CHECKING PERCEPTICS

A lecture given on 24 August 1950

Validating the Preclear’s Data

I have been asked by someone who hasn’t read the Handbook to "explain how analytical attenuation can be a factor in the prenatal area when the analyzer has not yet been developed; and also explain the use of the phrase ‘moment of pain or unconsciousness during prenatal, ’ when there is nothing but unconsciousness there."

There is a central nervous system in the sperm, in the ovum, in the zygote, in the embryo, in the fetus, in the infant, in the child, in the youth and in the man; and each one of these, I figured after a long, hard, arduous piece of work, was a consecutive line of the same individual. It seems to have been a forgotten or an overlooked fact previously that unconsciousness is not stored in the analyzer but is merely part of a nervous system.

The sperm is an animalcule, as Leeuwenhoek called it. It has no cytoplasm, but it has a nervous system which comes into play very early. Somebody recently discovered that the fetus had a nervous system which connected up to the analytical mind somewhere in the vicinity of birth. You could say that the switchboards got hooked up. So there could be recordings on one level, all during that period, then recordings on the other.

So, the child, prenatal, is not unconscious. That is mistake number one. One can’t say that an animalcule is conscious only when it has an analyzer. This would be like saying that a railroad engine couldn’t run unless it had a dispatcher. Unconsciousness is unconsciousness. There is an impact and we get pain and unconsciousness, wherever it is stored, whether in the central nervous system and the cellular tissues or not. There is analytical recording going on after the fourth month after conception. The recent "discovery" that the nervous system suddenly became complete with myelin sheathing is like saying that current could not be carried in an electric wire unless it had insulation. Those people sure should have studied some electronics.

This situation, then, of whatever connects up, occurs at around four and a half months postconception. For example, Mama is lying down on the couch, the baby has been perfectly comfortable for days, and suddenly somebody turns on the Dixieland jazz band and you get the recording of the bass notes coming through. Or, Mama goes to a symphony orchestra and we get an analytical recording of practically the whole thing, particularly if she is sitting well up front and particularly if the child has been alerted by constant pain. All sorts of data is in the prenatal bank, unimportant or important.

The phenomenon of extended hearing is one produced in hypnotism and it is very easy to produce. You merely tell a person he has extended hearing and now he can hear such- and- so. This can be tested. For example, a bus started out at a certain moment, about eight blocks up the street, and the hypnotized person, whose hearing had been extended merely by command, was told, "The moment you hear the bus start, you will tell me." So he would hear the bus start and the hypnotist would start his watch and go out and take a look for the bus. He had already timed it so that he knew how long it would take that bus to get down the hill. And the hypnotized person would call off the bus starting— except that obviously nobody could possibly have heard it. The first time the hypnotist could hear the bus was when it was about a block and a quarter away!

So you can extend these faculties by hypnotic command. You can extend a person’s sight, too, merely by suggestion.

It is important to know that recording picks up in moments of pain. You will get more content in an engram than you get in the analytical bank in terms of volume. For instance, the analytical mind, while a person is lying down neither in pain nor unconscious, records somebody’s voice talking alongside of him at a normal volume. Then we put him in pain, and the noise volume jumps dramatically. The organism, which is very aware of the survival value of this mechanism, jumps up in its recording action in the presence of danger. So, a person becomes "afraid"; he is out there in the woods with a saber- toothed tiger around. This person by being afraid has heightened senses, which can go so far as to seem to be telepathic.

To the child in the womb who has been injured only a few times and not hammered around very much, life is pretty well a snore. You only get recordings like bass drums and a dropped frying pan or something like that. Recordings don’t startle them.

But after a child has been injured several times and Mama has gotten very emotional, there has been a lot of quarreling, you will eventually get a state of restimulation; and then you start to get analytical level recordings. If attenuation doesn’t take place, you get a recording which is actually a standard bank recording. It may or may not be actually in the standard bank; if we are taking the person back down along the track, we may be getting it out of the reactive bank. That is just a recording and is not aberrative; it is in full recall and does not need to be deintensified. You will find this in quite a few people if you want to spend the time looking for it, but you can find so many painful recordings that you needn’t borrow the trouble.

