Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (20 page)

He recovers his gun. He begins to leave the scene. He feels a great necessity to recoup his own self-esteem and his tone comes to 3.2. He walks away and reaches a safe area. Suddenly it occurs to him that he can borrow a friend’s Mauser. He begins to make plans to get that bear.

His enthusiasm mounts. But, completely aside from the engram received when the bear knocked him out, he acts on his experience. Three days later he kills the bear and his tone rises to 4.0 for the space of contemplation and telling the tale and then his mind occupies itself with new matters.

Life is much more complicated than the business of killing grizzlies, usually a lot less dramatic but always full of situations which cause a fluctuation of the suppressor. The gaining of all pleasurable goals -- a bear killed, a woman kissed, a seat in the front row at the opera, a friend won, an apple stolen -- are sweeps through various levels of tone. And the individual is generally carrying on three or three thousand computations at once and there are thirty or thirty thousand variables in his computations. Too many unknowns, too many entrances of “didn’t know the gun was loaded” factors, all these can throw the analyzer from a direct alignment into the scattered dispersal of non-function. The analyzer can be considered to cut out when Tone 2.0 is reached. From 2.5 down the computations it makes are not very rational -- too many unknowns, too many unexpected factors, too many discoveries of miscalculations.

This is living on a “clear” basis. When our hunter was hit by the bear he received an engram. That engram, when it keyed-in, would give him a fear, an apathy attitude, in the presence of certain factors: every perceptic present -- the smell of that ground, twigs, bear-breath, etc. But he killed the bear. The chances of that engram keying-in are remote. Not because he killed the bear but because he was, after all, a grown man. And, if a clear, he could have thought back and cleared the whole thing himself.

This is a complete cycle of emotion. Enthusiasm and high pleasure are at the extreme top. Fear and paralysis are at the bottom. Feigned death, in Man, is very close to the actual thing on the tone scale. It is a valid mechanism. But it is complete apathy.

So long as the analyzer is operating, the receipt of an engram is impossible. Everything files in the standard banks. As soon as the border 2.0 is passed on the way down,

“unconsciousness” can be judged to have set in and anything registered, in company with pain or painful emotion, is an engram. This is not a shift of definition. The analyzer cuts out, with surgical anaesthetic, at 2.0. The anaesthetic may depress the level of awareness further. Pain may depress it even more. But depressing the level of awareness is not necessarily depressing emotion.

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How much conceived danger or sympathy is present in the environment? This is what depresses the tone scale. There can be a reactive engram which contains a Tone 4.0 or one that contains a 1.0 or another that contains a 0.1. This is not, then, quite two-dimensional, this emotion.

The level of depth of consciousness can be affected by painful emotion, poisons or other things which depress awareness. After that it is all engram and the engrams have their own tone scale which runs from 4.0 down to 0.1.

It can be seen now that two things are at work. First is the state of physical being. It is this which tunes down the analyzer. Then there is the mental state of being.

This is what tunes down the emotional tone scale.

But remember that in engrams there is another factor present: valence. Once its own analyzer is out the body will assume the evaluation or emotional condition of any other analyzer present. Here we have affinity at work in earnest. “Unconscious” in the presence of other beings, an individual picks up a valence for every other being present. Some of these valences are incidental. He will pick first that valence which is most sympathetic as a desirable future friend (or some similar person). And he will pick that valence which is the top valence (highest survival, the boss, the winner) for his dramatization. He will also take the valence of the winning entity (winning over himself or others) for emotional tone. If the winning valence is also the sympathetic valence, he has an engram which can be utilized to its fullest extent.

