PARALLELING THE MIND

A lecture given on 25 August 1950

Terrific Simplicities

An atomic physicist friend of mine commented on the subject of psychoanalysis once. He said, "The formulae of James Clerk Maxwell on electronics were available in 1894 and were being used in 1894, at the same time that Freud postulated his libido theory after his work with Breuer. We now have an atom bomb— and we still have psychoanalysis. It has not changed."

There have been many branches of it in about 60 years; however, it did not predict data. In scientific methodology, the first challenge of a theory is, will it predict new data which, if looked for in reality, will be found? And if that piece of scientific methodology is violated, then the theory should be abandoned and another theory applied.

The trouble with Dianetics is that it is too obvious. People try to move around back of it and figure it out in some complex way. It’s like a mathematician who calculates vast variables, and everybody says, "What a brilliant mathematician this man is!" You look this man over and you discover that he was trying to find out why horses wore harnesses when they were attached to carts, and he has completely overlooked the fact that there must be tension between the horse and the cart!

The substitution of complexity for fundamentals is a fascinating subject. If we were to knock out five fundamental principles in physics and just say they didn’t exist, the science of physics would cease to be a science and the explanations necessary to explain physics phenomena would probably fill practically every library there is in the world. Therefore, we are interested in fundamentals. We are not interested in a concept of high complexity. Most of the errors being made right now by student auditors are being made because of overreaching on the problem. It is simple. It is as literal as Simple Simon stepping in pies, and it is very easy to overlook this terrific simplicity.

For instance, we have a file clerk who keeps answering "No." All right. There’s a no there. There’s nothing simpler than that. I heard this the other day: "Do you suppose it is because of an association with psychologists who have been telling him that so- and- so and so- and- so?" No. It’s because he has got an engram that says "I can’t believe it."

Let’s get right back to the fundamental basic. The person says, "I am terribly worried about my marriage. I know it’s going to break up." Now, let’s not look for a religious connotation. Let’s look for the words "I am so worried about my marriage; I am afraid it’s going to break up." You will come across this often when running engrams. The fellow has just been dodging this engram continually. You know there is one there, but you just can’t locate it.

In one case, the whole case stalled down for 50 hours on this phrase "It’s your life line; hold to it until you are dead." The most unlikely phrase in the world, but the computation that was given to me about this case originally was that one didn’t dare lose his neuroses, because if he did he would not have any life left in him.

Most of the fear of losing engrams is because somebody is saying "I am afraid I am going to lose it," or "If you make me get rid of this, I will lose my mind." That was almost standard back around the turn of the century, and you will run into these apparently rational computations.

Now, we take that rationality, we build upon it and the person begins to explain it. He is worrying about something. The phrases which dictate the worry are right inside the statement of that worry, but he will build up over the top of it a rationality so strong and so powerful sometimes, and his logic is so excellent evidently, that one is dismayed by it and says, "Why, obviously, this man must be right." But it lasts just about long enough to get down the track someplace and maybe blow a grief discharge, loosen the case up a little bit, get in and knock out a couple of basic engrams and the person stops worrying.

For instance, I have had people who had a lapse of hearing on certain things. This is very interesting to you as an auditor. You are talking to someone at a certain volume and suddenly the person says, "What did you say?" Sometimes it appears that you have run on so fast that he didn’t understand you. But actually, the words that you have just used appear in an engram that is in restimulation, and those words have been swallowed by the reactive bank. The reactive bank opened, grabbed them and shut up again while the analyzer shut off and then went on again. And those words are now housed in the reactive mind. You will notice this, particularly now that you know that it occurs, but you may be surprised how often it happens. In fact, you can occasionally use it as diagnosis. You say to someone sometime, "Well, very few mothers are very mean."

And he says, "What did you say?"

You have been saying things like "Bicycles have red spokes" just before that, and he heard you perfectly well. But you have mentioned the word mother and a phrase in connection with it, and his analyzer went out and went on again— wham!

There is selective deafness on certain words. For instance, "I can’t hear it" would have a slight damper on the word it. The quality of literalness here is appalling, and if you are having trouble with the case, the first thing you should consult is whether or not you are rationalizing too much for the person.

If the person says, "I can’t return," find out why he can’t return. Ask him who used those words. Or he says, "I can’t believe in Dianetics. I can’t believe it would do any good." Do a little check. Don’t sit down and try to argue him into Dianetics. Ask him what he thinks about medicine. "Do you think medicine does you any good?"

And he will say, "Well, no. Most doctors are fakes."

"Well now, how about psychology? Has that ever helped anybody?"

"No."

"What about psychological tests? Do you believe in psychometry?"

"No, there is a lot of fakery to that stuff."

And you go across the board and get down to the point, "Well, do you believe you are standing here?" The fellow will think about it for a minute. What you are dealing with there is, of course, "I can’t believe it." If you held up a tobacco can, and insisted to him that this was a tobacco can, he would probably inspect it pretty closely.