I will go over the first part of Step Two again. We have inventoried the preclear by this time; now we put him in reverie and check his perceptics and see if he is moving on the track.

You can take a preclear before he has been put in reverie and check his perceptics by reading a few pages to him from a book, showing him a picture, pinching him, and then putting him in reverie to see if he can pick these things up. If he can do this ably he is full on, and the things which he can’t do, of course, are blocked. Knowing that, nobody can get by, then, as a dub- in and nobody can fake sonic in an effort to disguise an engram. People will sometimes try to do that. They will pretend to run off engrams. It is rare, but you can detect it very quickly.

So, you put him in reverie and you see if he is moving on the track by sending him here and there on the time track, and if he picks up perceptics, why, he is obviously moving. And even if he is a shut- off case, you can tell if he is moving on the track because he will contact different somatics. If he has a somatic shut- off, he may still be able to contact something else, like the impressions of words, and know whether or not he is moving on the track because he gets an actual sensation of movement (which is another perceptic, hitherto unknown).

Now we can tune him up by running pleasure moments. We simply send him back to the time when he was eating something. Don’t think that a person cannot contact pleasure moments just because he can’t contact last night’s dinner— last night’s dinner may have been unpleasant, it may have been eaten with his wife with whom he had just quarreled, or there may have been some other unpleasantness associated with the people there. What we are looking for is a pleasure moment.

Pleasure moments are to some slight degree moments of triumph, so if we really want to start the case off right, we would find a moment of triumph. "Now let’s go back to the time you were receiving the cup for public speaking." "Let’s go back to the time when you were given that piece of cake for having been such a good boy." In other words, you go back to a time when he was proud to be himself, and as such it may be that he is willing to get into his own valence and perceive what went on. The instant that you can get him into doing this, you will have demonstrated to him that he can return on the track and that there is a reality in yesterday.

When starting processing, there is a great deal of value in giving the person the idea there actually was a yesterday. Most people are in severe doubt about it. Yesterday is a sort of a handout given by a couple of newspapermen who sit just back of the left ear saying that such- and- so happened yesterday. They accept the data because they have to have it, not because they believe it. You would be amazed at how even a normal person is not quite sure of what occurred when and where.

Somebody mentioned to me that after a couple of months he could not quite tell whether or not he had read about a certain subject, seen it in a motion picture or heard about it. That is a delayed- action engram which is probably in there just exactly like that with somebody saying, "You know, after a couple of months, I can’t tell whether the thing has been spoken or I have read it or I have seen it in a motion picture." So, the running of perceptics is very important. We have to validate his own data for him, and nothing validates it more strongly than being able to go back to something and see it, feel it, hear it and smell it.

I have had several complaints from people after they have been thoroughly settled into an incident that they didn’t want to leave it. One preclear was returned to a moment when he was eating a lobster dinner. His auditor told him to come up to present time, but he said, "No! I want to stay here and finish this lobster," and he did.

This pleasure moment, of course, has the secondary use that when you come back up to present time, you should stop at an intermediate moment just before present time and turn on the perceptics in it.

There is a lot of pleasure back down anyone’s life. Of course in this society there is a primary aberration to the effect that it is somehow sinful to feel pleasure, that "hard knocks and rough experiences are things which do a person good. Those are the things one should remember, young man."

That type of engram will apparently wipe out pleasure moments. What it actually does is give a person a spotty time track, because as he comes up the line he is told that the important things are the hard knocks and bad experiences and that these are the things he should remember, so all he will have left on the track is just a spot here and a spot there. This is a strange looking time track; the track should look consecutive. It is like dropping a flock of trap doors out of the track, leaving a time track made exclusively out of locks, engramic locks and engrams.

The surest safeguard of sanity for any society is, oddly enough, an indulgence of pleasure. At a point where pleasures are physically destructive and nonsurvival, you have an aberrated type of pleasure, such as the nymphomaniac has.

Of course, a society can become tremendously aberrated on the subject of the pleasure they have to have; a society could run off in the opposite direction too. These things could then all be contained in engrams and everybody would be going around in a manic. This would also be rather unhealthy.

