THE TOOLS OF THE TRADE

A lecture given on 23 August 1950

File Clerk, Somatic Strip, Basic Personality and "I"

Dianetics goes out on an expanding basis. We are building a world with new tools, and we are trying to get maximal in minimal. Nobody will let us sit down quietly and say, "Well now, let me see. It takes six months to make a professional auditor." We have got to have them right away! Nobody is letting us rest or stand still anywhere along the line. We are carrying a terrific load. The pressure is enormous. My life since spring has been one consecutive row of crises.

In this lecture I am going to show you more about engrams and various parts of the mind.

If you don’t know how to run an engram precisely, if you don’t know what one looks like, you can restimulate the preclear and make him very uncomfortable. And it may be just some little scrap of information which you don’t have that causes this restimulation to take place.

An engram is a moment of pain and unconsciousness. It also has recorded in it the perceptics and sense messages that were present during that moment of pain and unconsciousness. However, an engram has an appearance which is a little more complicated than that.

The problem in handling engrams is that they are well protected from view. Firstly, they contain anaten. Secondly, pain protects the engram, because a person starts into an engram, hits a moment of pain and immediately goes out of valence. He will then run the incident very carefully out of valence, not touching any of the pain.

When asked, "Are you in your own valence?" he will say, "Yes."

"Well, let’s feel a little moisture. Can you contact some moisture?"" I don’t know about that. After all, what do you think I am? One of these pianola cases? No, I’m a tough case. I can’t contact any of this!" The preclear has been knocked out of valence by the pain and he is not going to get back into it again.

Inexperienced auditors, knowing that people can have perceptic shutoffs that prevent them from getting tactile and the rest of the perceptics, are all too prone to say "Well, those are shut off!" and let him run it out of valence without trying to adjust this case.

Pain will knock a person out of valence. The cell tries to avoid pain and reach pleasure, escape pain sources and obtain pleasurable sources. In trying to do that it has just that basic idea. Out of this the analytical mind, in its lower areas particularly, can build the most fantastic complexities. So, when it hits pain, it does not only avoid it in the environment exteriorly, it avoids it in the interior world.

It has many tricks of avoiding pain, one of which is to go out of valence. You will see this particularly in Guk runs. A person running along in auditing while on Guk will evidently kick in and kick out of valence.

It is a matter of running the person back to the moment when they went out of valence as they were coming on up the track. "Let’s go back to the moment you went out of valence," or "Are you in your own valence? Okay. Go forward again, and this time get the somatic." There may be some tiny excuse of a valence shifter there, and there may not be. Such a case, however, by the commands in the case, is already predisposed to being shifted in valence, otherwise it would not keep on doing it. A person who is frozen in his own valence by being commanded into it has less tendency to do this, but even so he still will.

A way to overcome the sources of the valence shift would be to put the preclear into Papa’s valence, then put him into Mama’s valence, and put him into Uncle George’s valence, or the doctor’s valence, and let him run the engram in those various valences, getting him moving around from one valence to the other. In this way some of the charge is taken off these valences, which then allows him to settle down in his own valence and run a relatively uncharged engram.

Another solution is to coax the preclear into feeling perception

Now, there is the overall behavior protection of the engram. Although received postpartum one year, for instance, the engram will lie dormant for many years and suddenly one day without much excuse will key in and after that restimulate. This displaces the apparent cause of aberration and chronic somatics, not by hours or days, but by years and decades.

On cursory observation of this, people say, "Well, it’s an obvious thing that when this man’s wife left him, it caused an emotional disturbance and so he’s all upset about life. That’s why he’s trying to blow his brains out. That’s pretty sad after all. We know human nature, so therefore we know that it is essentially weak and that it goes crazy without much cause." But instead of finding out why, they postulate something like a death wish, "Every human being wants to die," which solves the whole problem for them. Of course, it does not predict new data, but that is how they dispose of it, and that gets this very embarrassing question out of the road quickly for them. The way they explain the death wish is they say, "People have a death wish, that’s why they commit suicide."

And somebody says, "But it doesn’t seem very rational; after all, the person had happy periods in his life."

"No, that is a death wish!"

"Yes, but look here . . ."

"Listen, we are going to flunk you."

So the person says, "All right, it’s a death wish." It didn’t predict new data, but it certainly dead- ended a lot of old data.

That theory of the death wish is very old. It goes back at least 5,000 years and it showed its ugly head in a decadent, perverted Europe a century or two ago, with a whole school of Germanic philosophers who discovered they had some suicide engrams in common, so they pooled all their suicide engrams and said, "You see, this is how it is with us; therefore it follows that that is how it is with the whole human race."

All of this nonsense, this whole line of cultural thought, introducing an arbitrary here and there, all worked in favor of the engram and helped delay its discovery. In fact everywhere we looked, the engram had put up armor plate and smoke screens!

So it is not surprising that the engram has still got a few tricks. Its behavior, however, once understood, is very easy to handle.

In addition to the protection of pain and the factor of the lag, there is the fact that engrams bounce people out, misdirect people, call people back, suppress people and make them evade. There are all sorts of little word mechanisms, and practically as many combinations of devices as there are words in the English language. But they can be grouped into the five or six groups that we use: denyer, holder, bouncer and so on. We have really pulled a lot of the teeth out of an engram.

The anaten, together with grief as a type of converted anaten, exists over it as a smoke screen. The grief spills off in tears, and the unconsciousness boils off or yawns off.

