HANDLING THE STUCK CASE

A lecture given on 27 November 1950

Freeing Up the Preclear on the Track

I am going to give you a resume now of how one goes about unsticking a person on the track.

When you tell a person to close his eyes and move someplace in time and he doesn’t go anyplace, there are two things wrong. There is not one of two things wrong. He is stuck on the track, but "I" has to be very low on attention units for him to be stuck on the track at all. This man may, in life, be a complete powerhouse. But if he can be a complete powerhouse on the few attention units currently available to him, compared to those that should be available to him, this man will be a super powerhouse as soon as you get him rolling along. Just the simple mechanical action of unsticking him on the track will probably raise his IQ ten, fifteen or twenty points, immediately.

He will tell you, for instance, "I’m stuck in present time"; however, the "present time" he is referring to is probably at the age of fifteen years. This has been "present time" to him for a long time— only that is not present time.

There are three or four methods of getting him free. Book auditors sometimes bog down at this point. They find somebody who does not move on the time track and they say, "Well, nothing can happen here. This book is a lot of horse feathers, because actually nobody can move on the track. I have checked, and I am unable to move and Betsy Ann can’t move either."

The toughest thing that an auditor will face, in terms of cases, is a case which will not move on the track. Yet this "stuck on the track" case is almost a normal affair. A person can read the Handbook and learn how to run easy cases. However, we are not teaching you here how to run easy cases.

Cases can be unstuck in one place only to latch up in another place— out of one engram and into another engram. Furthermore, a person can get latched up on the track through bad auditing. That is the same problem all over again of somebody being stuck on the track. So, you make your first tests and find out that the person is stuck on the track, or you pick up a case that has been run for some time and find out that the case is stuck on the track. It’s the same thing.

There is a definite and specific routine for unsticking this person. You don’t sit around in despair or work your imagination to death. It is very simple. The first thing you do is tell the preclear to come up to present time. If he doesn’t move (and 98 percent of them won’t, but remember that 2 percent will), then tell him "Now let’s go to a moment of pleasure," and try to ease him into one.

It is not important where this person is stuck on the track. It wouldn’t do you any good to know at this early stage of the case, because normally he is stuck in late life. So we don’t need to know for this step where he is stuck or what phrase is sticking him. All you do is tell this person, who is in reverie, to go to a pleasure moment— preferably a moment of pleasure and triumph— for instance, the time he beat up Mrs. Hogwollegar’s kid or when he got his first check as a young writer or, for a woman, when she was awarded the cup for making the best apron in household science class, and so on.

It is very interesting to see how standard these pleasure moments are. You can practically lift yourself up to the role of a seer by saying "Well, let’s go to the time that you were given this pet."

And the person says, "How did you know about that?"

Everybody has, more or less, a standard run of experience. I have never met anybody yet, for instance, who didn’t have a moment of triumph sometime in school. I have met very few men who, as boys, did not win at least one fight. I even use that diagnostically: If this person has never won a fight he is usually in bad shape. Run that case the rest of the way on the track and you find out he is normally exteriorized and in pretty bad shape. Something about little boys is that they fight, and just by the law of averages, sooner or later another little boy should have come along who got licked. If this never took place, it means many things. It means that Mama or Papa was a dominator, probably, or that the boy was very sick when he was young, which gave the chance for a lot of ally engrams and which immediately speaks of a very serious prenatal bank and so on. But any vital, live boy will have won at least one fight. So you send him back to the fight and let him win it again.

If you can reach one of these pleasure moments, whatever the pleasure moment was, you can possibly unstick the person on the track, because one of the functions of the mind is to find pleasure for the organism. When the mind starts to find pleasure it has a tendency to go away from pain, so the attention units are liable to come out of the engram which had him stuck on the track. If enough attention units can be brought into the pleasure moment out of the incident in which he is stuck, you can then move him free on the track and bring him up to present time and stabilize him there.