Let us make this an example: a man is under nitrous oxide (the most vicious anaesthetic ever invented as it is actually not anaesthetic but a hypnotic) undergoing exodontistry. As usual everybody present around the “unconscious” patient chatters and yaps about the patient, the weather, the most popular movie star, or baseball. The exodontist is a tough character, bossy to the nurse, apt to be angry about trifles; he is also very sympathetic toward the patient. The nurse is a blue-eyed blonde who is sexually aberrated. The patient, actually in agony, receiving an engram amongst engrams which may ruin his life (terrible stuff, nitrous oxide; really hands out a fancy engram as any dianeticist can attest) is unanalytical. Everything said to him or around him is taken literally. He takes the valence of the exodontist as both the top valence present and the sympathetic valence. But every phrase uttered is aberrative and will be interpreted by that happy little moron, the reactive mind, on the order of Simple Simon who was told he had to be careful how he stepped in the pies, so he stepped in them carefully.

These people may be talking about somebody else but every “I” or “he” or “you” uttered is engramic and will be applied to others and himself by the patient in the most literal sense. “He can’t remember anything” says the exodontist. All right, when the engram keys-in, this patient will have an occlusion on memory in greater or lesser degree. “He can’t see or feel it”: this means an occlusion on sight, pain and tactile. If the patient has his eyes watering in agony at the moment (though completely “under”) he may get actual bad vision as well as poor visual recall from this experience.

Now they put him in the hands of this blonde nurse to let him sleep off the drug and recover. She is an aberree amongst aberrees.

She knows patients do weird things when they are still “out” so she pumps him for information about his life. And she knows they are hypnotic (yes, she sure does) so she gives him some positive suggestions. Amusing herself. She says he’ll like her. That she’ll be good to him. And stay there now for the present.

So the poor patient, who has had two wisdom teeth, impacted, taken out, has a full anger-sympathy dramatization. The general tone he takes is the tone the exodontist showed to the others in the room. The exodontist was angry at the nurse. With his recalls all messed up, the patient a few years later meets a woman similar to this nurse. The nurse has given him compulsions toward her.

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The silly little moron, the reactive mind, sees in this entirely different person enough similarity to create an identity between the nurse and this new woman. So the patient divorces his wife and marries the pseudo-nurse.

Only now that he has married the pseudo-nurse the dental engram begins to key-in in earnest. Physically he gets ill: the two molars adjacent to where the wisdom teeth came out develop large cavities and begin to rot (circulation shut down, pain in the area but can’t be felt because there’s a pain recall shut-off). His memory goes to pieces. His recalls become worse.

He begins to develop eye trouble and a strange conjunctivitis. Further (because the dentist leaned on his chest and stomach with a sharp elbow from time to time) he has chest and stomach pains. The nitrous oxide hurt his lungs and this pain is also in chronic restimulation.

But most horrible: he believes that this pseudo-nurse will take care of him and he stops to some degree taking care of himself in any way; his energy dissipates; and analytically he knows it is all wrong and that he is not himself. For he is now fixed in the valence of the exodontist who is angry with this nurse and so he beats the pseudo-nurse because he senses that from her all evil flows. The girl he married is not and was not the nurse: she sounds something like her and is a blonde. She has her own engrams and reacts. She attempts suicide.

Then, one day, since this is one engram among many, the mental hospital gets our patient and the doctors there decide that all he needs is a good solid series of electric shocks to tear his brain up, and if that doesn’t work, a nice ice-pick into each eyeball after and during electric shock, the ice-pick sweeping a wide arc to tear the analytical mind to pieces. His wife agrees. Our patient can’t defend himself: he’s insane and the insane have no rights, you know.

Only the cavalry, in this one case, arrived in the form of dianetics and cleared the patient and the wife and they are happy today. This is an actual engram and an actual case history. It is a sympathy engram, pro-survival on the moronic reactive mind level.

This is to show the ebb and flow of emotion within this one engram. The physical being is out and in agony. The mental being is given a variety of emotional tones on a contagion principle. The actual emotional tone of the patient, his own, is beaten apathy; hence he can no longer “be himself.”

In passing it should be mentioned that only absolute silence, utter silence and tomb-like silence, should attend an operation or injury of any kind. There is nothing which can be said or given as a perceptic in any moment of “unconsciousness” which is beneficial to a patient.