Unconsciousness is an anesthesia as far as an engram is concerned. A person goes into the area of the engram, hits the unconsciousness, turns off a lot of attention units and lies there boiling off and hallucinating, or he just drifts. If you did not know that lying under this area was a bear trap, you might be prone to say "Well, it’s just late at night and he’s getting sleepy." That is evidently what the engram wants you to think. It is very cagey.

No somatics will turn on as long as there is a boil- off over the top of it. However, somatics will come around by the back door. For instance, if this incident has a terrific back pain in it which makes up this person’s lumbago, it will come around underneath the anaten. But when he goes back down on the track he gets on the upper side of this anaten and rides it, and sometimes he will give you five, six, eight engrams in the middle of this boil- off. They are suspended there. Like two magnets with their poles reversed, one on top of the other so that one magnet floats, these incidents are locked in a field of boil- off and they float there. And the preclear will be muttering about this engram and that engram without much sonic, because they are sitting on top of the one that is hidden.

As the boil- off takes place, the person goes on down and hits the bottom on it and there you hit the somatic. There will be no somatic until the boil- off releases.

You may find a whole case, particularly one which has had electric shock therapy and a lot of punishment, with several holders on the track, which will do nothing but boil for many hours. The top limit I know of is around 50 hours from the start with no somatics contacted because of boil- off.

This preclear closes his eyes and he is immediately in boil- off. He has not returned to anything, he hasn’t even moved on the track— he just closes his eyes and starts to hallucinate and the boil- off starts. Incidentally, he could not do this without an auditor. He will lie there and boil for a while, with little scraps of words drifting up; after about an hour or so of this he will start to feel good, and he will have gotten a lot of boil- off and anaten off the case. Ordinarily the somatic will be contacted somewhere around that area because he is starting to feel more alert.

However, on one of these cases which is thoroughly snarled up into a boil- off, at the end of the period he will get up and feel fine. But because the auditor has not contacted any engram at all, the auditor may say, "We are getting no place with this case, and it is bogged down completely," which is not so. The test on such a case is, as he drifts back, does he get dopey and start muttering occasionally, and have to be jarred once in a while with the words "Well, let’s repeat the words ‘Go to sleep" ’? If he does not respond, tap him on the bottom of the feet, which is annoying but not particularly restimulative, and he will jog up out of a boil- off. It is important not to joggle people by their arms, or move the couch, or put one’s feet on the couch, or touch the body of the preclean The only place one should contact the body of the preclear is to touch him on the feet once in a while.

A preclear who is going back down along the line through engrams closely resembles a hand grenade with the pin out and with the handle but poorly depressed, and if startled is liable to go into a dramatization because he is right on top of the dramatization.

Most of the trouble an auditor gets into with preclears is just because the body has been touched or they have been disturbed by some outside noise such as somebody coming into the room and they think the auditor has not protected them well enough.

A whole case can be stacked up on boil- off. For instance, the auditor touches him on the feet and says, "Repeat ‘Go to sleep." ’

The preclear says, "Oh, well, Figueroa."

"I didn’t get that."

"No submarines."

So the auditor says, "Now, please repeat ‘Go to sleep." ’

". . . most beautiful picture in the world." He is hallucinating. That is a deep boil- off.

A sleep command merely puts the person to sleep. He doesn’t dope off, he just skids off in a rather steep curve and goes to sleep.

The way one awakens him is to tap him on the bottom of the feet. One does not go out and get a bucket of ice water, or joggle his arm or shake his body or shake the bed, because the incident may say "Go to sleep," but it may also say "I hate you" right after that. For instance, somebody in the engram may be saying, "I hate you, I hate you. If I could I would leave you but I can’t."

And the other party in the engram says, "Oh, go to sleep."

The preclear may trigger just the second command and go to sleep. Now if we startle him awake, he is liable to shift valence and say, "I hate you— if I could I would leave you . . . ," miss the command "Go to sleep," and then when you get him calmed down again he will simply pass over into the "Go to sleep" command and go back to sleep. Then when you wake him up again he will replay it from the beginning with "I hate you...." And it goes over and over like this.

These dramatizations are almost inexhaustible when they are replayed without the knowledge that they are an engram. As soon as one knows they are and starts replaying them, they wear out. That is the therapy discharge line this material travels out on.

There is another protection which an auditor has to know about and be very practiced in, and that is the shape of various engrams.

There is the engram which comes on smoothly, gradually and quietly, with the anaten proceeding to a considerable depth accompanied by a steady pressure of pain, and then recedes quietly and smoothly. Plotted out, that engram would have a specific shape.

So, different engrams actually have different unconsciousness and pain shapes. An auditor should know what kind of an engram he is running and what kind of shape it has or he will not be able to get all of it very easily, and may get one engram up and the next one merely restimulated which prevents erasure.

The deepest point of an engram is the most aberrative point. In running an engram you might run a little bit of the beginning and a little bit of the end and you might say, "Well, that’s an engram. Okay. Let’s go to the next moment of pain and unconsciousness." You can miss that the engram is expanding like an accordion. You will find this peculiar to anoxemia, lack of oxygen. You will sometimes find that the cord has been nicked and the baby isn’t getting enough oxygen for a little while and you will get a curve of unconsciousness and pain peculiar to lack of oxygen. It is also the curve of anesthetics and the curve of drowning. Run a drowning engram and you will learn at first that they hauled him out and somebody said, "Well, turn him over." These seem to be the first words. Start recounting it and you get a few more words, and as you recount it you’ll pick up phrases further and further back in the engram. This will become very plain to you when you understand that the last words to appear are the words in the period of deepest unconsciousness. So the words appear roughly on the same order that the unconsciousness deepens. There is a definite curve there. The words do not appear consecutively. On the first run through you might not, for instance, get the end of it. On the next run you get more words and part of the tail end of it, and then on the next run you get more of it.

