RUNNING ENGRAMS - SOP STEP TWO

A lecture given on 24 August 1950

The Auditor’s Responsibility

Processing done with Guk should be under the observance of pro auditors. It’s not that there is anything dangerous about Guk, but Guk is not the panacea to cure all problems for you. Yes, it makes it very easy to run engrams in most cases. Yes, it prevents some of the restimulation so that you can erase or reduce engrams before the basic engrams are out. Yes, it permits automatic running. But not for one instant does it suspend or supersede Standard Procedure. If you took a person on Guk, ran an engram halfway out and failed to reduce it, you would restimulate him badly.

The primary crime in Dianetics is invalidating the preclear’s material; but the crime which is number two, above robbing banks or shooting your mother, is failing to reduce an engram. Fail to reduce an engram in a preclear and you can trigger a psychosis.

There is no trick to it. If you have your hands on the engram and you are running it, the only thing which would prevent you from reducing that engram would be just sheer laziness or carelessness; because if an engram doesn’t reduce, you have to find the basic on that chain and that will deintensify the chain. If you run conception on somebody and you go halfway through it, you have started the whole combination of "I," the file clerk and the somatic strip all working on that engram, resulting in serious consequences if that engram is left halfway restimulated.

One has to run the engram from beginning to end until it is reduced, or if it doesn’t reduce go to an earlier engram of the same type which will reduce. The only reason that an engram won’t reduce is because it is suspended on an earlier one. That is very important, and that is Standard Procedure which will be covered in this lecture.

When that is done and you have the preclear in reverie, you bring him up to present time and you cancel. It is just exactly Dianetics, it isn’t any new, strange, wild factor that has been entered in. When the preclear is in present time you can then direct the somatic strip to continue to erase somatics. The perceptics are not all present. "I" is in present time and is well oriented. You can ask him, "Are you moving on the track?" and you get file clerk flashes of yes and no. If he says no, you say, "Give me a holder," or, "Holder, bouncer, denyer, what is it?" and get yes or no to each one. Finally you spot the fact that it is a denyer because it says suddenly, "I can’t reach it."

He then repeats this phrase two or three times. Don’t have him repeat it too many times because "I" will start back down the track. We are not interested in "I" going down the track. This is just a phrase which has come up out of nowhere, and we take a little of the tension off it and then we ask him, "Are you moving, yes or no?" And we get a yes. The somatic strip will continue to sweep somatics. He is not running engrams; his somatic strip is automatically going through the somatics and that doesn’t restimulate a person.

While running on automatic, don’t shift over into engram running. For example, if he suddenly gets a somatic and it holds too steady, you might say, "Are you moving?"

"No."

So you say, "All right. Is it a holder?"

"Yes."

"All right. When I count from one to five, you will give me a holder. One -two - three - four- five . "

And he says, "Stay there."

"Go over ‘Stay there." ’

"Stay there, stay there, stay there, stay there."

Now, it is right as far as we’ve gone. But if you now say, "Give me the next consecutive phrase (snaps)," you are now running an engram. You haven’t just picked up a bouncer or a holder or something. You are actively running an engram. And the instant that you start going off onto the whole parade of that engram, "I" starts down toward the point where it is.

The somatic strip will do a very good job of erasing somatics without picking up any other perceptic than pain, and you get quite a bit of relief on that when you try to run the engrams afterwards because you find out that they don’t have any somatics left in them. But they are two different things.

I am teaching you Standard Procedure. There may be some slight disinclination on the part of people to learn Standard Procedure.

To some, Guk is the panacea which now rules all the world. Many people have engrams which say "All you have to do is take three or four of these pills and then you will get rid of it and everything will be all right." After that, pills have a wonderful effect on them. You can give them flour and water mixed together and pressed. Maybe somebody says, "All I have to do is take an aspirin and I feel wonderful." That aspirin has become a euphoric. Now, after he has taken the aspirin, it doesn’t just cure the headache, it makes him feel wonderful. So, many of these people having such engrams say, "All I have to do is take a few pills and I will get rid of it," and they look at Guk as an automatic cure.

