Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (2 page)

The engram and only the engram causes aberration and psycho-somatic illness.

Dianetic therapy may be briefly stated. Dianetics deletes all the pain from a lifetime.

When this pain is erased in the engram bank and refiled as memory and experience in the memory banks, all aberrations and psycho-somatic illnesses vanish, the dynamics are entirely rehabilitated and the physical and mental being regenerate.

Dianetics leaves an individual full memory but without pain. Exhaustive tests have demonstrated that hidden pain is not a necessity but is invariably and always a liability to the health, skill, happiness and survival potential of the individual. It has no survival value.

The method which is used to refile pain is another discovery. Man has unknowingly possessed another process of remembering of which he has not been cognizant. Here and there a few have known about it and used it without realizing what they did or that they did 3

something which Man as a whole did not know could be done. This process is returning.

Wide awake and without drugs an individual can return to any period of his entire life providing his passage is not blocked by engrams. Dianetics developed techniques for circumventing these blocks and reducing them from the status of Powerful Unknown to useful memory.

The technique of therapy is done in what is called a dianetic reverie. The individual undergoing this process sits or lies in a quiet room accompanied by a friend or professional therapist who acts as auditor. The auditor directs the attention of the patient to the patient’s self and then begins to place the patient in various periods of the patient’s life merely by telling him to go there rather than remember.

All therapy is done, not by remembering or associating, but by travel on the time track.

Every human being has a time track. It begins with life and it ends with death. It is a sequence of events complete from portal to portal as recorded.

The conscious mind, in dianetics, is called by the somewhat more precise term of analytical mind. The analytical mind consists of the “I” (the center of awareness), all computational ability of the individual, and the standard memory banks which are filled with all past perceptions of the individual, awake or normally asleep (all material which is not engramic). No data are missing from these standard banks, all are there, barring physical organic defects, in full motion, color, sound, tactile, smell and all other senses. The “I” may not be able to reach his standard banks because of reactive data which bar portions of the standard banks from the view of “I.”

Cleared, “I” is able to reach all moments of his lifetime without exertion or discomfort and perceive all he has ever sensed, recalling them in full motion, color, sound, tone and other senses. The completeness and profusion of data in the standard banks is a discovery of dianetics, and the significance of such recalls is yet another discovery.

The auditor directs the travel of “I” along the patient’s time track. The patient knows everything which is taking place, is in full control of himself, and is able to bring himself to the present whenever he likes. No hypnotism or other means are used. Man may not have known he could do this but it is simple.

The auditor, with precision methods, recovers data from the earliest “unconscious”

moments of the patient’s life, such “unconsciousness” being understood to be caused by shock or pain, not mere unawareness. The patient thus contacts the cellular level engrams. Returned to them and progressed through them by the auditor, the patient re-experiences these moments a few times, when they are then erased and refiled automatically as standard memory. So far as the auditor and the patient can discover, the entire incident has now vanished and does not exist. If they searched carefully in the standard banks they would find it again but refiled as

“Once aberrative, do not permit as such into computer.” Late areas of “unconsciousness” are impenetrable until early ones are erased.

The amount of discomfort experienced by the patient is minor. He is repelled mainly by engramic commands which variously dictate emotion and reaction.

In a release, the case is not progressed to the point of complete recall. In a clear, fill memory exists throughout the lifetime, with the additional bonus that he has photographic recall in color, motion, sound, etc., as well as optimum computational ability.

The psycho-somatic illnesses of the release are reduced, ordinarily, to a level where they do not thereafter trouble him. In a clear, psycho-somatic illness has become non-existent and will not return since its actual source is nullified permanently.

The dianetic release is comparable to a current normal or above. The dianetic clear is to a current normal individual as the current normal is to the severely insane.

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Dianetics elucidates various problems with its many discoveries, its axioms, its organization and its technique. In the progress of its development many astonishing data were thrust upon it, for when one deals with natural laws and measurable actualities which produce specific and invariable results, one must accept what Nature holds, not what is pleasing or desired.

When one deals with facts rather than theories and gazes for the first time upon the mechanisms of human action several things confound him, much as the flutterings of the heart did

Harvey or the actions of yeasts did Pasteur. The blood did not circulate because Harvey said it could nor yet because he said it did. It circulated and had been circulating for eons; Harvey was clever and observant enough to find it; and this was much the case with Pasteur and other explorers of the hitherto unknown or unconfirmed. In dianetics the fact that the analytical mind was inherently perfect and remained structurally capable of restoration to full operation was not the least of the data found.

That man was good, as established by exacting research, was no great surprise, but that an unaberrated individual was vigorously repelled by evil and yet gained enormous strength was astonishing since aberration had been so long incorrectly supposed to be the root of strength and ambition according to authorities since the time of Plato.

That a man contained a mechanism which recorded with diabolical accuracy when the man was observably and by all presumable tests “unconscious” was newsworthy and surprising. To the layman the relationship of prenatal life to mental function has not entirely been disregarded since for centuries beyond count people were concerned with “prenatal influence.” To the psychiatrist, the psychologist and psycho-analyst, prenatal memory had long been an accepted fact since “memories of the womb” were agreed to influence the adult mind.

But the prenatal aspect of the mind came as an entire surprise to dianetics, an unwanted and at the time unwelcome observation.

Despite existing beliefs -- which are not scientific facts -- that the foetus had memory, the psychiatrist and other workers believed as well that memory could not exist in a human being until myelin sheathing was formed around the nerves. This was as confusing to dianetics as it was to psychiatry. After much work over some years the exact influence prenatal life had on the later mind was established by dianetics with accuracy. There will be those who, uninformed, will say that dianetics “accepts and believes in” prenatal memory.

