I would like to make a summary remark on the line of what I was giving you in the first section of this lecture. There is no effort of mine to in any way suppress, inhibit or discourage experimentation in the field of Dianetics. Originally I did all I could to encourage it. If you remember the early talks of June and July 1950 in Elizabeth, you remember the attitude toward experimentation and independent thought. I still would like to encourage that to its furthest extent.
The only thing wrong that occurs in the field is that someone takes an experimental technique which is very experimental — it has been run on a series of three or five, maybe for two weeks or a month at the most — and picks this up as a technique. There is a big difference between an experimental technique and a technique.
The fault, then, does not lie with the experimenter. In the enthusiasm which one has to get his preclears’ cases and his own case to move as rapidly as possible, the acceptor of the experimental procedure himself is the villain of the piece. I have seen papers come out which were marked quite bluntly “Experimental Procedure” and have seen people going completely overboard on these things.
The most that an auditor should be doing with an experimental procedure is this: He likes the idea, so he takes one preclear he is running and runs that experimental technique, if he wishes to be an experimenter himself, and he works with the preclear in the preclear’s full knowledge of the fact that it is an experimental procedure which is being used. He keeps on running Standard Procedure with his other cases. The auditor then keeps good notes on what he is doing and sends his unbiased results back to the individual who originated the technique. In fairness, this is what he should do.
The person who is putting out this technique then can accumulate a considerable amount of data. He evidently usually knows the most about this technique, so he can correlate what suggestions he receives back again.
But this is experimentation, not practicing. Make a good, clear line between these two things.
Do you realize that it would be possible for a group antipathetic to Dianetics to originate a very valid-appearing technique, send it around on a mimeographed sheet, and spin a dozen preclears in a month?
The United States Navy was very nice to me in 1941; they gave me an education in naval intelligence. It included a course on how to be an agent provocateur — the boy who causes unrest and trouble within the group that his forces are attacking. There are two sides to sabotage: one is the agent saboteur and the other is the agent provocateur. The modus operandi of sabotage and provocation are very simple ones.
Dianetics has a great many friends and it has a few small, measly and unimportant enemies. Nevertheless, it is a very dull fellow who neglects all of his enemies. We have just been through the sawmill, through the public presses. Nobody need convince me further that Dianetics has enemies of such a low altitude that human liberty and the right to think in the society are nothing. I don’t care to get off on this line very far, but let me assure you the attacks made were completely unfounded on anything even faintly resembling truth.Of course, I could spend the rest of my life hunting down these dogs, but I have more important things to do. I know enough about the modus operandi of theta-entheta to know that all I would succeed in doing is enturbulating myself and Dianetics. What I am doing right at the present time is carrying the ball — getting out some books, advancing research and taking care of the things in Dianetics which have to be cared for. The entheta line has to be left where it lies. It will damp out; it will die out. Nevertheless, human life and human sanity have gone by the boards in this effort which we have just survived.
Therefore, you can understand my concern in keeping the name Dianetics in practice as ethical and as provenly workable as possible. We have to stand together when it comes to the effort of thrusting out a new idea, a new concept and a new goal into a reluctant and debased society. We have got a great deal of work to do.
No one should feel that by the submission of an experimental procedure or paper to the Foundation it will be neglected. Nearly all of them come before my eyes. Very often the experimenter himself and I have talked; my ideas have been expanded and so have his. Things which have come out that we can refer to as wildcat very often came out even though I was right in there working with the group. The only unauthorized part of it was that somebody published it very broadly, and it was accepted by practitioners, as standardized procedure. For your own safety and the security of Dianetics, the use of Proven Procedure — until Proven Procedure is altered by these new techniques — should be a primary concern of yours.