Guk speeds things up to probably a twelfth or a twentieth of the time previously required. But Standard Procedure on Guk is absolutely no different than the Standard Procedure I am telling you about now. It is simply something that will let you erase engrams more swiftly, and that is right in line with this lecture, because I am going to tell you about the shape of engrams.

In the running of engrams it says, "Direct the somatic strip, work with the file clerk, reduce all engrams with their basics contacted." And that ought to say: "Reduce all engrams with their basics contacted, reduce all engrams with their basics contacted, and reduce all engrams with their basics contacted. And be sure you reduce them and always reduce them and never do anything but reduce all engrams with their basics contacted!" And then there ought to be 18 exclamation points, 9 underscorings, and the type ought to be as high as that used by William Randolph Hearst to write YELLOW PERIL! or WAR!

While auditing, the auditor is supposed to compute. He is supposed to detect and deintensify all denyers, bouncers, call- backs, l holders, groupers2 and so forth. 3

Very often somebody new at the business will run through an engram and it says, "I am very tired of you. Get out. I don’t want to see you anymore." He will run this engram, go through the "Get out" and keep right on going. And of course instead of the phrase "I don’t want to see you anymore," the next phrase will be "Where is my hat?" or "John, are you going to be home for dinner tonight?" or "Where did you put the baby’s bottle?" because the preclear hit the "Get out" and bounced. In doing this, you can start clipping engrams all the way up the bank, restimulating them.

So the preclear starts to run something and he hears this phrase "Get out." The first time he hits it, the preclear may say, "Uh- huh. Yah, well, it’s ‘Get out, ’ that’s fine," and he runs on through without paying a great deal of attention to it. But "Get out" is now activated, and being activated, the next time one tries to hit the engram, it isn’t there.

If the auditor lets a denyer, a bouncer, a misdirector, 4 a call- back or a holder go by without deintensifying it, the engram running will not be smooth. If he lets a feeling shut- off5 go by, or a visio shut- off, in running a postpartum engram, he of course activates it and the next time he goes over the same area the thing is working. Even though the preclear may have had a slight somatic up to the moment he got to "I can’t feel anything," all of a sudden he now says, "I can’t feel anything," and goes on running the engram.

If you as the auditor then say, "Ha, reduced. Well, we’ll go off and leave this one," you will be in trouble because that incident is now active, and as such it might have had a bouncer in it or a denyer or something of the sort, and these things are all active. The first thing you know, he is up at 12 years of age and you say, "Well, let’s return to the prenatal area," and he can’t because the phrases were not picked up at the right time.

This can be tough because sometimes the preclear may be saying, "Mumble, mumble, mumble; jabble, jabble, jabble; gong, gong, gong," and the auditor is sometimes prone to just sit there and let him run, and not try to understand what he is saying.

It doesn’t do any good to tell him to talk louder. It doesn’t do any good to tell him to talk faster. That engram is running at its own speed and the preclear, had he ever been able to force this engram to do anything else, would of course have done so long since, and it would not have been aberrative. He runs it as he runs it and if it is "gobble, bubble, gobble, gobble," that’s just your hard luck.

I have run a case with my ear right down next to the preclear’s mouth trying to make out what he was saying, and he would still occasionally hit a bouncer and mumble it and then be out of that engram. But if I hadn’t heard it, I would not have known he was out of the engram.

Pay attention to what the preclear is saying; that is why the chart says, "Compute at all times. Detect and deintensify all denyers, bouncers, callbacks, holders, groupers," and it ought to add shut- offs too.

In going through such a phrase as "I am tired of you, get out," the "I am tired of you" is not an important phrase, it is merely aberrative; but that "get out" is very important. If we hit the "get out" and he starts on maybe even into the next phrase, turn him right back to that phrase by saying, "Go over it again," "Go over it again," "Go over it again," "Go over it again," "Go over it again," "Go over it again," "Go over it again," to take the kick out of it, then go on. We get down to the end and it says, "I can’t feel a thing." Knock that out, and then the phrase "Come back here," which follows on right afterwards.

