Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (36 page)

Now it’s beginning to bear down harder but a lot less than it did the first time. Then it eases up and I hear my father’s voice: “Oh, honey I won’t come in you now. It’s better to wait until much later to have one. I’m not too sure I like children that well. Besides, my job ...” And my mother must shove at him because there’s a sharper somatic here. “I don’t want you in there at all then. You cold fish!”

AUDITOR: Return to the beginning and recount it again, please.

GIRL: (Recounts it several times, somatic finally vanishes. She feels quite cheerful about it but doesn’t think to mention that she doubted prenatals existed.) This is repeater technique at work. This particular case had had about two hundred phrases thrown at her for repeater technique without finding one of them that would fit. In the first place, there were only a few lower engrams which the file clerk was willing to give out and the auditor was guessing at the whole gamut of deniers. A later incident might have contained -- and did but no somatic appeared -- numbers of the phrases he used. But the file clerk was willing to settle for this one for it was early and could be erased.

The file clerk rarely hands out something in a badly occluded case which cannot be reduced to recession. And an auditor never leaves an engram so offered until he has made every effort with many recountings to reduce it. The file clerk, in this case, by the bye, would have let down the auditor by putting forth such an engram as birth, which would not have lifted and which would have caused a lot of lost work and given the patient a headache for a few days. The auditor would have let the file clerk down if he had not reduced the engram offered by making the girl go over it several times until the somatic was gone and the voice faded out.

The reason this engram stayed hidden was because its content said so. Actually it was a coitus. As an engram it seemed to say that the incidents would be found later on in life.

Further, as an engram, it said that it was not to be entered.

Repeater technique will sometimes embroil a patient in trouble of a minor sort by getting him “sucked into” incidents which will not lift. This is not common but the file clerk occasionally hands out a late incident, rather than an early one. However, this is not an error on the part of the file clerk. Remember, he has these engrams filed by subject, somatic and time, and the auditor can use any one of these. When the file clerk responds and hands out a somatic on a repeater phrase the auditor has gleaned from the pre-clear’s chatter or has guessed himself and yet that somatic will not lift or no voice appears with it (in a sonic case, or merely won’t lift with a non-sonic), the file clerk had to unstack a pile of material. Therefore, the auditor, realizing this, finding that a voice does not appear or that the somatic will not lift, has the preclear repeat the same phrase and tells him to go earlier and earlier. Another somatic may turn up in a different place in the body. The file clerk has gotten an even earlier one loose, now that a small amount of trouble has been taken from what he could first get. Now this earlier one is addressed similarly. It may get mediumly strong as a somatic, the pre-clear repeating the phrase all the while, and still no voice may appear. The auditor then sends the pre-clear earlier. The file clerk again has managed to get out an even earlier one, now that something has been taken from the second. This time again, an even earlier somatic turns on, probably down around the basic area in a case which has not previously contacted this area, and this time a voice can be heard. The engram reduces. The file clerk, in short, was willing to risk trouble in order to get several somatics unstacked and let the auditor get a basic incident.

There are variations on this sort of thing. As the filing system is by subject, somatic and time, the auditor can use other things than phrases. He can send a pre-clear to the “highest intensity of a somatic,” and often results may be obtained, though this is not as reliable as by subject nor as foolproof. The pre-clear, incidentally, does not mind going to any “highest intensity” of somatic because somatics are about a thousandth part as strong as the original agony, though they are quite strong enough. In present time with the pre-clear not in therapy, the intensity of one of these somatics can be a drastic affair as witness the migraine headache.

143

Taking the migraine, a pre-clear can be returned to the very moment of its reception when one would think its intensity would be the highest and yet find a mild, dull ache such as one would get with a hangover. This is part of the principle that any entrance of a case is better than a case not entered at all. For by return with standard reverie technique the source is approached, and if the source is contacted at all, the power of the engram to aberrate has become reduced in strength no matter how many mistakes the auditor makes.

