STRAIGHTWIRE

A lecture given on 17 August 1950

A Precision Technique

The original name for Straightwire was straight line memory, which is to say one is remembering rather than returning.

The reason we call it Straightwire is because it is the "I" going straight through to the standard banks. We are not, however, doing anything even remotely resembling free association If anything annoys the professional auditors, it is finding people doing free association when they are supposed to be doing Straightwire; not because they have any antagonism to free association, but because in the past they have seen dozens of people wasting hours and hours of time.

Straightwire is a precision technique. It has no relationship to any past system of remembering, although you are using a straight memory to perform it. The difference is that in this technique the auditor specifically directs it. The auditor is doing the thinking across the gaps where the preclear cannot think, and this is quite different than sitting in a chair looking at somebody on a couch and letting him wander. Let your preclear wander in Straightwire, and you have lost the effectiveness of the whole subject.

It is very important to understand this distinction. Once you understand it, you can do this particular process very easily, and I think you are going to find this enormously useful. This particular skill is what the professional auditor really puts into the act that makes everybody sit up and blink, but you can’t do that unless you know very well what you are doing. You are actually doing a telephone lineman’s job. You are stringing wire from "I" to the standard memory banks and hooking it up with this technique, and the auditor looks very clever both to the preclear and to an audience.

I had a body of students who didn’t understand the precise nature of this technique say, "We don’t think we could ever do that because you have to think too fast. We watch you and the professional auditors and it’s remarkable." And they got inferiority complexes about this. That’s why at this moment I am making it as clear as I can to you. No amount of fast thinking goes into this. What we are putting into the process is a very precise equation, and we never permit ourselves to stray off that equation.

We appear to our observers and to the preclear to be very clever, because it is sometimes miraculous the sudden results that can be gotten from this. It is so astonishing that the auditor knew right there that this person’s grandmother must have been dead and so on. He appears to have been psychic. It’s a good show, but you don’t have to be very clever to do it. You do have to pay attention to its basic fundamentals and never let the processing deteriorate into casual conversation or reminiscing on the part of the preclear.

Somebody can sit there and talk to you about fishing trips for hours. He can talk to you about what he thought somebody might have thought because they said, and he guessed, and he is not sure but that’s fine, and he had a Buick car once. And when you get through maybe he feels fine. He has talked to somebody. Well, people feel that fine every time they go to a party, if they don’t have too bad a hangover, because they talk to people.

Communication all by itself is a kind of therapy. The Catholic confession is a more positive type of therapy. Free association and psychoanalysis in general have as an ingredient the establishment of communication with another human being. But the next thing psychoanalysis sought to do was to go through and ransack a person’s hidden memories, and it unfortunately specified the wrong things to remember in some cases which slowed down the technique, so that it takes two or three years sometimes to completely psychoanalyze a person. Well, we haven’t got two or three years to spend so we speeded this thing up.

In psychoanalysis was the astonishing fact that someone could talk to somebody for sometimes two hours, sometimes two weeks, sometimes two months or two years, and at the end of that time the person evidently felt better, but there wasn’t an adequate explanation as to why he felt better. I kept asking psychoanalysts why they suddenly achieved these results, and they gave me very many answers, but it was quite obvious that they were not hitting dead center. They were shooting blindly in that direction without much technique, and sometimes they were getting it, but they weren’t too sure what they had gotten.

I picked up people from time to time who had been put into a manic stage by psychoanalysts, which is very dangerous. A person is supposed to remember things and then somebody triggers a manic such as "You are so powerful; you feel so strong; you are so good today," and all of a sudden the person goes around feeling fine, and he will tell you "Psychoanalysis is a wonderful thing." He may even go into a euphoric state, and that’s very frightening even to an analyst. He feels too good. He is too upstanding.

One gentleman that I was working contacted a manic down in the basic area. His mother had tried to abort him because he was illegal— it said in the Ohio state laws— and so here he was, well on his way, and his mama decided to get rid of him and save her face at the church. She used a very strong solution which almost killed her, and Grandma picked her up off the floor after she had fallen downstairs. This was an extremely complicated engram.

We couldn’t get this preclear to return. One of the reasons why was that people kept saying in this particular engram, "She fell downstairs. We will have to take her upstairs again and keep her there for a while." And here he was at the top of his time track and then at the bottom of his time track. He had been in the beginning portion of the engram, a very sad incident, which had the words "Oh, I don’t know what I am going to do; life is horrible," and so forth. But right at the end of this, Grandma gives a lecture on the subject: "This baby might grow up to be a fine, upstanding young man or woman and a credit to the world."

We triggered this manic. We got him out of the front end of the engram into the rear of it by accidentally ticking the thing and moving his position on it.

He had been wearing thick glasses, and he was considerably hunched. With this "fine, upstanding young man" manic in restimulation he almost broke his spine walking around upright saying, "Oh, I feel good. Dianetics is absolutely wonderful, I no longer need to wear my glasses." And he couldn’t. His eyes had gone completely back to normal. He was a fine, upstanding young man, and a fine, upstanding young man does not wear glasses. The muscles alongside his spine were snapped taut. They were aching. Of course, if we had just left him for a few days, he would probably have gone back to the rear end of that engram where he started. But, possibly, he could have hung up on this point too.

A manic is quite often not as interesting as this fine, upstanding young man— it might be a nymphomaniac. So, we don’t turn on manics, and if we turn them on, we turn them off in a hurry by finding them and triggering them.

In psychoanalysis, they don’t use a therapy discharge line. They use a different type of line. They get a straight memory, sometimes by restimulation, which is an entirely different process than returning a person.