You will occasionally find a preclear trying to strangle to death but unable to do so. He has a definite sensation that he is strangling and yet there is nothing wrong with his throat or breathing. He will try to relieve it by deeper breathing, but that doesn’t do any good because it is the umbilical cord which has been nicked and which was carrying him oxygen. If the oxygen coming in through the umbilical cord becomes too slight then he will pass out along one of these gradual curves.

You can best detect this condition by the fact that words seem to be appearing consecutively. It lifts along one run of the engram and the beginning of it was very easy to find. Always suspect an engram where the beginning is easy to find. It’s one of these gradual curve engrams. And that means, if you’ve got a gradual curve engram, that there’s data in this thing at its lowest depths which you haven’t contacted yet. It may even read consecutively, the dialogue in it might be excellent, but there’s a missing chunk. For instance, there might be a missing chunk when the nurse came in the room and walked out again. There’s conversation there about the nurse, but this would be disrelated to the conversation before or after she came in. You could miss the whole nurse sequence, thinking you have it reduced, but there’s this much engram left and it is left in restimulation.

[gap in recording]

Snapping fingers happens to be of very good assistance in the majority of cases, but when you find somebody jumps when fingers are snapped, or is leery of having you snap your fingers, or gets irritated about it, just don’t snap your fingers. Furthermore, anesthetists very often say, "Now let’s count: one, two, breathe deeply." Or somebody says in the middle of an operation, "Well, that’s five...." Of course when you start to count from one to five, you will get a reaction from the preclean Ask this person how old he is and he is liable to say "Five"; or you say "Five" and he jumps. You are expected to be alert for anything which restimulates your preclean It means that you should avoid it at once, but it also gives you a clue as to an engram which is probably in chronic restimulation and bothering him.

The rule on this is, whatever bothers the preclear is contained in an engram.

Sometimes preclears take refuge, and the engrams hide themselves by putting forward this beautiful computation: "Anything you do restimulates me."

The auditor says, "Let’s go back "

"Don’t say ‘go back’!"

"Well, I don’t mean to have a bad effect "

"Don’t say ‘bad effect’! Don’t you realize these words are restimulative?" At that point I usually take firm control of the situation.

You will find out, too, that some people have a habit of overusing the file clerk. They will say to themselves, "Should I go downtown?" And the file clerk says yes. Or they say, "Am I in present time?" and the file clerk says no. People who are giving themselves their own flashes are actually busily engaged in talking to a demon circuit about 50 percent of the time. Once in a while you will even get somebody who says, "You know I have a very good file clerk. Last night he was telling me..." File clerks don’t tell anybody anything.

An analytical demon can think. It can actually compute. So whenever you ask the file clerk for data that has to be computed and you get an answer, know that you are not talking to the file clerk. The file clerk is just that. You wouldn’t go to the office manager and ask for a high- level decision to be made which would ordinarily emanate from the president and his board of directors. And yet people do that continually with the file clerk. They say, "Is this erased?" and they get a flash of some sort.

The file clerk hands out yea/ nay data when it is just that, data. You can ask, "The file clerk will give us the date when the ambulance ran over the preclear," and you are liable to get the date, the day of the week and everything else. That is the file clerk.

But now let’s put it on the basis whereby a little adjudication has to be made. "Was the preclear badly hurt when the ambulance ran over him, yes or no?" Now that is something that has to be looked up in the files: "Let me see, what is ‘badly hurt’? Uh— badly hurt. Yes, I’m afraid he was badly hurt." But just that much computation is beyond the scope of an actual file clerk.

The file clerk knows about topic and index. He knows about dates, he knows names, people, places. He can count. But he can’t think; that is an analytical demon.

Treat the file clerk as you would treat an actual standing file of data. If you want specific data, you can get it from the file clerk; but if you want to know something that requires judgment, don’t go to the file clerk because when you try to, a demon will generally step in.

Demons seldom give you flashes on dates. They are pretty stupid. They compute, but that’s about all they do. And they don’t have good access to data ordinarily. Sometimes, however, you can get a demon who is set up with full access to the standard bank. Then you have a psychotic.

If you ask the file clerk, "Is this the engram which is next in order to resolve the case?" that means to him "Is this the engram which is on top of the pile?"

And the file clerk will say "Yup." He is perfectly willing to get these files cleared up and get these engrams out of there, but he is dumb in some respects. For instance, he doesn’t know that you have to get the earliest engram in the bank to sweep the rest of them out.

He simply looks on top of the pile and finds, not the latest engram, but the engram which has been causing the most trouble and which is accessible. Evidently, in order for him to view something, it has to be fairly loose. He doesn’t know anything about earliness, so you have to tell him to look down at the bottom of it and give the earliest engram by saying "How many engrams of this kind precede the one which we are running?"

It is very easy, but that is the specific data you are asking for.

There is the standard bank. Then there is circuitry, blocks, curtains and so forth set up by the reactive bank. And then there is "I" with the list of data which has been filed with "I"— things that "I" has remembered lately.

He gets something out of the standard bank and he will put it on sort of a waiting file. For instance, "The time we went down to the beach. I like to remember it, so I will keep that data." Actually the data is still back on the time track, but "I" has taken a photographic plate of it and brought it forward.

