TONE SCALES

A lecture given on 27 November 1950

Affinity, Reality and Communication in Processing

This is the scale of affinity. Affinity can be represented by a vertical line, with gradations of tone descending from tone 3 to tone 0. Right above tone 2 we have indifference. Below indifference is boredom. Below that, resentment expressed. Below resentment expressed we have anger. Below anger, which is just getting to the lower band of tone 1, we get unexpressed resentment. Below unexpressed resentment we get fear. Below that is grief, and finally we run into apathy. And of course at the bottom of the tone scale, at 0, is death. This is the emotional tone scale. It begins just above death with apathy, then grief, then fear, then unexpressed resentment, then anger, then expressed resentment, then boredom and then indifference, above which is relief, and then above that is tone 3, which is happiness. That is the tone scale on the affinity line.

Sometimes it is necessary to unburden a case of the lighter emotions before one gets to the tougher ones. Sometimes it is necessary to hit a tough one before you can start getting the lighter ones.

Occasionally a person is caught on the track someplace in an apathy engram that says "It’s just no use." An inaccessible case is not just somebody who is walking around in circles screaming a dramatization; you can often get that person to stop. But try and work on somebody who is solidly in an apathy engram. If you try to get him to talk or do anything, all you get is "It’s no use"; he is just dead. It is very hard to get any response out of him. Apathy is a very bad type of engram. It’s worse than grief.

As you go lower on this scale, engrams get worse and worse. An anger engram can be more easily reached than an unexpressed- resentment engram —that is, a covert- hostility engram— but these are still not hard to reach.

However, below that we get fear, then grief and then apathy, which is the hardest one to reach.

Each of these also has an order of magnitude; for instance, a big fear lock or secondary engram would be terror. Terror is not arranged elsewhere up or down on the scale; it is simply a greater magnitude of fear. Grief starts in by merely being sorrow or sadness and then in greater magnitude becomes grief. In apathy the fellow just has a feeling that he doesn’t care what happens next; that gets up to "My God, he’s dead!" which is just a higher magnitude.

Very often shame acts as a suppressor to grief, just as apathy does. Shame belongs just below grief and is a special kind of self- negating apathy. It is computational.

So there is the tone scale. We start to work on a person on an emotional line and we run into this factor immediately: The mores of this Anglo- Saxon society are built out of the old Teutonic suppression- of- emotion codes. I don’t know why that is; they could have been built out of the Latin codes.

Americans are just sufficiently divorced from the English to be not quite as suppressed. Take a look at how the English handle emotion: "It’s just not gentlemanly, you know, to carry on that way." Then look at what Americans do to little boys: The man in the society is supposed to have an emotional suppression. He is supposed to be able to control himself. This is a major aberration in the society. "Little boys don’t cry," "You mustn’t cry," "You mustn’t feel that," "I can’t stand this emotion," "You mustn’t be so emotional"— this is all suppression of emotion. It is even up to the point where if a person is irrational, people say, "Well, he’s talking emotionally," not "He’s not talking rationally." Actually, when we look at the scale that goes on up the line to clear, and at our tone scale, looking it over in real life, we find out very easily that a person cannot be rational without being emotional.

Here is a society, then, which suppresses emotion. Look in any society for that thing which is most suppressed and you are looking for that thing which you will most have to unsuppress in order to get therapy done.

For instance, if wearing hats was the most suppressed thing in the society of the Bunglejulems and you went in there as an auditor to do something, you would have to make up and process a scale about wearing hats; that would be the thing.

In this society, emotion has been mixed up with sex, enjoyment, and so forth, and according to statement, these things have a certain evilness. So emotion is all bound up with the second dynamic and is extremely suppressed. The whole society seems to have combined into a belief that if it just heavily suppresses the second dynamic, all will be well and happy. But there is no society in existence which would continue well without treating its progeny well.

The most suppressed thing in this society is emotion. There is even a social aberration that a person cannot be emotional and rational, whereas an examination demonstrates completely that as someone comes up the tone scale he cannot have a fluidity of emotions or be emotional unless he is at the same time rational. For instance, the arts are best appreciated by rational people.

There is another aberration in the society which is closely related to this. People say, "Oh, well, that person is so coldly rational, he is so coldly logical, that of course he couldn’t be expected to be emotional." That is merely another aberration— the idea that because people are logical, they are cold. I don’t know where this got picked up, unless it was in the dark forests of Germany; it was some very dank place.

