OPENING THE CASE - SOP STEP TWO

A lecture given on 22 August 1950

Handling the Glue on the Case

An auditor who does not know his Standard Procedure is in a very sad way. The main difference between a professional auditor and someone who has merely read the book is the facility with which the professional auditor can address Standard Procedure to the problem.

A student auditor has lots of people to observe. He also receives coaching on his own auditing. However, the end product he is aiming for is being able to use Standard Procedure so well that he doesn’t sit there wondering what to do next. It becomes automatic. The case runs a certain way, so he handles it a standard way.

Perhaps one could learn all about this by just reading it and applying it, but did you ever try to read how to play a game of golf? I did one time. I had been playing a fairly good game. Then I got ahold of a copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and decided to learn how to play golf a little bit better. It almost finished me. I couldn’t even get the ball off the tee after that. And when I managed to do so, it usually went in the wrong direction by 180 degrees! It was fantastic to me. Every ball I had finally got so tired of being abused in this fashion that each one got itself lost.

I kept wondering what this was all about and why my game had gone off so badly. Finally I asked a golf pro, an old Scotsman with a rather dour sense of humor, and he said that I had just eaten more golf than I had digested! This pro took my golf game and got me down to a point where I was breaking 200, and this great triumph leads me to pass along the good word to you. It is very possible for someone to eat more Dianetics than he can digest, and a lot of people are probably in a state of gorge on the subject. I want you to digest what you have got. The Standard Procedure Chartl works out pretty smoothly. After a person has worked cases for a little while, he no longer uses this on a one- two- three step basis, he simply does what is supposed to be done at the various moments. In working with a particular preclear for a little while, he notices such signs as the preclear sighing and wondering "Well, I don’t know whether I can get back to that or not, " and "I don’t know whether that’s true or not either," and immediately asks, "Who’s dead?" This is as per Opening the Case, part A: 3, where it says to try for painful emotion discharges. It is not just a set of words, it is a fact that in running the case various things happen, and when there is painful emotion on the case one cannot go very far unless one gets it off.

An auditor must never be in the situation of the airplane pilot who was sitting in the cockpit mid- flight reading a book on how to fly! A preclear is not actually safe in an auditor’s hands until that auditor is so well acquainted with the Standard Procedure Chart, and has the data so well organized in his own mind, that it is actually a learned training pattern.

In reading about golf in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I would learn that one addressed one foot 45 degrees off to tee off and then one took the brassie . . . I could think all of that out, but if you have to stand around and think about what you are going to do before you do it, you are not going to do it sometimes quickly enough. A stimulus- response pattern is what is required.

Standard Procedure Chart Step Two states, "Opening the Case and Running Engrams: If case won’t open or bogs down, go on to Step Three." Step Three is Straightwire, inventory and processing. A person can receive some Straightwire if Step Two does not take place but the heart, body and soul of Dianetics is the running of engrams.

An engram is a moment of pain and unconsciousness which contains perceptics. It happens at a certain age in the preclear’s life. Engrams have been found in the early prenatal area and they continue up through the birth engram, childhood illnesses and on forward.

The engram has a characteristic which may not have been stressed previously. That characteristic is that the later it occurs on the time track, the more solidly it is held. That which holds it down is the engram earlier, which is held down by the engram earlier than that, which is held down by the engram earlier than that. So that any late life engram (such as one happening in adulthood) has literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of such moments of pain and unconsciousness existing prior to it. Now I’m only talking about the serious ones. Actually there are thousands of moments of pain with just a little unconsciousness. Even a little thing such as someone burning his finger still causes a flick of attenuation of the analytical mind.

So, the thousands of engrams prior to this adult engram have this one riveted down in place. Every perceptic it contains, usually, appears not just once or twice but ordinarily hundreds of times before it, and it has achieved the final result of a long chain of unconsciousnesses.

The engram has one common denominator above all else, unconsciousness. Of course it has the common denominator of pain, but it could be a pain in the foot or the leg. It could be a pain in a tooth or a shoulder or it could even be a pressure somatic. So we cannot say that one single pain is the common denominator; pain in general is.

But unconsciousness is common to every single engram, because unconsciousness does just one thing; it closes down the analytical mind. At the moment of impact of pain, the analyzer seems to unfuse itself to a greater or lesser degree from the computive circuits of the mind. A very obvious contribution of Dianetics was the discovery that there was an available recording going on at this time by a portion of the nervous system or the cells.

The attenuation of the analyzer could be great or small. And the first time it happened was the first time anything shocked the nervous system into this unfusing process. That first time is very, very early. It may be before conception. We can trace this back. The objective reality of this data, of course, has not been checked, but the zygote has been. Sixty hours after conception, engrams have been validated with objective reality. They are that late.