On aberrative phrases, the person need only go over them once, but on these special phrases which are action phrases— phrases which produce an action or command that he do something— those phrases have to be run and out they go.

Sometimes the following will happen. You will have a call- back and a holder in the same engram with the engram in one place and the preclear in another. One preclear had a bouncer, a call- back and a holder in the engram. The bouncer said "Up," the call- back said "Come back," and the holder said "Stay here," and as a result he was running the incident without somatics. He was off the engram because he was told to get off it, but he couldn’t get away from it because he was called back to it, so he was running this combination and he was floating above the engram. In order to get him down on the engram it was necessary to knock out the bouncer first, then to knock out the holder, and finally the call- back. Actually, it doesn’t matter in what order they are knocked out.

If you get in the basic area you can get a conception sequence running on the basis of somebody saying "Oh, come on," and somebody else saying "Get out." "Oh, come on— get out" is then reactivated in some way, let us say, and perhaps has been in restimulation for years. When you start down the bank running engrams, you will find each one of them seems to be acting like a call- back/ bouncer. In other words, the person is running more or less without somatics. You might say that this basic engram, being the most aberrative, is actually keeping this situation going all the way up and down the track. That is why it is important to get out the first one first. Also, a more important reason is to get the anaten off down in the basic area.

But you could get this combination down in the basic area, and the person will be running over the top of every engram he contacts. He can actually do this: He can drop down a little bit and get the somatic, but he can’t get the words. That’s a specialized case of this. Then he goes up a little higher and he gets no somatics but he gets the words. That is one of these stretchers; he is not quite there. (Of course, having an engram he is not all there anyway.)

A serious error can be made as one runs through an engram. You all of a sudden hit "Get out." At first the preclear goes into this terrifying engram and he is shaking and breathing hard as he starts on through it— there is a lot of charge on it. Then you go back to the beginning of it and start on through it again, and he is very calm about the whole thing and maybe he is talking in a hushed voice with no somatic. Know at that point that there is a bouncer and a call- back in there. They have both been activated on the first run through, and the auditor didn’t pay attention to them. The preclear can go on and on recounting it, because he is playing it off the line, and it takes a long time to recount it. Let’s say we get him to recount the engram 12 times and at the end of it we say, "Well, that should do it, all right." But he is above the engram lying there sort of frozen.

That is an interesting manifestation. I have stood and watched an auditor three weeks in training who let the preclear do this and then sat there and ran the thing out about 10 or 12 times. To what end? The preclear was obviously off it. Of course, if he ran through it enough times, certainly these words would deintensify, and eventually he would come back down on it again and get the somatic if he just said the words enough times. But it was a funny thing that the preclear in this case was starting to omit phrases like the call- back and the bouncer. And the engram was very long, it took about half an hour to run, so there was a large amount of time being wasted. An auditor can really waste time if he doesn’t watch what he is doing. All one had to do in that case was run the "Get out" when encountered on the first time through the engram.

Of course, there is such a thing as running an engram so late in the case that none of these things are going to deintensify. But you could still go back on them. In fact, if the case started to spin on a "get out" in an engram which won’t reduce, the preclear can go over "Get out, get out, get out, get out, get out," and the first thing you know, you are running a "get out" of an earlier engram without even noticing it. "Get out, get out, get out, get out, get out, get out," and then you are running into an even earlier one, and suddenly you may be running conception. So you want to watch it, because as these things spin they are liable to go right on down the bank. Your target, of course, is basic- basic.

Learn to recognize the literal quality of these phrases. We are dealing with phrases, not as an English major would, but as an idiot would.

Hamlet’s soliloquy, "To be or not to be, that is the question...," run as an engram, has several bouncers, denyers and groupers. It is a very interesting engram, it is also extremely aberrative. In one case we couldn’t get to basic- basic without running it. Mama was trying to hold it all a secret from the world that she was pregnant, hoping she would resolve the secret before anybody found out, and she was playing the part of something or other in a play. I never quite found out what Mama was doing in the play but right at a particular point, in droned Hamlet’s soliloquy. The poor man who had that engram was in dreadful shape because the thing had been in restimulation ever since he was in high school and had had to memorize it!