But emotion assumes a great deal of importance in this society, and it has a lot of suppressors on it. Therefore, you will probably be working with this one more than with reality and communication. In fact, emotion is so suppressed in this society that even up to very recently, in Dianetics itself, we had overlooked that communication has a special quality all by itself which is not necessarily joined up with emotion at all, and that reality has a special quality which is not necessarily joined up with emotion. Those are two different things and two different "Q" quantities which can be suppressed. How they come off a case and what they release off a case, you can witness.

This society is so crazy on the subject of emotion that we haven’t even got a special word for this Q quantity that has to do with reality or the one which has to do with communication. Here is two- thirds of the rationale of life and we haven’t even got a label for it! So we will take these up as two specialized things.

Now, looking down the scale for emotion on a person, you’d try to get some grief, you’d try to get some shame and you’d try to get some apathy, and you will spring locks on this subject.

"When was the last time you felt apathetic?" "Oh, well, I don’t know— that was when my mother- in- law came to visit me." "Okay. By the way, did your grandmother ever come to visit the house?" "Oh, yes." "Well, did anybody feel apathetic then?" "Yes, my father used to all the time— say, that’s right! My father used to go all to pieces when my grandmother came; that was his mother- in- law! Ha! Well, to heck with that."

We have all of a sudden gotten a whole chain up. This can be done rapidly too. I have done it a half- dozen times, giving Straightwire by long- distance phone call with somebody hanging at the other end some thousands of miles away saying he was going to commit suicide or do something. One of them was most interesting: he had just decided that he was going to murder his wife but he thought he had better call me first!

The next scale is the reality scale.

In this society we have an agreed- upon reality. Agreement and reality can be considered synonymous. When we agree upon something it becomes a reality. If we have not agreed upon that it is not a reality. That is very true in the society and it is quite workable.

Additionally, reality is part of the computation of an individual. Communication, affinity and reality combined demand this thing called computation and thinking, but it is heavier over on the reality side than anywhere else.

I have not yet completely refined what the reality scale is. I have got it broken down to its general form, but it is going to be refined further in the very near future. Similarly with communication, I haven’t gotten it completely formed as to its scale. However, we have the emotion scale fairly well refined.

At the top of the scale just above 3, we get agreement with reason. This is selective agreement— not just willy- nilly agreement, but actual agreement, with reason. When you have thought something over clearly— not aberratedly— and you agree with the person, or you have reasons why you don’t agree and it is not just an instinctive or a critical type of disagreement, that agreement with reason is the top level.

Around 2, boredom, we start to get indecision on the reality scale. Below 2, into the 1 band, we get disagreement, which compares with anger on the emotional scale. And down near the bottom of the tone scale, apathy, we get unresponsive on the reality scale. For instance, a truck comes rolling down the street— it’s a reality— and the person stands there and gets run over. He is at unresponsive on the reality scale. He does not agree with the reality of this truck, so he dies.

This also happens in dramatizations. For instance, the husband won’t work and he consistently drinks. His wife tells him she is going to leave him because she has to do something on her own and so forth, and he says, "Oh, well, she won’t do that anyhow, because actually I am just a put- upon character, and I have perfect justification for doing all of this." He is not looking at the reality of the fact that she isn’t eating; that is the reality of it. She is going to leave him; that’s the reality. But he says, "Oh no, there are ninety- five reasons, and I’m over here in the next pasture about this whole thing anyway," and then all of a sudden she is gone. "How could she do this to me?" he asks— completely failing to look at the reality of the facts. He is probably at covert resentment on the affinity scale. He has not looked at any reality on it; he is not responding to the reality but is arguing with it.

Now, let’s take him a little further down the scale into an unresponsive bracket. His wife says to him, "I am going to leave you, dear, because . . ." and so on. He just doesn’t think about it. It has no reality to him that she would leave him. He is at the bottom of the scale on reality. His emotional tone about it would probably, but only incidentally, be apathetic. He doesn’t have any reality about what is going on around him.

The person who walks into a room and sees somebody there when nobody is there, of course, is suffering from both a communication difficulty and a reality difficulty. That this person is unable to differentiate computationally the fact that there couldn’t be anybody in that room, and accepts as a fact that there is somebody there, says right away that there is something very wrong with this person’s reality.

The inability to differentiate between imagination and reality can be found as well on this scale. That’s dub- in. For instance, someone can be actually one hundred percent imagination all the way up and down the track. His reality level is definitely in a low band when he has cut in imagination for reality. He is disagreeing with the reality of existence by dubbing in something else for it. He is down around 1 on the reality level. This is how bad a dub- in case is. Look along the line and you will find out that on the affinity scale he is down around covert resentment, ordinarily. He is well below anger. You very seldom find dub- in cases getting angry. They seethe behind the scenes. They get very upset one way or the other but they don’t come out with it. Reaching for locks on this scale you would be looking for moments when people disagreed

with this person: disagreements with his reality, attempts to foist off another reality, and dramatizations of people around him. You are looking for chronic phrases like "This is not true," "You don’t know this," "That’s false." You are trying to find people who, for instance, constantly said to the child "Oh, well, that’s not true. It’s just your imagination."