Nothing! In the light of these researches and scientific findings (which can be proven in any other laboratory or group of people in very short order), speech or sound in the vicinity of an “unconscious” person should be punished criminally as, to anyone who knows these facts, such an act would be a willful effort to destroy the intellect or mental balance of an individual.

If the patient is complimented, as in hypnosis or during an injury or operation, a manic is formed which will give him temporary euphoria and eventually plunge him into the depressive stage of the cycle.

The golden rule could be altered to read: If you love your brother, keep your mouth shut when he is unconscious.

Emotion can be seen then to exist in two planes, the personal plane and the extra-valence plane. It is communicable in terms of identical thinking. Rage present when a man is

“unconscious” will give him a Tone 1 engram: it will contain rage. Apathy present in the vicinity of an “unconscious” person will give him a Tone 0 engram. Happiness present during an engram is not very aberrative but will give a Tone 4 engram. And so forth. In other words, the emotion of those present around an “unconscious” person is communicated into the person as part of his engram. Any mood can be so communicated.

In dramatizing an engram, the aberree always takes the winning valence and that valence is not, of course, himself. If only one other person is present and the other is talking in 80

terms of apathy, then the apathy is the tone value of the engram. When an apathy engram is restimulated, the individual, unless he wants to be hurt severely, is apathetic and this tone, being the nearest to death, is the most dangerous one to the individual. The rage emotion communicated to an “unconscious” person gives him a rage engram he can dramatize. This is most harmful to the society. A merely hostile tone present around an “unconscious” person gives him a merely hostile engram (covert hostility). With two people present, each having a different mood, the “unconscious” person receives an engram with two valences other than his own. When this happens he will first dramatize the winning valence with its mood and, if forced from this, will dramatize the second valence with its mood. Driven from this in a chronic engram, he goes insane.

Nothing here should be construed to mean that a person only uses or dramatizes sympathy engrams. This is very far from the case. The sympathy engram gives him the chronic psycho-somatic illness. He can dramatize any engram he has when it is restimulated.

Emotion, then, is communication and a personal condition. The cellular level evaluation of a situation depends upon any other analyzer present, even if that analyzer is thoroughly hostile to it. Lacking such evaluation, the individual takes his own tone for the moment.

There is another condition of emotion which is of extreme and useful interest to the therapist since it is the first thing with which he will have to deal in opening a case. We do not mean here to start discussing therapy but to describe a necessary part of emotion.

Great loss and other swift and severe suppressor action dams up emotion in an engram.

Loss itself can be a shock to reduce analytical power. And an engram is received. If it is the loss of a sympathetic person on whom an individual has depended, it seems to the individual as if death itself stalks him. When such a suppressor effect occurs, it is as if a strong steel spring had been compressed within the engram. When it releases it comes with a terrible rush of emotion (if this discharge is, indeed, emotion, though we hardly know what other name to call it).

Life force apparently gets dammed up at these points in life. There may be enormous quantities of that life force available but some of it becomes suppressed into a loss engram.

After that the person does not seem to possess as much fluid vitality as before. This may be not emotion but life force itself. The mind then has below it, as in a cyst, a great quantity of sorrow or despair. The more of these charges exist in such an encysted state, the less free are the emotions of the individual. This may be on a basis of suppression to a point from which there is no swift rising. Nothing in the person’s future seems to bring him up to any plane like those he occupied before.

The glory and color of childhood vanishes as one progresses into later years. But the strange part of it is that this glamor and beauty and sensitivity to life are not gone. They are encysted. One of the most remarkable experiences a clear has is to find, in the process of therapy, that he is recovering appreciation of the beauty in the world.

Persons, as they live forward from childhood, suffer loss after loss, and each loss takes from them a little more of this ; Ø quantity which may be, indeed, life force itself. Bound up within them, that force is denied them and indeed, reacts against them.