These moments of pleasure when reconstructed demonstrate to the person that he has had a good time in the past, that he did enjoy himself and so he is now more willing to return to the past. It is a mission of the mind to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Therefore, when you start him into a pleasure moment and start running him through it, that pleasure moment will begin to accumulate and snatch up attention units from the painful incidents and put them into the pleasure moments. Then when you bring him back up to present time, you bring him back up with lots more attention units than he had before.

I worked on one person who was extremely nervous, harassed and worried. I took this person back to a pleasure moment, ran him through it a few times and it turned on in full together with all the perceptics. I didn’t have any more time, I was merely demonstrating the time track to him, yet I brought him up to present time a changed individual! There was a yesterday. There had been pleasure in yesterday, and the attention units had been pulled up out of hundreds of locks and centered there, and the person became very alert, very much on the qui vive.

Somebody postulated one time that just this action all by itself had rather definite therapeutic value, so we must not overlook it as a technique.

When you bring a person back up the track after running a number of engrams, the best way to drop out the somatics so the person won’t get them in present time is to halt him on the track, backed up to a pleasure moment. It recaptures the attention units that you have expended on the engram which he was running. That stabilizes him and brings him back to present time.

A graph of perceptics would show them as actually a bundle of strips. Sight, sound, smell, and so forth, all track together so there is a synchronizing effect. One can almost say that these strips get out of sync with one another and that putting them back in sync is a necessary step. Perceptics out of phase is possibly one of the sources of shut- off. They could be very grossly out of phase.

These perceptics are coming in on communication lines and are being registered in, probably, various banks in the standard bank. For instance, there may be a smell bank coordinated with the other banks. You start to count the number of banks and the amount of data in the mind and you have to go into some very high- powered figures. It greatly exceeds the number of molecules in the body. There are undoubtedly more than a hundred thousand recordings for every one molecule in the body. There are many theories on this. Somebody postulated a continuum of time along which a person had his own recordings and that the cells themselves were possibly nothing more than small radio sets in contact with that, and that memory storage was not in the body at all but was back along the time stream. What we do know so far is that it is impossible for the human mind to record any of this material and retain it!

Let me give you a demonstration:

LRH:

[to pc] Now if you will just stand and let’s fix your attention. What do you want to look at there? That automobile fender? All right. Let’s look at the automobile fender. Now, become aware of this automobile fender. All right. Look at the fender.
[aside to assistant] Now, would you make a noise like a buzz? All right. Just keep buzzing continually.
[to pc] All right, listen to that buzz. Now, feel yourself standing on your feet. Hear that buzz? Do you see the fender? Okay. Standing on your own two feet, become aware of all three of them simultaneously. All right, feel your clothes on you as you stand on your feet. Listen to the buzz and look at the fender. All right, feel that small amount of pressure on your eyes.
[aside] Make a louder buzz.
[to pc] Look at that fender. Feel yourself standing on your feet. How do you feel?

PC:

Rigid.

LRH:

Okay. Do you feel dizzy in any way?

PC:

Well, no. I can’t say that. Just kind of rigid.

LRH:

All right. That’s one reaction. Thank you.

[Another member of the audience comes on the stage.]

LRH:

All right. Now, if you will look at that sign there that says "Exit." Yes, you look at that sign that says "Exit."
[aside] Will you buzz some more, please?
[to pc] Now, look at the sign that says "Exit" and listen to that buzz. Feel yourself standing on your own two feet. All right, feel your clothes on you, now. How many things are you doing? Are you scanning from one to the next, or doing all of them simultaneously?

PC:

I seem to be doing all of them simultaneously.

LRH:

All right. Now, feel your clothes on you. Now, feel my touching your arm. See that "Exit" sign there. Listen to the buzz. How do you feel?

PC:

I am very aware.

LRH:

All right. How are your perceptics?

PC:

Fairly good.

LRH:

Have you got sonic?

PC:

Yes.

LRH:

Good. And you have pain recall?

PC:

Yes.

LRH:

That’s interesting. Thank you.