Then there is the communication line. This is communication as a tone scale.

On communication, we find that around 3 and above on the scale the person is communicative. This person will talk when he should talk and be quiet when he should be quiet, according to the reasonableness of the situation. This is not because somebody else is oppressing him but is according to his understanding of the reasonableness of the situation. He is able to communicate to and be communicated with. Communication is a two- way affair. The person who can communicate all sorts of things to all sorts of people but nobody can ever get any of his attention to communicate anything to him shows a fifty percent shut- off line.

In the boredom range of the tone scale, we start to get secretive— selectively cut- out communication. This person will sometimes be so secretive that he will occlude data which is coming in. He won’t receive it. He will select it out as it comes in.

This is useful to know in trying to break locks. For example, you could say, "Did you ever have any trouble talking to your mother?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact, I used to have an awful lot of trouble talking to my mother."

"Did she ever say ‘Shut up’ to you?"

"No, she never said ‘Shut up. ’ She used to say ‘Be quiet. ’ She used to say ‘Don’t talk in company, ’ and ‘Don’t talk here. ’ Oh yes, she used to say ‘Don’t talk’; that’s what she used to say."

"All right, let’s remember a specific moment when she said ‘Don’t talk." ’ Suddenly he is able to pull one into view and you get a lock and are able to restore an attention unit or two to "I."

Dub- in, on the reality scale, is down around the covert hostility band. At this point on communication we get prevarication. Life lies to this person because of his selection. What he observes actually lies to him. He doesn’t get the straight communication in; furthermore, when he puts it out he is very apt to lie. He distorts what actually happens. There is prevarication and general distortion of communication.

The communication scale can be compared with either the affinity scale or the reality scale, but communication is very special. There is a special type of unit which is not an emotional unit that gets tied up when the communication scale gets broken down. This unit, when released by Straightwire, is restored to "I."

As you are processing a person, you should bring them up the tone scale. They pass through, on their whole tone and general tone, many manifestations of the tone scale. If you have a preclear whom you cannot get up to a point where he is mad at anybody, you have somebody who has not passed through the first tone band, and if he has not passed through the first tone band he is still below it no matter what he says.

For instance, Mama used to beat him up but he keeps saying "Well, Mama had her reasons. There’s no reason to be upset about that," or "Why should I be upset?" This person is still below 1. There is no use in your trying to prime this person so that he will get angry. You are not just trying to make him get angry. You have got to pick up enough locks and secondary engrams out of this person to bring him up tone generally.

If you have a dub- in case who still dubs in after you have worked on him for quite a while, you simply have not brought him up to a point yet where he can communicate with himself. Furthermore, on the affinity scale he has not passed through anger yet, and over on the reality scale he hasn’t passed through disagreement. He has not disagreed with what has been foisted off on him. He hasn’t gotten angry.

Below that level there are undoubtedly many other steps, but the language is pauperized on these scales. Communication has never been considered before, neither have the aspects of reality. There is not even a good definition of what reality is in the English language. In fact, in grammar, we are not supposed to qualify, modify or limit the word real.

Actuality demonstrates that nothing is more than relatively real. Well, nothing expresses it more closely than the paucity of stops on this communication line, but I think it is possible that if we search thoroughly we can find the rest of the stops on this line. The general shape of it goes from communicative, through secretive to prevarication and distortion, down to unresponsive, then doesn’t put out, doesn’t receive (the catatonic schizophrenic), and finally, a dead man.

You are trying to break up locks— times when this person was unable to understand other people and when other people couldn’t understand this person. This is chronic with small children in this society. They have a very difficult time trying to make grown- ups listen to them and understand them. Grown- ups are very impatient with them and they are constantly having their communication chopped off. Their communication is being severed continually.

As you start picking up these locks, you will find out that there are usually thousands of them on a case, because the society is very good at interrupting communication. However, I don’t think at this time that there is a lot of circuitry existing about communication and reality, because people haven’t specialized on these things in the society. Therefore, you can reach these locks and bypass circuits. For instance, circuits in the society such as "You shouldn’t permit yourself to get emotional," or "You mustn’t be emotional," are on the affinity line, and so we get the emotions very badly encysted on a case with this type of circuitry.