Trying to find a conception engram is rather embarrassing for a person. We take Mama and Papa and try to find the specific moment, and they don’t give up the data very easily. As a result this validation has not taken place.

But there is an equation at work here which makes it unnecessary to do any validation of it. The common denominator of all engrams is unconsciousness. So we get all the way down the track through hundreds and hundreds of engrams, and when we get either number one or into the vicinity of number one, we start to get off the case some of this unconsciousness, which is a type of biochemical electrical process and is apparently a byproduct of a nervous impulse. It seems to register itself very clearly much as pain does by this process, and leaves on deposit in the reactive bank an actual entity called unconsciousness.

In Dianetics, we don’t like to use the word unconsciousness because the conscious mind is the only mind which is unconscious during an engram and the unconscious mind is the only mind which is never unconscious.

So, we have coined the word anaten. You won’t find it in the Handbook because we didn’t want too many neologisms in it. But it is a very common word, and one which I use. It is a compound word, similar to one of those words that the engineers like to make up, like radar. It is a contraction of the two words analytical attenuation. (Attenuation means shutting or closing down. It is what one does with a radio set when one lowers the volume.)

This then becomes many things. It becomes the biochemical electrical deposit of actual unconsciousness. It becomes a verb and a noun. One can say, "He is anaten." There is no such thing as anatenned. It would just be anaten; for example, an anaten subject who had been anaten. Anaten in that case would mean "knocked out." And when we put someone through the engram he releases anaten, which refers to that which happens— oxygenation or whatever it is— when the anaten comes off the engram.

So anaten then is one of the things contained in an engram— pain, unconsciousness and perceptics. Of course the manifestations of the engram contain, additionally, demon circuits and valences, but right at rock bottom one is dealing with pain, unconsciousness and perceptics.

Anaten is the glue which holds down the whole engram bank. This occurs particularly on a chain, but all of the material in a whole case is glued in the same way.

The first time a person was ever anaten he got anaten. And when he got it he stored it. And when he got it the next time it had a slight tendency to hook on to the earlier time, because the one thing they have in common is anaten. It is the common denominator of engrams, and the one thing that is always restimulated when an engram is restimulated. It is also what causes the dwindling spiral, because when one engram gets activated it activates the anaten of another engram. This activates the anaten of other engrams, which activate more and more anaten, until finally the normal person goes around with about 50 out of 1,000 attention units available. This compounding finally adds up.

There is no glue at all down in the first one. Run it through and the preclear will start to yawn. The incident will then erase, and once the first one is gone, the whole bank is lightened to that degree. Go to the next one and after a little more yawning, the whole bank is lightened just that much more. The important anaten on the case is very early.

An engram may consist of four days on a battlefield, shot in five places with surgery taking place afterwards and two weeks of lying around unconscious. One might think that is obviously what aberrates this case, but that is not so. If the case was not possessed of earlier factors, that incident would not aberrate the person. It is down the track someplace where Mama walks along happily, bumps into the table and says, "Oh, I’m always doing that. I just can’t seem to keep from hurting myself." That is very important because on that structure of injury then becomes built all the rest of the anaten in the whole bank right on up to present time.

The engram is buried due to several factors: pain registry is not in the standard banks; the organism has built various dodges and mechanisms to avoid pain; language (statements about it and so on); and anaten.

The reason why the engram goes into a hidden state and stays there is because it is impossible to penetrate this much compounded anaten. You would have to really work hard— unless it happens to be one of the strange ones which occur once in a while where an engram sits over on the side. It has decided to disassociate itself, and its anaten is not pinned down earlier. It may be that some painful emotion has separated it off. Sometimes birth will sit out like that, and sometimes an exodontistry will. It is as though the person had another little reactive mind sitting on one side.

It can be very disappointing to run out birth in a case complete with yawns and so forth only to find when you start working the case that that was just an added attraction. Of course there is no aberrative birth engram left on the case, but the case is not yet open. One now has to go down into the basic area to get the basic anaten off the case. So there is this exception of an occasional engram that stands in lonely majesty.

Now, handling an engram is particularly difficult when it involves the use of drugs. Of course a drug induces more anaten. So, if you make the person anaten, he cannot then tackle more anaten without becoming completely anaten.

For instance, the person has 25 units of analytical attention to move in on an engram. The engram promptly extinguishes 23 of them, and the auditor somehow or other pushes the preclear on through with the remaining 2 and gets them to where he has 6 and then 8 and then 10, and suddenly the preclear is able to run the incident. He even gains a few more attention units and starts running it with 30 units.