A person who is stuck on the track is using that for present time, so you try to run him into a pleasure moment. If that fails, you go to the next step which is to try to straightwire him out of it. Give him straight line memory. You can shift back and forth from attempts to put him into a pleasure incident to straight line memory, without doing anything fancy, because this person is stuck on the track. If you are able to get this person moving, you can bring him up to present time. And you can alternate between straight memory and reverie to achieve this, without bringing the preclear out of reverie or canceling. It does not matter how many times you shift. If you say "Let’s go to (some pleasure moment)" and he remains where he is, you can say "Well, let’s remember (something)," and then let’s do this, and let’s remember that. And just by trying to get him to remember various moments and locks (communication, affinity and reality breaks), and shifting back and forth from straight memory into reverie, you give him the impetus he needs. It pries him up to present time.

With the combination of running pleasure moments and Straightwire on these affinity, reality and communication break locks, you can generally free up enough attention units from the area of the track where they are stuck to get them up to present time. If that fails, there is another routine.

But let me give you a precaution here. Giving the person a lot of holders to repeat is not a way to get him straightened up on the track. Repeater technique on a lot of random holders will not unstick the preclear That is a way to get him further locked up. For instance, some auditor asks a preclear "What would you say a holder would be?"

The preclear has just read the book, perhaps, and he says, "Well, ‘Stay here." ’

"All right, let’s go over the words ‘Stay here." ’

The preclear repeats, "Stay here, stay here, stay here."

Nothing happens, so the auditor figures there can’t be anything there. "Well, how about ‘Hold still’?"

"Hold still, hold still, hold still, hold still." That is now engram two, and so on with engram three, engram four, engram five.... The auditor, if he keeps that up, will have the preclear stuck on the track in about eight places! The probability is that he was stuck on the track in several places to begin with, but the auditor’s intention is to get the preclear unstuck from the main place he is stuck on the track. Giving him repeater technique on a lot of holders can only get him stuck in a lot more places on the track.

However, quite often when a person is stuck on the track the file clerk is in very good working order, and you may even get the somatic strip to work. So what you do is just try to move the somatic strip through the engram in which the preclear is stuck and up to a time when he was well, and then bring him up to present time. Simply tell the somatic strip to go the rest of the way through the engram, then go to the time he got well, and then go to present time. Quite often it works.

Of course, almost any one of these things may find you working with an engram which has a call- back in it, which is discouraging. You get the person up to present time and then this engram says, "Come here." You give him an age flash a moment later, and the person is right back where he was before. Realize that you are working a call- back.

There is a technique of telling the somatic strip to go on through an engram and run the somatics in it. You can actually tell the somatic strip on almost anybody to go back to birth and run through birth without restimulating it particularly. The somatic strip works very nicely.

You cooperate with the file clerk and the file clerk cooperates with you, but you order the somatic strip. You can order the somatic strip all over the track. You can tell a somatic strip to go to the twenty- first of August 1943 at two o’clock in the afternoon. But don’t then say "Are you there? How do you know it is there?" Don’t do that to the preclear Just say, "This is the twenty- first of August, two o’clock in the afternoon, and when I count from one to five a visio will flash. One- two- three- four- five (snap)." The fellow is there. It is interesting how one human being can put another human being through the time scale. The way it works and the preciseness with which it will work is wonderful.

If the somatic strip won’t move, then the person is really stuck hard.

Telling the somatic strip to go through the rest of the engram and to the time when the person got well by saying " You will . . ." is a technique that you should know. It has this additional side panel: If a person gets stuck in a childhood illness, it is often enough to run them up to a moment when they were fully recovered from that illness, two or three weeks after it took place, and stabilize them in that moment. It destimulates the illness and enables them to come up to present time from that point.

If the auditor doesn’t know this, he can get into a situation such as one that occurred not too long ago, where someone got hold of a copy of the book and went home and said, "I wonder if this works.... Dear, lie down on the couch. Let’s go back to a time when you were really sick." So she went back to a time when she had measles and remembered all about this and looked at the room and so on. Then he said, "Isn’t this fascinating!" and brought her up to present time, and the next morning she had all the symptoms of measles, except there was no respiratory disorder.

He took her to the doctor, who said, "Well, obviously this is a case of measles, but there is nothing wrong with the throat or nose." They puzzled a great deal over this and had a big consultation, but before they reached any conclusion the engram destimulated and the symptoms disappeared!

The way to handle a case like that is to bring the person up through the engram to a point where he is well. Sometimes you can do this hour by hour or day by day. Then run that moment thoroughly and get him really settled in it. Then go to a pleasure moment later than that and run it, and finally bring him up to present time, and no bad effects will occur. This parallels the method just given you of getting a person unstuck on the time track.