Returning to “maximum intensity” of a somatic, then, is nothing very painful. Actual maximum intensity is when the pre-clear is awake before the contact with the incident is made.

But in returning to “maximum intensity” the incident may often be contacted and reduced. If

“maximum intensity” however, contains in its engram the phrases, “I can’t stand it!” “It’s killing me,” or “I’m terrified,” then expect our pre-clear to respond to it in some such way. If he does not respond, then he has an emotional shut-off, which is another problem which will be taken up later.

Similarly, the auditor can handle his pre-clear in time. There exists a very accurate clock in the mind. The file clerk is very well acquainted with this clock and wherever possible will comply. The auditor who wants the patient to go “six minutes before this phrase is uttered”

will generally find that his pre-clear is now six minutes before it, even though the incident is prenatal. The auditor can bring his pre-clear forward, then, minute by minute as he desires. He can take a pre-clear straight through an incident by announcing, “It is one minute later, it is two minutes later. Three minutes have gone by,” and so forth. The auditor does not have to wait for those minutes to elapse; he just announces them. He can make a pre-clear go through time at five minute intervals or hour intervals or day intervals, and unless there is engramic material which holds him or otherwise affects the operation, the auditor can move the pre-clear on the time track at will. It would be very nice if the auditor could send the pre-clear to conception and then tell him it is one hour later, two hours later and so forth to pick up the first engram.

However, there are more factors involved than time, and the plan, though pretty, is not feasible. The time shift is generally used when the auditor is trying to get the pre-clear ahead of an incident to make sure that he really has a beginning. By returning the pre-clear by five or ten minute intervals, the auditor may sometimes discover that he is running backwards into a very long and complicated incident and that the headache he has been seeking to alleviate on the preclear was received, actually, hours before the period in which he thought it had initially been received. In such a case there is a second engram appended to an earlier engram and the auditor cannot lift the second one until he has the first one.

Actually time shift is of limited use. The auditor who tries to go chasing backwards through time will find that he will have on his hands an artificially restimulated case and that the work is much impeded. Repeater technique works best and is most easily handled by the file clerk. The auditor uses a time shift to get the pre-clear as close to basic area (early prenatal) as possible and then generally, if the file clerk doesn’t simply go to work handing out engrams which can be washed, one after the other, the auditor uses repeater technique. Time shift and

“running down a somatic” have some limited use. Some experimentation will show about how much use they have.

The laws of regression are these:

(1)

A returned patient reacts more, theoretically, to those commands which are earlier than he is on the time track and less to those commands which are later than his point in time.

(2)

A pre-clear reacts to those engramic commands which are: (a) in chronic restimulation, or (b) to which he is nearest on the time track. Thus, if an engram says, “I’m afraid,”

he is. If it says, “I’d rather die than face this,” he would. If the command to which he is near says, “I’m sleepy,” he will be. If it says, “Forget it,” he will. Commands in chronic restimulation give a false color to the personality: “I can never be sure of anything,” “I don’t know,” “I can’t hear anything” are all possibly in chronic 144

restimulation. If the file clerk won’t give them up, then keep working the case anyway around these. They will give up after a while.

(3)

The action of the pre-clear on the time track and the condition of the track are regulated exclusively by engramic commands classifiable as bouncers, holders, denyers and groupers and misdirectors. (These conditions, it is repeated, are quite variable, as variable as language: “I don’t know whether I am coming or going,” for instance in an engram makes it very confusing. “I can’t go back at this point” makes the pre-clear keep progressing later and later.)

(4)

The engramic command manifests itself either in the awake speech of the pre-clear after a session of therapy or is inadvertently announced as a supposedly “analytical” thought when he nears the vicinity of the command.

(5)

The engram is not a sentient, rationalized memory but a collection of unanalyzed perceptions, and it will develop into contact simply by the process of returning through it, to it, over it or asking for it.

