In this lecture we will go further into the subject of accessibility. I have drawn an Accessibility Chart which complements the Standard Procedure Chart, so that one can look at any case, spot it on the chart and know what to do. This chart is for any person in any stage of processing.
You can see by looking at this chart that there are various points of entrance. This chart covers all cases, even the psychotic. It is the first time we’ve paid any attention to the psychotic on a Standard Procedure Chart. He belongs there and he always has. He sits at this first point, “Personality accessible for conversation,” and above that point he is inaccessible. This is simply the matter of a man’s personality being accessible, and we have to work the case until the person’s personality is accessible. That is the point of entrance on a psychotic.
The wrong point of entrance on a psychotic is to try to hit engrams before the personality is accessible. Sometimes you have to, but get the personality accessible first if you possibly can. That is the proper procedure and you do it by establishing any communication with him. You establish any awareness in him for the world around him (communication is awareness). You establish any affinity with him, and that could be by sympathy or by mimicking him and getting him to mimic you to some degree. Establish some reality with him on the lines of agreement — getting him to think about something, getting him to agree with something — and you can establish that by agreeing with him.
You enter the case of a psychotic by touching on any one of these three points, and you try to pick it up, even just a little bit, because the moment you do, the other two points are going to increase as well. If you can get a psychotic’s attention, you can sometimes just tell him to come up to present time and he will come out of the engram in which he is held.
So in order to process a psychotic, or a person who is not willing to go along with you on what you are trying to do, you have got to establish affinity, reality and communication with his personality.
This goes further than just dealing with a psychotic. When you begin to audit a person who has been rather outraged as to processing, start establishing a little communication, affinity and reality, and just by talking to him and picking up these points you can bring him up to where he will be willing to work with you.You can pick up reality on some people simply by convincing them that what you are going to do works.
So, by communicating with a person you can bring him into processing. You wouldn’t argue with him, because reality depends upon an agreement, and arguing is disagreement. Regardless of whether what you are saying makes good sense, a person with whom you are arguing is not going to permit you to process him.
Suppose the fellow says, “I know very well what causes my trouble. I have a libido complex on my left udipis.”
You say, “Well, that’s probably very true; that’s very interesting. Tell me more about it.”
He does, and you say, “Well, you know, some of the people we’ve found very often did have this sort of thing.” And the first thing you know, he is willing to have some auditing.
If the person refuses to talk to you the first time you see him, sometimes if you just go away and see him later and you are always nice to him, soon you will find that you can talk to him a little bit further — enough to get him to agree with you about something and for you to agree with him about something. Pick up these three points, and you have got his case started. But you won’t do it by arguing. You won’t do it by hammering around at him.
You won’t accomplish a thing unless you go according to these affinity, communication and reality tenets.
So, what is meant by point 1 on the chart, “Personality accessible for conversation,” is a person who will actually sit and answer questions on an inventory or talk to you about his condition without being highly antagonistic toward you and what you are doing. This is an actual point of case entrance which you have to establish, and if that case entrance point is not known to you, you won’t try to establish it. That is the first thing you have to establish with every person you process, no matter what his magnitude of neurosis is.
Once this person will sit and talk to you, you want to be able to do some Straightwire. An inventory is the entrance into Straightwire. You start giving this person an inventory and suddenly he is actually working — he is being processed. It is supposedly just an inventory to be filled out, but he is being processed, he is in communication with you, and you are demonstrating to him that you are interested in what has happened to him in his life. The affinity level will pick up and his accessibility will come way up. This applies to anybody.
The second point on the chart is “Memory accessible for Straightwire.” You can ask him the proper questions that constitute Straightwire. Find out whose valence he is in, who his wife reminds him of, who the last person was that insulted him, and so on. If you are doing your job well, this person will be getting lots of relief and will go into a slight tone 4 and be able to laugh about things. Just by working with him in this fashion you are releasing attention units and bringing more and more of him up into present time. You are getting the materials with which you are going to work in terms of circuitry, and you’re finding out some interesting things about him.
In picking up the materials of circuitry, you want to find out who the people were who surrounded this person, what they had to say, what they did, what their dramatizations were and what their relations were between each other and with the preclear And you want to find out if possible the exact words with which those people expressed themselves. In this way you will learn a great deal about the engram bank of this person. Try to find out specifically who on the case is the dominant, which is to say, a person who seeks to dominate.
