s run so- and- so now."

"Well, I think I had better go to so- and- so anyway." You are probably running into a control phrase like "You’ve got to take care of yourself" or "You’ve got to control yourself." We call that control circuitry because it is actually controlling a person. To cure dub- in, we find these control circuits and that is why in the demonstrations above I asked him the question about "Who used to say ‘control yourself’?" He said nobody said it. All right, so nobody said it. But in a case which is running dub- in, you will find that there is somebody in that case who habitually said "Control yourself" or "Do it yourself" or something of the sort, and it actually does cause the imagination to go to work. There is a false individual set up inside the person.

In straight line memory you are looking for one of those dramatizations. Find that dramatization and use repeater technique with those exact words and go straight down the bank and knock out engrams with it. Get the first engram in which that phrase appears and run it out or reduce it.

Concerning valences and the person who can’t be himself, such a person has been told to be somebody else. "You are just like your mother," or "You are just like your father," or "He’s just like me, the little lamb." This usually occurs right after birth. The poor baby is lying there unlike anything in the world, and Grandma, the ally, comes in and says, "He’s just like me." After this, of course, he has a valence shift— he goes out of valence and his perceptics have a tendency to close down on him because he is out of valence.

So, we are looking for those two things. Therapeutically we ask him what he is worried about. He says, "Oh, I’m worried because I’m no good; I just can’t seem to do anything."

And we say, "Who told you that?"

"Nobody," or "I tell myself that," or something of the sort.

"You can remember somebody. Who would have said that in your family?" And he may remember that his father said it. Make him remember a specific moment when it was said to him and he will chuckle for a moment and no longer be worried about it.

A psychiatrist in New York City is using this. He is one of these doctors who takes on about 50 patients a day, so he can’t put everybody in reverie. He is using Dianetics and he is using straight line memory. A few months ago he stated that he had turned off three cases out of five of Parkinson’s disease with straight line memory. I haven’t verified it but I know that we have made people feel very good with this.

This is a demonstration of how you induce reverie and what you do with it when you have it induced.

The patient reclines upon a couch. Dianetics has this in common with psychoanalysis. The patient, however, is very carefully kept out of the hypnotic trance. There is nothing wrong with hypnosis used by proper practitioners as anesthetics, but it is not used in reverie.

Sometimes people go into a hypnotic trance by accident with this count system that we have been using, so at the Foundation we no longer use it. The way you induce reverie is as follows:

"Close your eyes." The preclear is now in reverie. "Open your eyes." The preclear is now out of reverie.

There is nothing strange about reverie, but by giving it a name people have been trying to achieve something very special when there is nothing special to achieve. A person, wide awake, could be said to be in reverie. That is to say, he returns up and down his track— especially some people running auto. It has a name to denote the fact that we are practicing therapy upon the preclean We are not even calling it therapy now, we are calling it processing. We refer to the preclean not the patient. We haven’t figured out one for a diagnosis yet, but it will probably be something like scouting the case.

LRH:

All right, Mary, close your eyes. Now, any time in the future that I utter to you the word canceled, anything which I have said to you while you are lying here is to be canceled and will become completely nonaberrative, okay?

PC:

Yes.

LRH:

[to audience] We install a canceler because sometimes people do go to sleep and the auditor may not realize it.

[to pc] All right, now let’s find out something very important. How old are you? (snap!)

PC:

32.

Aha, she’s in present time. This is very unusual. It says in the Handbook, "If the preclear is stuck in present time . . ." But the editor erroneously took the quotations out from around the words present time. No one could possibly be stuck in present time, he is always stuck in past time. He isn’t stuck at the end of his time track, he is stuck on his time track somewhere and it is up to you to find out where he is. It sometimes startles people very much if you walk up to somebody who knows nothing about Dianetics and say, "How old are you?"

And he says, "Ulp— uh— 28."

You say, "What was the first age that flashed into your mind?"

"Well, 4 years, but I can’t understand that!"

"What happened to you when you were 4 years of age?"

"Nothing! Oh, well, uh . . ."