Completely aside from the fact that an exact science does not “believe” but establishes and proves facts, dianetics emphatically does nor believe in “prenatal memory.” Dianetics had to invade cytology and biology and form many conclusions by research; it had to locate and establish both the reactive mind and the hidden engram banks never before known before it came upon “prenatal” problems. It had been discovered that the engram recording was probably done on the cellular level, that the engram bank was contained in the cells. It was then discovered that the cells, reproducing from one generation to the next, within the organism, apparently carried with them their own memory banks. The cells are the first echelon of structure, the basic building blocks. They built the analytical mind. They operate, as the whip, the reactive mind. Where one has human cells, one has potential engrams. Human cells begin with the zygote, proceed in development with the embryo, become the foetus and finally the infant.

Each stage of this growth is capable of reaction. Each stage in the growth of the colony of cells finds them fully cells, capable of recording engrams. In dianetics “prenatal memory” is not considered since the standard banks which will someday serve the completed analyzer in the infant, child and man are not themselves complete. There is neither “memory” or

“experience” before the nerves are sheathed as far as dianetic therapy is concerned. But dianetic therapy is concerned with engrams, not memories, with recordings, not experience, and 5

wherever there are human cells, engrams are demonstrably possible and, when physical pain was present, engrams can be demonstrated to have been created.

The engram is a recording like the ripples in the groove of a phonograph record: it is a complete recording of everything which occurred during the period of pain. Dianetics can locate, with its techniques, any engram which the cells have hidden, and in therapy the patient will often discover himself to be upon the prenatal cellular time track. There he will locate engrams and he goes there only because engrams exist there.

Birth is an engram and is recovered by dianetics as a recording, not as a memory. By return and the cellular extension of the time track, zygote pain storage can be and is recovered.

It is not memory. It impinged upon the analytical mind and it obstructed the standard banks where memory is stored. This is a very great difference from prenatal memory. Dianetics recovers prenatal engrams and finds them responsible for much aberration and discovers that any longing for the womb is not present in any patient but that engrams sometimes dictate a return to it, as in some regressive psychoses which then attempt to remake the body into a foetus.

This matter of prenatal life is discussed here at length in this synopsis to give the reader a perspective on the subject. We are dealing here with an exact science, precision axioms and new skills of application. By them we gain a command over aberration and psycho-somatic ills and with them we take an evolutionary step in the development of Man which places him yet another stage above his distant cousins of the animal kingdom.

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INTRODUCTION

The progress of Mankind from the period of savagery to the present is marked with milestones. Conventional history books would have you believe that these milestones are battle monuments or the tombs of great men. Yet there are more important markers of Man’s progress -- and these are New Ideas. Whenever a New Idea has been created, Man’s chances for survival have been improved and the arduousness of his journey away from animalhood is lessened.

There have been numerous New Ideas in the past. To name a few of the more obvious, consider the invention of the wheel, the control of fire, the development of mathematics or even the newest one -- the discovery of the means of atomic fission. Every one of these ideas has altered the progress of Mankind -- sometimes temporarily for the worse, but ultimately for Man’s betterment.

In my opinion DIANETICS is worthy of being called a New Idea, and is destined to take its place alongside of these other milestones of progress. It might even be considered to be more important than any of these, for it is a science which for the first time gives us an understanding of the tool with which these other inventions were created -- the human mind.

In the creation of any New Idea, there is one step which is highly important. It is so obvious as to be frequently overlooked. This step, the sine qua non of any idea, consists in examining the basic assumptions of the subject and determining whether or not they need to be revised. The creator of a New Idea asks, “What would happen if I assume that this belief which everyone has had for centuries isn’t necessarily so?”

The primitive man who invented the wheel did just that. His fellows assumed that, when one wanted to transport an object, it had to be carried or dragged along the ground. The inventor changed the assumption -- and the wheel was born.

Again, so long as man assumed that fire was dangerous and should be avoided, he made no attempt to control it. When some brave soul re-examined this assumption and decided that fire, although it entailed some hazards, might offer certain advantages to the dwellers in his cave, he took the first step toward the creation of the science of chemistry and nuclear physics.

So it is with DIANETICS. In it there has been a reexamination and a re-evaluation of numerous basic assumptions regarding the functioning of the human mind.

The originator has had both the temerity and the wisdom to refuse to accept all of the old assumptions.

For example, we have all assumed that when a person is unconscious, he is unconscious -- that’s all there is to it. The originator of dianetics was critical of that assumption and, as a result, was able to demonstrate that the mind is never totally unconscious. The assumption that nobody can remember anything which happened to him before the age of three or four also came in for consideration -- and the result of these and other reassessments was DIANETICS.

Yes, basic assumptions are important. They are especially important when they get such a strangle-hold on our ways of thinking that we can’t get away from them. For hundreds of years it was assumed that the sun and the planets revolved around the earth; it was not until the assumption was tested and found to be faulty that modern astronomy was able to develop.

For hundreds of years a certain group of philosophers and religionists have assumed that Man is fundamentally evil; now comes DIANETICS to test this assumption. It will be highly interesting to see if there will be any change in our interpersonal relationships as a result of a new, different basic assumption.

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The basic assumption is also a long-lived brute, hard to kill. Perhaps one reason for his hardiness is that he feeds upon Authority. There is a vast difference between Authority and an authority. An authority might be described as a man who propounds a basic assumption which is valid for his time and applicable to the state of knowledge at the time it was propounded and has had his ideas accepted. No doubt this man would not be at all averse to altering his assumptions if a change in knowledge warranted it. His protagonists and disciples don’t seem to act this way, however; before very long they begin to treat his idea as if it were some sort of divine revelation -- and the man now becomes an Authority.