Inspecting the field of psychoanalysis it came to view that if this could be done occasionally, there must exist some sort of push- button arrangement in the mind, and if you could push the proper buttons you could get a precise result. I tried to find what these push buttons were and came to the conclusion that they weren’t sure, because it took such a varied amount of time to do something about it. However, the prior art in psychoanalysis was very useful and I started adding this thing up. I already knew about locks and engrams. I found out that straight memory had a new quality which I had never suspected. If something is gotten by Straightwire from the standard banks to present time, the process of picking it up by "I" is a validating one. Somewhere along this line there is a monitor unit, and it says "That is real. That really happened at 4 years of age," so we rehabilitate his reality and his affinity, because by validating his communication with the past, the other two kick in as real. If this incident was not real we wouldn’t get that effect.

Normally these things seep up to the surface by various means. For example, you ask somebody on the street, "Where were you born?"

"In Columbia, South Carolina."

And you say, "Do you remember being born in Columbia, South Carolina?"

"Well, that’s silly, of course I don’t remember."

"How do you know then?"

"Well, it’s on my birth certificate," he says triumphantly. That is not Straightwire.

None of us, before we have really been back through it and granted the actuality of it, really know if we have been born or not. We have been told so; it is a fact which we take on faith— which is rather invalidating to our affinity and communication. Everybody knew "nobody could know he was born." In fact, by working hard on somebody you could probably take him back to the time he was born. We have sent people back to 4 or 5 months, and once a memory comes back like that it cannot be invalidated.

You will often find people returned down the track, running off an engram, getting impressions of sound and visio, who are not sure this is real. They are lying there on the couch with their eyes closed and they are not very well oriented to now, so they have a slight wonder about whether or not it is really happening, because they have nothing to compare it to. But they will run it for the auditor’s sake.

Sometimes, when you run an experience like that, you bring the person back up to present time, make him open his eyes and sit up, and you say, "You can remember this experience now."

He may grind on it and know that it couldn’t have been in that house. "It must have been in some other house; and I don’t think it was Doctor Dimwittie, because my mother told me distinctly that it was Doctor Jones." He puzzles over this thing, and sometimes he will say, "Yes, sure, I remember that," and all of a sudden he feels better because he has validated the fact that he used to be alive and that there were people around. Perhaps he has been told a lot of things about this incident, now he knows whether they are true or false and he can separate them out.

In other words he has a lot of data related to this experience which he has taken conditionally, and it is still standing there. It is not in good solid slots, with nice labels on it, "That’s true, false, true, false, yes, no, yes, no." His mind is in this condition: "Well, I think— at that time— I did go— they said— and it’s my opinion that, history books to the contrary . . ."

He has all of this data jumbled up in what we call a bullpen. In electronics, the memory, as it comes fully forward to the computer, has a waiting area which is called a bullpen.

Of course, only so much data will wait for recomputation. The human mind is pretty good. It will hold a couple of million facts waiting fairly easily. But don’t start getting it up to a couple of billion, because a man isn’t comfortable with a bullpen.

One man I knew had every joke he had ever read or heard parked in his bullpen. You could tell him a joke and he would look at you seriously, you could see him thinking about it, and then it would occur to him as a learned pattern that he was supposed to laugh, so he would say "Ha, ha, ha." Then he would go off and think it over carefully.

Some people carry a joke around for a few days or maybe a few years, thinking about it, wondering what the point was. It may be a story which runs something like this: There’s a newsboy on the streets of Boston, and a fellow walks up to him and says, "Have you got the New York Times?"

And the little boy looks at him, smiles and says, "No, but I have got the Boston Globe."

You can tell this joke, drop it there and then change the subject. There are a whole series of these stories. One of them has this line, "Will peach pie do?" and if you say it very alertly, it becomes a datum in someone’s bullpen because it can’t be resolved. He hasn’t enough data to resolve it. The mind operates more or less algebraically, "No greater than yes, yes greater than no," and he can’t get a no greater than yes, yes greater than no in relation to this. He doesn’t know whether it was funny or whether he was just going crazy, and so there the data waits for a period. And that bullpen is very deep. Start going down with Straightwire and you will find jokes back to the age of 5 or 6 years of age.

A historic misconception was one where a little girl was 2 years of age and her father took her down to the seashore on a very foggy night. There was a spit of land out into the water with a tower on which a light swung around. She wanted to know what that was, and her father said, "That’s Mr. Johnson’s place out there." What she was asking about was the spit of land running out into the water. She couldn’t quite make it out. That was Mr. Johnson’s place. She took in this datum and looked at the land and there was a giant about 125 feet tall looking her way, saying "Moo." He also had a very angry eye, and the fog shadows behind the beam shining through the dark looked like hair streaming out behind him.

Her father left her not too long afterwards, and she was sick for quite some time. At night she would hear strange moaning sounds, and she decided that there may be lots of Mr. Johnsons in the world walking around that she hoped were friends of her father. And she had this datum waiting there in the bullpen because of course it was an unresolved problem as she wasn’t quite sure whether or not it was Mr. Johnson. Later on in life other data had come up that didn’t compare with the earlier data. It didn’t fit, so there it stayed in the bullpen.

By straight memory, this incident was contacted and a considerable fear of the dark was broken out because it was the dark in which one occasionally heard a moan. She had a lot of engrams down below this, so that not enough attention units could actually pour through this area and it was parked data which had worried her. She was now about 22 years of age, and she was still occasionally worried about seashores because there must be giants in the world.

With Straightwire you are simply recomparing data against the real present, but you also compare it with all the incidents subsequent to the moment when the datum was acquired. So, "I" is more in present time, because every time one of these went to the bullpen, an attention unit had to be following it around in there all the time. A man is 40 years of age, he received the data at 5 years; that is 35 years one attention unit has been following that around. It is important to get the attention units back in present time and you can get them back in a terrific rush by Straightwire.

