I want to tell you about ways and means of spotting people on the tone scale. Actually, it is so easy that it is hard to talk about.
For instance, if somebody comes in and sits down and says “Well, I have been sick most of my life. As a matter of fact, I am pretty sick now. People always said I wouldn’t be well, and I guess I never have been,” you start looking over this person and you don’t have to question him too much to spot him on the scale. Here are hypochondria and glandular disturbances.
You start looking over people at various levels of the tone scale and you will pick up a tremendous amount of experience. As a matter of fact, when you start getting up along the line you really sharpen up your powers of observation on this. For instance, if a girl walks into the office who is maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, you look at her ankles — not for any aesthetic bang you might get out of it, but because it will tell you something about her endocrine system. Fat accumulates in back of the ankle when the estrogen level is down, even in young girls. If a girl walks in and her pelvic area is not developed you know she is below 2.0.
You look at somebody who is physiologically retarded by reason of glandular malfunction; the body is trying to kill itself. That person is definitely physiologically 2.0 or below. As you follow out this case a little bit further you will find other traces of this. The case might prove to be, on questioning, a little bit higher than you thought it was, but sometimes it’s a little bit lower than you thought it was, too. You can spot people pretty well just by looking at them. For instance, there is really no trick in spotting the majority of male 1.5s who are really chronic 1.5s. You go around and look at them; you will see them. You can also follow right up and say what is wrong with them; they have arthritis, or they have something else that is a depository illness — kidney stones and so forth.
If you were a salesman you would have to develop this to a tremendous degree, because one glance would have to tell you exactly where this person is on the tone scale, and then you would sell him the product accordingly. This is like shooting ducks; it is really awful, the ease with which you can get agreement by following out this tone scale. I mean, it makes you feel like a thief or something!
You walk up to a 1.5, and you want to sell him the idea of something or other, so you talk about it in terms of death and destruction — more or less that line — and the first thing you know, this guy is in agreement with you and you are pals right away.
Or take a 1.1; you look at this 1.1 and you are looking at the covert level. There is where you get glandular upsets, bad ones. If you try to sell this 1.1 on big, broad, constructive projects, he is just going to sit there and look at you. What you want to do is say, “Well, confidentially, Myers Incorporated uses poison in their beverages and we don’t.”
The fellow will go right into agreement with you. This is the level of gossip along a malicious angle — old wives’ tales and that sort of thing. This person will buy this pretty regularly. If you want to sell him an idea or something, it has to be sold on that band.
If you were selling something to someone in apathy, you would go in on the level of “I know it’s all very hopeless anyway. Of course, probably nobody will ever buy this from you, but I’d like to leave you a case or two, just in case somebody does.”If you were really trying to sell people something at their tone scale levels and somebody were watching you, he would swear you were trying to depress people’s tone and all sorts of things. But actually, they come alert and they get very much on the qui vive. They get more volume of what they are, because here you are, another Theta entity. You get a cross-resonance going with a 1.1, for instance, and he can really get to be a 1.1 now. His life force, in other words, exists at his chronic level on the tone scale. If you want the most of him to vibrate, and you want the most of him to be there, and you want to talk to the most of him with the greatest amount of attention from him and the greatest amount of what you would call ARC, you have to talk to him at his level on the tone scale. It is pretty hard to figure how you get affinity below 2.0, but it is an actual fact, you get a sympathetic vibration.
So don’t ever try to take a 1.1 and sell him the great roseate dream of becoming wonderful and superhuman and growing gilt wings and so on; he won’t buy it. If you are going to sell him the reasons he should get processing, they have to be 1.1 reasons: “You could get a lot smarter. You could trick a lot more people; you could fool them. You could get, with this processing, up to a point where you could really get a guy to cut his throat and he would never know what did it.” The 1.1 will say, “Yeah? Okay, let’s do it.” That is the horrible truth.
Or take an apathy case; don’t ever try to sell an apathy case at even half a tone higher than apathy: “It’s no use anyhow. It’s all given up anyway. There isn’t much hope for it. Sometimes preclears die when they are being processed, but we might as well try anyhow.” And the apathy case will say, “Well, go ahead and process me.”
This is not poetry. You start practicing with this tone scale just by talking to people — preferably people who are way out of Dianetics — and run a two-minute psychometry on them, or a two- minute Dianometry or whatever you want to call it.