Now, the submission of papers to the Foundation will find those papers enclosed without change in the back of the book supplements which will come out once a month. If any censorship is done on them at all it will merely be that somebody has written something in one hundred thousand words that we just don’t have the space to print. If a book comes out which is of considerable importance to Dianetics, the Foundation will publish that book. Furthermore, the copyrights and so forth can be exchanged and safeguarded in this fashion. There is not even any effort to suppress the publication of other books. There is a definite effort to keep the copyright of Dianetics straightened up.
I would feel very foolish, if some friend of mine suddenly published a book using the word Dianetics, to have to say “You can’t publish that” after it is already out. This would put me in a very embarrassing position, and yet I would have to say something or do something. Otherwise, that book going out validates the fact that now anybody can publish “Robonetics,” “Apenetics,” “Anynetics,” or publish the word Dianetics on a book which is subsidized and paid for by somebody who doesn’t like us. Right now, I have the right and the power to close down, like a slammed window, such an operation as the last one mentioned.
If somebody wants to publish a book about Dianetics there is no quarrel about it at all. All he has to do is write the Foundation and we go through copyright release — permission to use the copyright. That is all it takes. The Foundation will publish the book with a 10 percent royalty to its writer, if that book has any sales quality or quantity at all. And as far as small papers are concerned, these things sent to the Foundation will come out automatically as part of a supplement. By sending them in and distributing them around in such fashion, a maximum number of people will be able to see them.
In other words, there is going to be and will continue to be an experimental line of action in Dianetics. That must be promoted.
But also, on your bread and butter, on your own preclears’ cases, count very solidly on the reliable production of results. Use what is provenly useful and usable.
If you have ideas that can be improved, remember that there are a lot of people who are very willing to help you dress them up and expand them. And remember too, just as I have been utterly unable to do anything with new procedures as they came out without the aid and assistance of other people, so is the experimenter himself limited. I use anything and everything in the Foundation in carrying forward the advance research line and the proof line on Dianetics.
Validation Processing has fewer cases behind it than anything else released. I told you that when I was giving it to you. Nevertheless, it is not really experimental. We have been running across this thing for a long time. It is just a development and an extrapolation line.
I want you to feel friendly about this idea of ideas, because, believe me, I think I have proven myself to be your friend with regard to them and I would like to have you be mine with regard to them.
Now, there are a couple of matters which I have been asked about that I would like to take up very briefly.
I spoke considerably about extroversion in an earlier lecture. If a person is extroverted the attention units are in present time regarding the environment. That is extroversion. When the attention units get scattered back on the track regarding yesterday’s problems, or even on computations regarding today’s problems, he is introverted. A perfectly legitimate introversion, by the way, is trying to think of the answers which compare with the data being received from the current environment. But having the attention units scattered back along the track, looking into this incident and that incident and the other incident — as produced both by an introverted person and artificially by self-auditing — is an undesirable state for a person to be in in his everyday life.
The difference between extroversion and introversion could be stated in another fashion. We have wondered for a long time what necessity level is. How would you like to be able to artificially pick up a person’s necessity level? All you would have to know is what necessity level is. Necessity level and extroversion are quite similar. As a matter of fact, necessity level is merely, evidently, extroversion occasioned acutely by the presence of a recognizably menaceful problem in the environment.
Here we have the environment suddenly posing a big, recognizable problem. There is the problem, and the person comes up to present time and extroverts on it. That is necessity level. Of course, because it has that magnitude he automatically responds physiologically. The adrenal system and the rest of it goes into action. This makes necessity level look pretty terrific, because here you have theta and MEST both alerting toward a danger, so you get an extroversion and you get the energy in the body necessary to make this extroversion effective.
Man was built, evidently, to have one of these occurrences happen to him five, six, ten times a day. After all, we lived a lot longer in the jungle and on the sea floor and in sea water, probably, than we have lived walking around in the streets of America as men. And even as men, there are probably ten to fifty thousand years of being a hunting society behind nearly any group now alive. And there are probably another ten thousand years of being in that, really, not very much less perilous environment of the agrarian society — animals, outside all the time, accidents happening in wild places, and so forth. You could count on this, then: Man has been built along the line to have lots of necessity level many times. A white man starts living the kind of a life that man used to live and it is a funny thing, but it doesn’t tear him to bits.