However, if you do this and the person is still stuck on the track, you have to really get down and start working. Many stuck cases have a visio and a sonic right at the exact moment they are stuck. But if the case gets pushed all over the track restimulating this and that, and the preclear gets fed a lot of holders to repeat, stirring the case up thoroughly, the stuck point will get covered up. Sometimes when a person is stuck precisely in one engram there is a sonic on the holder. Just ask the person to listen and see if he hears anything. Then ask him to take a look— "Do you see anything?" He is liable to give you a phrase such as "Stay here," or "I’ll be right back." Run it! That very often takes the tension off it enough to move the person out of the stuck point. I have only unstuck about five people off the track by telling them to listen like that, but they all unstuck very rapidly. The rest of them heard nothing, saw nothing and it was a blank. So the method does have some efficacy.

If they get a little visio on the incident, that’s fine. They might be able to identify the place, and sometimes just identifying it will restore enough attention units and recollection to them so they can unstick.

These, then, are the degrees of solidness with which cases are stuck, and methods of getting them out.

When a person suddenly recognizes where he is, he can be brought up to present time. If he has a little sonic on the incident, have him repeat it a time or two and then say, "Come on up to present time," and he will unstick off the track right then.

Let me give you another precaution here: Don’t try to run a flock of physical pain engrams on someone who is stuck on the track. If he won’t move, don’t try to get another engram; you have got an engram right there.

If you have got a good working file clerk in a person who is solidly stuck on the track, get an age flash. There is a way to do that. Most people who are stuck on the track have got a built- in circuit that gives back their age. This circuit will very often give itself away immediately after a birthday, when the person will keep giving his old age, whereas the file clerk would never do that. A person who consistently dates his checks 1949 when it has actually been 1950 for two weeks is stuck on the time track. He has a dub- in circuit that is giving him the date instead of the file clerk giving him the date. People who are moving and very mobile on the track don’t make this mistake.

Getting an age flash is a three- way affair. The first part is done by saying "How old are you? (snap!)"

"Twenty- nine." Well, that is probably his right age.

Then say, "What’s your age? (snap!)" Demon circuits are usually pretty dumb, and this circuit is probably educated to respond to "How old are you?" but not "What’s your age?" so his stuck- on- the- track age comes through and he says, "Two."

Follow that with "Two what?" and the person says two months, two days, or whatever it is.

So the three- way test is "How old are you? (snap!)" "What’s your age? (snap!)" and "Give me a number. (snap!)" If you get the same number on all three rapid flash responses, there is no doubt that this person is in present time. However, the normal is to get, for example, twenty- nine then sixteen.

But if this person has really got some fancy circuit there fixing it up so that nobody is going to find out how old he is, you will get twenty- nine, twenty- nine again, and then you say, "Give me a number."

"Two. Why did I give you a number two?"

He wants to know right away why he is not following through on this twenty- nine. The reason he isn’t is because he has a circuit there that is trained to respond to "What’s your age?" and

"How old are you?" but not one trained to "Give me a number" as a follow- through of the first two questions. You couldn’t simply ask the person to give you a number and expect that to be his age. This works as a follow- through because you have already been working with the file clerk, asking the person’s age, and it will follow through with the same data you’ve been asking for, and send through his actual age. The file clerk is very shrewd and it will work with you.

So those are the various tests.

If you get an age flash on this person who is stuck on the track, you want to know what happened to him in that year. Sometimes, by just making him recall what happened to him during that age, he will all of a sudden click in to the engram in which he is stuck and you can bring him up to present time. It puts it on straight line memory and is not too hard to do. Ask questions like "What happened to you when you were twenty?" or "What happened to you when you were five years of age?" and he’ll start telling you.

Normally the age the preclear gives is an extremely occluded area. If it is, you will not ordinarily be able to spring him out of there just by making him remember what happened to him.