The number of bouncers there are has not been determined, but it is quite a large number. For instance, "You’re always taking it out on me" is a bouncer. There are many bouncers that don’t appear to be actual bouncers at first glance. You have to learn to listen to this material as it runs through and figure out whether or not it is going to bounce.

So when the chart says "Compute at all times," that is what it means.

A person who says "I can’t make it out" is voicing a holder. It is also an aberrative phrase which means one has to build things in the house. That gives you a sample of a literal meaning. It takes practice, but you ought to practice up on this. These phrases are sometimes very tricky.

A control circuit that you wouldn’t suspect at first, and which also has other connotations, is "Fight it down, fight it down." It puts the person back on the track, to fight, and it is also a control circuit.

There are other such broad phrases that don’t have a precise heading which are nevertheless very interesting. Somebody says, "It’s all up to you," or "That’s all for the present." Those are present time groupers and they are the worst kind.

Another thing is that the words present time occur in the bank continually, and if you haven’t reduced that engram and you tell the person, "Go to present time," he will go to that engram while you are saying, "Well, there you are, the session is over"!

There is also a skip type of phrase that you will encounter often enough that you have to know about it although it is not worth a full classification of its own. It has quite an interesting action and can be classified as a bouncer: "The next thing you know there’s trouble."

I ran across this phrase in somebody once, and the second time we ran this thing he bounced right up the bank and found trouble in the literal meaning.

These things are like a lot of insane traffic cops who have received orders from the police commissioner that they will obey his orders to the letter of the law, as in Les Miserables, l and who then try to foist it off on the general public to that degree. That would make a remarkable traffic situation— just as it does every day.

In running a foreign language case where you don’t know the language, you have to say to somebody, "Give me a phrase that means ‘get out," ’ when you notice that he has bounced and his somatics or manifestations have changed markedly. And in running foreign language cases, one is very often in hot water with the case.

The optimum runner of a foreign language case is a person who speaks that language so fluently that he knows all of its idioms and colloquialisms and its literal meanings. The reason why foreign language cases are very often quite frustrated is because they have to dramatize in English, and that gives no release because the engram is in Slovenian. They would have to dramatize it in Slovenian in order to get any release off it. So the happiest thing to do with a foreign language case is to get somebody else who knows the language, but you can handle it if you have to.

If you hit a bouncer, all of a sudden the somatic goes off. Naturally it goes off, he’s out of the engram! So we run the bouncer and the somatic will turn on and then you continue to run the engram.

If a person hits a phrase which is a holder and he runs three or four phrases beyond this holder, his contact with the incident will get dimmer and dimmer. That is because the attention units are latched up in one place and you are trying to run him beyond that point. So you have to knock out the holder.

This works the same way with a call- back. A call- back calls back to that particular portion of the engram. So, back he comes to the engram.

You have to deintensify phrases just as though they were independent little engrams inside the engram, and if you regard it in that fashion, you will find it very easy to do.

The next step in running engrams is to start in the basic area and proceed to present time, erasing all engrams on the way, and keep at it until you have a release and then a clear. If the case bogs down, check for poor auditing and a detrimental environment and remedy their effects. If the case is still bogged down, go to Step Three.

Now, I am going to tell you something about the shape of engrams. There are two major types of engrams. Engram one is the curve of a single loop of gradual, increasing unconsciousness, such as loss of blood, loss of oxygen, or anesthetics as in an operation. The second type of engram is a blow, an impact, a sudden shock of pain. It causes very swift reduction of consciousness. The unconsciousness comes on BOOM! and then hits the bottom and actually does a loop at the bottom, evens off and then gradually the preclear pulls out of it on a steady upward line.

When you are suddenly cognizant of the type of engram you are running, you know whether or not the major impact is on the front or on the center, and that’s important to know. If it is on the front, the first phrase which you will receive will be late in the engram. There are earlier phrases. There is the sound of impact. There is earlier kinesthesia and so on. Sometimes we would be lucky even to get close to the impact. I have picked up an engram where I have gotten just the last phrase.