If one were to give the person drugs, it would cut him immediately down to one attention unit, and if we then started running him into the anaten, of course that one little unit would be extinguished and the engram would remain masked and unknown.

Why didn’t people know about this? It seems incredible to us when we go up and down the time track and look at these things, picking up perceptics when one was supposed to be knocked flat on his face.

People sometimes tell me, "Oh, yes, it has been practiced for years." But I have never read about it before! Freud never would have claimed anything like that, neither would Korzybski in General Semantics. When they tried to go into this anaten, out would go the attention units leaving the person "obviously" unconscious. Then "obviously" the analytical mind when attenuated did not record. "Obviously" nothing recorded, and therefore the unconscious mind was thought to be the product of the delusions of childhood!

That would all have been considered sequitur, and on that theory the delusions of childhood produce the delusions of childhood, which in turn produce the delusions of adulthood! Let’s get back to Dianetics! One does not get anyplace on such theories.

If you really know a late incident is there, you could start running it with drugs or hypnosis; and even though you can penetrate it one way or another (at the risk of activating it), you would not get anyplace. You can actually slug into one of these late incidents and start picking it up at the beginning and end and blow it apart with main strength, but dianetically speaking that would be stupidity as it would restimulate and not lift.

One could get all the perceptics out of it just by hitting the line hard, picking up a little bit at the beginning, and then a little bit more at the beginning, and then maybe chipping off a little at the end of it, and picking up something in the center.

For instance, take an operation at a moment when the person slightly regained consciousness and then they had to slap the ether cone on him again quickly. An unconsciousness period has a high and low, it is not very even, and a person’s consciousness varies from time to time during any one period. One can go through and pick up all of the perceptics even so, now that we know they are there.

It is quite a labor to enter in upon this, and one would very early have become discouraged if he had not known that there was some good reason for him to do it. As a consequence, the ordinary practice in striking one of these incidents in narcosynthesis was to have the person recount the incident right up to the moment when he went unconscious, go lightly across the moment of unconsciousness until he regained consciousness and pick it up on the other side, having sometimes restimulated everything in between.

This should be understood thoroughly because working with anaten one had better have a good idea what it consists of functionally. Certainly, some day we will know what it is biochemically. We don’t know now. We know that it comes off the case in a boil- offl or in yawns, and that once it is off it does not come back again. There is a reversal of some chemical process which accumulates in some fashion, and we reverse it in the yawn and oxygenation. The pain, the impact, and the analytical attenuation create this bin full of stuff, and then in Dianetics there is an automatic reversal of it and the bin empties.

It is an actual entity that is being handled. It is not something that is indefinite. Anaten is just as tangible as a cup of water, and it pours out in the same way. One can empty that cup. Therefore one has to know a lot about it.

Researching Dianetics and discovering the part of the track between birth and conception was a consequence of following something through that was mathematically indicated. I did not know that any part of this lower track existed. "Obviously" when a person learned to talk, he started to learn the first things he knew in his observations of the society, and so on.

I was going along in that line until one day very early in the researches in the science I noticed something very peculiar, that when we went into it and started to look it over, there were flicks of recall over such a period. I was working with amnesia trance hypnosis on a volunteer and I could not understand where he was getting all these headaches from. I found out that there were actual moments there, and someone said, "Maybe it’s recorded someplace else." A simple statement but it certainly led a long way! It was enough of a tip- off. I went back to the volunteer, took him through one of these incidents and looked it over very carefully, and I found that there was more there than there had been before.

I already knew something about deintensification through hypnosis, so I started running this moment of unconsciousness the same way we used to run locks, by taking a painful moment in a person’s life and going over it a few times, at which point it would somewhat deintensify. And this was good, valid therapy, though it seldom cured anybody very completely. I went over and over this and found out that it would go down to a certain point and then hang there. I was getting a recession. About three days would go by with this person, then it would come back and had increased almost up to full strength again. It was a peculiarity to me that there was full recall through this period. So I said, "I wonder if there is another one in the case?" I might just as well have gone later because I did not know how this thing worked yet.

I came down fairly early and found an operation in childhood which we went through like sawing through butter, but there was a portion of it that didn’t budge. That was a curiosity. Why did this little scrap of this incident refuse to pull up?

I put in a lot of thought on the matter. We knew that in hypnosis the matter of filing was done on the basis of what is put into the mind first has priority. So there might be a priority on this, and I decided to look for it elsewhere. I went down earlier and found another chunk and ran through another moment of unconsciousness when "obviously" the person could not have been recording. It ran very easily and erased! Something was definitely working here.