You have got two time tracks working. There is the time track that goes from conception on up to present time, and then "I" has another time track. (This is just an analogy so that we can see it and explain it.) The originals are on the track. There is a darkroom nearby, and when "I" wants data it is instantaneously duplicated and sent up to him as memory. Or he can go back down the track and ask for data and look at the original, because all the data is on file.

People sometimes talk about the file clerk going back to an incident. This is a misconception. The file clerk doesn’t move. The somatic strip moves.

Now, there are also attention units, which are free units, and they have full access to the files, with sonic, visio, tactile and so forth. You can drop the person into amnesia trance and contact these units, and get the most remarkably accurate dissertations on any of this data— but "I" isn’t there. Just these units knowing about this data is not much good, because they knew about it anyway. These are standard bank units, yet they are still able to reach engrams.

The file clerk might be said to be just the bank monitor, and this monitor is aware. Actually the mind is so constructed that there are several monitors. "I" is aware of being aware, but these monitors are merely aware, so there is a distinction. In other words, they can be activated on a stimulusresponse basis but they have no concept of individuality. "I" has a concept of individuality and that is the primary difference. "I" knows that "I" is.

So there is this "I," and you are trying to get "I" back down the line to take a look at the originals of incidents.

The file clerk’s job is to be the monitor on the standard bank monitors. He is the librarian in charge of a library that has a lot of clerks. "I" thinks of something and instantly, in order to think of it, he has to put in a demand. The demand goes through, the file clerk picks up a duplicate and forwards it to "I." It takes a few milliseconds in order for this operation to take place. If it takes any longer it is going through demon circuits on a delay mechanism.

An artificial bullpen can be set up by a demon circuit that says "You’ve got to think things over carefully and take your time in making a decision. After all, you can’t know everything there is to know all at once. You’ve got to consider it." That is a demon circuit, and when this data comes in, he has got a time mechanism which says "Release in three days."

The optimum operation is from "I" to the file clerk, down to the bank and back to the file clerk to "I." Now, when he picks up data down there, he generally files it through in concepts and groups of data rather than as a single datum, so it takes a little more time to select out the datum.

These units are also embroiled in the business of filing conclusions. The computer has made conclusions of which "I" has been aware and they have all been filed with the data and the perceptic of the time. There is a tremendous cross- filing system.

One begins to look at this cross- filing system and after a while he gets groggy because it is so enormously complex. Every perceptic gets filed there and not only that, it gets filed in coordination with the conclusion. And every time it is remembered or used in any way, the data of its being used and the conclusion are filed with it. In addition, the environment of the individual at the time he made the conclusion is filed with it and the imagination circuits are filed with it as well. So the more times this data is used, the more conclusions are filed with it.

If you start to think of how much of a library it would take to file one lifetime, you would start to stretch across at least the area of southern California on a punch card system.

This staggering complexity of filing in the human mind has, I believe, been the primary balk for investigations of the mind. Instead of taking it down to particularities and discovering something resembling this system by which it was done, people looked at the enormous amount of work that was being done and they said, "Well, obviously that is too complex to be understood," and didn’t pay much more attention to finding any system.

Therefore critics felt justified in saying, "Well, naturally the human mind is too complex to be understood. Everybody knows that." This system of filing goes on all the time. These cross- references may be very complex, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be understood. Actually, data comes in. There is "I" and the file clerk’s communication center. Then there is the internal working of this communication center, and that is very interesting because it is a network which must number thousands of channels which are used as "clear channels"— channels kept clear for traffic. They don’t have data filed in them. A terrific amount of selection has to be done in order to keep this data from simply coming through with a crash. For each datum there are about 26 perceptics on file with it. In addition to that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 or 16 perceptics that seem to be synthesized by the imagination.

So, the human mind is "too complex." Well, the data is too numerous to be easily checked, but the system of its checking, filing, recovery and so forth is very simple, and any well- run office has more or less the same organizational setup. They have in effect set up a file clerk right there in the office— they have made a duplicate of him.

Now, "I" wants the data. He gets this data on file and this is what he keeps in consciousness. At all times "I" has at his disposal the controlling computer circuit, which makes the big difference between "I" and a monitor that has to do with files.

"I" is keeping a tabulation on a central computer which is fed by thousands of computers. These computers are all geared up and connected to the file clerk. They get their data without that data being processed through "I." In other words, the whole computer circuit system of the mind has in each one its own monitor, which is in contact with the bank monitor, and each one as it requires more data has the data forwarded to it.

Almost every bit of computation in the mind is done completely out of the sight of "I," which is very interesting because education makes "I" grind and grind and grind, but he isn’t the one who is supposed to be doing it.

It is something like an educational system deciding that it was all wrong and going down and finding the janitor and saying, "Now listen, you are the one who is going to do all the reading and the selection of books."

This system of computers probably runs on a progressive logarithmic system of "I" being the central computer served by several computers which are doing the high- level computations, and each one of these is served by ten or twelve other computers, each served in turn by further computers. What these computers are doing is evaluating the data which is fed through from the file clerk in order to arrive at a conclusion so that a datum can be weighted by this computer. This datum can then be combined into a conclusion by the front office. Anybody who works in a complex organization knows that the front office cannot arrive at a conclusion unless they have been rather well informed by their subordinates. The subordinates had to go out and get data, and each one had to conclude that this was the important data. In the past, in dealing with the mind, we have very grandly overlooked the importance of evaluation, yet that is about all those computers are doing. That is "I" at work. That is his computer system, that is awareness of awareness, that is being. The file clerk’s whole job is to do nothing but forward data. It comes in from this computer circuit and that computer circuit— data, data, data. Most of this data is forwarded without being inspected by "I," just as any data, for instance, relating to the processing plant of Universal Pictures would be very thoroughly boiled down before it ever crossed the president’s desk.

