TAKING INVENTORY - SOP STEP ONE

A lecture given on 21 August 1950

Standard Procedure Is Always Used

In this series of lectures I am going to advance your knowledge of Standard Procedure. It doesn’t matter whether you are running a preclear on Guk or on the back end of an observation car, Standard Procedure is what you use.

The amount of latitude which is allowed is such that the various sensitivities and nuances of auditing are very well cared for. Standard Procedure contains all those techniques which are accepted in Dianetics. There is no bullpen of techniques lying outside of Standard Procedure which somebody suddenly lets you in on. Standard Procedure is an all- embracing process. If and when there are new additions to be made to Standard Procedure, you will know about them.

For instance, "controlled accessibility is part of Standard Procedure. Picking up things by straight memory is Standard Procedure. Running somebody on Guk is Standard Guk Procedure.

Somebody may say, "Well, I have heard of dive- bombing. That is a new technique in Dianetics. Of course, that isn’t covered by Standard Procedure," but you find out that it is one of the techniques of Standard Procedure which is delineated in such a way that you can rapidly see what is required. Standard Procedure is very elastic. It is not something that is done by rote, step by step.

There is a bulletin and Standard Procedure Chart in which this technique is delineated. You will find in this bulletin a great deal of data; it is written in a very condensed form in order to publish it as a bulletin.

Some of the changes in the Handbook are taken care of in Standard Procedure. For instance, reverie is the same thing as being wide awake with one’s eyes closed.

Some people, when told to close their eyes, immediately go into hypnotic trance. You should know when this happens. One of the main reasons we have a canceler is that the hypnotic trance is a possibility. The canceler works anyway. The preclear’s eyes will roll a little bit under the lids and when he returns, particularly, the eyelashes will flutter, which tells you immediately that he has become more suggestible than he ordinarily would be. As a result, you have got to minimize what you say to him and you have got to put most of what you say to him in questions. In other words, reduce the positive command level. Also, reduce the sharpness of your voice, because at that moment you are putting another "I" slightly behind the front edge of the analyzer, and that is in essence what hypnosis does. It sets up an analytical demons with the hypnotist becoming an interposition between "I" and the banks.

There was the case of a newspaper reporter who asked for a demonstration of Dianetics. One auditor spent about an hour and a half giving him a very beautiful demonstration of how one returned. He took him back to a time when he was swimming, and had him going through the air in slow motion (which should have warned him) and into the water, feeling the moisture and getting all the sounds. In other words, he was there; the auditor had revivified him completely. When the reporter came up to present time and was told to open his eyes, he said, "Well, go on. What about Dianetics?" The man had been in an amnesia trance2 the entire time; he had gone into an amnesia trance merely by closing his eyes. So, of course, all memory of everything which had happened was entirely occluded!

Recognize the depth these trances achieve, just on no provocation. Tell a man to close his eyes, bong! he goes into an amnesia trance; or sometimes use the old counting technique and it becomes more frequent: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven— bong!

The eye moving underneath the eyelid is the indication of when a person is slightly or deeply tranced. That is a second stage of which the fluttering eyelid is the first.

There is also another test. If the person begins to answer you literally— you say "Go on," meaning continue, and he says "Where?" that means that your preclear is now a hypnotic subject and you are running him in hypnosis.

There are a couple of ways to overcome this. One is to carry on and run him, but you are going to have a very long, strange time with this case. The other is just to have him work with his eyes open with the use of smelling salts. Of course, after a person has been a preclear for quite a while, he ceases to be as well regimented as he once was. Then if the auditor says "Close your eyes," he may start to go back on the track, even with his eyes open! But don’t confuse that with a person who is obeying a "Look out" or "Watch out" command. The matter of inducing reverie requires some judgment. There are cases in which you might want to induce a little deeper state of suggestibility than you have achieved. Just have him look you in the eye for a few minutes and talk to him quietly, and then tell him to close his eyes, and you will find out that he has quieted down considerably.

A sentence in the bulletin says, "It is not a special state of being." There is a great deal that can be said about reverie and as you work more and more in Dianetics, you will learn by experience what you are achieving. You will also learn not to work somebody in amnesia trance if you can possibly help it, because "I" will be out of contact and you are going to have a bad condition on your hands. Everything that you run in amnesia trance becomes a lock.

The first thing we find at the beginning of Standard Procedure is Step One. This we are calling inventorying the case in lieu of diagnosis. Diagnosis is a medical term, and we are not interested in the medical approach. What we are trying to get are thoughts and memories.

To do an inventory there is an inventory sheets which is quite exhaustive. On it we have name, age, height, weight, foreign language, whether or not the person has been hypnotized, received shock therapy, prefrontal lobotomy, psychoanalysis, or any other disasters.

Fortunately you can generally blow out a complete psychoanalysis in a matter of half an hour unless it has been done under sodium amytal.

One case in particular was very interesting to me. He had a bad set of stomach ulcers, and Dianetics broke down psychoanalysis simply on the basis that the person read the Handbook and the ulcers precipitated again. He was worked on for a short time, bringing him back up the time track to the moment of the analysis. We got the playback of everything that was said by the analyst. One way or another these words were all locks on the manic this man had. There may have been an engram in the analyst that caused him to use these words.