There is an important elementary procedure and that is "walking an engram backwards." Sometimes an engram has to be walked backwards. You go to the phrase before and the phrase before that, the phrase before that and the phrase before that, earlier and earlier. I walked a case all the way backwards from birth to conception once. I had to. The bouncers in it were so vicious and so thoroughly reactivated that the tension had to be taken off this case all the way down. It was convulsive throughout the whole bank. And I took it backwards, "The phrase before this phrase, please, the phrase before this phrase," going through AAs, morning sickness and everything else, taking the tension off each one. It was quite a job.

So, this engram is going to offer you trouble. And sometimes you tell the somatic strip on an engram to go 30 seconds before it started, and then sweep into it. Some of this is so deeply buried and there is so much boil- off in the front end of it that you may not get a somatic in the early part, and your first impact of the somatic is much later. It is just going over a deep portion.

These deep portions are usually smothered with unconsciousness. They often contain phrases, and because of their depth they are, together with the moment of impact, potentially the most aberrative and therefore the most important part of the engram. They are also the most masked portion of the engram, but that is what we have to know, and what we have to get.

When you start to swamp up a case, what you mainly find are missed front ends or missed centers, and they can be all over a case.

A high blood pressure engram is probably caused by an engram which caused an intrauterine pressure rather than by an emotion. It is not an emotion on the part of Mama which created an engram in the child, it is the result of the emotion; but more important than that is the future translation of the engram by the analytical mind. Then he gets his own metering system hooked in on it. There are no hormones transplanted; that rage dramatization can come over just as easily from Papa. So what we have with a high blood pressure somatic is just pressure, and it is also intraumbilical- cord pressure.

On a graph it would rise and then fall off over a long time period. Sometimes it could take two or three hours to build up. Sometimes it builds up in three or four minutes. But three or four minutes is still a long time period compared to an impact. So it goes up and it falls off, and it goes up and it falls off.

It is accompanied by a very unusual perceptic, the baby’s heart is going brrrrrrrr and Mama’s heart is going BOOM- boom BOOM- boom. And when such people go to see symphony orchestras, or listen to voodoo drums beating, or if they ever get a bulge on a tire and it goes BUMP- BUMP BUMP- BUMP on the road, while the motor is going brrrrrrrrr, they get migraine headaches!

The restimulation may start taking place on Tuesday, with the person perhaps getting a little tired on a dwindling spiral. But you don’t get a real roaring migraine headache on this person until Friday. There is a long lag period on that restimulation.

These migraine headaches constituted possibly the most relentless search inside the application sphere of Dianetics. What caused migraine headaches to turn on? How could you possibly trace them back? I would find people were always in different places when the migraine headache turned on. It was a real piece of detecting to try to find one of those things, and I was trying to do it before I knew about prenatals. The whole thing was very mysterious.

Then one day I got the first migraine headache case back into the prenatal area, and here was BOOM- boom BOOM- boom, and brrrrrrrr as the baby’s heart started to speed up.

Firstly, in a migraine headache case there is intrauterine pressure, and then the baby’s umbilical cord starts to get pressure. It may even be that something happens to the membrane in it; and as the pressure goes higher and higher, the baby stiffens out straight finally in a real rough one, while its heart is trying to keep ahead of the pressure. It’s like a pump which is having too much water pumped through it, and it starts to shake itself to pieces.

It is an odd thing, but on two of these migraine headache cases each told me (they had never noticed it before) that it was not a migraine headache, it was a migraine bodyache including the head. But the pressure in the head, where the nervous system is located to a large degree, was so enormous that the pain overshadowed the body pain. When the thing was clipping out as an engram, they suddenly discovered that their bodies had a somatic; and then they recalled something that they had never quite registered before, which was the fact that every time they had a migraine headache, they hurt all over. So it’s a misnomer to call them "migraine headaches"; the headache is just worse than the body pain. It’s a specialized sort of somatic. Then there is the operation engram which includes anesthesia and surgery, and the surgeon is saying, "Knife, chisel, hammer, pneumatic drill, riveter," and then he says, "Well, is he out?"