Now, a lot of this has to do with voice tone. Voice intonation will carry your message even better than sentiments or words — the mood. But a two minute Dianometry would merely require that you start up at the top of the tone scale and with each succeeding remark come down the tone scale until you get a response — and that is the level the person is at. So you start in talking about this great big, wonderful, beautiful world and how terrific it is and so on; then you say, “But of course, a few precautions would have to be taken in order to carry this forward.” If at this point he says “Yes, that’s true, a few precautions would have to be taken,” you have yourself a 3.0.
If you get no response, you say, “Actually, there isn’t much use in going to all that work, is there?” If he says no, you have a 2.5.
Next, you say, “There are a lot of people around that wouldn’t want you to do this, but . . .” He says, “There are, too!” You have a 2.0.
Or you drop down again and say, “You know, a guy that would do a thing like that, though, ought to be killed.” If he agrees, you have a 1.5.
If you still haven’t got a response, you say, “Of course, a fellow would have to go into this sort of slyly; I mean, he wouldn’t dare let on really what he was doing.”
“Yeah, he wouldn’t.” You have got yourself a 1.1.
Or you drop down again, saying, “Well, it’s kind of hopeless doing anything about it, but you might try — not that there’s any future in it.”
“No, there really isn’t any future in life, either, is there?” and you have a 0.5.
There is the way you can run the gamut. But you can just listen to people as they talk to you and find out what they spontaneously talk about, and there you have a tone scale level. What they spontaneously talk about and resonate to most rapidly and readily is where they are.
However, if you happen to be way up the tone scale around 2.5 or 3.0 and you are laying a tremendous volume into this fellow, you are liable to bring him up the tone scale to where you are. You aren’t finding out where he is; you are making an acute 2.5 or a 3.0 or a 3.5 out of him because you make him start to resonate where you are.
That is actually what a good auditor does who is riding around 2.5 or 3.0. He gets this fellow resonating up where he is. He does not want to process a guy down at 1.1 if he can process him riding at 3.0. If every session this person has the hopefulness — if a little bit moderated by conservatism — that he is really going to get well and so forth, he will not behave during that session like a 1.1, he will behave like a 3.0.
So in spotting someone on the tone scale you have to talk to them briefly, because you can talk to a 3.0 on a 1.5 basis for three or four minutes and put them into a 1.5. In other words, the variable tone can be changed, and when it comes to processing, what you are interested in is chronic tone.
Now, there are many ways of looking at this. I’m going to tell you how this breaks down.
The thing the auditor is interested in primarily is the Theta/entheta ratio — in other words, the mechanical aspect of Theta and entheta on the case. How much of this case is “permanently” enturbulated and how much is variable on the tone scale? Reading off these columns and asking the proper questions will give you some sort of an approximation of that.
The ratio itself on this chart is subject to better understanding and further adjustment. But you are interested in that fixed ratio. You are not interested in the fact that this person occasionally is capable of great constructive actions, nor are you interested in other variable manifestations. What you are interested in is the entheta manifestation, but you should not make the mistake of believing that you are measuring the reactive mind solely and that this person’s behavior is going to be something else, because he has Theta to work with too.
You are going to find that the case, just as you look at it, as you test it, as you talk to it and so on, is going to lie along a certain band on the tone scale. You don’t have to know how to subdivide the case, in other words, to read it off on the tone scale. But the point is that the only Theta on a case exists preferably way up above 2.0, and it rocks around in the upper band of the tone scale from 2.0 up. That is what Theta there is, unless a tremendous volume of restimulation hits the individual, and then all the free Theta on the case will resonate at the level of the entheta on the case. And if it resonates there harshly and solidly and for a long time, you have a case that is spun in; in other words, there is no free Theta left on this case to rock around on the tone scale. Then you have a permanent reactive-mind manifestation, and there you have what is really considered to be a psychotic. That is the psychotic break — when all of the free Theta that was able to reason and move around on the tone scale suddenly resonates and then stays permanently fixed at the chronic level of the case. Nothing is free about this case; it is static, permanent. Of course, it is up to you, then, to free enough Theta to get it back up along the line again. These sudden entrapments are generally done by fear or grief secondaries. Sudden big fear or grief secondaries are what will spin somebody in ordinarily. People say, “He had a shock and he went crazy.” It just spins in what free Theta there was.
But don’t think that, because a person has free Theta that can move around on his case, he won’t manifest on a chronic level, because he will. If the fellow just has one engram, the tone level of the reactive mind is below 2.0, because there is where the reactive mind cuts in — all the way down from 2.0. That is the band of the reactive mind.