But there was one particular case, a man of forty- five, who kept giving the age flash of twenty- nine. He had had about fifty hours of processing but could not be budged on the track. By working with this person for a long while (a long while for something like this is about fifteen minutes) I was finally able to find out what happened to him in his twenty- ninth year. At first he didn’t know what had happened to him from the time he was twenty- five to when he was thirty- four. By using Straightwire I finally made him recall the period by asking him apparently disrelated questions; for instance, I asked him, "Who gave you your first job?" in order to get the chronological sequence of jobs, till we spotted who he was working for when he was twenty- nine. Then we found out whether he liked the job or not, who the boss reminded him of, and so on, to get his mind picked up on his twenty- ninth year. Then I asked questions like "Now, what happened to you in that year?" "When were you sick?" "Did you have an accident or something like that?"

And all of a sudden he said, "Ah yes, appendicitis, that’s when I had my appendix out!" Up to this time there had been no record of an appendectomy on his case!

He immediately got a visio on his room and on the nurse, and he finally picked up a sonic on the nurse telling him he would have to stay there although he wanted to go home. But that was a tough case.

So, if the file clerk is working, you can handle it that way. But if the preclear is stuck on the track, and even though the file clerk is working somewhat and you can get his age, you can get no clue as to the incident he is stuck in and you are unable to refresh his memory in any way, then you can start asking for flash responses on any question which can be answered yes or no, referring to accidents, injuries or any kind of an engram.

You say, "Give me a yes or no on the following: A hospital? (snap!)"

"No."

"Doctor? (snap!)"

"No."

"Fever? (snap!)"

"Yes."

"Home? (snap!)"

"No."

"Office?"

"Yes."

You can then start building the personnel in the engram, and merely with yes- or- no responses to your series of questions you can get the entire nature of the engram and everything that took place. You build it back, now that you have the data. It requires rather full questioning by the auditor, but he can get what it is.

However, just getting the data alone usually isn’t enough to free the person from the stuck point. This engram is usually in the bank in a very solid chain and the person has gotten stuck on the track in the middle or at the end of the chain instead of the early part of it. The way engrams behave is that if you contact them in the very early part of the chain you can reduce them, and if you contact them at the very beginning of the chain and the beginning of the chain is in basic area you can erase them, but not when they are halfway up the chain.

For instance, you have contacted an engram at age thirteen and you want to get the preclear out of it. It has a holder in it, so you have the preclear repeat the phrases and try to deintensify it, but nothing happens and he stays right there. That is because this late life engram is actually stuck in a whole pile of engrams.

This is not the time to lose your head and say "Well, that’s just too bad." What you do is ask the file clerk "Is this the first engram on the chain? (snap!)" The file clerk, if he is working, will tell you no. If it is stacked in a chain and the preclear is stuck at thirteen years of age, you can go right back down the same chain in which he is stuck. You take a little tension off the engram in which he is stuck by running it, and then tell him to go to an earlier engram (" The file clerk will now give us an earlier engram") and get it, and you go back down the track through this chain.

That is the point where some auditors go wrong. They locate the engram and then try to repeat it out of existence. They evidently consider this as being an entirely foreign thing rather than an engram. It is just an engram and it is usually at a late position on the chain. If the auditor cannot get the preclear unstuck by Straightwire or any of these other methods and get him moved up to present time, then he had better walk down that chain and get the earliest engram on it.

Sometimes the file clerk is forced into telling you a lie. You as the auditor tell the file clerk that you want the earliest incident on this chain, and the file clerk will give you an earlier incident but it is not the earliest incident. This is a compromise between you and the file clerk. You tell the file clerk to give you the earliest incident on the chain, then you ask "Yes or no, is this the earliest incident on the chain?" and the file clerk says yes, and you run this incident. What has happened there is that you have forced the file clerk to tell you a lie. As you go down one of these chains, the chances are that the file clerk can’t get to the bottom of the chain without deintensifying two or three engrams on the way, so he gives you the first engram of the chain necessary to deintensify so that he can get to the basic on the chain. I have seen a file clerk give out six consecutive engrams, each one as the earliest on the chain, because each one had to be deintensified.

The person is stuck way up the track someplace. You say, "Now give us the earliest incident on this chain," and the file clerk actually comes up with an earlier incident. You tell the somatic strip, "Go to the beginning of the incident. When I count from one to five the first phrase in the incident will flash into mind. One- two- three- four- five (snaps)." You start running this incident assuming that the file clerk gave you the earliest incident, because you ordered him to give you the earliest one. However, the file clerk is not under your orders. The file clerk is your partner in trying to get these engrams out of the preclear, not your slave. You can order the somatic strip, or the file clerk can order the somatic strip. The file clerk does so very often, and that is what freewheeling is.