I am warning you about this because people are going to tell you (while grasping their stomachs painfully), "Now, I have spent three years in psychoanalysis. I don’t want all this destroyed. I am in a happy frame of mind. I don’t want to tamper with it." Don’t be suddenly amazed if, while going back down the track, you find out that you have broken to pieces long and arduous work. You can put it back in that state fairly rapidly again. It may be that for a week or ten days your preclear will be in a state just as bad as he was the day he reported to the psychoanalyst if you don’t start clipping charge off the case.

You will sometimes find that analysis has been done under sodium amytal. That is a very peculiar thing to run into. It isn’t performed as hypnosis. It’s deep analysis or narcosynthesis. Something happens when people are worked in that state. They look the same as when awake, but because they are now in a drugged state they will answer even more rationally than usual. This is peculiarly true of the psychotic. A psychotic is given sedation and he appears now to be rational, as though you can converse with him. And the impulse to be casual with this person who a moment before was screaming is almost irresistible, but the result is that any work that you do on this person restimulates him— it is a hypnotic command. You are going to restimulate things which, when the sedation wears off, will in themselves be engrams. Careless conversation around this person, like "Lie back; be quiet," may not sound like much, but think of it in terms of an engram.

When one is dealing with sedation hypnotics, one has to be fully aware of the fact that one is in the role of, at that moment, a hypnotist.

You will find that where the person has a large number of treatments by narcosynthesis or deep analysis, or has been analyzed under sedation, it poses exactly the same problem that is posed by the patient who has been hypnotized many times.

One interesting case was a young boy who had been under psychoanalysis for about a year and two things had taken place, not necessarily related. The analyst, an old lady, liked young boys. This made a nasty situation and put a complete block on the second dynamic because he was told to forget it all.

The bulk of these statements that one has been raped while drugged are usually false, but there are some that have happened, and just because the majority of them are false is no reason to throw them all out of the window. That would be irrational selection.

So, in this particular case, the boy was drugged with sodium amytal and raped several times. He was in pretty bad condition. In addition to this, all of his engrams in the postspeech area had been clipped but nothing had been done to them. However, the auditor who went into this case did something quite brilliant. Instead of worrying about various parts of the case, she went into the first sodium amytal treatment, ran it out and found its material, then she traced back, found the engram and reduced it. She then picked up the next sodium amytal treatment, ran it out, picked up its material that had already been found by the analyst, and went back and reduced the engrams. She followed this on up the line with each one of these sodium amytal treatments, and in such a way used the sodium amytal.

In Dianetics we rapidly get to know the characteristics of anyone who works on the mind, and activities are certainly an open book when you are an auditor. You find out all about the home life of America. You find out all about what doctors say to nurses and so on. These things have not been published in the past, and some ignorance as to their nature has existed, such as Mama’s penchant with a knitting needle. Mama has never advertised that she was handy with a knitting needle and has always said that she wanted the child.

In the Johns Hopkins’ nurses’ handbook it says something to the effect that a nurse must always reassure the mother as to the physical condition of the child, so that the mother will not be upset at the thought that the child will be a monstrosity, since nearly all women have to some degree tampered with the unborn child.

Then there is the psychoanalyst who practices more or less silent analysis. He simply lets the person talk and talk and talk, and "educates" the case that one does free association. Those auditors who have been analysts sometimes have to bring themselves up hard on this or they are liable to let a preclear run on and on and get very little work done.

You will occasionally find that the analyst has been working a person who automatically returns on the track, whose whole track is wide open and who has sonic and visio. This is not always fortunate because quite often the analyst has left him regressed on the track in a painful incident, and of course there is a deterioration of the case. Sometimes he has left the person in a manic and the person is saying, "I feel wonderful. Psychoanalysis is wonderful," but three days later says, "I feel terrible."

We list psychoanalysis as one of the things you should know about the preclear on your inventory, especially if he has been analyzed over a long period of time, because the habit that he should free- associate must be broken.

Run any preclear who has been a patient in psychoanalysis and he starts analyzing himself every chance he gets. He runs through an incident, and then lies there analyzing, wondering why this and that and so on, instead of just going through it again and again. The analyzer does an automatic job of refiling and computation on this material anyway, so there is no reason to burn up time on it.

Occasionally in running grief engrams, however, it does some good to let the preclear wander a trifle, particularly if, let’s say, you are dealing with the death of his father and you let him wander into the early youth period when his father was still nice to him, because that assists in blowing the emotional charge. Sometimes, when someone has wronged the preclear considerably there is a break of affinity, and if you will just let him tell you how mean everyone has been to him before you run him back through it again, he will then run it again, whereas he may not otherwise.

An auditor should also know enough about hypnotism so that he can take a hypnotic engram and pull it apart. They are a bit tricky, and one must know precisely what one is doing. Hit for these hypnotic engrams quite early in the case.

Shock therapy gives us a new type of engram. Sometimes it creates cerebral hemorrhages, sometimes it creates a broken spine and other interesting side issues, and it always seems to have amidst it a lot of conversation, such as, "Where did you go last night?"