A case becomes difficult when the childhood of the preclear was spent with other people than those who surrounded his prenatal period. A lot of the data is missing. However, this person will still be selectively affected by the people who have surrounded him later, so you want to find out about those people too. You may be able to find out about early material even if his parents died when he was two years of age.
You want material there so that you can start to put together your picture of the preclear’s case. When you have gotten straight memory working fine, then start into the affinity, reality and communication locks, and run them. This is something you do on any case; it is point 3 on the chart, “Affinity, reality and communication break locks accessible.” Either by straight memory, or by putting the preclear in reverie and sending him to the moment, you are trying to take the tension out of the breaks of affinity, the breaks of communication and the breaks of reality.
Naturally, on an affinity line you may find yourself working, not with a lock, but with an emotional engram. You may just be able to slide into one and get it off the case. At that moment, that is the thing to do, because at this point you are testing the case for circuits. Here, at point 3, you are not only restoring to the case a great many attention units so that this person is more alert and more aware, but you are finding out whether or not this material is available and whether or not there are any circuits on the case which would suppress grief and apathy engrams.
So it is at this point that you put the person in reverie and try to get some grief or apathy off the case in order to raise the general tone of the case.
Here is an example which shows how important this is. A person had three psychotic points on a Minnesota Multiphasic, and an auditor was given orders to do nothing but blow a grief charge on this case. Just one grief charge was blown, the person was brought back and retested, and lo and behold, two of the points of psychosis had dropped out of the case.
The aberrative pattern of this case did not change. There was just so much less of it because of blowing that one grief charge that it became something with which the person could live quite safely.
Charges on the affinity, reality and communication line are so called because they charge up the engrams. The engram is sitting there all ready to roll, but it is not going to have any terrific effect upon the case unless it gets charged up. Later on, life, by losses and so forth, charges up the engram bank. The engram bank without any later incidents would not be charged up at all — it would be null. But the later incidents furnish the energy, which goes into the bank, activates it and makes the engrams very serious in their effect upon the preclear
As an analogy, imagine a ten-thousand-volt short circuit, with the current running in the wrong direction. Should one just throw a hand grenade into the machine to stop it, or should he try to bleed off some of the current which is pouring into the short circuit? He would try to bleed off some of that current. Similarly you would try to run out these affinity, reality and communication engrams to get the charge off the engram bank so the engrams would not then very badly affect the person.
So, between point 3, “ARC break locks accessible,” and point 4, “Circuits accessible,” is the first point on the chart that you put a person in reverie; you are trying to see if you can get off a grief engram or a communication break engram. If you can’t get these things off the case easily, you go straight into the problem of circuits because the only things that suppress engrams are circuits, such as “You must not cry,” “You must not show your emotions,” “You can’t be yourself.” So at this point on the chart you are looking for circuits, and you are looking for the dominant person in the preclear’s environ.
There are ways and means of blowing circuits. You can knock out circuits with the preclear out of valence. Circuits are usually charged up, and you have to get line charge or other material off the case to discharge them. Try to get points where Mama said “Don’t cry” and so on. I’m not referring now only to control circuits; they are a rather special type of circuit. You are also looking for commands like “You’ve got to protect yourself,” or “I’ve got to protect you from yourself.” With that type of circuitry in a case the person is being protected from himself, he is protecting himself from himself, and he is not going to be able to get to any of himself. The circuit is an interposition there, and so that circuit has got to be run out.
I want you to understand that when we say circuitry, we are talking about “you” commands, like “I’ve got to protect you”; and when we talk about aberrative commands in general, we are talking about “I” commands, such as “I have a cold,” “I am stupid.” Those are not circuits. They are just aberrative.
“You” commands are circuits. They come from the mouths of dominant people in the vicinity of the preclear and have to be picked up as early as possible. You often have to run circuitry completely out of valence just to deintensify it.
Blowing circuitry out of a case is the most skillful operation in Dianetics. It requires a full knowledge of running back a chain of engrams. If you don’t know how to do it, you are not going to be able to crack anything but pianola cases. The difference between a case which presents a problem and a pianola case is chiefly a difference of circuitry. Circuitry includes as a subheading “control circuitry”; you are shooting for the whole field of circuitry.
So we get the circuits out of the case, and then we go back and break some locks. We just keep oscillating between knocking out circuits and breaking locks, and then trying to get out some ARC engrams to get the charge off. That is the next point on the chart, “Affinity, reality and communication engrams accessible.” If we aren’t successful in that we go back and break some more locks, shoot out some more circuits, and then try again to get some ARC engrams. And we just keep doing this.