You ask for the earliest engram on the chain, and the file clerk gives you the earliest engram that has to be deintensified on the chain to get to earlier engrams. You then take the tension off whatever the file clerk gives you, reducing it if you can. Sometimes you have to run one that cannot be reduced or erased, and you have to run it a couple of times in order for the file clerk to give you the next earlier one on the chain.

So never make the mistake of taking the first thing the file clerk gives you as being the earliest one. After running it a couple of times, don’t assume that it was the earliest and that you can now go back up the track. Ask the file clerk, "Is this the earliest engram?" The file clerk will sometimes tell you yes, when it has to be run a couple more times. But then you ask again, "Is this the earliest engram?" and all of a sudden you get a no. This means that an earlier one is now in sight.

So you say, "All right, the file clerk will give us the earliest engram which can be reached to resolve this chain. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of the engram. When I count from one to five the first phrase will flash into your mind. One- two- three- four- five (snap!)." You get the first phrase of the earlier incident and reduce that one. After two or three passes over it, if it is not going to reduce further, you check "Is this the earliest one?" and if the file clerk says no you have to go earlier. You can expect to work back in this fashion.

I have gone down a chain of about twenty- five engrams, one by one, having to deintensify a little bit out of each one, in order to get the basic on the chain. It was in the basic area. The person was stuck at thirteen years of age, and it took superhuman wits trying to find where this was! The file clerk finally just got tired of being fooled with and gave up the information. I said, "The file clerk will now give us the month in which this occurred."

Instead of the month I got "Tonsillectomy— but I’ve never had my tonsils out!"

I said, "Open your mouth."

They were missing.

That’s like a dub- in case we had who used to get run over all the time. Once he was lying there telling the auditor about this awful travail where something had gone right across his throat and they had had to put forty- eight stitches in it. The auditor reached over and pulled down the person’s collar a bit and let him go on talking. No scar!

When a person is stuck on the track with great solidness, you can expect routinely that the person is stuck in a chain of engrams and that there are earlier engrams that have to be reduced before you can get him loose off the chain. So it is a question of walking back. If you can’t get him walking back, keep on using Straightwire. Try to knock out enough affinity, reality and communication break locks until the person finally has enough attention units to come up to present time.

I had a lot of difficulty with a preclear once until I told the file clerk to give me present time, and the file clerk did! What I am warning you about is that at any time you may be able to get the preclear into present time, and that means you have gotten to a point where the case has enough alertness to move on the track.

The thing that you have got to do before you can do a great deal with reverie is get the person moving on the track. That is why you test their perceptics and why you try to find some pleasure moments.

Occasionally you will enter a case with reverie, which is actually stuck on the track and which will come unstuck before you even notice that it was stuck. I have had that happen, and by checking back over on the behavior of the preclear, his facial expression and so forth, a couple of moments before and then again afterwards, I noticed that they were entirely different.

If you put the preclear in reverie and tell him to go to last night, you may find that he did not go from present time to last night, he went from the engram in which he was stuck to last night! In that case you didn’t ascertain where the person was, but merely told him to go someplace and he went.

The auditor who does not know how to unstick a person on the track might as well just give up the ghost as far as his efficiency is concerned, because more than half of the people that he runs into are going to be stuck on the track. Additionally, as he goes through processing, he is going to find a case occasionally getting stuck on the track and is going to have to go through the whole routine trying to get him unstuck.

Let me give you a warning here: Never leave your preclear stuck on the track at the end of the session if you found him moving on the track. You must bring him back up to present time. Always check a preclear, particularly one that you don’t know well. After a while you can get careless on this if you know the case well and know that the person ordinarily comes to present time and stays in present time without getting called back down the track. But on a new case or one that you are not too sure of or one that has difficulty moving on the track anyhow, check two or three minutes after they come to present time to find out if they are still there.