He would also give to Dianetics his reaction that his reactive mind is getting from this engram. It’s a parallel: The closer that Dianetics approaches the working operation of the basic personality and the reactive mind, the more successful Dianetics is. The mind, in order to hook up with memories, gets back with the file clerk and that sort of thing takes attention units. The mind is trying to free up attention units and so are you, but you are trying to free up attention units because the mind is trying to free up attention units.

We are not working with a system that has suddenly been put up independently. What we have done is to take a look at the mind and try to find out what it is trying to do. What are the mechanics of its operation? These happen to deal with returning attention units to areas, trying to get engrams, trying to compute, working with bouncers, denyers, misdirectors and so forth. Those are all impeding the mechanics of the thing, and so each time we ask for something new that is impeding the mechanical processes of thought, we can then add something new to Dianetics as a parallel and deal with this new item. For instance, we knew about valences but we weren’t using them very hard. And finally, as we understood more about the mind shifting around on valences, we could adapt Dianetics to match it.

It should be very clear to you, then, when you say "Well, what about this rape?" and the preclear says "I don’t like to think about that," that is true. That is a difficulty his mind is having. In fact, those words are contained in the vicinity of an engram. An attention unit has gone back toward it. You are dealing there with milliseconds of time, just flashes. It is too quick for you to track or follow or notice that the attention units could be said analogically to have gone down, taken a look at the situation, come out to its outer periphery and found the words "I don’t like to think about that," come back to a hooked- up connection and reported "I don’t like to think about that."

If the file clerk is answering "No" to questions such as "Is this a holder?" "Is this a bouncer?" then ask the preclear a question to which he can’t answer no and still be rational. If you get a no, then you are bumping up against "No." In the same way, where the person’s mind is being made to shy away from something, you can sometimes make his mind come around and go in the back door.

For example, we have asked him, "Did your sister ever have any boyfriends?" The attention units go down and start to pick up this datum, but there is a warning, "Don’t enter," and they come back up again. You insist then. You say, "Well, did your sister ever have any boyfriends? Can you remember something about these boyfriends?"

The person has now got this thing as a line. It is harder to get into. You have restimulated it and it is going to be bucking attention units harder. You insist again and one of two things is going to happen. You are going to restimulate it to a point where it will discharge, in other words you restimulate it until you get a running of the engram, or you take his attention off it completely. So, let’s start asking him about the time that he had a scooter. "Who gave you this scooter? What color was it? Who took it away from you? When did you get run over with the scooter?" and so on. Then ask, "What did your sister’s boyfriend say?" and an attention unit is likely to snap down there so quickly it will bring up data.

Now, in using repeater technique, don’t start him in present time and have him repeat nothing but holders, because the first thing you know, attention units would be locked down in holders all through the bank and he would be in bad shape.

The way to use repeater technique is to follow down chains. First you find out if there is a denyer in the engram.

"Yes."

"The denyer will flash into your mind. (snap!)"

And you get "I can’t tell." So, you can use repeater technique there on the phrase "I can’t tell." If "I can’t tell" doesn’t lift, you say, "Let’s go to an earlier ‘I can’t tell," ’ and walk down the bank with repeater technique.

We have been using repeater technique for a long time. If you ever say to someone, "You know Miller, don’t you?" and the person says, "Miller, Miller, Miller, Miller, Miller . . . yes, I know Miller," that is a parallel, and there are parallels in practically every one of these mechanisms in the everyday life of people.

We have unloaded the useless facts, organized the useful facts, discovered new fundamentals, and out of this whole thing we have a science. That is the way sciences get built. In fact, pieces of Dianetics have been known for the last million and a half years. A witch doctor of a hundred thousand years ago was probably quite smart on the subject. A lot of principles of the human mind were known and used. An Egyptian priest was a pretty smart character. In medieval times, there was a magician’s cult. The magician had a lot of strange principles. He believed that one could cause an effect, and the cause of the effect was important. That doesn’t sound like much today with all of our knowledge of science, but believe me, that contains in essence what made it possible for Francis Bacon and others to really work things out.

Cause is what is important, not effect. If you study effect alone, you become part of the effect and becoming part of the effect, you are therefore acted on by the cause. So, you don’t want this cause to disappear mysteriously. What you want is to get back with the cause, and then you can overcome or create as many effects as you want. That was the principle of the old- time magician.

In Dianetics, we are dealing with causes. I don’t quite know what lies behind what we have in Dianetics. There is something just behind affinity, communication and reality. Everybody agrees with reality, and as long as we agree there is a reality we are in communication with our perceptics and we are in affinity with the universe at large because we have agreed that there is affinity and reality and communication with each other. But there is something a step back of this. It might even be that reality only exists because of our communication with each other, which exists because of some order of affinity. In other words, the whole thing might be just an idea.

It is very dangerous, I know, to explode good ideas. You get a terrific reaction from people if you do. Someday, somebody might say the right set of words and we will all just disappear!

In all of this, we are fighting for cause. As the science advances, it will be because we have paralleled the mechanical action of the mind, and it will advance in a direct ratio to the nearness with which it approaches that cause.