When an auditor first puts the preclear into reverie — between “ARC break locks accessible” and “Circuits accessible” — he should find out if the preclear will go into his own valence in the basic area and run and erase an engram, because sometimes he will. A certain percentage of cases will promptly go down into the basic area, pick up sonic, go into their own valence and start erasing engrams. However, the better proportion of cases won’t. But even though the preclear is out of valence, you run out what you contact, deintensifying and reducing it. You get the basic on its chain, reduce that, and then you come back up the line and knock out some more circuits.
If the preclear can’t run in the basic area, it means that the bank has been charged up by affinity, communication and reality break engrams to a point where he cannot get into the basic area and be himself. The standard manifestation of a very seriously affected case is exteriorization as he goes back down the track. He is not in himself, he just sees himself.
Occasionally, people who are exteriorizing badly as they go back down the track will get into themselves merely if you tell them to, and at that point they can run affinity, reality and communication engrams. They cannot discharge one of these ARC break engrams out of valence.
It is standard to start running a highly charged engram with the preclear out of valence, but by the second or third pass over it you can get him into his own valence, at which moment he will run off the charge. Sometimes cases are just out of valence and exteriorized at these great emotional moments or blunted reality moments on the track, and interior in themselves at the other points on the track. A very serious case is out of himself all the way down the track, including pleasure moments. It isn’t safe to be in himself, so he is standing outside of himself, and there is a terrific amount of charge on the case.
That is the mechanical reason a person is exteriorized. The computational reason is continuous commands from somebody to the effect of “Watch yourself,” “I can’t be myself around you,” and so forth, which are actual valence shifters and can shift him outside himself. But supercharged emotion, communication breaks and reality breaks can charge up the bank to such an extent that the person is continually exteriorized. When you get a case like this, work to get the person interiorized before you do too much else with him. Even that person can sometimes be gotten down into the basic area to run out an engram.
Our next point, then, is to knock enough circuits out of the case to get the preclear into his own valence.
I have been asked whether, if the preclear can be gotten into the basic area at this point, you would go ahead and work him there, or whether the auditor should nevertheless go after circuitry.
The only reason one would be working the preclear in the basic area at this point would be so you could get to the circuitry. Don’t think you are making an erasure on a case at this point. He is not erasing; you are getting deintensification.
Just because the preclear can get the text of an engram does not mean he is running engrams. I have seen people run scores of hours without anybody trying to get the circuits off the case, and what happens is the case will finally ball up to the point where the preclear starts yawning when sent back ten minutes on the track. In other words, the whole bank gets so loaded up with anaten that when you send the person back to last night’s dinner or something he’ll yawn. There is unconsciousness coming off inconsequential moments.
The only reason that you would go into basic area engrams and run them out of valence without the proper somatics and so on is to get the circuits off the case. The target is to get the circuits off the case so that you can discharge some of the charge out of these affinity, reality and communication engrams. Any time you can discharge some of these ARC break engrams you are moving the case closer to the own valence step on the chart. That is your goal.
Circuits are not run just because they are aberrative. They are run so that the case will resolve. In fact, in the bulk of cases you can’t discharge affinity, reality and communication engrams until you get the circuits off the case.
These circuits say, “You must not cry,” “You mustn’t show your emotions,” “You’ve got to be strong,” “You’ve got to be brave,” “You mustn’t ever be yourself,” “Don’t do that, now,” “You mustn’t be weak,” “Little boys don’t cry,” and so forth.
This type of thing can be on the case so heavily that, for instance, when you run the preclear back to the point where his dog died (and you know that this fellow’s life just practically went to pieces at that moment), his chest heaves but he says off-handedly, “Yes, my dog died. Oh, well, you know, little boys have dogs and they get attached to them, and the dog died.”
You look at this preclear and say, “Are you inside yourself?” “Well, no.”
Run it several times, through and through, and try to get something off the case on this dog’s death, because that is a charge. It is this kind of charge that charges up the engram bank. If one could get all the charge off a case, the engram bank wouldn’t be able to do anything to the preclear
So the fact that this fellow can’t cry about his dog alerts the auditor to the fact that somebody told him not to cry about his dog. That is a bit of a circuit which may lie in the same engram, and you can try to shoot it out. If you can’t get that, then try to find out what the major circuits are on this case about displaying emotion, and find the dominant who was saying “Control yourself,” “You mustn’t cry,” and so on. Somebody was laying circuits into this case. Find those circuits and start to run them back down the bank, and run out the basic engram which contains those circuits to get a reduction on it. Run it out of valence or any way you can, but get a reduction on it and the tension will ease.