(6)

The file clerk will give the auditor whatever can be extracted from the engram bank.

The auditor must aid the file clerk by reducing in charge or severity everything the file clerk offers. This is done by making the patient recount it. (Otherwise the file clerk gets so much material piled around that, with this in restimulation, he can no longer get at the files. The auditor who bucks the file clerk is not rare. The file clerk who will buck an auditor except by withholding data which will not reduce has yet to be found.) The techniques available to the auditor are as follows: 1.

Returning, in which the pre-clear is sent as early as possible on his track before therapy itself is engaged upon.

2.

Repeater technique, by which the file clerk is asked for data on certain subjects, particularly those affecting the return and travel on the time track, and which aid the ability of the pre-clear to contact engrams.

3.

Time shift, by which a pre-clear can be moved short or long distances on the track by specific announcement of the amount of time forward the pre-clear is to go or time backwards, or return or progression through intervals of time. (It is also useful to find out if the pre-clear is moving or which direction he is moving on the time track in order to discover the action some engram may be having upon him.) 4.

Somatic location, by which the moment of reception of the somatic is located, in an effort to discover whether it is received in this engram or to find an engram containing it.

145

One of the largest roles in therapy is played by Emotion. In the second book we covered this subject and divided it tentatively as a theory only into three divisions: (a) the emotions contained in the command of engrams whereby physical pain became confused with emotions; (b) the emotions contained as endocrine reactions subject to the analytical mind of the clear and the analytical mind and reactive mind of the aberree; and (c) the emotions contained in engrams which bound up free units of Life force.

Further work and research on emotion will undoubtedly bring about an even closer understanding of it. But we have a workable knowledge of emotion now. We can use what we know and produce results with it. When we know more, we shall be able to produce much better results but just now we can produce the release and the clear. If we treat emotion as bound up life force and if we follow these general precepts to release it, we shall obtain a very large gain in any pre-clear; indeed, we shall produce our largest single gains by so releasing emotion.

In an engineering science like dianetics, we can work on a push-button basis. We know that throwing a switch will stop a motor, that closing it again will start it and that no matter how many times we open or close that switch our motor will stop or start. We are using here a force which is still as mysterious to us as electricity was to James Clerk Maxwell. Much earlier Benjamin Franklin had observed that electricity existed and had done some interesting things with it: but he had not used it much and he could not control it. A philosopher like Bergson selected out a thing he called elan vital, a life force. Man is alive, there must be a force or flow of something which keeps him alive; when Man is dead there is no force or flow. This is life force in the Benjamin Franklin stage. As he considered electricity, so did Bergson consider life force. Now we are up, in dianetics, to the James Clerk Maxwell stage, or very nearly. We know that certain equations can be made about life force and we can use those equations. And we can theorize that “life force” and what has been called a certain kind of “emotion” are either similar or the same thing. We may have the wrong theory, but so might James Clerk Maxwell.

Indeed, Maxwell’s theories may still be wrong: at least we have electric lights. In dianetics we are pretty certain that the majority of tenets are parallels of natural law: these are the big computations. We are not certain that we have emotion properly bracketed, but then we shall not be sure until we have actually taken a dead man and pumped him up with life force again.

Short of this extreme, we are on solid ground with emotion as life force.

We can, for instance, take a girl, examine something of her background with, let us say, an electro-encephalograph (an instrument for measuring nervous impulses and reactions) and then proceed on the basis of the information so obtained to do one or two things. The first is inhuman and would not be done, ot course, but she could be made sick or insane merely by using this data, so obtained. (If the data is obtained in therapy, it is obtained by actual contact with engrams and an engram contacted in reverie has lost its power to aberrate: dianetic therapy thus makes such an eventuality utterly impossible.) The second and far more important fact to us is that she can be made to recover, with this same data, all the force, interest, persistence and tenacity to life and all the physical and mental well-being possible. If it could not be made to work both ways, we would not have the answer, at least in workable form.