I had observed the fact that later on the track incidents were heavily glued down, but as we got earlier and earlier they got lighter. I checked this observation several times, and found out that it seemed to be invariable that although some of these things were tougher than others, as a general law the earlier one went, the thinner one of these unconscious periods became. The question arose, How early can one get? Right there I started to dive. I got down to little babies falling out of high chairs at 6 months of age and finally got it down to a baby being stepped on, on the floor where the nurse had put it, and having its head severely kicked at about a month old.

The next case I worked on presented me with contractions. They were obvious contractions with the person crunched into himself and so on. These people who volunteered for the research really deserve some gold stars! We know now what happens when one goes into birth cold— it is very uncomfortable for the preclear. I found myself running birth in this person and I concluded that evidently birth was a moment of pain and unconsciousness so powerful that it recorded in the whole organism, that it was the start of life, and that it was this shock which started a person thinking. That gave me bucket- loads of theories to account for. So I set out to find out how many people had this birth recording, because it might not be everybody.

I started to look around, and found it in this person and that person, and all of a sudden ran into someone who had no birth recording, which meant that it did not record every time and therefore that the next moment of pain or unconsciousness after birth on that case would of course immediately deintensify very rapidly. So I went swiftly up to the next moment we could contact, which was where he was being struck by his brother’s coaster wagon at 2 months of age. However, that moment of pain and unconsciousness was stuck as solidly as though it had appeared way up in adulthood!

Following this line of thought through conclusively, there must be an earlier experience than birth. I was perfectly game to find one. I thought that perhaps right before birth his mother might have been bumped, and that the mind might have been recording just a moment before birth. I allowed myself that wild postulate. So I went back to find this moment and said, "Well, let’s go back to the first time you were bumped." That was all I said to the person who was in very light hypnosis and quite conscious of everything being done.

He suddenly said, "Where am I? This sure is wet. I can hear a gurgling noise which sounds like a flock of factory whistles! " I thought this person was probably crazy. However, we found a moment there right adjacent to the point he had landed and we ran through the incident which deintensified!

Working on scientific methodology this meant that I had to refine the whole theory in order to fit the observation, and maybe predict new data. Obviously a person occasionally had a very early cellular recording of some sort (at least one).

Working on that basis I went back for one or two recordings in that area. I soon discovered what happens when you contact an engram at about six months after conception— it sticks solidly in the mud. It will restimulate and will not erase. It can only be beaten down into a recession. I continued to work on the problem.

The preclear had recall. Obviously this experience was rather thin actively but it would not reduce in any way, it wouldn’t deintensify, which left me no recourse but to go earlier. So I went earlier and I found another incident and that would not deintensify either. I went earlier and found another one, and I went on walking down the bank about twelve engrams, and suddenly found one that would reduce!

At first I thought there was some sort of a delusion going on, and maybe these people had all read Freud’s theories about longing to return to the womb.

I had a mother and a daughter who had volunteered, so I went to work on them and, without telling them what I was doing, taped their own early experiences. I had been very cautious about birth up to that moment, and I got about a seven- hour labor verbatim out of each case. Mama’s story to the child was completely wrong. It was founded on Papa’s story to Mama. And Papa had been walking up and down outside in such a distressed state that he was evidently unable to record clearly, and he had told Mama what had happened at the child’s birth. Mama had then repeated that story to the child, since she herself had been completely unconscious during the period. So the child had no idea whatsoever of the actuality. But the child’s birth deintensified in this case, fortunately, and the mother’s delivery of the child deintensified, and we had two tapes.

So, I started going back in the child’s bank very, very early, entered the prenatal area and started to pick up validating material. These prenatals were true then. There was an actual recording going on; and the earlier one got in the case, the thinner these recordings were.

I decided that maybe this was just a freak, so I took a whole string of people and found these experiences one after the other, occasionally finding another mother/ daughter/ father/ child relationship and checking their tapes together.

It would be one thing to have the concept of an incident handed down, such as "Yes, when you were 5 years of age we had a nurse by the name of Bridget," and quite another to have the preclear hear "Bridget, where the hell did you put the washing?" There are two kinds of material being relayed there.

It is the same way in the prenatal bank much to the embarrassment of many a parent up to this time. Maids, dogs, family quarrels, in- law troubles and so forth suddenly come to light, and the parents often wonder, "How did he find out about that?"

For instance, the first time one young lady got down into the prenatal area she lay there for a moment and said, "What’s that sound? Is somebody playing music?"

I said, "No," and gave her an age flash. "What’s happening where you are there?"

"Well, I can hear music, it’s the Wedding March!"