You will find almost anybody who has done a lot of living has got a lot of engrams. Now, when you get to his data in the bullpen you start to get occluded areas, caught attention units, or units more or less absorbed in tracking around Mr. Johnson’s place and so forth. On an educational level it is of vast importance to have each datum learned by the individual compared to the real world.

A lot of people have commented on the fact that some people get over- educated. They just don’t seem to be able to use their information. I had a young man before a board one time in the navy. He had been through his 90- day course, and the poor man had had the 90- day course pulled up on top of a technical education which had lasted for 4 years, and before that he had been in a military school, and the time he had had to look at the real world was practically zero. So here he was, and his attention units were all the way back along the track busy tagging around the fact that "they say the stress and strain of concrete is so- and- so." This had nothing to do with concrete sidewalks. This was out of a textbook and it was unrelated. A datum has no value unless it is related, and the most reliable thing you can relate a datum to is the real world. So this boy had a very bad case of mental Jam- up.

His whole attitude toward the ship was quite remarkable. He had had nothing to do with anything he had ever studied. He was suddenly placed aboard; he had a stripe on his sleeve; he was supposed to function as an officer of the deck and as a gunnery officer, and to execute his knowledge. Unless knowledge and computations become executed when ready, they start damming up.

So a person thinks, "Let’s see. The best thing to do today is to go down to the secondhand dealers and get that radiator cap for my hot rod." So he gets into the car to do this.

But something says "Nope," and stops his execution.

The next day he says, "The best thing for me to do is to clean out the basement and get rid of all these old newspapers." And he is all set to do it when something says "Nope," and he can’t do that. You might say he is traveling at a certain velocity in life as it pertains to executing those things which he has solved. He solves them computationally, but when he has to put the computation into execution, he gets stuck.

The mind is rigged up to a normal amount of stopping. But don’t stop a little child, for instance, if he has something he wants to do or the first thing you know you will have all of his attention units in the bullpen, because every one of those conclusions which wants to be executed is still in the bullpen.

So the engineer is told how to build bridges, fly kites, and so on, and he is getting attention units gathered with no execution, no release. The inertia of his application is therefore stalled down slower and slower and slower. It can actually get to the point where it will just start idling, like the rest of the attention units in the bullpen, on an educational, conscious and analytical level. This has nothing to do with engrams; that is the way his mind operates.

A person, however, who would do this would have had to have had quite a few engrams, because the impetus to put things into execution is so strong and the analytical mind’s necessity to overcome obstacles toward any one goal is such that you can’t stop an individual, aside from chaining him down completely. He is going to execute what he thinks up, or he is going to resolve what is keeping him from executing what he thinks up. If he has got engrams, he can be slowed down to a point where he won’t. Everything goes into the bullpen. With Straightwire, we start knocking things out of the bullpen.

You could take this person who has been educated on this system of "train the standard memory banks to remember" (which neglected the execution side of it and minimized the amount of exercise that the mind itself must have), and you could sit him down and put him through the whole curriculum. He has had maybe a couple of years out in the world away from studies. You start him remembering and he starts comparing the fact that the tension factor in testing concrete is so- and- so. He can use that. That is the real world all of a sudden. The unreality of this related data becomes the reality of having actually existed in the real world. You don’t even have to make him compare very much, until all of a sudden the inertia picks up, the force starts going through, and it is like opening a small hole in a dam. The hole gets a little bigger and a little bigger, logarithmically, until eventually the dam itself breaks.

You can do this with Straightwire. You can straighten out a person’s education; you can make people happy on an educational level without touching engrams. That is merely his mind working. It has nothing to do with engrams.

Somebody who has been cleared (the technical definition of which is somebody who has no engrams left) will have to walk around for months before he has got all of his data re- related, because the amount of data he has stored is fantastic. For instance, he will see an advertisement about a railroad train. He has a whole string of data bullpenned about railroad trains which he will suddenly think of, and he blows a lock here and a lock there. He goes around doing this continually. It is an astonishing thing. And the world really settles for him. That is a primary step of Straightwire.

The way the time track looks to the analytical mind is conception, birth, present time— all fairly equally spaced. To the reactive mind the prenatal area is really full. The child is quite vulnerable apparently, and lots of engrams appear up in childhood, but nothing like in the prenatal area. That is really a bundle. And these engrams get reactivated from time to time, and these things start forming locks. The definition of an engram is a moment which contains pain and unconsciousness. Pain and unconsciousness of perceptics is the total concept. A lock is a restimulation of that moment of pain and unconsciousness, even if the unconsciousness is only a microsecond long.

A person bangs his finger. He says, "I couldn’t have possibly been unconscious at any moment during the time the finger was banged," but suddenly he picks up the fact that there were two words missing out of the sentence he was listening to when he banged his finger. There is that little instant of unconsciousness. Actually, it is a very tiny engram. Its power to do very much to a person is slight. An engram is pretty tough. A real honest- togoodness engram contains all sorts of stresses and strains. It is something like being run over by a railroad train and then having your wife ring up and say "I have just run away with another man."

As a person lives his life, these incidents are reactivated and then they can be restimulated, which is of course the key- in. This can happen very easily, but an initial reactivation of an engram has to contain with it a bit of weariness and similar perceptics to the engram. But it is a relatively conscious moment in life.

People sometimes ask me, "Does a person have to be slightly unconscious or very tired to have an engram keyed in?" They are assuming that a person when he is not very tired has no anaten present. That is not true. A normal person has a lot of anaten present if he has any engrams in the bank. So he comes up to the time when he fell off his bicycle and hurt himself. But what was said to him immediately afterwards was a very similar conversation to another engram. Now we have an engramic lock. An engramic lock contains pain and unconsciousness in its own right, but is so similar to an earlier engram that it merely compounds the charge.