There is a vast difference between the file clerk and "I" and the computer system of the brain. The computer system is very complex, very able and works on evaluations of evaluation. Here is data and stored conclusions. Some of the data has been weighted, some of it correctly and some of it incorrectly. Every datum which comes through insofar as possible is reevaluated by the mind before it is used. In the absence of engrams this weighting can go forward very automatically and very swiftly, but the instant engrams come in they forbid the weighting of certain classes of data, and as a result you have held down a number of 7s, and

"I" will achieve an incorrect solution. It is that mechanism you are consulting with when you ask for a flash answer.

This analytical mind setup is not in contact with the engrams themselves. The file clerk, however, is very close in to engrams and if these engrams exist, sooner or later he will find them and hand them up. He gets 10 off the pile and then all of a sudden he can find 20 more for you. So, when you are asking for information from the file clerk, you are asking for data. That data is coming out of a library. It is not computed; it is just data.

When you ask "I," the analytical mind is being dictated to already by the hidden portions of the engram. According to the engram, the mind is not supposed to be in that vicinity. So you say, "Is this engram erased?" and you get your flash from computer circuits who know they are not supposed to be there, so they say "Sure."

But ask the file clerk, "Is a bouncer here?"

"Yes."

"Denyer?"

"Yes." He will give you all the data because he is looking at the underside of the case.

Any time you get a computed answer, it is not from the file clerk.

The somatic strip is something else entirely. Somatic strip is a combination of words used to indicate one small group of data which is not really standard bank, and the data has very little relationship with the standard bank. What you are consulting there is the muscular system. There is apparently a sensory strip and a motor strip on either side of the forehead. On the outside is the motor strip. It contains a full list of the physiological conditions of the body from preconception forward. The sensory strip is intimately hooked up with the analytical mind. This is even now too close to structure to be used much in that fashion, so consider that again as an analogy, not an actuality.

The apparent state of affairs seems to be that the sensory strip is hooked into thought and the motor strip is hooked into form. They are switchboards. Where the monitors for these strips are, I don’t know, but the somatic strip is very easily taken under the control of the auditor. It can be operated completely independently of the sensory strip of the preclear.

The auditor can operate the somatic strip, but it is normally operated by monitors who operate the sensory strip, or it runs unmonitored to some degree. There is nothing easier in hypnotism, for instance, than to get a muscular rapport.

It is very interesting that the somatic strip will obey one so literally and exactly on such a precise time schedule. The auditor says, "Go 30 seconds before the impact," and the somatic strip will go 30 seconds before the impact.

Now, if we say "The somatic strip will go to the beginning of this engram," the somatic strip does go to the beginning of the engram, but if we say "The first phrases will flash into your mind," we are dealing with another mechanism. We are dealing with the first phrases that the file clerk can get out of this engram. There is a difference, but the somatic strip is that easily handled.

The auditor commands the somatic strip. He can send it all over the track. He can operate it as a time clock. He can say, "Go to 2 o’clock of August the fourteenth, 1941. Now go to 2: 01, 2: 02, 2: 03 30 seconds," and it goes there.

That is what the auditor, particularly at the beginning of his practice and study, fails to realize. He doubts whether or not the somatic strip moves on his commands.

The somatic strip obeys the auditor literally and accurately. If the auditor says "Jump!" it jumps. You can take a person, sit him down in a chair and say to him, "The somatic strip will now go to the beginning of "and the somatic strip will go right to the beginning of it. Then you say, "Sweep on through." "Come to the end of." "Now go back to the beginning of." "Now sweep on through."

By doing this sweeping, we are not getting any perceptics. The person’s "I" is sitting very solidly in present time wondering what is going on because "I" was never aware of having any control over this monitor setup. And you can run the person from the beginning halfway through to the middle of it and then stop the somatic strip there. If it happens to be in a moment of drowning, your preclear will practically drown ! But the somatic strip has to be moving in order to accomplish this. So, we are moving two objects: "I" goes back down the track to take a look, and the somatic strip runs along pacing with "I" because it is supposed to do so, although "I" is going down independently. Sometimes "I" will start to tag along with the somatic strip, but they are not necessarily right there together.

The file clerk, on the other hand, when you ask for "the next incident necessary to resolve the case," looks over the pile and pushes the button. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of that one. That incident is sitting there, now, but nothing will happen with it unless you tell the somatic strip to go through it. You won’t get any perceptics out of it unless you tell the preclear to run through it. You are handling three separately operating entities: "I," the somatic strip and the file clerk.

When you put a person in reverie and send him back down the track by asking him "Now, what’s happening with this incident?" "I" has to go back and take a look.

But the diabolical timed accuracy of the somatic strip is something which you had better take into account. I have seen a lot of processing go slowly or fail because the auditor was not aware of the completely literal obedience of the somatic strip. He would wait for a while and finally say, "Well, is your somatic strip at the beginning of the track?" Who was he asking? There was nobody there to answer. At that point he could have asked the preclear, "Well, do you feel something?" And the person could have said yes or no. But he would be doing a check on the somatic strip on another route. You tell the somatic strip to go somewhere and it goes if it is not frozen on the track at some point.

Now, this is what happens with repeater technique when it is misused on holders. You start feeding the person holders, and the somatic strip will latch up in the first or second one, or it may be latched up already. Then you start feeding attention units around the thing, start robbing "I, "and all sorts of things begin happening to ball up the situation. However, you can’t get into trouble with this so long as you realize that the somatic strip does what you tell it to do, goes where you tell it to go, won’t go to two places at once and will carry out an order before it will follow a second order.