She had always celebrated her parents’ wedding and she got very curious about this and sent off to the registrar of weddings, and sure enough it was the right date. So, we had all the data in that bank, she had full sonic and the bank was not too cluttered up with punishment, so we had the name of the license clerk and so forth, and the argument between the husband and her father! There was a great deal of material in this case and in many others.

Here was the process then of running back these experiences. The earlier they get, the thinner they get. For some peculiar reason, between 2 months and about 8 months there is a fairly tough period in which the material is very hard to lift. But the material earlier on the zygote level is very easy to lift and very aberrative.

There is a reason for this aberration. At that stage there are only a few cells, and certainly the central cell which will be the nervous system, doing the full recording. Therefore the whole organism is permeated with this one recording. Every time a cell divides it is its own identity again— A= A= A= A— so that recording "Boo" in cell A will also be recorded as "Boo" in cell A’ when it subdivides; and when it subdivides again, the third cell which is now A" will also have the recording "Boo" in it, and so on. So, down in the basic area it means that every single part of the nervous system that could record this, on subdividing now knows, for instance, that "We don’t get along, I might as well leave," or something like that. It knows this intimately and this is fundamental data.

It is getting down toward its being as fundamental as survival itself. "Survive" is underlying the command, and the earlier these commands are in the bank, the more priority they have, as the more cells they seem to influence.

Of course, there is an emotional charge which influences these engrams and can stiffen them up and make them intense.

When you go over a case, you will find out that this basic area material is extremely aberrative, even when it is fairly light with no great punishment involved, or anything else. So that must be our first goal in running engrams.

The problem of basic- basic will have to be much more extensively covered. Briefly, basic- basic would be the first engram in the case, the basic engram on the basic chain. It will be number one. That is why it is your target.

Of course, every chain of engrams has its own basic. Actually one can start a chain way after birth and give it its own basic. That is no reason to suppose that basic on that chain is going to lift. It is simply the first engram on that chain. But basic- basic will inevitably lift. That is why it is the target, and it will get the first unconsciousness off the case. When that is off, one has lightened the whole bank. By the time 15 or 20 of these engrams have been lifted in the basic area, the auditor has taken enough unconsciousness off the case so that he can then safely go into practically any part of it and in so doing produce a deintensification without restimulating the case further.

A case can be considered to be relatively dangerous up to the moment when basic- basic and a few other basic engrams have been run out of it. After that it becomes progressively less and less dangerous. The potential of harm that can be done on a case is always highest at the opening.

Here we have the whole parade of the engram bank. The incidents are not filed in a nice orderly state as is the filing system of the analytical mind; but you will do very well to envision the reactive mind and the time track as having some kind of schematic appearance and, as your preclear returns down that track, to envision him going down some sort of ledger. Have a scheme in your mind at least so that when you are looking at him, you are checking against what he is doing and where he is on the track. In this way you begin to build up a picture which positions for you as you work on the case, and you are building up a scheme of engrams— what you have touched, what is there, what is erased— until eventually you don’t need a written record.

The standard banks are filed by time and topic. They have a lot of cross- filing systems and are very intricate, neat and orderly— and perfect. That data is beautifully filed in the standard bank and if engrams were listed on the standard bank time track they would look very orderly. The reactive mind, however, is a very intricate system of confusion. It gets into that state in various ways, the main one is that locks get down on top of the engram. Fortunately there is a standard bank time track on which one can travel and the file clerk can pull material off the reactive bank for you to run (you are never traveling on a reactive bank track).

Sometimes one appears not to have a track at all. One is off the track. He can return somewhat but everything is very thin to him. He can’t quite reach these things and they come through as vague impressions. Of course, a lot of things could be wrong, one may be that he is out of valence. But there is something else that is potentially wrong and that is an untapped grief charge.

Grief actually seems to be a conversion of anaten into something else. It’s a sort of a chemical conversion in relationship to anaten and pain. Grief isn’t something itself, but a conversion of. It is a sort of reverse process on pain and it can spill back off the case as tears. The tears actually complete a reconversion of this material, which blows out with the expression of grief.

There is something very interesting about grief (we don’t know all there is to know about it) because it seems to be affinity in reversal. Affinity with a reverse charge on it would be a functional expression of grief. The biochemical expression of grief working in a machinelike (chemical) fashion is a reconversion of whatever anaten and unconsciousness are. So grief can’t exist without preexisting pain; sadness can exist, tears can exist, emotions can exist, but not one of these grief engrams.

A grief engram is called a grief engram because in that way its nomenclature reminds you to run it as an engram, treat it as an engram and to handle it in that fashion. Before it was so labeled, people were in the habit of saying "Well, tell me about the time your mother died."

The preclear would say, "So- and- so . . . Boo- hoo- hoo- hoo, yup."