In Dianetics, we deal in spectrums. It is a graduated scale. If there is a great deal of unconsciousness the person would be dead, and up at the other end of the scale we have a person with no unconsciousness, which would be full life. As we go up the scale, there is less and less death and more and more life. It works the same way with pain and unconsciousness, but up above the actual incident of physical pain we get locks.

I am emphasizing this because in Straightwire all we are looking for are locks and light engramic locks. We are not looking for real engrams with big teeth.

A key- in is a very precise thing. The engram has been floating somewhere off the bank. Let’s say it had to do with a person being hit in the head and screaming "Get out, get out, get out," and then a door slamming. Then one night our aberree comes home and hears his wife quarreling with her mother, and somebody says "Get out, get out, get out," and a door slams. He doesn’t feel good about it. They have been quarreling all along and he has never really had any reaction from their quarreling, but at this particular moment he feels bad.

Originally, that "Get out, get out" and the door slam was himself being hit in the head. So, it is dangerous to have people say "Get out, get out" and slam a door. That forms a key- in. That is the first time this engram has been activated. Now, the reactive mind has moved it into a ready position and it can be restimulated. It couldn’t be restimulated until it was keyed in.

The similarity to the incident must be very strong to have a key- in take place. There must be similar personnel, or some other similarity, for a key- in. Such an incident, evidently, has a tendency to sink out of sight. It is apparently lying on the time track at the time of the key- in, but actually it isn’t. There’s a hole in the time track right there with the key- in incident filing right down with the original incident in the lower area.

You will find very often in running engrams that a person will start to run an engram and then say, "Oh yes, well, when I was 12 years old, I hurt my foot, too." Don’t mistake it for a bouncer. It is quite different, because he is right there on the track where he belongs. He is not at 12. He has just looked at this piece of information. While recounting it he just happened to lift his eyes slightly off the top of the engram and found that he had hurt his foot at 12 years of age.

As a student auditor, you may discover that the engram you ran out of Bill may tomorrow be found in you. This is nothing about which to get excited, and you shouldn’t think you are having delusions. If this happens, your auditor would be missing a very important point if he didn’t know that you have got a lock on an actual engram, and that the engram you ran out of Bill has settled on your own engram, which is similar. You may have run 40 engrams out of Bill up to this point and none of them stuck, but this one did; and as you start to recount this and say, "‘ I can’t stand it around here anymore.... ’ That’s funny; that is Bill’s engram," the auditor should at that moment say, "Let’s go to the moment when the words ‘I can’t stand it anymore’ appear." Or, he may change it a little bit. Your engram may be "I am not going to stand around here anymore," in a similar circumstance. The lock lay immediately on top of an engram. So, this is another way to find engrams: find out who else’s engram is stuck. It is a method by itself.

So don’t upset yourself if you find yourself running someone else’s engrams. And if you as an auditor find an engram in a case and the person saying "This isn’t my engram" and you don’t immediately look for and get his engram, you are very remiss because you are standing right on that engram at that moment. It isn’t a case of moving him on the track. He is right there. He is right there on his own engram. The lock was received much later, but this lock has just drifted down onto the engram.

We can’t get this engram with Straightwire, but we can go right down the line and get some of these restimulations, and if we really want to make it effective, we can get that first key- in, which is the important one; and if we can find the key- in point of the engram by Straightwire, the engram immediately keys out. That engram is a zero as an aberrative quantity in a person’s life at that moment. Of course, this engram can be reactivated, later, by a new key- in. But it doesn’t key in more easily or less easily. It has to have the same amount of stress and strain that keyed it in before, and that stress and strain might not be particularly major. But it might require specific personnel, such as Mama and Papa, to really key this thing in, and he hasn’t seen them for years. So if you key this thing out, the chances of keying in Mama and Papa are slight.

If you want to do a fast job of auditing somebody, 20 to 30 percent of the time you can go down in that case to the key key- in of his whole case, and if you can find that key key- in, the one that worries him the most in his case, 20 to 30 percent of the time he feels better, and it’s so spectacular that your own repute will go up quite markedly. It gives one a tendency to say

"Oh, it’s very easy when you know how." It looks remarkable, and it sounds fantastic. To people who are listening who don’t know the intimate mechanics of this (one has to be practiced in this), it sounds miraculous that you can suddenly reach into a case and off goes Parkinson’s disease.

Someone became acquainted with some of these data and took off on straight line memory. It was actually a doctor using straight line memory that recalled it forcefully to my attention because he said, "You know, Dianetics is wonderful."

I asked him, "What have you been doing with Dianetics?" thinking he was going into Standard Procedure.

He said, "Well, I cured the last three cases of Parkinson’s disease with it." I said, "Wait a minute. Parkinson’s disease! How many patients are you working?"

"Oh," he said, "50 to 90 a day." It didn’t make sense.

In an earlier conversation, we had talked about straight line memory. I had merely mentioned it, but he, of course, picked it up as this was something he could use in his business.

So we started teaching this, because we found out that psychoanalysis received it very happily, and that doctors loved it. It made quite a show and people got better with it. And then, some more techniques were developed and it became a diagnostic procedure, and now it leads the line on diagnosis and Standard Procedure. It is a technique which you can employ and which you should practice a great deal before you even start to run very much in the way of engrams. You can employ this very safely, because it isn’t going to upset anybody, and it may do a remarkable amount of good.

So the technique is to get a person by straight memory to remember the key- in and blow it, because it will go automatically just by remembering. It will nullify the engram on which it is lying and a person will feel pretty good when you knock out these little locks. Sometimes you really haven’t knocked out the key one but you have knocked out some of the later ones, and it has had a remarkable effect upon the health and outlook of your preclean If you really get the key- in, that is hitting the jackpot, and if you are good at this, you can take a chronic somatic, an illness of great magnitude sometimes, and whoosh! it’s gone. And, of course, this is magic.