The way you bring a person to present time— which is part of Standard Procedure— is to run a pleasure moment and then bring them to present time and give them straight memory on all the processing that you gave them during the last two hours. Make them recall it, but not by telling them or assisting their memory, because this undermines a person’s self- determinism. You merely tell them to remember these things— and they can remember these things— and they will go on and remember the processing and so forth, and they are in present time. That inhibits a call- back. Test it by giving the preclear age flashes: "What is your age? (snap!)"." How old are you? (snap!)" "Give me a number. (snap!)" And if all three figures agree, that person is in present time.

But when you have given him the canceler and brought him up out of it, and he is sitting there telling you that he didn’t know he had ever drowned his grandmother’s kittens, if you all of a sudden say "How old are you? (snap!)" and you get the reply "Seven," realize that a call- back has activated. The preclear was not sufficiently stabilized. So you run more pleasure moments and Straightwire on the session and get him into present time so he will stay there and be stable.

On a case that has just been started for the first time, if you find this person stuck on the track and being called back to earlier engrams on the track, it very well may be that you won’t be able to get him unstuck in the first session. It may take many sessions to get him unstuck. The longest number of sessions I have seen anybody stuck on the track was eighty hours’ worth. This person had had close to a hundred insulin shocks and he was stuck in the last one.

The auditor is concerned with fluidity on the track. When we examine the mind, we find out that there are several things that can take attention units away from "I": communication, reality and affinity break locks, and communication, reality and affinity secondary engrams. Both of these depend on physical pain engrams. But the actions which charge up the reactive mind and charge up and separate "I" and take attention units away from "I," starving "I" down until he is so weak that he cannot move on his own time track, are communication, reality and affinity break locks or affinity, reality and communication secondary engrams, which include grief and apathy engrams and so on. These take the attention units away from "I" and roll them up in a ball with the physical pain engram, leaving a scarcity of attention, which prevents the person from moving smoothly on the track.

The degree of seriousness with which people are stuck on the track does not depend upon the seriousness of the engram in which they are stuck. It depends upon the supercharging of the bank, on the general condition of the bank and on the robbed condition of "I," created by these affinity, communication and reality break locks, under which, of course, are all these physical pain engrams.

When you find somebody, then, who sticks on the track so lightly that when you say "Come up to present time" he comes up, you can probably work this person. If the case is stuck heavily enough for you to have to tell the somatic strip to move on forward and go to a comfortable moment, and then run a pleasure moment, get present time and give him Straightwire, this case is just supercharged a little bit more. And if you get somebody who is just so totally stuck on the track that you have to give him the yes- and- no routine with "Doctor? Hospital?" and so on, creeping down the bank engram by engram to find the earliest moments of it, you are working a case that is really supercharged.

Now, this case may be so serious that it is exteriorized all up and down the track. This person’s sense of reality is going to be negligible and his ability to communicate with you— much less with his own past— is going to be almost absent.

This is a new index. The seriousness with which a person is stuck on the track is an indication of the amount of charge on the case. It means, in other words, that the more charge there is on the case, the less able "I" is to move on the track.

These engrams are just engrams, they are sleepers, until they get keyed in and start to get locks on them. The engram is not active until it gets keyed in, and an engram which is not keyed in is not effective in any way on the mind. It is like a stored phonograph record, and that phonograph record doesn’t begin to make any noise until you get it near a needle.

So here’s this bundle of sleepers. Up to the moment of key- in there is no circuitry. There is not a single keyed- in engram in this hypothetical case, and there is no circuitry. Now one engram gets keyed in. The person was tired and there must have been some situation analogous to that engram occurring in his workaday life. When this happens the engram gets a little bit restimulated, and we get a slight reaching- out from this engram bank. Now another incident takes place which restimulates this engram, and the charge on the bank builds up just a little bit more, impinging itself on "I." Then the person gets an affinity, reality or communication secondary engram. The charge goes in and starts to interpose between "I" and the standard banks. This would also indicate a shut- off of the early portion of a person’s time track.

The secondary engram could be a death. It has started to charge up the bank, and the person begins to pick up locks on this secondary engram. Not only is he getting charge on the early engrams, he now has this secondary engram. Let’s say it was the death of his grandmother. Anything that has to do with the death of an older person becomes a lock on this secondary engram, and any time that occurs in life this charge gets built up a little bit more. These locks can be on there in terms of thousands and thousands; every time the person reads a newspaper and sees the word death it makes a little tiny lock. This case is starting to be pretty heavily charged.