"Well, go on, what happened? You can remember what happened when you were 4."

"Nothing— well, oh, that’s when I was run over by the truck!"

If Mary, for instance, had said at that moment "5 years of age," I would have tried to find out who had said "Wait there," "Stay there," "Come back here," "Sit down"— some holder, some command that would make a person stay in one spot— and I would have tried to find that command, not with repeater technique so much as trying to scout up the incident. Failing to find out what happened to her at 5, I would go into the second process.

LRH:

Let’s go to the time you went down to the beach about a week ago. Were you at the beach a week ago?

PC:

No, but I have a very recent incident at the beach.

LRH:

All right, let’s contact that incident. What are you doing there?

PC:

I’m laying on a blanket; it’s spread out on the sand.

LRH:

How does the blanket feel?

PC:

It’s a little bit scratchy.

LRH:

Can you hear the surf?

PC:

Yes.

LRH:

Who is with you?

PC:

My boyfriend.

LRH:

What’s the color of the blanket?

PC:

Army tan.

LRH:

What does his bathing suit look like?

PC:

Winesap, I believe.

LRH:

Let’s take a look at it.

PC:

Yes, it’s a little tired.

LRH:

Hm- hm, it’s a little tired. Okay, come up to present time.

PC:

Hm- hm.

I didn’t run that moment very thoroughly. Now, take a person who is well shut off, sometimes he has commands which inhibit him from experiencing pleasure; but in a lot of preclears you can get the pleasure moments, and you simply run a recent pleasure moment just like an engram.

Find a moment when the preclear was, for instance, diving into water, and go over and over that moment until suddenly she can pick up the perceptics. You can make her see, feel and hear, if you go over it, one pleasure moment after another.

One preclear on whom this was practiced had been completely shut in. After a short time I found a moment of pleasure he could remember, and then I found his perceptics gradually, one by one. The moment was the first movie he had ever attended as a little boy and he was watching Felix the Cat slide off a roof and fall in a rain barrel while the xylophone ran rapidly down the scale. When he finally heard the xylophone he got so excited he jumped off the couch. We sent him back over it again and again, and we just let Felix fall off that roof, time after time after time until the preclear was actually sitting in his theater seat looking at that screen, smelling whatever odors there were in the theater, feeling the emotion of enjoying that picture! And gradually, just working at it and finding first one pleasure moment and then another, and working each one very thoroughly, one by one his perceptics began to turn on and his case began to move.

Merely by finding a pleasure moment sometimes you can crack the preclear out of a holder on the time track. If she had said 5 and I couldn’t find the incident at 5, I would return her to recent pleasure incidents. The attention units in the mind would get so interested in that pleasure that they would come out of painful incidents and the person would come up to present time. The mind seeks pleasure, and you can actually get a person up to present time that way. You can also turn off headaches, toothaches and so on by running a recent pleasure moment, because it has the tendency to key out engrams. This is very useful. You can practice this on people and you will see how it works.

We use the file clerkl and the somatic strip as follows: We don’t fish around in the case, we don’t question the file clerk or the somatic strip. The auditor orders the somatic strip around. He tells it where to go. But he asks the file clerk politely.

Never leave an unreduced incident. If you are having any trouble with your preclears, it is probably because you are not reducing incidents. If you find an incident you can’t reduce, you have got to get the preclear earlier to one of the same type which will reduce. But don’t leave the case with an unreduced incident, because that is very restimulative.

He won’t feel badly lying there regressed— returned— on the track, perhaps, but when you bring him up to present time he will really get the somatic, so we reduce incidents that we locate. We don’t leave them carelessly and we run the actual incident.

In the case I am using for this demonstration, first I tested her perceptics and found out that they were very good. She is in present time; she is evidently moving on her track. This is the sort of a preclear you dream about. However, for the purposes of this demonstration, I’ve asked her to stay in present time and not run any actual incidents. This is just to show you how Standard Procedure would be run. On this case, here is the first thing we would do:

LRH:

The file clerk will give us the next moment of pain or unconsciousness we need to resolve the case, the somatic strip will go to the first moment of this engram. When I count from one to five, the first words of the engram will flash into your mind, one- two- three- four- five.