Our subject here is not a very complex one. Undoubtedly, a lot of people are going to try and make it so, but if you reach for this it will come very easily.

We have covered the idea of a lock and how it files, and how if we could get a key- in on direct memory Straightwire, we could get a key- out. In other words, we could clear the bullpen of its data. The key- in acts like an engram itself.

In the beginning, the engram plus all its locks form a complete aberrative sequence. Almost any one of these locks has an aberrative effect. The locks append to the engram in this way. For instance, the engram says "He is no good." Then, let’s say there is a bad experience with "He is no good" in it; that’s a key- in, right there. The next time that statement is made may be merely a conversational "Well, you know Bill. He is no good." The person being talked to may be adverse to people criticizing people; nevertheless, when he tries to reject the data by arguing about it, he doesn’t have much luck, ordinarily.

The rejector mechanism is an automatic mechanism in the mind. A fact comes in, gets compared, accepted or rejected and filed. The data comes in on top of an engram in the form of a lock, a person tries to reject it and can’t do it. Laughter, however, is a great rejector. If you get into laughter and study it, you will find out that it is evidently first and last an ejector mechanism. It is trying to eject data, and does— if one can laugh.

A whole community can listen to data about its aberrations, if placed in a nondangerous category, and they will laugh. They are ejecting this data back out again, and it is amusing to them to do so, rather like the small boy playing with fire. He may even have gotten burned, but he still likes to play with fire. A human being works on the proposition "I will show that engram."

Locks form a key- in lock chain which becomes very important in straight memory.

There is the engram and above it is an engramic lock, which is another similar moment of pain and unconsciousness, and so on with various kinds of engramic locks. They are all engrams, though, and that makes a chain, the contents of which are out of sight. He can remember the beginning and the end, but the center of the incident is gone because it has never been filed in the standard banks.

Now, a person can usually remember by straight line memory that he was run over by a train and that he was taken to a hospital. But he wouldn’t be able to tell you by straight line memory what the nurses looked like or what the doctors said. That data is filed out of sight.

A lack of differentiation in matters of pain is the main fault of the reactive mind. So here is this series of engramic locks, based on this engram, which is the basic on this chain. These all have similar subject matter. So, by knocking out the first key- in of this material, or an early key- in, we would knock out quite a bit of it. And the locks, as they come up the line, would be filed by time sequence.

These locks are holes on the time track, and this is occlusion. If you hit one of these key- ins by straight memory, you will fill up some of these holes on the time track. Every one of these engrams, of course, seizes quite a few attention units. It doesn’t seize the attention units at the moment it is received. It just bundles up right there and waits. Now, it can be keyed in 10 minutes or 10 years or 50 years afterwards, but the moment it keys in, it reaches out its big paws and pulls in these attention units, and they are then clenched into the engram. A person’s inability to think and function stems from a lack of attention units.

So, every one of those locks is an attention unit robber. They seize more and more and more attention units which become frozen up and pulled into the original bundle. When you hit the key- in sharply by straight memory, it validates the fact it is the key- in, compares this to the real world, demonstrates to the person that it is not dangerous and that all of those attention units are walking around looking for nothing, and all of a sudden the track goes back together again. By taking an engram chain which, let’s say, has led to sinusitis, we can knock out sinusitis— if we can get the key- in.

If you work on a subject for five or six consecutive hours in 15- minute sessions on one subject only, various things can happen. Let’s say the preclear’s mother died when he was 2 years of age. There might have been a terrific key- in prior to 2 years of age but his mother’s death occluded it. The only way you can get that out is to get Mother’s death.

That is why 70 percent of the time you don’t turn off superchronic somatics with Straightwire. But Straightwire, whether it turns off the big ones or not, is a technique you have to know and use, and is an enormously valuable weapon because you can straighten out a person’s time track with it and pull all sorts of things into view.

Before an engram is keyed in it is not dramatized, because there are not any attention units to be utilized by the dramatization. If we were tremendously interested in studying the behavior of man, dramatization and all of its facets would be of enormous interest to us. But, as you go along, you pick that up automatically. You see people dramatizing and know what they are doing. There is no sense in my wasting a lot of time on it, because we are not studying man’s activities as phenomena. We are studying man’s activities from the viewpoint of doing something about them. You don’t have to know too much about dramatization until we get up to push buttons, at which point I will show you how to handle them.

There is the engram. Every time the person dramatizes it, it is not a key- in. However, the fact that he dramatized it means that it is in restimulation, but that he got to dramatize it means that it didn’t form a lock. It will only form a lock when he starts to dramatize it and can’t.

Now let’s take a series of incidents where a stepfather has been in the environment of our preclear, and all these locks are saying "You do what I tell you. You have to do what I tell you. You have no choice but to do what I tell you." That is the type of thing we face in a case of selfcontrolled circuitry so great that it dubs in. We are trying to find what the dramatization is.

Now, we may find it by Straightwire and key it out in a few cases, but we may not reach deep enough into it or get early enough to key it out. However, after we have gotten the data on it by Straightwire, then we can put the person in reverie and take him back to the first engram. We have the dramatization; we run the dramatization until the person has nicely picked up the lock, then we just shoot him to the first time it happened. And that is the diagnostic use of Straightwire.

What an aberree does once, he will do many times. If he says, "You do what I tell you. You have to mind me," the chances of his having said that in his lifetime just once are about ten billion to one. He has said it time after time after time after time, up to the time when somebody finally crushed the dramatization utterly, and then the fellow sat around with ulcers because he couldn’t dramatize it so he had to have the pain.