"Oh, I went to the movies. Say, do you like Clark Gable?"

"No, I don’t like him very much, but Lana Turner is my meat. Well, take her down now. It probably won’t do her any good, anyway. Come on, let’s strap her to the table here. Let’s shoot her the juice now. Boy, look at her convulse." That is the sort of material you will find in these electric shock incidents.

Sometimes you will find that the person has been put in narcosynthesis, strapped down, electrodes fastened, given a shock causing big convulsions, and just as soon as the shock finishes, somebody leans over and says, "We are taking care of you here. You are going to be all right. Now don’t worry about anything." Then they wheel the person out of the room.

One psychiatrist told me rather proudly that he made a practice of doing this to every single person that went through electric shock with him. Of course, by putting that very strange line right on the end of those engrams it has a tendency to make sympathy engrams out of them, which toughens them up. So it is important to know about electric shock.

It is also very important to know about transorbital leukotomy, prefrontal lobotomy and things of that nature. As a matter of sober fact, the information usually presents itself, not by your being told, but just by looking. The analyzer is pretty hacked up in a prefrontal lobotomy. In some prefrontal lobotomies, where they just slice through the lobes once, the neurons have gotten together and hooked it all up again. But transorbital leukotomy is another thing. It was started in Europe and had to do with an ice pick. Not an ice- pick- like instrument, but a sterilized ice pick.

I am telling you about this in case you ever have to lift one of these incidents, if there is anything left to lift it out of. The ice pick is sterilized, an electric shock machine is set up and the patient is given sedation. The patient is brought in and put on the electric shock table. The electrodes are attached to him and they shoot the juice, giving him standard convulsive shock. Then, they take the ice pick and lift one eyelid, passing the ice pick up underneath the eyebrow, and sweeping it across once before taking it out again to resterilize it and give the person another electric shock. Then they take the ice pick again, lift the other eyelid and push the ice pick up under the eyebrow, sweeping it across in the same fashion. Then they wheel the patient away. A couple of days later, the patient is still bleeding from the eyes, and is in rather foul condition.

Then they say, "Well, how’s your psychosis today? Hm?" He is tractable; to them he is now a well- adjusted person. He is thoroughly adjusted to the vegetable kingdom. It is an operation akin to throwing a hand grenade into a telephone switchboard because somebody in Chicago is swearing at somebody in Los Angeles.

The topectomy is another operation where they use an instrument that looks like an apple corer. They put the patient under sedation, then they take a tool that looks like a brace and bit to cut rings out of wood, and they bore through the skull. They open it up, and then they take the apple coring device, insert it into the brain, swish around in a circle and remove a section of the brain. With these various operations, they can take out a person’s ability to see or his ability to hear. It affects the structural switchboards situated in the brain. You will find a few of these people are not too far gone to save but it’s very doubtful. If somebody says to you, "I have had a prefrontal lobotomy," the rational thing to say is "Very pleased to meet you. Next!" unless he appears to be pretty rational, and then maybe he had a single slice and the neurons grew back together. However, that has been defeated by a more recent operation, a double prefrontal lobotomy, where they cut a section of neurons out. Then of course the neurons can’t stretch back together again. One of those cases is pretty hard to handle.

I am sorry if I am making your blood run cold, but this is what is being done in practically every institution in America, and it’s the fate of a large number of psychotics. These psychotics will probably continue to be treated by psychiatrists, but some of them may escape from that particular fold and fall into your lap as an auditor. The situation may be such that the family demands that you do something with such a person, but don’t, under any circumstances, promise to do anything for him. You can try. If you get results, that is wonderful; but don’t say "Dianetics can take care of that."

Someone known as Meduna claims personally to have originated electric shock in America. I think it is highly questionable, but in some of his papers and recountings he gives the following story on how the lobotomy started in Europe. It was a very simple thing.

There was a blacksmith’s shop, and there was an accident whereby a crowbar flew through the air and struck a blacksmith in the temple, and it went right through. People pulled on it and the man lived, so they discovered that you could cut up a man’s prefrontal lobes and he would still live. What happened to the blacksmith’s ability to think or whether or not this blacksmith was an idiot to begin with and now became rational is omitted wherever I have read that story. It says merely that they learned that the prefrontal lobes could practically be knocked out of a man’s skull and he could go on living.

Some people believe that Dianetics assumes a very punitive attitude toward these brain operations, electric shock and so forth. This is not true. Dianetics has no attitude. Dianetics is a science. The science of physics never had an opinion about Einstein. It never had an opinion about an atom bomb. Similarly, Dianetics does not believe; it merely performs. The engineer who goes out and starts to build a bridge, of course, uses physics. The bridge might not believe in Boss Tweed who authorized it to be built, but the bridge gets built.

Concerning Dianetics and religion, you can knock the stuffings out of atheism with Dianetics. Someone can be ranting and raving on the subject of the church and its dogmas, and then you run out the prenatal engram where Mother is saying, "God is punishing me. That’s why I am pregnant. God is punishing me." After that the person says, "Church? Interesting social group."