Where does this charge come from? We are not working here with some wonderful mechanism that picks up its energy out of thin air; we are working with a mechanism that has a certain degree of conservation within itself. This charge has got to come from someplace. Every time this person gets another charge added to the engram bank from an affinity, communication or reality break lock or secondary engram, every time this engram gets charged up, it charges up by taking something away from "I."

Now, for every lock that occurs on this secondary engram, a little additional scrap comes off "I."

"I" has to have more power than there is in the charged- up bank to be able to move on the track. So if "I" gets gradually cut down, slowly and steadily cut down through life, finally this bank becomes too highly charged for "I" to be able to move on the track. We are postulating that "I" would be made up of positive units up to the moment that a secondary engram is received, at which moment these units are taken over, reversed in polarity, and deposited in the reactive mind as something opposing "I."

In other words, "I" is being stolen to fight "I."

This is the same trick that life uses throughout all of its mechanisms against the material universe; it discovers how to get a little piece of the material universe and turn it around on itself. When you start to get the material universe mixed up in engrams, that law begins to operate in reverse and "I" begins to cut down.

The ease with which you enter a case— the accessibility of the case— depends upon how much "I" is left in proportion to how much charge there is on the reactive bank. For instance, take a person who inherently has a thousand units of "I." He has terrific survival value; you couldn’t kill him if you ran over him with a battleship, and this would express itself in various ways. You start taking off some of the units of "I" and his bank starts getting charged up. There is a lot of bank to charge, and it takes quite a bit to charge it. He goes all the way through life and he has still got a considerable amount of "I" left.

Now let’s take another case. This one has one hundred units of "I" to begin with. So he hits one secondary engram and goes right straight to the spin bin, because it took all the units he had, and all of a sudden "I" isn’t there anymore.

A person goes mad in an inverse ratio to the amount of attention units, or the size of his survival dynamic, or how tough he is in the business of living. That is the dynamic of the person. It is inherent. If he has lots of dynamic, lots of force, lots of power— boy, he can have thousands of engrams, and they can be all piled up with all kinds of secondary engrams, and locks all over the place, and this person is still functioning. Then you see somebody else who lost a doll when she was five years of age, or somebody knocked him off a tricycle when he was nine years of age, and that one is crazy. The difference there is just the number of "I" units that can be stalled down, because these units don’t get taken out in ratio to how big "I" is.

You will never find a psychotic who does not have a very thoroughly charged- up bank. The secondary engrams are tremendous in number in proportion to this fellow’s ability to take it. The engrams are too much for him and he gets swamped. What happens then is that "I" just eventually disappears from view.

Now, your job in trying to get a person to move on the track is not just a job of getting the person to move out of some holders. You have got to pick up enough attention units by breaking locks, and generally restoring this person by running pleasure moments and so on, so that "I" gets strong enough- to run on this charged track. That is the mechanical aspect of trying to get a person to move on the time track.

When you run out circuitry engrams you are going to be running down a chain of engrams; when you run down a stuck- on- the- track engram you are running down a chain of engrams. Ordinarily you have to go down the chain and find the bottom one on the chain. When you get down to the bottom of the chain, make sure you are at the bottom, after you have reduced the engram, and then run it all the way out. Don’t run down a chain of words and get to the bottom of the chain and run the somatic that is on those words, and then walk off and leave it. You run the whole engram at the bottom of the chain. You then do not need to walk back up this chain engram by engram. You wouldn’t be able to do it and you would get into trouble if you did, because when you start up to the next engram above that it has usually got something on another lower chain. Be content to get to the bottom of this particular chain of engrams and to run out all of the bottom engram on that chain.

The fact that a person is not in his own valence and you can’t get him in his own valence at that time is no excuse not to reduce this engram. You reduce the bottom engram on the chain in any event. As you start getting down to it, you reduce engrams enough so that you can go earlier until you are at the bottom of the chain, and then you reduce the whole engram, not just a part of it. Then you make sure it was the basic on this chain. l If the file clerk is working, ask it again. And if the file clerk isn’t working just try to get the person back a little bit earlier. Get the bottom one off the chain.

All the above factors are intimately associated with Standard Procedure. This is Standard Procedure. These are some expanded points in Standard Procedure to make it even more standard.