And they would say, "Well, I guess we got rid of that one," and go off to something else with this thing only about a tenth discharged.

You can’t really restimulate a grief engram by running it. You can run through a grief engram once or twice and it doesn’t harm your preclear to bring him out of it to present time. He can be sad, which may throw up some aberrated material, but it isn’t like running a physical pain engram. That is mechanically dynamite. Run one of those things once or twice, get it restimulated and then go off and leave it without getting the basic of its chain and that is trouble!

You don’t have to be too careful handling grief engrams, but they are very important in that they convert pain and unconsciousness chemically over into something else, and in the filing system in the reactive mind these charges seal down part of the track just like supercharged anaten. So a person may be trying to go down his standard bank track but is actually running down a grief- encysted track over certain areas, and we have an occlusion produced by grief, which together with other things will act as a filter and make it hard to pick up perceptics. That is why the first thing we try to contact in the case is grief. It is a goal in itself.

If we take a psychotic down the track, find an emotional upset, a death or something like that, and discharge it, the chances are we will bring him back up to present time sane!

Sometimes you have to discharge a lot of grief off a person. Sometimes it won’t come off because the preclear is out of valence, but at the same time, if you can get it off you will really have taken tension off the case.

If you can find and release a grief engram, or several of them, you will produce a marked alteration in the case. The psychotic ceases to be psychotic and becomes merely neurotic. The neurotic becomes normal, and when you take grief off the normal person he becomes to some degree rational.

Now, this grief gets over into the side of the bank, like a sort of a haze, and the preclear comes along this track trying to perceive engrams and does a detour. So grief puts a casing on a large part of the prenatal bank. Because it converted an early physical pain engram, we are now apparently contacting this grief charge on the track postpartum, but we are actually knocking out the converted anaten off an early physical pain engram. As soon as you get one of these grief charges it is very important to look for the physical pain engram on which it is sitting. You can discharge rage and fear the same way, but grief is the thing which produces a very marked alteration. Rage and fear are more likely to be engramic commands.

Let’s say the grief discharge was at the age of 21; we run the person back through the age of 21. He is recounting something that may even have appeared to him to have been on the surface and in sight, but actually it is not. If we recount the grief for a short time and discharge it thoroughly, then ask the file clerk for the engram on which this grief was sitting, the file clerk will very often give us the engram immediately unless that engram is too late in the bank to erase at that stage. Work with the file clerk, but don’t try to force him into any more than you have to.

So, here we have a grief discharge having converted one of these engrams or a chain of engrams, and when we try to get into one area we are apparently bucking something in another part of the track and this is the actual state of confusion into which one is running.

It appears, as the preclear runs down the track, that his experiences are laid out and orderly. That is because the experiences which he had when he was fully awake and analytical are laid out in that fashion. But the instant we start to run into an engram, the preclear may have taken a dive and gone off the track to that degree.

So, wherever you find a grief engram, you are actually operating a physical pain engram which has been converted. But the grief experience is there as a very highly specialized kind of lock lying right with it, and that highly specialized kind of lock actually prevents one from attaining the physical pain engram until you have gotten off the grief. So number one, as you go down the track, is grief. That is the first thing you try to get off the case.

It is also a safeguard. If you can get grief off, you have deintensified the case and reduced the likelihood of precipitating a psychotic break. l That likelihood is never large, but it is always there to the extent that very poor auditing on the case may be the one tiny straw that was necessary to throw this person across the line. This person was already close to the line and might have walked out and seen a purple taxicab and gone across the line too. But remember that you are dealing with the very stuff of which insanity is made. So, take precautions. Reduce the grief engram if you possibly can as a primary step immediately after placing the person in reverie.

Step Two says, "Opening the Case: Put preclear in reverie, check perceptics and see if moving on track." That is the first thing one does in an effort to obtain material off the case. The next step is to run pleasure incidents to tune up perceptics, strengthen sense of reality and get the preclear in his own valence. This will sometimes work. And the next one is to try for painful emotion discharges, which are normally now called grief.

The preclear will tell you, perhaps, that no grief is connected with something, and the odd part of it is that he may have been so far out of valence and so shut off at the moment Papa died that he felt no grief. But for years he hasn’t supposed Papa to be the ally, and when we run him back in his own valence, we get a terrific spill of emotion.

This then is a primary target. It does two things. It takes a lot of the danger of restimulation off the case, the case will run easier, his tone will come up and his analyzer will turn on a bit more. You get the most positive relief— sudden, quick relief— that you can get on a case when you run off one, two or three of these heavy grief engrams. Secondly, we make it much easier to reach the basic area. The preclear will work better because this grief is probably lying right there in the basic area. So you try for grief. You can set it up as a rule because you may, by tacit consent, avoid grief engrams in your precleans

Recently I ran into a case that was being worked on some late physical pain engram, yet there was grief sitting on this case very heavily. The case was not moving well on the track, it was rather out of contact and the person’s sense of reality was at that time poor until we hit a grief engram, after which he felt very good.