Your data on the inventory has to contain all these things, and if you omit to get it, you are being remiss. You are sailing into an ocean with no charts showing where the rocks are. For instance, if a person has had a lot of electric shocks, he will usually start to boil off every time he closes his eyes. He is trying to get the unconsciousness off the electric shock. There are a lot of attention units tied up in these shock treatments.

Then there is foreign language, which is very important. I met someone who had 14 languages in his prenatal bank, and he couldn’t speak any of them. That was an interesting situation because there was highly charged emotional tone on some of those engrams, but when he would try to dramatize them, he was beaten down. He could never dramatize the engrams.

You will very often find that in a foreign language case a great deal of repression results in the person’s inability to dramatize in his own language. That was quite puzzling to me, as it would seem that a foreign language case would be in pretty good condition because there are no words to restimulate him. But that is not true; in the first few years, the basic language is probably that foreign language, so English is still being translated in and out of the basic language. When the person starts to dramatize one of these engrams, he gets twice as frustrated and it quite often practically breaks him. Someone with a foreign language background will translate for you if he possibly can, but some foreign background languages are learned in early childhood and then forgotten.

One case who came in to find out about Dianetics was speaking Yiddish in about half an hour. He hadn’t spoken Yiddish since he was about 5, yet he was chattering away merrily. His whole prenatal bank was in Yiddish.

You don’t have to know the language to treat a foreign language case. Simply go back and try to pick it up. Sometimes you have to be very insistent in trying to find out about it because the preclear does not immediately volunteer the information, he doesn’t think it is important. So you may find yourself running back down the bank into the basic area and saying, "Well now, let’s repeat this."

The preclear says, "Someone’s saying, ‘I can’t believe you."‘

"Go over it again."

"I can’t believe you. I can’t believe you."

"Have you got a somatic?"

"Yes. ‘I can’t believe you. I can’t believe you. I can’t believe you."‘

You wonder why this isn’t erasing, so you say, "Let’s find another engram someplace." He finds an engram that says "I believe you utterly. I believe you utterly. I believe you utterly," right down in the basic area. You send him right down to conception and find "I love you so much. I love you so much," but nothing lifts and you have now got three engrams restimulated and nothing erased. It may be that all these incidents were in German and he is translating for you, but it won’t lift unless it is spoken in the language in which it was laid down, because an engram is a phonograph record and you are trying to get the ripples and grooves off the sound track of this record. So, it is useless to say "I believe you utterly," when the underlying tongue, although it says "I believe you utterly," may be "Bang yung bong." Therefore it is very important to know the foreign language background.

One very rough case was a young lady who made a tradition in Dianetics. We called her "Yoneznam." And eventually a "Yoneznam" case became one who just didn’t know, because Ja ne znam means "I don’t know" in Slovenian. This young lady, through shame or something of the sort, had neglected to tell us anything about her Slovenian background, yet her whole prenatal bank was in Slovenian. She was in very bad shape, an apathy case. She would run through an AA with full pain, going through it in English, never bothering to give the Slovenian, and it wouldn’t lift.

Finally, after going over this young lady’s love affairs, and when her father had beaten her and so on, we suddenly realized that she must be hiding something about the family. It turned out that although she was right there in an incident with her father, she couldn’t tell us the meaning of it. And we went whir, click, "What language is it in?"

She said, "Slovenian," and after that the case started to run.

So, inventory of that character is very important. It is also important to know if you are handling a Junior case. l And remember that girls can be Junior cases too, and also that children can be named after grandparents or great- uncles and so on, and are also Junior cases.

If the preclear knows the meaning of the words, he will very rapidly fall into a free translation of them. If he doesn’t know the meaning of the words, he will run them off as sound. He will go "Yakety- yak, dubbidy- dub," but when asked, "What does that mean?" he doesn’t know.

If you don’t know Russian, for instance, you have to say, "Give me ‘Get out’ in Russian. Give me a bouncer in Russian. Give me a word in Russian." It restimulates by tone, emotion, noise, pain, tactile, kinesthesia, or any of the other perceptics.

The attention units of the analytical mind have learned by mimicry what these syllables mean. So when an attention unit goes into the area and something says, "Get out," it gets out because it is obviously dangerous. In other words, it is the analyzer which analyzes the whole subject, and it does it simply on a phonograph record basis.

There is no more certain proof of this than in watching somebody with Chinese in his bank, for instance. Suppose Mama left China before he was born and he was raised in India, he doesn’t know what the words mean so merely goes straight through the incident.

Sometimes the reactive mind will combine some of these syllables into an apparent word, but very seldom. The reactive mind is fantastically accurate on the interpretation of language. It will embrace puns and homo nyms, but it won’t make an error. For instance, let’s say we have a push button on a person. Every time we say "painted" to him, he coughs. Now we say "painter." No cough. "Painting." No cough. We say "painted" and we get a cough. The chances of the reactive mind making an error on a foreign language are quite small.