In order to find out why this person has a self- control mechanism (we know he does, because he has dub- in), we try to find out who was the most bombastic or the most self- controlled person in his environment. We are searching for an aberree who had a dramatization that led to this fact which we see in the preclean

What a person believes erroneously or aberratively, he has been told by someone else, and the source of having to believe it is an engram which has been given to him prenatally, probably by the same person who afterwards told him the same thing many times. We merely want to key the engram out. A person will tell you his worry in approximately the same words as it was told to him, although he believes it to be his own idea. For instance, you ask "What have you been worrying about?"

"Well, I don’t think I will be able to get along in life. You know, I have had a couple of rows lately with the boss."

Now, there are ways to jump this individual so that he will become very defensive about the whole thing. There are also ways to talk to him so that he will begin to believe everything he says is out of an engram, or a lock, and that would be a very villainous thing to do. So we are very adroit about our questioning. We start to ask him about the people who surrounded him when he was young. We want to find out in this particular case who used to say "You won’t get along in life" or "I won’t get along in life." That’s a serious thing because it will keep a person from moving on the time track. We don’t care particularly whether he gets along in life or not. We can solve that. We want to know why he is not able to move along the time track, so we question him along the line of "By the way, were there any ne’er- do- wells in your family? Did anybody used to fail?"

"No."

"Was your father successful?"

"Except for the times he failed."

"What did your father used to say about that? Can you remember a time when he failed at something?"

"No."

"Well now, you can remember this; you can remember a time when he failed. The moment he failed; you can remember the exact experience. He used to run stores, I suppose, or something like that?"

"Oh, no. He sold Fuller brushes."

"Well, do you remember a time when he complained about it?"

"No, except the night when he had the big fight with Mother. Yes, he had a big fight with Mother."

"What did he say?"

"I don’t know, probably a lot of things. I can hardly remember that; I don’t remember."

"Well, you can remember this."

"I don’t know. She kept saying something about . . . oh, yes. ‘You will never get along in life, ’ ha- ha- ha."

Now, we have got the villainess of the piece. It was Mama. Only, of course, Mama might have said it to Papa when he was worn out, after which he finally begins to say, "Well, I have thought it out all by myself, and you know, I don’t get along in life." Once we remove this incident, we will find that the preclear will start moving on the time track, but, more important than that, this feeling of failure will have lifted to some degree.

Unfortunately the Research Department has not yet come up with an engramoscope so that you can look into a person’s mind and see a diagram of this. I would like to be able to put one of these things at your disposal. We tried an EEG (electroencephalograph measuring brain impulses), but we found out that it didn’t make good contact. It doesn’t pick this material up very well. Engrams, unfortunately, are so muscular, and the muscular impulse overrides the thought impulse so much of the time that it is not a good, reliable test. We don’t have an engramoscope, so you are just going to have to use this test.

"Did your grandfather ever tell you you were a good boy?"

"Oh, yes, he did. Yes, sure." Or he will say, "Oh, yes, yes. My grandfather told me I was a good boy, yes." But with no relief.

And you have to follow through with "Let’s remember a specific moment when he said this. Where was he standing?"

"Well, he wasn’t standing, he was sitting down...." And all of a sudden you have got the incident you want. Of course, you wouldn’t be going after "You’re a good boy" as being a particularly aberrated phrase unless you were trying to key out a manic.

When a person has run an engram out, he has been back on the track someplace and may have keyed something else in. So when you get him back up to present time, get him to remember the session and knock it back out. Make it a practice to ask him about what happened in the session. Sometimes people have aberrations about remembering, and use of the word remember on that person keeps him from remembering. You have to put it some other way, such as "What did we do? What was the first thing you did?" Make him check over it, not word by word because you want to be very sure that he is staying in present time. Give him the command "Come up to present time; open your eyes," then say, "Now, give me the time when your mother used to put you in the garbage can and put the lid on it." A preclear who has been in reverie for several sessions will often go down the track looking for it. But you are not interested in putting him into reverie, so you just insist, "Come up to present time. Open your eyes. Now, you can remember this. Tell me about it."

"Oh, I remember that she did; that’s all I can remember."

"Well, let’s remember a specific incident."

"I couldn’t do that."

"Tell me a specific moment that she did."

"I couldn’t tell you a specific moment that she did."

"Was it awfully smelly?"

"Yes, it was." Lead the person into these things. You are apparently making almost disrelated remarks, as far as he can tell, but what you are doing is taking another direct wire which goes back on all the communication lines. Maybe you only have part of one wire hooked up. But even if a person only has his sense of smell hooked up to his standard bank, he can smell all of his former experiences and it validates his past for him. If he can smell it, it happened.

Your job is to get as many of those perceptics stretched down there as possible. So by saying "Did it smell bad?" you are trying to get olfactory, and by asking "Where were you standing?" you are hooking up his visio. You are a telephone lineman.

One case I was working said, "My memory is so bad, I can’t remember anything."

So I said, "Anything? What do you remember least?"

"People. I can’t remember people. I can’t remember names, I can’t remember faces. I can’t remember anything."

I said, "What is my name?"

He said, "I know you, Ron."

"All right, that’s one person you know. Now, let’s remember a time when you and I were together, some time ago."

"Yes."

"Well now, there’s a time you have remembered. Where were we at that moment?"

"In your office."

"What were we doing?"

"Oh, so- and- so."

"Who else was there?"

"Well, you know who was there; George was there."

"Ah, that’s two people you have remembered."

And you take a person back along the line and make him remember his father, for instance, just by using the analytical mind’s mechanism.

You can say, "Was your father a very neat man?" He can’t remember his father. He has him badly occluded, but he answers "I would say yes."

"I thought you couldn’t remember your father." "Oh, well, you ask me things like that, of course "

"Well, tell me, did he keep his appointments?"

"Oh, I wouldn’t know that."

"Did he like to eat?"

"Oh, yes. He loved to eat. I remember one Fourth of July, we had watermelon." And he is hooked in.