PC:

I don’t know how I can do it."

LRH:

Okay, let’s go over that again.

PC:

I don’t know how I can do it."

LRH:

Go over it again.

PC:

I don’t know how I can do it."

LRH:

The next line.

PC:

It seems to be so much trouble."

LRH:

Let’s go over those two lines again.

PC:

That’s very interesting, I’ve lost the first one! (laughing) "I don’t see how I can do it. I don’t see how I can do it. I don’t see how I can do it."

LRH:

Next line.

PC:

There isn t any use

LRH:

All right, go over that again.

PC:

There isn t any use

LRH:

The next line.

PC:

Why do you have to do it?

LRH:

The next line.

PC:

"Because I think it’s necessary."

LRH:

Next line.

PC:

"Well, this is just useless procedure. "

LRH:

Okay, now, give me a yes or a no on the following:Is there an earlier phrase in this engram, yes or no? (snap./)

PC:

Yes.

LRH:

All right, let’s contact that phrase a little bit earlier.

Notice that the somatic strip has gone to the front of the engram, but sometimes the unconsciousness is deepest at the front if it is a blow, and a phrase or two will be lost before the first ones you contact. If you try to reduce the engram without reducing the first pain of it, the engram is liable to hang fire.

LRH:

All right, let’s go over that now, the first line that you just contacted.

PC:

"I don’t see how I can stand it."

LRH:

All right, let’s go over that again.

PC:

"I don’t see how I can stand it?"

LRH:

Go over it again.

PC:

"I don’t see how I can stand it."

You notice that what I am doing here is getting the preclear to repeat that first phrase a few times, and by repeating it she settles into the incident solidly. Now, if we run the incident and discover something in it that says something like "Get away," that is what we call a bouncer, and we know that it will activate as a phrase because it has command value causing her to go off the incident slightly. So when we find a bouncer or a misdirector or any one of those phrases, right there we take that phrase and run it.

LRH:

Let’s pretend you just found a bouncer that says "Get away."

PC:

"I don’t see how I can stand it, go away."

LRH:

All right, go over "Go away" again.

PC:

"Go away."

LRH:

Go over it again.

PC:

"Go away."

LRH:

Go over it again.

PC:

"Go away."

LRH:

Go over it again.

PC:

"Go away."

LRH:

Go over it again.

PC:

"Go away."

LRH:

Go over it again.

PC:

(yawn) "Go away."

LRH:

Go over it again.

PC:

"Go away."

LRH:

Go over it again.

PC:

"Go away."

LRH:

Go over it again.

PC:

"Go away." (deep sigh)

LRH:

The next line.

PC:

"I’m too tired?"

LRH:

Let’s go over that again.

PC:

"I’m too tired."

LRH:

Go over it again.

PC:

"I’m too tired."

LRH:

Go over it again.

PC:

(yawn) "I’m too tired."

LRH:

Go over it again.

PC:

(getting sleepy) "I’m too tired."

LRH:

Go over it again.

PC:

"I’m too tired."

LRH:

Go over it again.

PC:

"I’m too tired?" (voice is firmer)

LRH:

Okay.

[to audience] This will demonstrate to you merely the running of an engram in reverie.

[to pc] By the way, were you running a real engram there?

PC:

(laughs) There were certainly parts of one.

LRH:

Okay, let’s come up to present time.

PC:

(pause)

LRH:

Come up to present time.

PC:

Yes.

LRH:

All right, now how old are you? (snap!)

PC:

32.

LRH:

Okay, canceled. When I count from five to one, your eyes will open, five- four- three- two- one (snap!). Wake up. Okay?

PC:

Yes.

LRH:

Thank you very much.

That is reverie and a fast look at the precise procedure.

The goal of Dianetic therapy is the clear. The psychometry on a clear demonstrates him to be without aberration.