Notice the tiny difference. One case said he felt rigid, and the other said he felt fairly comfortable. If you take a person who is shut off with no sound, no sight, no recalls, no pain recall or anything, and tell him to do this, the first thing you know you will find him standing, then looking, then listening, then feeling. Well, you interrupt his doing this because it is a one, two, three, four, and he can do that all right. He has got these out of phase. He may also have an aberration "You can’t do two things at once," and if you insist that he synchronize this, he may collapse. I had a hold of each one of these gentlemen by the arms. But, if you just have him keep looking, the best he will get is dizzy and he will begin to reel, because this is something that is not generally done. People are not recording across the bank. They are recording on some perceptic, they are scanning. It is very interesting that the observation of people could be so spotty, but that is the way the records go down.

Now, if this were practiced consistently, one would think with practice the person could do this. But that is not what happens. What actually occurs sometimes to a very badly shut- off case is that he goes into a screaming set of jitters and almost blows his skull, because these things are pushed out of phase by an emotional experience, originally, which contains pain and may contain terror and the rest of it. They are pushed out of line, and when you stand them up and insist that they go back into line, the instant they do so, the thing which they have been avoiding all the subsequent years is the first thing that has to come into view. And if they were to let it happen, that thing would pop into view.

This isn’t something you just play with. I am simply demonstrating it. This little test of looking and listening and standing is not a technique.

When you run these perceptics through a pleasure moment, you will occasionally get great reluctance on the part of the person at first; and then as you coax him more and more, he will begin to get very nervous, just like the person who said he felt rigid. If we had kept that up, we would probably have picked up a death or something like that, if he had been in reverie and we were running pleasure moments. And in trying to run this pleasure moment over and over, if we really started to turn it on fully, he might have gotten the reaction of having this big charge turn up and finding himself right in the middle of looking at Grandma’s coffin or, as it happened in one case, watching the undertakers cut Grandma up. They were working in the back bedroom, and that incident had really been hidden.

So, in checking perceptics and running pleasure moments, three things may happen.

1. One could actually achieve a pleasure moment and turn on the perceptics in full force, after which the person will have these perceptics permanently.
2. One could draw a complete blank if the person has an aberration about pleasure.
3. One could turn on a terror charge.

You can expect any one of those three things to happen when you try to run a person through a pleasure incident. This is important to know, because if you come that close to getting a moment of great grief, terror or fear, without running it through and without knowing what you are tackling or what it is going toward, you will miss a very great opportunity to unaberrate this person fast. You will get a marked improvement in the case if you get that moment out, and you’ll get a marked alteration in perceptics. There may be several such moments, and the next time you do it you may get another charge, and unfortunately probably the third time you do it, he is educated to keep it straight and he may just sit there and lie to you.

So this is synchronization of the perceptics. The time track is actually a bundle of perceptics, and running pleasure moments synchronizes those perceptics.

Now, as we have gone into affinity, communication and reality, we have found out that a break in affinity would influence communication and reality. So, one of the first things that you can expect to appear when you start to tune up perceptics is little breaks in affinity or communication. (There was the break in communication where the preclear was not communicating with having eaten lobster; he was out of phase.)

The least likelihood of your doing anything with a tune- up would be in the vicinity of someone who has broken affinity with the preclear. So, if you have some antipathetic person at the table eating, don’t expect this person to be able to sit there and run the perceptics through that meal. Pick out moments of triumph which were also pleasurable.

If you keep this up, and it is worth quite a bit of effort, you will be able to do something with this tune- up of perceptics. The reason it gets into bad odor, occasionally, is because people don’t recognize what happens on a terror charge, a fear charge or a grief charge; it makes the preclear very uncomfortable if the auditor is not quite sure what to do with this or where to go.

One preclear ran back and the word cotfin occurred to him as he tried to tune these things up, so his auditor told him to repeat the word cotfin. I quote from a letter I received from him recently, "The damnedest biggest stone giant, in the damnedest biggest box, showed up in front of me, right there." He said that after he had repeated the word cotfin for a while it went away but before that he had been getting neat little eight by ten still color pictures of everything. He was getting actual visio of being a little boy, looking at his grandfather, but his auditor wasn’t smart enough to grab it. The preclear then did the next thing that he shouldn’t have done. He wrote Mama and asked, "Was I around when Great- grandpa died?" And of course she said, "Oh, no, you were miles away." So they never went back and looked for it until I put them back on the beam again, then they found and handled it.