What the auditor has done in this case is string wire. One starts on a small periphery. You can get him to remember yesterday. You can get him to remember last week, staying in present time and remembering. You can get him to remember the last car he had, and that is Straightwire at its best, spotting a place where a person is stuck on the time track. Don’t feed him repeater technique because you will only stick him further on the track. What you want to do is to find the place where he is stuck.

So we get a situation like this. We give him a flash, l "How old?"

And he says, "29 . . . but that’s silly, I am 43."

Or you say, "How old are you?"

And he says, "43."

"What was the first number that flashed into your mind?"

"Oh, well, I often do that; I got the number 29." Or, he will say, "43."

"What was the first number you got?"

"43."

If the person is obviously stuck on the time track, you change your words and say, "What is your age?"

And he will pause and then say, "43."

"What was the first number you got?"

"29."

You follow through with it. "What happened when you were 29?"

"Oh, well, at 29 . . ." There is also a chance that he is talking about 29 days, which you mustn’t overlook.

So you say, "What happened when you were 29?"

"I was just back there in Dayton."

"How do you know you were?"

"Well, I lived in Dayton from the time I was born up until last year. I never left town."

"What accident did you have when you were 29?"

"Oh, I wouldn’t know anything about that."

Now, we start in by taking something which is a little narrow periphery. Don’t try to make him remember when he was 30 or 28 or bracket it in any way. You are not now diving for the engram. Try to find out something else along the line on an entirely different activity.

Simply say, "Well, who did you work for after you got out of high school?"

"Oh, my first job was for Bill Peters. I remember that very well."

"Why do you remember that especially?"

"I got fired."

"Well, how old were you when you got out of high school?"

"18. Yes, I must have been 18."

All of this is conceptual. He isn’t remembering a specific incident.

And you say, "When did you get your next job?"

"I don’t know. I worked for a while on a flatboat out there on the river; I had a pretty good time."

"How long did you work on this flatboat?"

"Quite a long time. Then I went on to something else; I can’t remember what kind of job."

"Was it like the work you are doing now?" flash, the flash answer is the first thing which comes into a person’s head when a question is asked him. "Oh, yes, accounting."

"Well, did you like your boss or dislike him?"

"I hated him. Yes, that’s right; I hated him." He was able to get a flash answer out of himself because you hit some stimulant.

All right, you were working on his boss and you were also trying to find some accident that had nothing to do with his boss; but what you are really trying to do is open up his 29th year and find the engram he is stuck in. So find out who his boss was, how old the kid was, when he got married, and develop it just as though you were developing a photographic negative, getting it bigger and bigger until he says, "Well, that’s the time I went to the hospital with a fractured skull." And then he will say, "Of course, I knew about that all the time."

That is the discouraging thing about Straightwire. The instant you blow out a lock, of course the data has been sitting there all the time, he has the complete knowledge that it has been sitting there, and he will very often say that he remembered it all the time! You can work yourself into a complete lather with Straightwire, digging things up with a shovel and a pick and a pneumatic drill, and a couple of minutes later he will say, "I remembered that all the time. Why didn’t you ask me?"

What you are doing is developing the time track, because the time track has gotten full of holes. And the sum of all these locks and engrams is the sum of the wipe- out, because they are stolen moments which are then stored, added in with the fact that this person is out of valence and isn’t getting any of his own somatics, all of which is dumped down in the reactive mind bank. All of his life he has been filling this bin up.

Now, by finding out what his past was, and what the aberrative phrases of the people around him were, you can build back the past track, but do it on this very specific line: What is he worried about? What does he believe about himself? What does he think about people? He will tell you these things.

"What did your father think about people?" is another oblique one. Sometimes you will get a lock standing out on a brother’s or sister’s line which has disappeared on one’s own time track.

For instance, "What did your brother used to tell your sister?"

"She used to get into the most terrific rages."

"Oh, what did he used to tell her?"

"Yak, yak, yak."

"Well, when did she do this to you?"

"She never did that to me."

But the aberrative mind is not selective. For instance, someone says, "My father never caned me in my life," and you get back to a chain that contains beatings with chains. You will get delusory recall on this. His mother has said, "I don’t blame you at all, because your father keeps you so disturbed. He keeps me disturbed. He beats you." You often get Mama and Papa complaining to the child about the other. "Your mother’s no good. I have got to leave. I am sorry to leave you, but I have got to go." Of course, he will be there the rest of the day and the rest of the year. Why he didn’t go out and drown himself in the first place, I don’t know. But you will get these leaving dramatizations. They are very interesting. Every few days somebody is going to leave forever.

You also get the dramatization of "That’s all I have got to say," and then the person goes on talking for three hours. These things are locks on engrams in your preclean and you can start knocking these things out. Ask what he says to his wife. Often he will be able to tell you. That’s a dramatization, right on tap, straight out of an engram. You know that he has got locks worded just like this, and you can take his dramatization and say, "Let’s remember a specific time this was told to you," and pin him down. He can’t remember a time, so you work on something else, then come back to it again. Then work somewhere else and break a few locks, and then come back to this thing again and all of a sudden he can shed a little more light on it.

File drawers which are sticky will eventually open, and by asking for an engram often enough you can eventually find it in the chain. By taking the person back and forth up and down the track looking for something, it sort of greases his track.

It’s the same way with Straightwire. Give the person some homework. For example, we find out he has an unreasonable antipathy to somebody named Jolson. Let’s find out what Jolson has in common with someone who has physically harmed our preclear someplace, or disturbed his life enormously. Jolson, let’s say, is completely guiltless. This person just doesn’t like him, he knows he is treacherous, he knows he can’t trust him.... Let’s find the pseudo- Jolson.