Now, we get down to psychosis, neurosis, dramatization and chronic psychosomatic We don’t want to know everything there is to know about them, we simply want the history of a psychosis, or the history of a neurosis the person may have had, and we want the history of his chronic somatics. The chronic somatic will normally show up to have some sort of sympathy engram. So there are clues on what to look for because, as you work on him, this thing may cease to be the chronic somatic. It may destimulate as you go past it down the track and turn on some other chronic somatic. He no longer has what his chronic somatic used to be, but you want to know what it used to be.

One thing about dramatization is that it is an engram running off in a way to carry over the whole content of at least one valence into the environment. Dramatizations are extremely important to you in working engrams because they contain the content of the engram. There is the engram laying itself wide open out in the daylight where you can get at it, take a look at it, turn it around and see what makes this aberree tick.

Of course, that dramatization is not the engram, but it is a restimulation of the engram. You can go so far as to take a real, solid restimulation of the engram and put the preclear through it several times, and of course wind him up at the source; just say, "Let’s go to the first time this engram occurs in the bank," and you will find that these dramatizations are very closely hooked up. You have restimulated the emotional tone and everything else in the engram. This is called controlled accessibility.

The person who is dramatic about everything and the person who is dramatizing are entirely different. A person who is dramatizing an engram that says "I don’t like students who come late to class" will have that as the dramatization. Now, if we go down the time track and find some time when he said "I don’t like students who come late to class," we can run that a couple of times and then we can go into the lower part of the bank and we will find an engram with that content; ordinarily it has to be something aberrated. It’s a dramatization.

The mainstay of dramatization is emotional stress. The rough engrams are those which contain apathy, anger, and so on. The key to this is whether the analyzer is more shut off than it is ordinarily. If the dramatization becomes very pronounced, the analyzer is almost completely shut off. This is temporary insanity.

Take someone who has a rage dramatization. That rage dramatization goes along a certain line, and he normally dramatizes his rages in more or less the same fashion. If we can get him back to a time when he was dramatizing this rage, we can run it and run it until some of his emotional tone turns on, and then send him immediately earlier on the track to a moment when he received the engram. That is the proper procedure.

The rule is that when an aberree does something once, he will do it again. When he says something once, he will say it again. This holds true when we are looking for dramatizations. We find Mama saying, "Oh, I just can’t be myself around you," and if we go back down the chain, we will find a moment when Mama was saying that exact phrase when the child was on the way. First we find it in conscious recall and there is where we have the greatest use for straight line inventory. Straightwire recovers these dramatizations .

The best way to resolve the "control yourself" type of command is to find what this person says to other people, because that may not be occluded. So you find out, for instance, from what he says to children or what he says to his wife, what his dramatization of "control yourself" is.

This is practically the essence of another therapy whereby you get the person to say what he would say or do in a given situation, or you get him whipped up artificially into anger, and then you pull the engram into a dramatization. It is very dangerous to go too far on this.

In "orgasm therapy" they sometimes inadvertently train a person into convulsing, and occasionally the person can’t get into convulsing which just keys this thing in solidly and they will dramatize it.

One young psychiatrist had this so strongly that we never could quite get it through to him that it was an engram performing. He thought it was something he had developed himself. We could go back and turn this thing off and on by running engrams. It was very well developed. It was all the way down the bank. He was what you would call a convulsive case, very tough.

You can actually make a person start dramatizing an engram and wind up by keying it in, so don’t start the preclear dramatizing without doing something about it. This is not very dangerous. It is a mild risk, but certainly, at all times, you should safeguard against making this person go through the same emotions time after time because eventually you will start to key in one of his engrams. The only reason you want this dramatization at all is so that you can go right down the track and find the engram.

The engram is usually in more or less the same words. You go down the track to the moment of pain or unconsciousness which contains the record. It’s like listening to a jukebox playing by standing in front of it and gathering up handfuls of sound off the front of the speaker, and having listened to it, opening up the machine, looking into it, finding a record, taking it out, breaking it carefully and throwing it in the wastebasket so that one doesn’t play anymore. You could go so far as to say that breaking these records is the chief mission of Dianetics. This method is most useful in control circuitry. When you are trying to run a case with lots of control circuitry, the file clerk is something like a pitcher who is five miles from the grandstand, and you are right there, watching the show. You ask for a flash answer, and from this large array of fans one says yes, one says no, one hands up playing cards and another forwards the information through to you by a note. You will find this condition obtaining sometimes. And what you do about it is get dramatizations. We have an emotional charge on a case that is badly closed off emotionally. You get the person back to a time when he was crying about something and you find nothing happens. It might even be possible to make a person pretend to cry and force some tears out and ease him into the situation gradually that way. That would be perfectly valid.

For instance, you go back down the track and find that because of the nature of the engram you are unable to get information out of it. It has denyers, it is sealed in and you can’t find out much about this case. There is always this side manifestation— the dramatization. We can get Mama’s dramatization, Papa’s dramatization, Grandma’s, Grandpa’s, and the preclear’s own dramatizations. Try to run them on the track to get a little more content out of them, returning to the time when this was said and getting the whole play- off.