The analytical mind is from 2.0 up. That is the analytical band. Theta is functioning almost always in the analytical level. But this sort of a situation can happen: A dramatization occurs and the free Theta is made to resonate temporarily at that dramatization level. A person starts dramatizing 1.5, and this free Theta momentarily enturbulates; it is temporary entheta.
Now, the way a life course goes along is that with an engram you have a potential trap for free Theta, so the free Theta enturbulates, some of it gets trapped in the engram and it doesn’t get free again. Only the larger percentage of the free Theta gets free. Then there is another key-in and another lock and a little more Theta gets enturbulated; it is all enturbulated at that point, and then some of it goes free. This is the cycle of locks and secondaries.
So first there is the engram; it isn’t hurting very much. It doesn’t have very much free Theta in it to begin with. It has not enturbulated much free Theta. The initial engram doesn’t trap very much, but it goes into a dramatization and it is sort of like something that has hooks on it. The next time this fellow hits the tone level of that engram a little bit of his free Theta gets trapped in it and he has a lock. This happens again and again, and each time he gets another lock. This engram finally gets big and fat and sassy because it has the preponderance of free Theta on the case with this engram chain, or the reactive mind as a whole.
The reactive mind, then, fattens in the absence of processing at the expense of the free Theta. As the reactive mind comes on, there is less energy that plays in the analytical mind; you can look at it that way.
Now we can go back to our good old analogy of just analytical and reactive levels of thought, and we don’t have to worry about Theta and MEST or anything else, and it is obvious that the more the reactive mind has poured into it — the more reactive moments there are in a person’s life — the fatter the reactive mind gets and the more the analyzer shuts down. The person begins with almost 100 percent analytical and practically no reactive, and finally winds up with practically 100 percent reactive and practically no analytical — in other words, a “normal.” There is the cycle.
That is one manifestation, then, that you get on the tone scale, and that is the one the auditor is interested in — the mechanical aspect of the Theta/entheta ratio. That is very important to you because you are trying to get the entheta converted back into Theta again. That is what processing is all about. That is important to you and that gives you the manifestation of the individual. The most confirmed opinions of this individual will be along his chronic level. The things which he has cared to absorb are along that band. The things which he can remember best are at his chronic level. What he will call pleasure is at his chronic level.
You will occasionally find a person who has been way up for a long time and then really gets punched around for a while — he has to associate with a communist or something — and his case will go way off. His tone level will go way down and become chronic below 2.0 and not escape again. A series of shocks will do this. Let’s say his education is on a highly constructive level; this person will still try to function on that educational level, but he hasn’t got Theta enough to do it and he has a bad time. The manifestations he has will change and become those of his new chronic level. But the data he has to operate on is 3.0 data — he doesn’t have much of this other data — and he has a hard time making an adjustment. You will see occasionally where this has happened.
There are individuals who have been raised in a society and have been given a lot of locks and pounded around, let us say, at 1.1; that is all the educational level they have. When you bring this person up the tone scale you will find he has no data; he is out of the data band.
Take any person who has been to a university and raise him up the tone scale to 1.5: that person is then a fish out of water; he doesn’t know what to do. So you have an educational aspect that comes in there.
Now, the first manifestation is just mechanical — the ratio between Theta and entheta. The second way tone can vary is with the current situation. What is the person’s present time like? Look over his present time. You will find the present time has a tone.
By the way, as you ask him across the boards about general reactions to life you will find his chronic tone level, not his present time tone level. But if you ask him what he is going to do about some situation in present time he will give you the tone-level response of the present time tone level. If it is a pretty bad present time, if the tone level of the present time is down around 0.5 or something like that, you ask him if he is going to write a letter about something and he will say, “No.”
“Are you going to read your mail?” “No.”
Try and get him to talk to you. He won’t, although he could quite ordinarily be well up the tone scale. But here you have a present time which is just momentarily hanging at that level.
So you can get a present time manifestation of tone. And even though that present time extends only for two hours, three hours, four hours, it has in it all the elements of the whole tone band right across the line. For instance, you know that a case has been running ordinarily like a 3.0. You have been having a grand time with this case, and all of a sudden Mama dies or something or other happens. Are you going to keep on trying to process him at his chronic level? No. You would be in trouble right away. You have got to process him at the level he is in. This fellow has had a terrific shock, he is in grief, tears are leaking out of his eyes and he obviously is at 0.5, so do you say, “All we need to do is just run out the grief engram”? No! You cannot run a secondary at 0.5 — unless it is one of these strange flukes that you occasionally get where a psychotic is actually sitting in the thing and is running it all the time anyhow and you just run it on out. Once in a while you can do that but it is dangerous.