You will usually find that if you have got the circuit that is holding up the case, you can run it right down the bank and the preclear will go “Yow! Yow! Yow!” and really blow the charge. This circuit is lying on top of that charge. And if you are on the right circuit which if deintensified will resolve the case, that engram will blow. This is known as an exploder. It is not very hard to get the tension off one of these super circuitry engrams.
The first time that the engram is run, and as you come down the bank looking for the earliest time, you may not find any charge on it. But if it’s the right one, that earliest one will have some sort of charge on it because it is being run up against its locks. The engram is getting the charge out of its locks. The preclear is out of valence and is crying somebody else’s tears. You are trying to settle him back into his own valence and trying to peel off those locks. A person in the prenatal area in his own valence does not display emotion. He does not display any emotion during that whole period. If he displays any emotion in the basic area, it is because he is out of valence or because a lock is lying right on top of the incident. Run it and the lock will pry off.
Anybody who is getting a head somatic in the basic area is not in his own valence. The basic area comes before the first missed period and at that time a zygote doesn’t have a head. So if someone has a localized somatic, he is running a command somatic of some sort or he is running way up the bank and the file clerk is giving the wrong answers.
The circuitry on a case interposes between the file clerk and “I,” so the file clerk is apt to give you almost anything for an answer. You can’t get straight answers off the case.
A person can’t lay circuits or an engram into himself. You can have a person who has a command “I have to believe what I say” or “You have to believe what you say”; then later, if he learns autohypnosis, for instance, what he says will become locks. But somebody has to have told him these things. Straightwire’s first law is that a person does not aberrate himself. He is aberrated by others.
Ask someone, “Who in your life used to say ‘Control yourself’?” If the person looks at you for a moment and says “Well, I do, all the time,” and he can’t come up with anyone else, realize that he is so solidly in this other valence that he doesn’t know where his own valence is.
So at point 5 on the chart we are working affinity, reality and communication engrams. The auditor starts getting the charge off a case until he can’t get any more. Then he tries to run him in the basic area to get the person into his own valence and run out real engrams. With these, he runs out the whole engram, but if he can’t do it at that time, he comes back up and tries to run out some more affinity, reality and communication engrams. If he can’t get these, then he gets some more circuits off. When he gets the circuits off, he goes back and runs out some more affinity, reality and communication engrams. Then he returns the preclear to the basic area to try to run out some engrams. The auditor keeps this up as a continuing rotating process until he can run out an engram in the basic area with twenty-six perceptics.
One doesn’t run engrams as a steady practice until he can run them with twenty-six perceptics and get a complete and full erasure in the basic area.
So, first the auditor gets enough locks off to get this person shaken loose on the track. Then he puts the person into reverie and moves him on the track, and tries to get off some emotion or some communication breaks. If he can’t do that, he tries to get the basic area. Sometimes the preclear will go into his own valence and run out a full engram. If that doesn’t work, the auditor knows he is dealing with circuits. So he finds out what the circuits are, generally by Straightwire, and runs them out. In running out the circuits he will go into the basic area, but all he is after is circuits. He is not going for an erasure; that is not his purpose.
An auditor working in the basic area and just running people out of valence and so forth because he can get context doesn’t know his purpose. At this point the purpose is to find and deintensify circuits so that the person can run in his own valence and so that the auditor can reach the affinity, reality and communication engrams.
This is Standard Procedure.
Now, you have gotten to where engrams are accessible for erasure, so you run them in the basic area for a while and start to get an erasure off the case. You erase engrams for a while and you’re doing just fine, and then suddenly the preclear doesn’t seem to be in his own valence anymore and is not doing too well. When this happens you should go right back over the whole process again, because what has happened is that you have taken a layer off the available engrams. Engrams lie in stacks like sandwiches, and the meat of the sandwich may be the engram, but the bread of that sandwich happens to be affinity, reality and communication break engrams. Now you have to get some charge off the bank before he can run some more engrams.