Or the preclear says, "You know, I can’t stand my wife. I have just gone downhill ever since I got married." You want to find out who his wife represents in the bank. His wife is a pseudo- enemy. Maybe she was a pseudo- ally at first and also a pseudo- enemy— some other person in the bank.

Straight memory puts all data into the differentiative sphere of the mind.

The analytical mind thinks in minute differences (this covers similar ities, which are minute differences). The reactive mind thinks in identities. Therefore, all the data on one chain will be lying in the reactive bank labeled "Identical to everything else on its chain"; in other words, latched up on the same points of pain. The analytical mind in its highest computative sphere, which is present time, can differentiate fast and return back on the track. A person’s computative ability, his ability to compute swiftly and differentiate, is less when he is not in present time.

Straightwire works because we reach into the reactive bank and pull out material which is identified with other material. We pull that up into full view, and we demonstrate there are differences. The mind works it out. We don’t tell the preclean It says, "That’s wonderful, there is a difference between ‘He rode a horse’ and ‘He rowed a horse."‘

The lock, when it is given definition by the analytical mind, ceases to be an aberrative moment. So we can pull all sorts of material out of the reactive bank and put it back on the track, and the preclear will have pretty good recall and we can do all that with straight memory.

There is a difference between straight memory and reverie. Reverie is the mechanical process by which one attains moments of pain and unconsciousness containing perceptions, and eradicates them. Straightwire is that process which reaches into moments which should have been conscious moments, but because of their connections were not, and differentiates or defines the meaning of that moment. We are not erasing with Straightwire. We are not trying to knock anything out. What we are doing is differentiating data which should have been analytical all the time, and by restoring to the analytical mind what properly belongs to it, the analytical mind now feels better, and the attention units stop walking around in the bullpen. It now has what it owns. It can think about it and differentiate the moments which should have been with it all the time.

The reason it doesn’t work with an engram is because the percepts of the engram do not, have not, and never will belong to the analytical mind. They belong to the reactive mind. They are not thought about; they are like phonograph records. And with standard reverie we can go back to these things, pick them up early in the bank and erase them. The process there is as mechanical as erasing something off a blackboard. That is reverie.

The question has been asked, "After keying out an engram, is it not harder to find that engram to erase?" Engrams don’t suddenly dive out of sight and come back into sight. They stay about where they are. It doesn’t matter how much is on top of an engram. You still have the whole engram to erase. You can blow its locks afterwards, blow its locks before it; it really doesn’t matter.

If a person has seen somebody injured, obviously it wasn’t an unknown thing that happened. Someone got injured. One might puzzle a moment wondering how the plank came to fall off the building and hit this luckless fellow on the head, but one can say, "Well, plank, building, wind . . ." But, if one gets an emotional shock out of it, and all of a sudden a couple of days later he just can’t get it out of his mind, there is an engram holding this thing down and he is at about the 195th lock. It has probably got a holder in it. So the thing for the auditor to do, if he wants the person to get it out of his mind, is to route him down to the earliest time an accident was witnessed, and he will find out that the person was worried about 29 incidents, not just one.

Straightwire is the one legitimate straight memory therapy.

Here is an example of the wrong way to do self- therapy. A fellow thinks to himself, "You know, I have a headache today. Hmmmm, that’s interesting. I have a headache today. I have a headache today. I have a headache today. I have a headache. I have a headache. Yes, I do have a headache." And then he suddenly wanders off the subject completely. Why? The attention units with which he was going down the track got mixed up in the unconsciousness, and the next thing you know they are lost and he is wandering off onto something else. That is autotherapy.

Any time a person comes to you who has been indulging in this, know very well that this person has supercontrolled circuitry. That person is also the most likely candidate for dub- in, which seems to be caused by control circuits.

The right way to do it if he has a headache is to ask himself, "Who used to have headaches? I wonder if my mother ever had headaches? No. Oh, my father had migraines. Let’s see if I can get a time when he really had that migraine headache.... Oh, yes, rolling on the floor." Then maybe it has not gone yet, so he says, "I wonder if I am in my father’s valence?" Then, "Who used to tell me I was like my father? Oh, yes, my grandmother." All of a sudden he has no headache. That is the right way to do it. That is straight memory; that is not going back down the track.

You can do all the remembering you want to, and you can do a lot for yourself. You can clean up your track, but nobody is going to do it as well as an auditor because the person who is doing the remembering sometimes has the reason why he is upset occluded from him, whereas it wouldn’t be occluded from the auditor. The auditor can add it up, figure it out and say, "You remember this."

Perhaps the first time the auditor says that, the preclear might say, "Oh, no." Then all of a sudden he does remember and says, "Huh, that’s nothing." We can get that sort of play along that line.

In Straightwire we want the person in present time to remember the key- in. You don’t have him going down the track to find it, as the key- in is sitting on top of the engram and you would have the person running the engram itself because the words are the same.

It is legitimate to run a key- in. That is good Standard Procedure, because you want to find the dramatization that has caused maybe a control circuit or a valence shift. So you run the key- in once or twice and a somatic will start to turn on, and then he is running the engram. That is reverie.

Straight memory is different. We don’t want to do anything in straight memory but make the person remember specific moments. And we persuade him to stay in present time while remembering the incidents.

With straight memory you have a chance to work on each other and see how it works. Just, try and see how much you can find out— what a person’s circuits are, what the demons are. You can find valences. You can find out why someone is suffering from a particular psychosomatic illness. You can try and find out this and that and get yourself some practice on this, because it takes a lot of practice. Get really professional at it, because if somebody walks in and says to you, "I am suffering from a very bad headache," it is good to know two ways immediately to turn off that headache. One is to make him remember other headaches, and the other one is to make him close his eyes and run a pleasure moment the way he would run an engram. Make him run through it a few times and he will park the somatic back on the track someplace and attention units will return to him.