If this person all of a sudden has a terrific shock and he is at 0.5, but you know that he is a 3.0 and you try to process him as a 3.0, you will hang him up and louse him up and make him worse. What you want to do is hit him at the tone level he is in, not the tone level you knew he was in. That would be tantamount to saying “We know that this person had a very happy childhood and just went along fine to the age of five. Now he is forty-five and he is very sad, but he had a happy childhood so let’s process him at the level of his childhood as a 4.0.” You would really louse him up.
So the present time situation has something to do with it. As a matter of fact, a lot of people can become acutely psychotic, just momentarily. A fellow who gets angry and busts things up and so forth — even though he does it only for ten minutes — is a psychotic for those ten minutes and you have to handle him as such. Just because the fellow is ordinarily reasonable does not mean that when he is in this 1.5 dramatization he is reasonable then, too.
The third manifestation is with the tone of specific engrams. That is much more important than it would seem at first glance. We all know that engrams can hang anyplace on the tone scale; that is easy. Only it contains some data that I am sure some of you will be very happy to have.
A person has been living in a 3.0 environment and has been passing along very well in this 3.0 environment — not too bright, maybe, but he has been getting by. When you try to have this case respond well and easily there is something wrong with it, but you can’t quite put your finger on what. This person is riding an engram with a 3.0 tone. The person would have to be a bit out of valence in it because certainly his tone wasn’t 3.0 when he was going through the experience which gave him this engram, but somebody else around him was, or maybe everybody was just too happy and cheerful for words in the hospital, and it gives the engram this phony tone.
When you run into that on somebody, every time you ask him how he is doing he says, “Oh, I feel fine, I feel wonderful. Isn’t it a beautiful day! Isn’t it a beautiful day! “ This person obviously is responding to the environment just exactly like he ought to respond, but you know darn well the second you try to go into the case that you are dealing with a psycho. There is a manic! What do you do with people like that? I’m going to tell you right now how to bust a manic: you scan out all the times when they felt good! And you will wind up sitting in the middle of a manic engram.
I discovered the other day that auditors ordinarily didn’t fall into that one easily because it seems too reasonable that the person should feel well. The auditor is also too prone to accept his data — much too prone to accept it. The auditor wants this guy to be at 3.0 and this guy is at 3.0, so the auditor says, “That’s fine, we won’t question it any further. Good, we’ve got him up the tone scale.” And the auditor is dealing with a 0.4!
He starts to run this case like a 3.0 and he is really running a 0.4, and the case starts enturbulating more and more, and then one day this person picks up a gun and shoots the auditor and shoots himself!
Don’t let these manics fool you. There are plenty of them walking around in the society. There are always people around who are walking around in a manic. And don’t think that manic is “maniac.” In Dianetics it just means somebody that is apparently up the tone scale who is not. That is a simple definition.
The point is that by checking the person thoroughly you discover this rapidly; and then you will find, by checking this, what the person is manic about. Don’t think that by breaking this person’s manic you are going to make him feel worse, because you won’t. A person who is walking around in one of these I’ve-got-to-feel-good things feels terrible, actually. They feel bad; they feel hectic, strained. The guy who is “the life of the party” goes to the party, he is the life of the party all the way through and at the end of the party he is a rag. He is a nervous wreck and he hasn’t had a good time. But everybody says, “You sure were the life of the party!” and key it in again on him. So, semantic content can contain any kind of conduct.
I’ll repeat the cure for that again: just find out what this person is too high on and scan through all the times he felt good about that thing.
Let’s say this person is 0.5 pretty much across the boards but, strangely enough, on the subject of sex and children is 4.0. Do you say “The tone scale just erred. Let’s go on and . . .”? No sir! You stop right there and take a look at that second dynamic, because that is one of your first shots. Until you have that one, you won’t get this preclear broken loose enough to where he can run, because “I” is sitting over in the middle of a circuit — some kind of a manic setup. You are going to have a hard time with this case; this case is going to be inaccessible to you. So do something about those wild variables!