So you get some charge off the bank. You run some more circuits off and maybe find some other dominant person on the case. You straighten it up again and get some charge off — get off some more affinity, reality or communication engrams — and then you get down into the basic area again and you’ll find out that the preclear has some more engrams. You continue to erase in the basic area as long as you can with the preclear in his own valence, and when you can’t do that, you again get late life charge off the case (anything over two and a half years old). When you have actually blown some charge off the case, you again return to the basic area and continue the erasure.
The whole process of clearing from beginning to end is an alteration of these two things: getting charge off and getting engrams off. You run the engrams out only when the preclear is in his own valence, but you can deintensify an engram with the person out of valence.
You run circuitry engrams so that this person’s auto control is deintensified. You want to get charge off so that you can run affinity, reality and communication engrams late in the case. You get these charges off later, and then you go earlier. An alternation from one to the other will finally accomplish the erasure of a case.
Anyone who starts to try to erase a case which is consistently out of valence, out of contact, with no sonic or other perceptics, is not doing Dianetics.
The Dianetic auditor, when he finds out his preclear is not in good enough shape to run his engrams properly, is right in there trying to get off the heavy affinity, reality and communication engrams (which usually occur late). You have known these before as grief engrams, but there is more than just grief you can go after. The auditor runs these ARC engrams off to deintensify the bank so he can get at it.
If you can’t get off the ARC engrams, then there are circuits and you get the circuits out, and in order to do that you have to run engrams out of the case.
It is a continuing process and that is practically all there is to Standard Procedure. There is no other Standard Procedure.
Anything else that you are supposed to know in Dianetics as far as processing is concerned is how to accomplish one of these points. How do you get a circuit off? How do you trace a line of circuitry engrams down to the bottom and deintensify one there, and then what do you do after that?
This may seem somewhat different to Standard Procedure as you have learned it. I have tried to communicate it in the past as well as I knew how. Sometimes I find new methods of communicating it more easily. I generally discover these by analyzing what I myself do with cases.
It is a standard thing for somebody to come up to me and say, “I’ve got a case that’s running so-and-so and so-and-so.”
And I say, “Yes, and he’s also doing this and this, isn’t he?” And the auditor says, “Yes; how did you know?”
So once in a while I ask myself, “Well, how the devil do you know?” It isn’t by instinct or by shooting dice. It has to be analyzed. Once in a while I can break down the analysis a little more closely. Then I can make it more easily communicated and shape it up a little better by finding out what hasn’t gone across to people.
The Degrees of Accessibility Chart makes it go across more easily and puts it where an auditor can look at a case and say, “Ah, this person is out of valence.” Or someone will come up to him in a nervous, fearful manner, stuttering and stammering, and instead of starting into the case on “I can’t talk,” the auditor gets charge off the case, because this person is suppressed on the tone scale to a point where his communication line is almost zero. Therefore the auditor knows his reality is bad.
It has been hard to measure a person’s concept of reality in the past, but if he communicates on that level you know his reality is poor. And if you look over his affinity level you will find out that that is very bad as well. When the preclear talks in this nervous, fearful manner, and he tells you “I like people, I like people,” he is talking out of an engram, because the mechanical charge on the bank is saying that people are very dangerous; what he’s telling you is just a defensive mechanism. So you would work on picking up affinity by finding out who broke affinity with this person. In addition, you would find out who smashed his concept of reality.
If someone is saying “I’ve often thought to myself, ‘The Russians are liable to land on the coast tomorrow,”’ you can see that his reality is bad and that what he is going to tell you is probably a little bit off.
If a person is wearing glasses, his communication line is low and you have to pick up affinity and reality. Glasses don’t mean a very low communication line, but they mean it is down just that much. I would normally not start processing anyone who was wearing glasses by simply running them down the track into basic area engrams. I would pick up a lot of charge off this case first.
I want to tell you again that every session of processing is concluded by running pleasure moments and by using Straightwire on the session of processing itself (unless you were doing Straightwire in the session, in which case you would omit it). But if you have placed the person in reverie at any time during the session, make sure that when you bring him up to present time you run a pleasure moment and then Straightwire, with him in present time, making him stay in present time and remember the past. In this way you will get rid of the artificial locks that build up, and you’ll keep a case happier and far more stable.
We want one hundred percent of the people who go through a certification school to be able to crack the toughest cases that walk. At first, when we first started teaching, maybe only twenty-five percent could have tackled a tough case, but it has been increasing since then. With the introduction of this Accessibility Chart we may get that up to eighty or ninety percent case-crackers. That’s what we’re trying to do.