In other words, don’t give two or three contradictory orders. Don’t keep changing your mind. If you tell the somatic strip to go to birth and the somatic strip can move, that somatic strip will go to birth immediately. It won’t idle around at 2 years of age or someplace else, it will go to birth. And you had better be aware of the fact that it went to birth.

It isn’t necessary to bring the somatic strip up to present time; it will wander on up after you have brought "I" to present time, and gradually resynchronize. If you have noticed the preclear look rather dazed for a few minutes after you bring him into present time, the somatic strip isn’t with him yet. It still has to be synchronized and put into effect.

Don’t think that "I" does not have a valence. "I" is an individual, "I" is not a collection of mimicries. It is formed and refined and made more complex educationally and by mimicry, but "I" is a definite individual.

Some people follow out the old saw that "Everybody knows man is a composite of his past," or "Man is the sum of his experiences," or something of the sort. Well, maybe so, but that is very indefinite. "I" is definitely "I." When you swamp somebody up you find about ten times as much "I," about ten times as much personality as you ever saw before.

Give specific, definite orders to the somatic strip. Ask the file clerk in a generalized way for things. He can only get to what he can get to. He will give you what you ask for, but he knows what he can get to most easily because it is lying right there with him. He has got a pile of it and he will give you anything that he can take off that pile.

Ask him for the next experience, and there it is. It will be the most troublesome one, because the topic index filing system of the reactive bank is a very bad one; it looks like a hurrah’s nest. He is trying to clear the log jam, so he just grabs what is there and hands it to you.

If you ask him for the next incident to resolve the case, to his best ability you get the next incident which can be reduced or erased. Sometimes you ask for the next incident to resolve the case and it is very definitely the incident which resolves the case. There has been a lot of traffic across this incident; it is easily spotted. You are just asking the chief clerk to hand up the intelligence that you need and then you are asking "I" to look this thing over and tell you what is contacted.

So you are working with the file clerk, you are commanding the somatic strip and you are requesting "I" to look the situation over, to do the inspection.

Anybody not getting very good results in Dianetics has a misapprehension of the precision accuracy of the somatic strip, the good judgment of the file clerk and the desire of "I" to really contact it. He is perhaps doing tricks unknowingly such as giving one set of orders and then countermanding them, and then wondering whether or not the somatic strip got there because the file clerk hit a bouncer. And then he says, "Well, go over it again," but he hasn’t told anybody what to go over again.

He has not positioned the somatic strip anywhere on the time track but has just left it drifting somewhere. For instance, he tells it to go to conception and then he says, "How old were you when you were 5?" And then when the somatic strip rather confusedly tries to pick up 5, but before it gets a chance to, this auditor is liable to say, "Well now, was birth a rough ordeal for you? Why, let’s go to the beginning of birth. All right. Run birth." And nothing happens. So he says, "Well, let’s see. I guess there’s nothing in birth"— the somatic strip has already dropped into a holder right there—" let’s go to a recent pleasure moment," and the preclear says, "I can’t reach one," because he has been latched up in birth.

By countermanding orders, by having a cloudy idea of what is being performed before your eyes, by being slighting of the tremendous amount of cooperation which is given you always, you can slow down and almost wreck the case. Literal and complete obedience is the role of the somatic strip. Desire and cooperation occur on the part of "I."

There is also another factor. Basic personality wants out. "I," even though aberrated, sometimes has to be persuaded; but basic personality is in there saying "Let’s get it." Basic personality knows Dianetics. Basic personality has been trying to monitor this whole setup and does do a lot of the monitoring. All basic personality is is the sum of the monitor units, l but these monitor units have a definite personality in each individual.

The reason "I" gets deluded is because circuitry and aberrations are being handed through to interfere with computations. They are handed through to occlude and block lines of communication back to the standard bank and so on.

"I" is the awareness of awareness unit which is inspecting the front board. "I" gets data and conclusions handed forward to him. He recomposes these things and that is the way he sees the picture. "I" does not alter one iota in the whole process.

People think basic personality suddenly rises to the surface like Phoenix from the ashes, and the "I" which he now is disappears. That is not true. These monitor units are simply getting better computation than they ever got before, and basic personality and "I" are in unity as to the purpose. Now "I" is looking at the front board which has proper conclusions on it as based on the data which is in the standard bank. It is the same "I," but his conclusions are a lot different. Basic personality and "I" are the same thing when you clear an individual. They are merely the sum of the attention units.

The somatic strip is an individual switchboard rather than a computer in the front lobes, and the somatic strip and "I" can be synchronized at any past moment in a person’s lifetime.

In hypnosis, this is known as revivification. You will get it in Dianetics sometimes and it is called "reliving." The person is there at that moment. He is no older than 5. He will talk to you as if he is 5, the language he uses will be 5- year- old language and he will be computing at the level he computed when he was 5.

If you get a preclear reliving back in that area, things will really hit him with high intensity because he is right there at that moment.

If you are trying to scout up an area of occlusion, you can say, "Did you have a good time in school today?"

"I don’t go to school."

"Tell me something now, is your papa nice to you?"

"Well, if you promise to give me some candy I’ll tell you."

"All right. You can have some candy." So, he gives you all the data. (You never have to bother to give him the candy if you bring him out of it.)

You have synchronized all the units across the board and the somatic strip has placed the body in the physiological position of 5 years of age. "I" is using the computer boards of 5 years of age, and the data is cut off on the standard bank at 5 years of age, with no more data beyond that or anything else.