But there is relatively little circuitry that interrupts communication and reality. There are sometimes circuits on the basis of "You should not tell," "Nothing is real to you," "You are disagreeing," "You are so disagreeable," or "You are always disagreeing with everything," but on an overall average through the society, these circuits on the communication and reality line do not have the crushing force of the circuits on the affinity line. That may not be a very well qualified statement, and it may not be borne out on further examination, but that is the way it appears to me at this stage of the development of this situation. I will tell you though that these locks are easier to reach, ordinarily, than emotion locks.

By bringing up a person’s tone on communication, you bring up his tone on reality and emotion. By bringing up a person’s tone on reality, you bring it up on communication and emotion. These are the other two points of the triangle. You can start to look for these communication breaks and you will find real meat here. It gives you a lot more to look for in a case.

There are two ways of cutting communication: inhibition and compulsion. Under inhibition we have those statements and engrams and locks which inhibit speech and those which inhibit hearing.

Communication is perception. These perception lines that come through to "I" are communication lines with which a person communicates with the real world. Perception is communication. Communication is not just talking to somebody; that is a combined, specially packaged perception that is handed out and received back. So these things are the meat and core of communication.

We have inhibition of seeing, inhibition of hearing, feeling, smelling, motion, and so on down the line. These things are relatively light. There is inhibition of heat and cold as well— inhibition of thermal: "Oh, you never feel the cold." But these are very easy to reach as locks.

You can ask, "Has anybody ever said to you that you never heard what they said?" That is slightly difficult at first, because it is a shut- off to some degree, but once you get the preclear’s mind back down the track, he will say, "Oh yes, of course, that’s my wife! And she also says ‘You never pay any attention to me." ’ This would cause a complete shut- off.

For speech there are circuits like "Don’t talk to me," or "You mustn’t talk to people." The circuit "Don’t repeat this" is an interesting one. If you try to use repeater technique on a person and it doesn’t work, just have him say "Don’t repeat this" a few times and you will generally wind him up someplace on the track.

So there is inhibition of seeing and hearing and so on—" You can’t see," "You can’t hear," "You can’t feel," "You can’t smell," and so on. This means that a person’s communication system to the real world has been inhibited by people’s statements that combine up to this meaning, and there are lots of variations. Knowing this gives you a lot more Straightwire material to work with on your preclear

This society is very good at interrupting communication. They’re "polite" about it too. You hear it all the time—" Shut up!"

Then there is the compulsion line. It is strange that a "You’ve got to listen" circuit would not improve a person’s communication. However, get too much "You’ve got to listen" on the case and he will finally slide on down the tone scale into the apathy range or, at best, into the prevarication range on the communication scale. Every dub- in has got a lot of these compulsion circuits: "You’ve got to listen," "You’ve got to hear it," "You’ve got to talk," "You’ve got to communicate." Finally the "I" will say, "This stuff just keeps coming in all the time. Draw the shade."

If there is an enormous amount of control circuitry on the case, "I" says, "Well, I know how I’ll comply with these engrams; I will simply dub in a whole imaginary reality. I won’t have anything to do with this reality over here; that’s dangerous to have. I will just build a world," and he does.

There is, then, a duality: the compulsions of speech, hearing, seeing, feeling, smelling, thermal, and so on— the turned- too- full- ons which cut the communication line— and the shut- offs of the same things on the inhibition scale.

A person has concourse with reality up to a certain point, until reality hurts him too much, and then in order to keep reality from coming through to him too much he will chop the communication line and move down the reality band. He cuts the line outgoing and incoming. So anything which is trying to press communication upon him too solidly he will resist, and he will cut the line on it himself.

So, there is a lot of Straightwire material all the way across a case.

Take schoolrooms and the preclear’s teachers, for instance. We finally get him to remembering teachers and we get him to remembering shut- offs and compulsions like "You mustn’t whisper," and "Now, you’ve got to stand up here in front of the class and talk." These are locks on early communication lines.

The case that you should eschew early in your auditing career is a case on which the hypnotist advances with unwarranted confidence— the stutterer. Interruption of communication can be taken to a point where a person can’t get anything out; he is down there in an apathy tone, and the highest he will be able to get will be into the dub- in band. Don’t look at stuttering as being an easy target.

Stuttering can be interrupted computationally on statements such as "You can’t talk straight," "You can’t say anything about it," and so on, but it is not so much that as it is an interruption of communication, and it depresses a person on the tone scale. Or sometimes a persona emotions have been depressed down to a very low band and have carried communication down as well. A stutterer’s sense of reality is not normally very good.