And the nurse says, "Yup, he’s down and out now," and this kind of conversation goes on.

So we get a curve and a dip which take place as a result of anesthetics; it goes down and evens out more or less with a few waves in it as it lightens. Now we start to add pain in on this experience at the point where in went the chisel, knife or lancet, and then we get a recovery on the curve, although never quite as high again. Then there are cuts and stitching and so on— and he is coming out of this in the meantime, up the normal curve until he regains consciousness from the ether. The pain adds in on the unconsciousness, deepens it, carries it forward, and it comes out that much later.

These are the essentials of these two shapes of engrams, and they have various combinations. If we have someone who is drowning, we will get a different curve. The person has drowned, but somebody brings him out and puts a pulmotor on him and there is the shock of the pulmotor. Then they throw him over the top of a barrel and get the water out of him a few times and he starts to regain consciousness. The drowning engram often starts with mild perceptics— water, silence, no verbal content— and then a period where he is being rescued, which often mauls him around while he is in deep unconsciousness.

One should get a picture in one’s mind of what the shape of such engrams would be. In an automobile accident engram, for instance, after the accident they get him out of the car and he gradually returns to consciousness. Then there is surgery. Knowing this, when you start to look for an automobile engram, you don’t follow it up with "When were you treated?" or you will miss the bulk of the engram. Where they set the broken arm or leg is far more painful and produces a deeper unconsciousness because it is aided and abetted by anesthetics. He is already out, then more pain just drags him on down. But the first moment of impact is important, and it is important from there on through.

You will find all sorts of interesting things which you are liable to omit in running one of these things, such as the discussion at the scene of the accident and the siren.

You are liable to find someone antagonistic toward his name, and later find it was the admissions clerk at the hospital. They brought him into the hospital; there he was lying in a basket "unconscious" and somebody said, "Name?"

"Well, it’s John Jones."

"Age?" So- and- so. "Occupation?" So- and- so. After that he doesn’t like to be a journeyman printer. He decides that this is no good.

I went into an exodontist’s office one time, and there was a desk right behind the dentist’s chair with a nurse sitting there in a very crowded office. There was also a radio and a telephone, and all the traffic of a dentist’s office. "Oh, yes, she’s much worse now.... Well, that’s too bad; she probably will stay that way for a few days. But I’m sure it will get better.... Oh, you think it’s abscessed, hm- hm"— all of this talk going on over a telephone. Of course, she took down the essential information from the dentist after the operation had started, when she had lots of time.

So, when this person was really hurting, they recited his name and occupation; they made comments on how nice it was to be a newspaperman or how lousy it was to be a newspaperman. They made comments on this person’s personal appearance, on his general ability, aptitude and so on. That was an engram factory, as are nearly all hospitals and dentists’ offices at this time.

There is the subject. It is not complicated, although you can make it enormously complicated if you wish. Somebody could undoubtedly write a beautiful textbook on the subject. He could call these things by various shapes, an "octolangular occlusion" shape perhaps, but there is no reason for such names. All we have to know is that there are two courses of unconsciousness .

You should be very careful to clean up the beginning of any blow engram because the major material of the engram is just with and after the impact. And don’t suppose that an engram because it has one impact in it does not have another, because it usually has many impacts. If you get one, there will probably be several, except in the case of Mama, for instance, bumping into the table. Then it is just a little bump. But she may bump into the table and then fall on the floor so that you get bump— jolt, or maybe sometimes bump— squash if she happens to fall on her stomach. Some women have engrams that say "Well, I have to get it out one way or the other, but I mustn’t even let myself know I am thinking about it."

I ran into an accident- prone once. Every time she became pregnant she continually hurt herself very badly. She would wreck the car, or go out and fall over lawnmowers. It didn’t say how she was to hurt herself or what it was to accomplish, it just said she had to, so she did.