You will find occasionally that some preclear starts going into an incident and it appears to be terrifically intense. If it gets too intense and he seems to be revivifying (maybe he starts lisping, or using baby words), you can say rather sharply, "You can remember this," and enough attention units will come up to present time, because after all he is supposed to remember this.

Once in a while you get a person revivified, for instance, at one month postpartum. You are working on him very nicely and he is being very rational, everything is fine. He goes down the track and the somatic strip and everything else winds up at one month of age and you say, "All right. Now let’s contact a moment when somebody’s burping you," and he gives a perfect replica of a baby’s cry!

I had a person revivify in birth one time and got the whole performance and protest before I could finally bite through with enough "You can remember this" to bring him on up the line. Nothing harmful would have happened, and if he had gone to sleep everything would have wandered up into present time synchronization.

We have a parallel in insanity of the person who rolls up in the fetal position. That person has revivified prenatally. That is the form it takes. You can duplicate any kind of insanity you want to, with anybody, but people are very jumpy about insanity because it has been such a terrific mystery. Once in a while you will see a preclean while he is running an engram, giving a manifestation that anybody suddenly observing him would immediately adjudicate to be insanity, and yet he is perfectly sane when you bring him up to present time or the incident is deintensified.

If you are giving a demonstration on somebody who is quite convulsive and there is a lot of line charge, l it is usually a great relief to a class when the preclear, after he has gone down to the point of the engram and started running it, going through terrific gyrations, all of a sudden breaks out laughing and says, "Well, if that isn’t the damnedest thing." He is perfectly sane; you have simply been running this engram and too many attention units got caught up as he was running it. There is no particular danger in running somebody down the track and abandoning it, but when you run "I" up next to an engram and then don’t reduce it, that engram is going to pick up some of the attention units of "I" and then not enough of "I" comes back up to present time.

Insanity is almost wholly the problem of people not being in present time. You could go into some institution and see several psychotics and walk up to them and one after the other say, "Come up to present time," and the person is likely to turn sane. It might happen to two or three cases in a big institution, just like that.

One little girl with whom I am acquainted used to have a terrible time waking up. She would fight her mother and bite, scratch and scream every time Mama would try to waken her. One night she was at a house where I was and Mama had to take her home. She went upstairs and I heard this dreadful ruckus going on. I went up to find out what was happening, and decided to give her a hand. The little girl liked me very much and I talked to her for a minute, then she started to bite and scratch at me so I stood her up on her feet and she fought a lot worse. I laid her back down again and took her mother out in the hall and said, "What happened to this kid?"

"Nothing."

"Has she ever been operated on for anything?"

"Yes, she had a tonsillectomy."

"How did they wake her up in that tonsillectomy?"

"Why, I don’t know. That’s right, she was awfully angry with the nurse in that tonsillectomy."

So I went back in and jostled the child, and as she started to scrap I said, "Come up to present time." The little girl came up to present time, smiled sweetly, stood up, fitted on her clothes in a very orderly fashion, told everybody good night in a very ladylike sort of a way and went home, and never did it again!

Actually she was probably groggy and I may have laid in on top of the engram the words "Come up to present time." And they are probably still there. Every time she hits that particular area of the engram she comes up to present time.

So that gives you some sort of an idea of the seriousness of being stuck on the time track. Just a few units can be stuck on the time track, or the somatic strip can be stuck there.

Sometimes one sees people who are full stature but they have a physiology of 5 years of age. You will see someone who is 35 with perhaps a very delicate little boy’s face. That is a dead giveaway. The somatic strip is stuck at 5 years and, according to its genetic blueprint, at 5 years the structure is supposed to be a certain way, so structure just goes right on being built along those lines. It expands in size but thatb all. His endocrine balance will be right there at 5 years of age.

There is a limit. The endocrine system can be so thoroughly bad, the body can be so thoroughly out of adjustment that there is finally a point of no return. But that point is pretty extended. Actually, the endocrine system will rebalance unless the person is too grown down in mind. Just as you can bend steel a very long way before it fatigues, in the same way the body carried too far forward will fatigue, but the amount of recovery even then is amazing. Right now we can’t rebuild a body according to the genetic pattern that one should have it built on, but the body will still do a remarkable rally. It’s a long way from perfection, but it is very high above normal. There are a lot of examples, but here you are dealing with the somatic strip getting stuck someplace. When the somatic strip gets stuck, let’s say, half an hour after birth, we have a person who is chronically tired and who chronically gets sinusitis, because that is what the blueprint says. The blueprint has been aberrated by the engram. The engram adds in "Mucous membrane irritated, suppurating; eyeball inflamed; general condition of body, weariness," because babies are always tired after they are born. So you get these people who are chronically tired.

I have taken somebody, for instance, who was very, very tired and run them back to a moment when they felt fresh and good, gotten this settled very smoothly and they went off to a dance that night. So, something very peculiar is operating there.

Now, the engram can only activate when the somatic strip is there with it. You can have several engrams in restimulation simultaneously by getting lots of attention units from "I" into them, which hooks them into the computer circuits; but you turn on only one somatic at a time. You move the somatic strip to precisely one place at a time, and you had better trust it. If it doesn’t go there, then you know that it is hung up someplace else. Free it at that point and it will go where you want it to go.

"I" may not have enough attention units to do very much when it gets to this new point. You might have reactivated a lot of holders and the units may have become tied up in one of them, such as "Stay here."