If necessary, you can then start by making him "imagine" what he would say or do in a given situation. And you may get data that way which, when you retrace it, will be found in his own dramatizations and the dramatizations of his parents. Or, you can make him synthesize an emotion and get more data that way. Failing all these things, there is always his wife or his child.

One little boy who was not yet 10 was the source of a great deal of information about Papa. I simply ran the boy for a while, and he was very glad to tell me what Papa said and when Papa did this and that. The little boy was quite amused to find out about Papa’s engram. He knew all about Dianetics.

When people start to get prenatal visio, that is a control circuit. We can get the dramatization.

If you can get dramatizations in inventory, you can find out what the person would say under certain situations. You could write down certain words; that would do you some good.

In Step One you want to get no moments of pain or unconsciousness. The person knows, for instance, by hearsay that he was operated on for appendicitis and that he had an exodontistry. We get a list of these things in order to know what to avoid late in the bank. We don’t want to run into any moments of late pain or unconsciousness unless we can help them.

When exodontia is in the question, sometimes nitrous oxide will so snarl the whole bank that we have no choice but to isolate the exodontia. We have to hit it. It is right there. We can’t go anyplace; the case is locked up in it. That goes for any other engram in which the preclear is stopped on the track. We have to do something to open that engram in order to get him moving. We often find in our inventory that where movement on the track is impeded, the preclear has a recall of what is happening to him. I would try knocking out of the engram the words that are holding him in it rather than try to run the engram, because you can sit there for hours with a holder. Usually something holding the preclear will deintensify (a comment, not a rule).

For instance, take somebody held more or less permanently in birth. Birth quite often is not ready to reduce. You should generally shy away from birth, but any time the file clerk gives you birth to run, you had better run it. Certainly run the first section, the first few contractions, a few times to see whether or not it is going to reduce. Then if it appears that those are reducing, run the whole thing. Such a case will advance much more rapidly if you get rid of birth.

Perceptics are seldom shut off merely by a late life period of unconsciousness. The basic area is where one gets perceptics and where they will go on again. Tampering with late life moments of pain and unconsciousness is very unsatisfactory and very dangerous. You are liable to precipitate the preclear into them and get him held solidly on the track, causing a great deal of trouble.

Fortunately, when using reverie, restimulation of a late life period of unconsciousness will ordinarily settle out in three to ten days; but an incident gone into with narcosynthesis is permanently keyed in until you do something about it dianetically. Entering it by hypnosis or amnesia trance may likewise key it in permanently, until at last it can be stripped down to release it. The whole reason narcosynthesis and amnesia trance are dangerous is that they restimulate moments of pain and unconsciousness too late in the bank to lift. And then we have things in permanent restimulation.

Self- hypnosis can be resolved fairly easily. As a matter of fact, in self- hypnosis a person could never get into a late period of unconsciousness that would be very destructive to him. He would just pass out when he hit the thing. It takes an auditor to push it through.

A preclear who has practiced self- hypnosis is just another case of "control yourself." The auditor would knock out this circuitry as it was installed. Usually in auto- hypnosis it has been installed by a hypnotist, and it will lie on prenatal engrams about controlling oneself. That reinforces the circuitry. Anyone who can do auto has this sort of thing in the bank. If anyone says "I can hypnotize myself," know that Mama or Papa had a habit of saying "Control yourself," or the doctor was very insistent about telling the mother to control herself.

Early lives are frequently a certain type of control circuit. This is a beautiful type of dub- in. When one understands the tremendous amount of data which the analytical banks hold, early lives are not even peculiar. Such data can get fished up in the most remarkable fashion. Anyone who has practiced automatic writing is aware of the enormous amounts of data which can come around by the back door. The back door in this case I am calling dub- in. I will continue to do so until such time as somebody starts producing past lives, ostensibly spoken in Gaelic, which don’t lift very easily when in English.

Telepathy and clairvoyance are in the same body of research. Cases resolve without any attention to them, or past lives, past deaths, and so on. As a net result, they are in a bullpen with a big question mark over the door. Nothing has greater interest to me than psychic phenomena. I started playing with it at a very early age. I can even do the Indian rope trick on the stage. The audience pays a hundred dollars admission fee, though. It costs that much to rig the thing up.

Now, in Step One it is important for you to know about the loss of allies, and this usually will be very occluded material. The most occluded you will find to be the great- grandparents because the parents are themselves probably occluded on them, having grief charges on their deaths, and they may give quite remarkable misinformation to the child. The number of these incorrect relays is astonishing.

A statement had been made to one of our preclears that the greatgrandparents had all been dead long before the child was even conceived, so they were ruled out as grief discharges. But it soon became apparent that there was heavy grief on the case although there was "nobody dead nowhere." I asked this preclear to find, if he could, a family Bible. He did, and two of the great- grandparents had died within a week of each other when the preclear was 1 l/ 2 years old. They had been the source of sympathy for Mama all during her pregnancy and they had bossed everybody around with great regard to the care of that child for his first year and a half. When they died, there was a great to- do and everybody was very upset because they were fine old people. It laid a grief charge in this preclear that took about an hour and a half— one box of Kleenex!— after which the case started to move.