Stuttering is merely a physiological manifestation of a suppressed communication tone scale. This person has been told both to talk and not to talk. In order for those statements to have any real effect upon him, he must have been depressed clear on down below anger on the emotional ledger, and on the reality side he must have been pushed down at least into the area of distortion. Here you have a case which is well down the bank reactively, and you are going to have to rehabilitate this case considerably to get the case progressing. You start rehabilitating the case by knocking out locks and secondary engrams.

Any extremely solid interruption of speech, hearing, sight, feeling and so on would pen up some of the units of "I." There need be no emotional connotation with this at all. There normally is, but if you could pen any one of these up with a sudden shock you would have a secondary engram. Whether it is defined as a lock or an engram merely depends upon the force of its impact.

Supposing a boy has done fine with his father up to the age of six. He has always talked to his father and his father has talked to him, and everything has gone along well between them up to the age of six. Then one particular day Papa’s store burns down or something else happens, and Papa is in very, very bad shape and highly restimulated. The little boy comes in and says to his papa, "How are you?" and for the first time in his life receives the answer "Shut up and get the hell out of here!" There is immediate turmoil there, and that is a secondary engram— because if Papa said it to the little boy, he had probably said it once or twice to Mama way back in the prenatal period as well; there is usually an earlier engram on it. That would produce a marked aberrative effect on the child. You can contact these things and sort them out.

On the reality level, a person who is told continually "It’s all in your imagination" or "Its only your imagination" is having his reality denied consistently. Those are usually just locks. But suppose we get a child into a situation where he has told a story which he knows to be true and he is forced to say that it is false. The child has been communicating up to this point, but all of a sudden his reality is tackled by somebody fairly close to him who suddenly turns on him and makes him admit that it is imagination. There is a reality secondary engram.

The real secondary engrams, the masterpieces that interrupt people’s lives considerably, have all three interruptions: communication, reality and emotion. There is a sudden shock, the loss of an ally, for instance, and somebody says, "Don’t cry," causing emotional suppression on it; "Don’t look at him there in the coffin, come away"— communication interruption; "Well, just pretend that it never happened"— suppression of the reality of it. That would make a potent secondary engram which would then, itself, begin to pile up many locks.

When any one of these secondary engrams is run there will normally be lying under it, much earlier on the track, the physical pain incident for which it depends for its force. If we run the grief engram and get some grief charge off the thing we can send the person back to the physical pain engram and run that out.

The preclear’s position all across the board on the tone scale is predicted from his ability to communicate, his concept of reality and his emotional suppression and so on. Whether or not you get these things up depends upon the active circuitry of the case. If there is a lot of circuitry on the case, you have got to handle that before other things can be gotten up in their turn. The main thing you are trying to do is raise this person’s position on the tone scale. If a person seems to have a lot of grief on the case and you can get that grief off, the other two points of the triangle are going to rise correspondingly because you are getting charge off the case.

In tackling these so- called tough cases, make an estimate of their position on the tone scale and conduct yourself accordingly. If you realize that this case is supercharged with grief and with breaks in communication and reality, then you know that you have to get this material off the case, and that it isn’t just a statement back down the engram bank someplace, "I’m outside myself," that keeps this person exteriorized on the track, or "You’re always lying" that keeps the person dubbing in. There is mechanical suppression on the tone scale, and you had better unburden and take some of the charge off this case. The way you take it off is by breaking the locks on affinity, communication and reality and by trying to run secondary engrams, particularly those of grief and apathy. If you cannot get those engrams off, it is because the person is under the suppression of circuitry, so you try to knock out the circuitry and get going on it that way.

If a person cannot move on the track and you cannot easily start him moving, it immediately tells you that you have a supercharged case.

These points do not change Standard Procedure. They draw it in more closely. There have been two or three things pointed up and it has been refined, so that you, even more mechanistically, can look at a case and estimate it and know where to look on it, so that cases will be easier to run, and so that we won’t see a lot of circuitry cases walking around.

It has happened that somebody said, "Well, that case is pianola," but when I took a look, the case was running solid dub- in, with lots of circuitry, underneath of which was tremendous suppression and an enormous quantity of secondary engrams. This person had not run a piece of reality from one end of his processing to the other! There is no point in the auditor continuing to patty- cake with such a case, saying "The case is just going fine." The case won’t go fine! That case will rise just a little bit, but this isn’t a pianola case. A real pianola case is one which will run out an engram in the basic area with all twenty- six perceptics.

An auditor, in the first few hours of processing, should put the case into the kind of shape that it ought to be in to run out these basic engrams in the preclear’s own valence, and then begin the erasure on the case. Let’s start making some clears!