The somatic strip doesn’t care who commands it, so it will start to pass this place and all of a sudden hear the words "Stay here," just as though it had been spoken to, and it will stay there. Now, you have to get those attention units out of the "Stay here" in order to send the somatic strip someplace else.

Sometimes you can bully the somatic strip into leaving by saying "Move!" or "Go to birth!" or "Go to conception!" or "Go to present time!" After all, "I" can command the somatic strip; it can send it almost anyplace.

It was very dangerous the way this was rigged up because we didn’t have a blueprint of what could do who to which. We found out that there is an entity sitting in the body; so if someone comes along and says, "My tooth hurts. Have you ever had any tooth trouble?" the somatic strip is liable to go down to the dental.

It doesn’t mean that just because the somatic strip went to the place you told it to that the phrases are going to come through. It is simply that they are standard bank phrases that are supposed to come through at this time and you may simply be running through an occlusion on the area.

For example, a little boy had an ice cream when he was 8 years of age, on June the twenty- first, at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. He can go there and the somatic strip will track with it, but the occlusions may be such that the rest of the perceptics won’t come through on it. In other words, we don’t get a good hookup. In Dianetics we force that hookup by telling the file clerk, "The somatic strip will go to the front part of this engram"( or "the first part of this incident"). "When I count from one to five, the first phrase will flash into your mind. One- two- three- four- five." Or, "The first phrase will flash in the incident when I say flash. Flash!" You don’t have to snap your fingers, but you should give it an instant to jump.

Often a person who is very cagey about all of this will get a jump flash a long time before he should. He has got one ready; he wants to be prepared. It’s like age circuitry. The auditor asks, "How old are you?"

And the person says "60."

"Did you get a flash?"

"Oh, that’s the flash."

"What’s your age?"

"60."

"Give me a number."

"3."

"How old are you?"

"3— I mean 60."

He has got a circuit set up so that he gets an automatic response on his age.

In such a way we have got to force through the data, and particularly an engram. Some auditors can’t contact prenatals in preclears because of the way they are doing it. They say casually, "All right, go to an incident before you were born. All right, what do you find out? Okay, what’s happening? Okay, come up to present time. See, there is no prenatal." They never bother to establish the contact. If they simply told the person to go into the prenatal area and said "A phrase will now flash into your mind. Flash," and the fellow said "Heavens on earth," or something like that, and the auditor then said "Repeat that, please," that would be very proper use of repeater technique. "Repeat that, please" synchronizes "I" and gets attention units and the somatic strip tuned up with the incident.

So you have him repeat it several times and he settles into the incident. Now you can run it because it is synchronized.

These are the primary tools of your trade: the file clerk, the somatic strip, basic personality and "I." You use these things.

The basic personality is working right there with the auditor. "I" is getting computations one way or the other and trying to work with the auditor, usually, unless he is inaccessible; but the somatic strip is right there at the auditor’s command and the Sle clerk will do his best to get the data through to the auditor. You may get analytical demons interposed, but the file clerk is trying to get that data through and the file clerk operates whether demons are operating or not.

A demon is unable to put any real muzzle on the file clerk. The file clerk still operates. He doesn’t get strangled or put in jail by demon circuits. He is there; he is operating; he will work. Just because "I" can’t contact his working doesn’t mean he won’t work. When you get terrific "control yourself" circuitry, the "control yourself" is commanding the somatic strip while you are trying to command it, and sometimes the circuitry wins. So we blow the control circuitry out and then we command the somatic strip and it obeys.

The file clerk can become occluded. It can get behind data so that the data comes through on cards or ticker tape, or doesn’t come through at all, or comes through vocally.

This whole communications network is working continually. You say, "Give us the engram necessary to resolve the case," and you get it. It is there poised and waiting for you. Telling the somatic strip to go to the beginning of this engram doesn’t mean that the engram reactivates, it just goes into the slot ready to be run. So you tell the somatic strip to "go to the front part of this engram and start running it," reinforce it, get it synchronized at the beginning and run it off.

When you are not getting flashes, don’t immediately suppose that you won’t have engrams presented to you. Try to reduce the altitude of the analytical demon by saying "The somatic strip will go to

What is the first phrase?" Or get some clue as to the phrase and get him to repeat that and return him to it anyway in spite of the analytical demon, because "I" will cooperate with you in the absence of demons. It doesn’t mean that "I" is flabby, but "I" would want to do the same thing as basic personality wants to do, so he would go to the phrase and run it through.

If you ask for an incident to be poised, it will be poised. If you ask for a flash, you will get a flash. The flash might not come through to "I." The incident might not be contactable because something else may be holding or ordering the somatic strip in this area to do something else, but when that happens you are failing to get the somatic strip to the incident. It doesn’t mean that the incident is lost or is not ready, or that the file clerk is not working. You might say the file clerk isn’t getting through, but don’t ever say the file clerk isn’t working because he is always working.

In Standard Procedure we want to reduce this whole problem down to a very simple one. We want to make every case a pianola case, and until you have your case working like one, you really can’t consider that that case is thoroughly progressed.

You have to knock out the analytical demons and you have to adjust valences; but when you get through with disposing of valences and demons and so forth, you are going to have a pianola case. That is your goal. There are a lot of ways to achieve it, and that is Standard Procedure.

But, you want to be able to tell a case to do just exactly this: "The file clerk will now give us the incident necessary to resolve this case. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of this engram. When I count from one to five, the first phrase of the engram will flash into your mind; one- two- three- four five (snap!)." Get it and run it and the engram reduces properly, then you go on to the next engram in the same fashion. That is the way a case has got to run, and your first target in Standard Procedure is to fix up the case so that it does run like that.