Don’t trust anybody on the subject of great- grandparents. The most unreliable present time data concerns their deaths. The death of grandparents is sometimes off, but usually the child has been told by his parents when the grandparents died because, after all, the latter were Mama and Papa to the parents. Often the parents and grandparents were antagonists.

Some of the strongest allies are not members of the family. They may be people who came in, washerwomen, nurses or social workers. One preclear had grown up in a tenement, and the only breath of life that he got up to the age of 8 was a social worker who was very kind to him, reassured him, tried to help him out in life, and then was run over and killed in his sight by a truck. That case was occluded! There were opaque curtains and everything else when the auditor started toward any kind of an emotional charge, really a terrific shut- off. Therefore when you are going for allies, the data which you get on inventory is usually erroneous, but it does do this for you— it lets you rule out all the people that he told you were allies as being the hidden one, if there is a hidden ally in the case. After a mathematical subtraction of the number of people that he says were around from the number of people who might have been around, one of those remaining is an ally.

Sometimes, however, I have had people tell me flatly that a person was an ally and that person turned out to be an ally, and there was a grief charge on the loss.

The loss of an ally of the mother during pregnancy might create a bad sympathy situation. A preclear’s mother, when the little girl was on the way, lost her own mother at about the sixth month of pregnancy. "Oh, Mother, Mother, I miss you so. How could you possibly leave me? Well, I will see you in heaven," and all this sort of talk was there with terrific whoops and caterwauls. Then this child, at the age of 10, had her parents separate. Mama went away and left the child in the custody of the father. The reaction was most mysterious, because Mother had never done anything to this child but beat and nag. When suddenly Mama disappeared and the child was told about it, it was thought the child would probably say "Well, thank God." Instead of that, the child did a complete dive. That grief engram keyed in early in the track, and made the case ball up right there. The child became morose, the endocrine balance went out of gear, her studies fell off in school, and all sorts of things happened.

On working the child for a short time, it was suspected that there must be something of a strange nature in this case. After a great deal of crossquestioning of the father it was divulged: "Yes, the child’s grandma died while the child was on the way." The point didn’t seem important to the father but it resolved the case.

There is some misapprehension about personality. "I" exists from the moment of conception or earlier. It is without valence. When you ask a person to get into his own valence, the supposition is often that he has twenty or thirty thousand mimicries which when composited compose himself. Not so. A person has a personality, an "I" at conception. That "I" goes forward as a complete personality. It is genetic. But there is also a valence "I. "

Telling the person to get into his own valence is fruitless since he is in so many valences that to tell him to get into his own just shifts him around. A Junior case gets confused about what his own valence is. If you merely coax the person to feel moisture, to perceive, to hear and so forth, while running him in the engram, you will get the person in his own valence and he can continue on in it. After that, when you say "Shift into your own valence," he will know where his own valence is— but not until you have shown him. Sometimes it is very badly lost.

Valence is very pertinent to the loss of an ally because the person is in the ally’s valence, using it on a mimicry basis, and then life gets it tricked up in some fashion so the ally goes on living after he is dead. That is to say, the preclear has lived up to a given period more or less free of the valence, but suddenly springs full into that valence. He associates himself and seems to get locked up in that valence by the grief charge, as though life had planned a continuum of existence for the dead one.

It was postulated at one time that the reason a person went into a death valence was because everyone sadly remarked "He was such a good person," and "Poor old Joe. How we abused him." It became the winning valence. Death in this society is very often accompanied by many compliments. Actually, dying is one of the dullest things a person can do, because who can be wronger than a dead man?

A preclear can be returned to early childhood and there he is. He can see himself, he looks around the room and he sees Mama but he doesn’t see Papa. He is Papa so how can he see Papa?

In the case of a woman who at an early age was in a doll’s valence, and had engrams about it, you can imagine the valence shifter there. I have found preclears who were in a dog’s valence or a cat’s valence. What you do about it is you break the valence shifter. Somebody shifted that child into that valence.

Don’t omit dolls and dogs from your list of potential grief charges. Although the dog is rarely the only ally a little boy might have, when somebody suddenly poisons the dog, or the dog is run over, that is a rough one.

Getting visio of a person means that that person is pretty clear, as far as valence is concerned. But make sure you are getting the visio of the person at that time. Let’s not get Mama at the age of 21 with long gray hair, in a 1950 business suit. Mama at the age of 21, if we return to 1914 or 1915, was probably wearing something that Irene Castle was busily advertising. The size of the scenery is also different. The blocks of a parquet floor are enormous to a child. Great big blocks on the floor, and great big table legs and chairs, and the enormous people who are mostly legs— that is real returning.

A dub- in will go back, look around the scenery, and take a little bit out of the present and a little bit out of some picture book, and put a scene together. I have never seen a dub- in yet dub in these size relationships. It’s just too much of a strain, evidently. Demons are kind of dumb.

Occasionally you can check up on other occlusions very easily. Say the person’s wife is occluded. He can see everybody in the family but his wife. And you go back down the track and find that he can see everybody in his childhood but his great- grandmother. We have got a pseudo- ally combination there. It is usually not that precise, but it gives you an example of what is happening. The pseudo is occluded when the original is occluded.