So, just to avoid practicing an unwitting tacit consent, take particular care to look for grief when you open a case into reverie the first time, otherwise you are liable to avoid it. And when you have contacted it, make a good, strong effort to run it out. When you are thoroughly released, and certainly when you are cleared, you wouldn’t do this; but there is a possibility of avoiding grief without even knowing that one is doing it and having beautifully justified answers as to why one didn’t go into the grief engrams in this case. So make it a solid rule that when you put someone in reverie you are going right on through a one- two- three Standard Procedure to hit the grief.

I have got no patience with an auditor who restimulates grief in his own case. I have no sympathy for him at all, because I have sat sweating over "hot brains" for a long time with engrams galore jumping, pounding, leaping, pains shooting through me from various angles, not yet knowing what Dianetics was all about, trying to formulate the thing, trying to think, knowing something was wrong, knowing something of the principle of restimulation, and not being audited myself. So I have developed a tough attitude which is that if I can knock myself to pieces and nearly kill myself in the process, you can too!

It is a good thing to have lots of auditors in an area in contact with each other. They can start up co- auditing teams, and if one of them has got lots of grief in the bank he can have it run out if he gets into a state of restimulation.

There are three orders of action which a physician does with regard to a patient. The first order is to cure the illness. Do what you have to do to cure the illness. The next order is to make the patient comfortable if you can’t cure it. Give him an aspirin or some phenobarbital, or prop him up in bed on a couple of pillows and make a long prescription on how the hot water bottles are supposed to come in every three- quarters of an hour to make him comfortable. And the third order and the least useful of them all is, if you can’t do anything about it and you can’t make him comfortable, give him some sympathy.

But don’t let that throw you off the track in getting grief engrams, because you have to sound very sympathetic when getting them. You can’t get grief engrams in the same mechanical way that you get physical pain engrams. You can’t say mechanically, "The file clerk will now give us a time of grief. When I count from one to five and snap my fingers the first words of the grief engram will come into your mind. One- two- three- four- five. Go over it again, please. Go over it again, please. Go over it again, please. What does the coffin look like? Yes, yes, go on."

We have, then, the grief engram which we want out of a case as fast as possible. Sometimes, in line with that, without going into Step Three, you can simply tell the person, "Let’s shift into your own valence now." He is evidently seeing everybody in the room, including himself, when he starts into this grief engram. That is common in grief engrams. You run him back to this point and he is standing off someplace watching himself, so you can say, "What sort of a suit are you wearing?"

"Oh, I don’t know . . . blue suit."

"How do you feel about this?"

"Nothin’— never cared for her anyway...." Know that you are sitting on top of a grief engram that would run a steam engine for half an hour!

By running it two or three times in this fashion, going over and over it, all of a sudden the person sometimes automatically moves into himself. There he is in his own valence and in the scene; he isn’t likely to cry until he gets into the scene.

So, you tell him to get inside himself after a while if he doesn’t and then maybe he can make it, after which you run it again.

But you have to run all this sympathetically, and you have to run it quietly. A rough rule of thumb when you are attacking an engram is to try to match to some degree the tone of voice and mood of your preclean In the old days when Mary Pickford was trudging through the snow, the audience was put into mood by music. Let’s put the preclear into mood with voice. It requires a minor amount of acting. Don’t corn it up to a point where it is not workable, but usually it works if you approach a grief engram very quietly and put him into reverie by saying gently "Who’s dead?"

"Well, it’s my grandmother."

"Where did you hear this news?"

"I don’t remember...."

"Well, just try, it’s all right if you can’t...."

"Well, I think it was a telephone call."

And you say, "Yes?" sympathetically. "Now, who was calling?"

"It’s my father."

"Well, where was this phone as you picked it up?"

"Right there."

You have now pulled him back down the time track and he is finally sitting in the grief engram without your telling him to go there. You creep up on these things.

If that doesn’t work, the next thing that you can do if, for instance, you know his grandmother is dead and he appears to be doing a dive around it, and he "can’t tell you" and he "doesn’t know" and so on, is to try and get him back to the time when she baked him cookies by saying something like "Well, let’s go back to the time you were a little kid and your grandma was baking you some cookies."

"She never baked me any cookies."

"Well, what did she do?"

"She used to sing to me once in a while."

"What did she used to sing?"