The way you handle this case is to scan the person through all the times when he felt good on the second dynamic: “Scan through all the times you felt you loved children.... Now scan through all the times when children were nice.... Scan through all the times when you enjoyed children.... Now let’s scan through all the times when you really enjoyed sexual intercourse.” Do this over and over and over, and all of a sudden this person will go anaten. Of course, they will do it for other reasons, but if you are really working on one of those wild variables, the guy will go under that anaten quickly and he will boil and boil and boil. You try to get him out of it, and then all of a sudden whopping big somatics turn on.
Sometimes the person is sitting over there in present time in the midst of this circuit, and he is really way off the time track and everything else, but there is a phony track under it and there are all sorts of perceptic manifestations that are all loused up. These can be really terrific! You won’t get very far as an auditor if you don’t recognize one of those when you see one, because you will give him too heavy a processing and you will keep him enturbulated, and the next thing you know, you won’t have any preclear And that is unfortunate.
Now, the other manifestation that you find with the tone of specific engrams is the reverse of this. You can have a fellow who has lots of Theta but he is hung up in a low-toned engram. It will go into restimulation and he will go around feeling like the last rose of summer and awfully hangdog and so on; he will go into these depressive states which are quite unlike him. That is just a low-toned engram that kicks in, and you handle that the same way. You just knock out every time he felt like that and you will finally uncover the engram. So it varies with the tone of specific engrams.
The fourth tone scale manifestation is according to phrase manifestations. We more or less covered that when I talked about manics. A person can have a line of conduct dictated by the engrams themselves, and you can place him on the tone scale semantically. Having placed him on the tone scale with words, you will find, oddly enough, that his actual behavior does not vary an iota from the first manifestation — mechanically, with the ratio of free Theta to entheta.
He will talk and act, for your benefit, at some other level on the tone scale than where he really is, but just by going across these columns and finding what his actual behavior is you will discover what his actual tone level is. In other words, the words don’t change it that much. What has seniority here is the mechanical aspect of the free Theta/entheta ratio. That has seniority over word content.
The tone level of education and general environment is manifestation number five. If you get somebody who all his life has lived in a 1.5 family or society, something like that, and whose education has been along in this band, and clear all the engrams out of his bank, you are not going to have a person who will easily manifest. He is going to have a tough time trying to adjust himself to his own educational level. What do you do about this fellow? Pull his education up and throw it away! There is nothing to that. Most education’s are fixed entheta anyhow.
One of the quickest things you can do for the case is to start back on the educational line, pick up the last school he went to and scan it out; pick up the school he went to before that — college — and scan it out. Class by chess, knock it all out. Go back to high school and grammar school and scan it all out. And then you will find Mama and Papa. All of this formal education, in lots of cases, is actually sitting on top of and occluding his early-life training and education, which is the most effective because it came first and had priority and because he was smallest then and he couldn’t fight back. He had to do it.
So if you want to uncover early childhood, that is one of the quickest routes into it I know of. Then he can reevaluate his educational data, according to the reasons which he now has and can see in his society, toward a survival direction. He doesn’t have to believe everything the professors told him. That is important.
By the way, there is another trick associated with this. As professional auditors you can always pick up a quick buck just before examinations. This works for any student. All you have to do is scan him through the course he has just had; scan him through the course a few times and then send him in to take the examination. The data is now “live” to him. It hasn’t been reduced; it has been restimulated and a lot of the suppressors — the entheta — have come out of the line, and he has less inhibition about writing it down. That is worth doing.
There you have those five ways tone varies on the tone scale. I’ll repeat them now:
There is another one, which has less serious- effect than some of the others. Some person who has been restricted physiologically or glandularly from certain types of activity will have been forced to assume a certain level on the tone scale for certain subjects, which will have influenced his conduct at other points of life. This is something that an auditor can square up and should square up rather readily and rapidly. After you have straightened out something like this, or it has been straightened out, go back over the stuff again and lock-scan the data on it. Lock-scan a lot of the data on it, because otherwise the person is liable to keep operating with certain inhibitions which he really doesn’t need to observe now.
For instance, take a chronic psychosomatic illness: some fellow who has had sinus trouble has busily trained into himself the mechanism whereby he shouldn’t sit in the draft. So he will go around being careful not to sit in the draft. But birth has been erased and the person doesn’t need that mechanism anymore! You will find out that if you just say “Scan through all the training patterns resulting from your nose condition,” or something of the sort, you will clear this up and give him a lot more flexibility in life. Until you do that, the environment has closed him in a little tighter than it should.
What we are talking about mainly is straightening a case up after you have run quite a few engrams off it. That is important.