Now, we have the data on checking perceptics. We don’t go into the case, find the person getting very nervous and dizzy, and then say, "Well, we can’t turn this person’s perceptics on. It’s no use." At the moment when he starts to get nervous, say, "Now let’s taste the spinach carefully. Feel the chair under you." And when he gets more nervous, say calmly, "All right now, let’s take a spoonful of soup. Now convey it to your mouth. Can you taste it?" We have got him right back into the incident.

It is a peculiarity that a person’s color perception may be parked some place on the track in this way. One preclear had his color perception parked at a time when he was arrested. He had a lot of prenatals about being arrested, and somebody came up and gave him a traffic summons that he had avoided. So they took him down to the jailhouse and booked him. The moment they told him to come along was in full color and was threedimensional. Life had stopped right there, and from that moment on he had no perceptic of color or dimension. It was flat and gray and white when he did see anything, and it was motionless.

There are a number of ways these things can go off, such as valences, command shut- off and so forth.

The next thing is to try to obtain an emotional discharge. You very carefully coax it out of a person without being particularly saccharine and certainly not noisy. You cat- foot up on these things using minimal mechanical commands in looking for an emotional discharge. The somatic strip sometimes won’t go there anyway. The area is a reverse charge area, and it skids off. Sometimes though, just to test the rules, say, "The somatic strip will now go to your grandmother’s death," and you may get grief flowing immediately, but the sneak- up approach is usually much better.

You undoubtedly will try to run cases which are thoroughly bogged down on the track, without realizing they are, and you will assume it is just a perceptic turn- off. The major part of perceptic turn- off is caused by being stuck on the track. The first thing to do then is to free the person on the track, and you can free him in various ways. Try all the methods known. Feeding him repeater technique on holders is not good, but you can feed repeater technique on forgetters and various mechanisms which might have denied him the information, because nobody is going to latch up very badly on running denyers.

I ran into a denyer one day where the person was outside himself all the way up and down the track getting visio of himself. He was over on one side watching himself. Usually this shows high emotional intensity on the case. But we ran into two incidents finally which let him emerge. The first was "Watch yourself," which was one of his mama’s standard phrases, and of course he would have to get back and watch himself. We got that one out and he got a little closer to himself, and then we ran into a terrific fight charge which said "Get out of my life, stay out of my life, don’t ever come into my life again." So, we got rid of that one and the person then ran inside of himself up and down the track.

In review, try for the painful emotion first and then test the file clerk and somatic strip, free him on the track if he is not free, then try for the basic area engrams, and if you can’t get any one of those, go to the third step, Straightwire.

The file clerk and somatic strip should work in this fashion: "The file clerk will now give us the incident necessary to resolve this case. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of this incident. When I count from one to five, the first phrase of the incident will flash into your mind. One- two- three- fourfive," and the preclear gives you a phrase. That is the way a case ought to run, and we keep doing things to a case until it does. Of course he will finally bog on one of these thoroughly, at which point we send him over to Step Three. In other words, we have got ample and adequate tools in order to get the file clerk and somatic strip working on a case, and that is the way to do it.

Sometimes they will work in a limited fashion and sometimes you can be satisfied with that if you are actually getting engrams and the case is proceeding. But remember that any case that is not proceeding satisfactorily can still be squared up and made to run pianola.

When you have finished a Standard Procedure run on your preclear who is on Guk— you have run and reduced every engram you have contacted— bring him up to present time and tell the somatic strip that it can continue to erase somatics in the case.

Try not to restimulate an engram and go off and leave it. The somatic strip, sweeping through the engram and knocking out the somatics, and occasionally picking up a holder or a bouncer, doesn’t restimulate. But starting to halfway run an engram and then leaving it is inviting disaster, and I would advise you not to do it.