Here you have these tools, and you have got to learn how to use them in coordination. For instance, we don’t take just one tool and use it. As one’s faculties increase, he learns to use several tools instinctively and knows which one belongs next. For instance, we are talking about this flash answer of "No." We want to use repeater technique on some word "No" and find out where this thing comes from. So, from asking for a holder, bouncer, or denyer, we suddenly shift over tools and we are on to repeater technique. (Actually, any time you get a holder, bouncer or denyer, you shift over to repeater technique.)

In Educational Dianetics there is an axiom: A datum is as valid as it is related to other data. So we get an isolated datum. What is it? Actually, it is just as valuable as it exists in relationship to something else.

Somebody wheels in a womfachugger and everybody looks at it and says, "What is it?"

And the fellow says, "It’s a womfachugger." That is a datum.

"What do you do with it?"

"Well, it runs along and collects splinters out of the floor."

"Oh, yes. Isn’t that interesting."

The instant that one can take this datum and relate it to his own reality, then it becomes a valid datum. It doesn’t even have to work, but this is at least its intention. Furthermore, you can describe imaginary objects, and as long as you call them "imaginary" that’s fine. But even imagination depends on reality, and maybe the world of reality depends on imagination.

You have these tools and they are very important. For instance, when a person gets into a hot area of an engram, or he gets into something with some tension on it, he wiggles his toes. That is an important datum because when someone bounces he stops wiggling his toes, and then you have to have him repeat the bouncer a few times. When his toes start wiggling again he is back in the engram. So, we don’t have to depend upon his saying so. We just look at his toes.

If we are trying to get into the vicinity of a grief discharge and we say, "Are you in the vicinity of your grandmother’s lamentable demise?" he may say, "Oh yes, sure," but we look at him carefully and we find no slightest sign of it. One sign of it would be a big sigh, which is grief trying to get loose. The mechanics of the body get mixed up perhaps, trying to oxygenate when actually the person should be crying, so a heaving chest indicates a grief discharge loose in the vicinity. The wiggling toes indicate a somatic, because even if the person has a somatic shut- off, he will wiggle his toes. If you get a person who is too far out of valence, sometimes he won’t wiggle his toes, but each time you will know something is wrong because there will be agitation.

The person who lies on his back all the way through the prenatal area is probably out of valence. If he rolls on his side and curls up, you know he is in his own valence. These data are related to knowing whether or not the person is in the prenatal area. A person can be out of his own valence and running in a prenatal engram and still get some charge out of the case. Sometimes you have to run these things out of valence in order to bring them up to a point where a person can run the somatics that belong to those engrams.

When do you use straight line memory, and what happens when you start to tune up perceptics and find they are in good shape? Do you go to the basic area immediately? No. Going to the basic area is very important, but it is not as important at the beginning of the case as getting a grief discharge. You are dealing with relative importances.

I have seen men after 90 days of arduous study come aboard ship and say, "So, there is the engine room, telegraph, wheel, compass and the maps on the floor. Oh, yes. Look at these maps on the floor. Let me see. Let’s find out what is important around this bridge now. These maps are very important. Let’s see, what kind of maps are they? Where have they been made? They told us about maps in school. Yes, they said maps were to keep from getting flatfooted while standing on the bridge."

I would hate to read up on maps and then take over my duties as navigator. The person had data, but it was uncoordinated.

We have tried to keep that from happening by knowing and evaluating a single datum in its relationship to the importance of a function or operation. For instance, the most important things on a battleship are the guns. And yet people will go aboard and look over these things and be impressed by the Spanish lace on the captain’s bar! A battleship is a floating gun platform. That happens to be its definition. The only thing important about this battleship is whether or not it can fire those guns. Therefore, guns are important. Mobility is important. The hold is important, but the soda fountain is only of very slight importance because it provides a morale factor.

There has to be judgment on this sort of thing. As a student you will probably see a lot of things and many of them may seem of mono tone importance. I have tried to stress those things which are terrifically important, to give you some yardstick by which to measure them. I have punched up the idea of reducing every engram you contact, that is important. And if you don’t do it, you are inviting the precipitation of a psychotic break, a chronic somatic or a psychosomatic illness. In short, you can do several things that are quite harmful. Therefore, reduce everything and don’t invalidate the data of your preclear Above all else, those few things stand up.

Next, it is better to enter a case than leave it unentered. That may seem odd but it is possible, through the failure of that point, to cost a person his life. For instance, the person has come down to see the auditor. He is contemplating killing himself. And if the auditor then thinks this case is too hot to handle and says, "I will tell you what to do. Go home, change your environment and change your life a little bit," he may go home and kill himself! So, an auditor must be courageous. He should safeguard himself by being closely in alliance with a doctor if the case looks like it might blow, but he can cause more harm by backing off from this case or pattycaking with it or treating it lightly than he can by charging into the case and opening it wide open.

Even electric shock cases are better entered than left unentered. This applies to any case. If you can enter a case, do so, and if you do so, carry on through with it. If you enter a case with a severe reservation that "This case is dangerous, it might blow up in my hands, it might precipitate a psychosis, " it might do just that.