"Oh, songs like ‘The Little Toy Soldier, ’ and so on. Nice songs, you know."

"Well, let’s pick up one of those times." And he goes back. Maybe he is very blunt and unemotional about this whole thing and he runs through it and finally picks up a few words and maybe some charge on it. We stir up this moment of pleasure with this ally, and we get him to having a good time. We work at it. Sometimes it takes two or three sessions if you want to do a good job and really get that grief off. It takes the expert touch. You go back there and get him nicely wrapped up in having a good time. Then you suddenly say, "Go to the moment she died!" and he bursts into tears. You have come in at the back door on it.

Sometimes he is very occluded about the whole thing, so we try to knock the occlusion out by Straightwire. We try to get some of these moments in sight, we work on that, then we go back to a pleasure moment. Finally we turn on this early pleasure moment with the ally and then we slam him into the grief engram, bang! And if we can do that, why, the grief will spill.

Perhaps sometime in the future we will be able to open his mouth and drop a pill down it, and he will cry for three and one- quarter minutes and at that moment all the grief will be gone off the case, but until that time you had better learn how to be very adroit. Don’t sit there with a pencil, saying mechanically "When did your grandmother die?" "Hm- hm." "What did they say?" "Uh- huh, continue," because you are not going to get anywhere.

It is almost impossible in a case which is supercharged to keep grief from blasting out. It is odd how many psychotics are very wide open. A lot of thetn have full sonic and visio. The amount of aberration has nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of perception. They are not constants. This person may be "full on" with sonic, visio and all the other perceptions, and be completely insane; or he may be thoroughly shut off and be very sane. Aberration and perceptics are different things.

There is a very definite reason for this, and that is that bouncers, denyers, valence- shifters and definite shut- off commands can knock out the perceptics, and to that degree his sense of reality. When we are dealing with aberration, we are of course dealing with an aberrative command level. There is where the aberrative commands appear.

In addition to this, affinity can be broken on a case in several places leaving him frozen in his own valence. Then this person can’t get out of it and squirm off into some other place. There is just no escape for him, he is frozen on his own time track. Now, as grief tends to knock a person out of valence and off his time track, this also has a buffer effect on the grief. It is a mechanical proviso that is a built- in mechanism of "Let’s save this guy, in spite of . . . We have made this many mistakes in construction, now let’s make these things work for us too."

So, he can get knocked out of valence, therefore he will be shut off; there can be grief on the case.

Take this person who is frozen in his own valence, who can’t get out of it, who is commanded to be right where he is, yet doesn’t happen to have command shut- off, and we have a fellow who is wide open and terrifically aberrated. Usually such a case is also highly charged emotionally, and it will also have very heavy circuitry.

So we start back on this psychotic and perhaps all we want to do with him is run him back to last night’s dinner, but basic personality has been sitting there for a long time just waiting to go, and we go back to last night’s dinner and that’s enough for him. He starts handing up everything in the case! This person will leap off the couch and we are able to knock out these grief engrams wholesale.

With some of these incidents it is about the most deafening thing you will run into. It is supposed to be that the wounded horse on the field of battle makes the most dreadful sound that can be heard by man. No, it’s the psychotic in the full rush of a Dianetic run! This does not mean because the person is loud on a run that they are psychotic, but it does mean that when you have a psychotic he is quite often very loud.

I have seen an auditor come off a very loud psychotic case a shaken man. And then someone has had to take him off to the side and run out the high points of this run on the psychotic, because the pain impact of sound is an actual physical pain and it causes attenuation.

You can actually hypnotize a person with sound alone. You can make a pain impact of sound so great that it will knock the analyzer straight out. As a matter of fact, supersonic frequencies of sound can kill a man, but that is on a different order. I haven’t heard of anybody being killed by a noise yet.

Sometimes grief is what seems to be trying to come off the case naturally as the first thing when you start a preclear down the track. He can be out of valence so that it’s badly shut off. Shame circuitry, such as "You should be ashamed of yourself," or "You should be ashamed to cry," seems to have a definite suppressive effect upon the grief engram.

There is such a thing as a pathological liar but almost anybody has a tendency to fib regarding grief engrams. And that is the one thing that is a constant in all lying, almost anyone will lie about a grief engram.

You say, "Well now, the file clerk will tell us whether or not this has been exhausted."

And whether he gets no, yes, maybe or Timbuktu, he’ll say, "Yes! Yes, this is all gone," because he doesn’t want to face it.

But if you recognize that grief can be taken off a case even when the person is occluded and out of valence, you will try for it. And I am trying to persuade you to make that try, to prevent case after case from being run in the basic area that is completely top- heavy with emotional charge which is lying right there ready to blow.