Another test of allies and valences is the chronic somatic of the individual which may well be a counterfeit of that thing from which the ally died. The preclear’s reactive mind has taken one of his own pains and injuries and has dubbed it in to try to counterfeit this death proposition. On Straightwire this becomes a very important fact because you can sometimes, by discovering what an ally died from and discovering its similarity with the chronic somatic of the preclear, spot immediately that this was an ally. Sometimes you can just separate their identities, at which moment the chronic somatic will whoosh out.

Don’t be surprised to find somebody with a little boy or girl as an ally. Parents may perceive a son or daughter in that way. If something happens to that son or daughter, it is not just the loss of a child, it is sometimes the loss of an ally.

I know a grown man whose ally is a 12- year- old girl. He looks up to her. He expects to be told what to do by her. He respects her judgment. Fortunately, her judgment is excellent. I found this out when I was having difficulty with him in keeping appointments with me. He was hitting an engram that said "Oh, I don’t want to lose it. Don’t make me get rid of it. I would lose my mind if I got rid of it"— the kind of engram that created the idea that neurosis composed the personality. I finally learned this about him and I got hold of this girl and I said, "The best thing for your pop is to go through this and sweep up some of this stuff, and then he won’t be quite so erratic."

"Oh, I will be so glad."

"Well, tell him to get over to my place on time."

She said, "Sure." So he did. On further delving, it turned out that this 12- year- old was, for him, his grandmother. There was enough of a shadow of physical appearance to trigger the ally computation. It is not terribly rare.

It is very important to know about the early environment of an individual. Notice the poor- man orientation, the failure orientation, and so on. What sort of a life has the person lived? What sort of a life is he living? You will find a great deal of very valuable data in relationship to this.

Furthermore, you should understand his relationships to his teachers in school. Did he like school? Did he get along well in school? Did he get good grades? That tells you something very important. Teachers may be allies. A time when he was scolded by a teacher may stand in there as a royal command. One may have said to him, "Well, that’s all right, Johnny. Don’t be sad; we can’t all be musicians," and here this fellow is trying to learn to play the piano when he is 18 but just can’t make it. That is how commanding an ally can be. Just the thought, transmitted, has very high value because of the engram bank.

Because of antagonists in the vicinity, the child will associate himself very closely with an ally; what the ally says is very important. "I have got to believe you" becomes an automatic proceeding, and combined with engrams and attenuation it creates a slight suggestibility, in other words, a light trance. But if we get rid of all the engrams, we don’t have to worry about this. Anybody who sits there and just writes "Are you alive?" "Yes." "You have a name?" "Yes." "Were you born?" "Yes," as an inventory, is going to miss the vital data in the case, because he is demonstrating to the preclear that he is not very interested in him. It is during this inventory— and is the chief reason this inventory exists— that you attain an affinity with your preclean Here is where you get him talking about himself, becoming a bit introverted about his own life so that he can contact it. Here is where your whole relationship begins, so be interested in this person. Don’t ask these questions mechanically, be very interested. Get him talking about things. You are doing Straightwire there, you are broadening out his life. You will suddenly find that you are opening up occluded areas as he talks to you. That is very important. It is therapeutic, but above all it is your establishment of affinity with this person.

As an auditor, you become the ally of every preclear you treat if you are going to do any successful treatment at all. This is not transferences so much as an operating line of affinity. You are not asking this person to be dependent upon you. You want this person to be confident in you. You must do, then, everything you can to keep that confidence reinforced. Breaking appointments with the preclear demonstrates that you are not interested in him; invalidating his information indicates that you are not interested in him, in addition to doubting him. You are doing what all the antagonists did to him.

By running inventory, you are setting yourself up as an ally. You are committing yourself, by asking these first few questions, to continue to follow the Auditor’s Code. An auditor who consistently breaks appointments without warning, arrives late, and generally makes himself a bit of a worry to the preclear is cutting down the preclear’s ability to work with him— the very thing he ostensibly is trying to build up. In other words, processing starts here on Step One, not when the person is put in reverie.

The auditor who is late is telling him "You are not important." The auditor who says, "Well, I don’t know if I want to work on you today or not," is telling him "I am not interested in you." The auditor who does not force work on him is also telling him that.

Your relationship to basic personality completes the alliance you are making. You are not in alliance with the engrams. Your alliance may not be visible to you, but it is nevertheless being created.

Alliance with a preclear can be broken by losing your nerve when you are running something on him. He may be begging to come out of it. He may be pleading and finally, out of misguided softheartedness or just lack of nerve, you may walk off from it and say, "Well, come on up to present time." Basic personality’s confidence has been violated and the affinity will break, making it very hard for you to continue and hard for the next auditor to take over. Don’t count on your being able to reduce it. Sometimes such breaks are so thoroughly latched up to engrams that they won’t reduce.

There is absolutely no excuse for making an appointment and breaking it. The best way to get around it is to make appointments tentatively—" If I come," "Unless something breaks down," and so on.

You must start to establish all points in the Auditor’s Code, right down the line from number one on, as soon as you go into Step One of Standard Procedure.