Now, I will interview Miss Ann Singer, a young lady whose case has this great interest to us. She was cleared by an auditor who knew no more of Dianetics than the Handbook. It is true that she was a relatively easy case, but all the auditor knew was the Handbook and with this information he ran out the engram bank. As a result, this case checks out as clear.

The technical definition of clear is merely a case which has been returned all the way up and down the time track without finding any engrams. Psychometry on the case demonstrates the person to be without aberration.

How are you, Ann?

Fine.

Now tell me something about yourself. Are you in the university?

I was in college graduate school.

In a college graduate school. What are you doing now?

I’m now in Harvard Summer School.

You mean you are now playing hooky. Yes.

Did you used to have any psychosomatic illnesses?

Yes, I had hay fever, several types of allergies plus chronic sinusitis.

Were you happy, normally?

Well, I was considered a rather moody person.

Moody?

Yes.

Were you ever nervous?

Oh, very.

Was this a record of psychometry which is available?

Yes, at the university.

All right. And how do you feel now?

Fine.

Do you feel cheerful these days?

Certainly.

How do you think your life may have changed through being clear?

Well, the biggest help of all has been the improvement of my psychosomatic illnesses because they would certainly drag me down all the time. I had difficulty attending classes and I couldn’t study and in the future I’m sure without these I can accomplish many more things.

That’s fine! Do you feel your life has been changed?

Well, my tone level is certainly quite a bit higher. I find that I don’t worry about many things that I had worried about before. In fact I don’t worry at all, which is one of the things that is worrying me!

Okay. Do you think you have come to any harm by being cleared, or otherwise? No, I’m sure there is no harm in it.

All right, there are questions people might like to know the answers to regarding your state of clear. (I think there are going to be a lot of clears disappearing from sight as soon as they are cleared because the public has a tendency to tear them to pieces.)

[Question from audience] "You say in your book that a clear has eidetic memory, sonically and visually. Is this true of this young lady? Does she have eid etic memory ? "

It is true that those things which a person has actually looked at are recorded. The photographic type of memory where one looks at a page and has that whole page then on record is a trained process. But what a person has actually read is a matter of record.

[to Miss Singer] Can you do these things?

Yes, I can.

How do you feel about them?

It feels wonderful. I don’t spend hours studying and learning things, I just go back to it.

All right, what do you normally study?

Physics.

All right, shut your eyes. (Of course this type of examination actually means very little.) Read me something out of the physics textbook— something complicated.

Very complicated?

Yes, very complicated. Just look at the physics textbook and read it.

Which one?

Which one do you want to read?

Well, let’s look at Electromagnetic Theory.

Electromagnetic Theory, now that’s a nice book for a young lady to have been studying. It’s by Hugh Skilling.

Okay, and let’s go over to the middle of the book and read something complicated out of it.

All right.

How about Newton’s formula of gravity?

In vector notation?

Yes, in vector notation.

All right, yes, there’s a vector notation in the book I’m using. It is written in darker ink. It is equal to M, which is not in dark ink, times A, which is also in the dark ink.

Can you see the page number on it?

This is my mechanics book.

Okay. Actually, we could probably do a lot of that sort of thing. Your eyes are closed there, what color suit do I have on?

It’s sort of grayish blue.

Okay, and what’s the color of my tie?

I’m afraid I didn’t look at it.

Okay, as you walked in here, as you looked down front, what did you see? As you look, can you name any color of the clothes you see?

There’s a black and white print dress in front of me. I don’t think I looked at the people very directly.

Let’s walk in. Who are you looking at as you walk in?

You.

What about me?

Your red hair.

Okay. I would very much like to give you a very flashy demonstration on this sort of thing, but the best way this can be done is by letting the lady read a page and then having her read it back and so on, which can best be done by a competent psychometrist whose word is beyond question because like anybody else we could be accused of rigging something.

The young lady’s IQ will also be established and will be on record, certified by the highest authority for anyone to inspect.

[to Miss Singer] Do you think your IQ is up?

Yes, I think it is. Otherwise I wouldn’t have come.

All right. Thank you very much, Miss Singer.