I was the first casualty home from the South Pacific. I turned myself in at the hospital, got some adhesive tape glued on me, and I was all set to go home in a hurry and see the wife and kids. But the doctor said, “No, you go to bed.”
“Why?”
“Well, you’ve got to have a routine checkover, routine checkover.”
Any time the navy says “routine,” this means it is unavoidable. So I proceeded to turn myself in. I woke up the next morning and there was the most horrible character I had ever seen, saying, “How many fingers do you see? What time is it? What is your name?”
I was smart enough not to give him some flip sarcastic answers, or I would probably be there yet! I said, “Two fingers. It’s seven-thirty,” or some ridiculous hour. But what I couldn’t get over was the eagerness of this person. He was so eager and he looked so disappointed every time I answered him rationally!
I saved the anger that was building up inside of me until I saw the officer of the day outside. And I said very “politely” to him, “What’s the idea?”
And he said, “Didn’t you know?” No, I didn’t know. He said, “You are the first casualty home from the South Pacific. Everybody knows that the stress and strain of modern war is such that the human mind can’t stand it! “
This was one of these “everybody knows” things!
Over in Europe, the Germans had been bombing troops with these Stuka screamers and all sorts of things. The troops were getting tired out, worn out, nerves frazzled and so forth. And naturally these fellows were out of food, they were exhausted, and their engrams were keying in left and right. Why? They were being defeated so fast they didn’t know which end they were standing on! Those troops were in such full retreat that the rear guard was always in advance of the vanguard during the retreat. They pulled back to the beach at Dunkirk and went home, leaving most everything they had in Europe. And in the field of psychiatry they were adjudicating about this as “Obviously the human anatomy and mind could not stand. up to modern war.”
Japanese Zeros and the rest of this stuff down in the South Pacific didn’t offer the same picture. We very definitely were losing; we lost the first part of that war. Nobody seems to mention that, but we really lost it! However, just because a man comes out of the war area, to immediately assume he is crazy is a bit crazy!
I got away from the hospital after a while. I was insulted. But I really needn’t have been insulted, because they needed data. The data finally worked out this way: The people who were carrying forward the war in combat areas had a pretty low percentage of psychotics compared to the people who were standing idle in rear areas, on supply ships and other places. War neurosis came up and slapped those people who had not enough to do, who were merely there being worried. They wanted to do something and nobody would let them.
In the navy, the big combat cargo vessels just cruised around endlessly; even when they made a beachhead landing they could see action over there on the beach, but they weren’t ducking very many shells. The menace in the area at most would come from a few aircraft. There was no big necessity level; there was just frustration. There was something going on and they should alert to it and then immediately close with the enemy and tear him to bits and that sort of thing, but that was being prevented.
For instance, take a soldier out of the front lines where he has been wounded and treat him at a first-aid station. He will be all right; he is right up near the lines where the guns are going and everything else. He is an effective social unit (or an antisocial unit — the army). He is right up there in the front lines, but he is sane. Now let’s move him to the rear area to a base hospital. There he goes. He will cease to have a target for his necessity level.
It is interesting to you as auditors to realize, then, that man is baffled and confused by indefinites or too-definitenesses, not by violence. He can stand up to any quantity of punishment so long as he knows what it is and where it is from. It is when he doesn’t know or when he knows too well that he is really upset.
In other words, you are going up against two kinds of mental aberration which are very general and which apply very definitely to your business. One is when the danger is unknown, unselected and unrecognized — indefinite. He can’t find it, he can’t fix his mind on it, he can’t locate it. The other one is complete fixation on one thing as dangerous to the exclusion of any other dangers in the environment.
In the first one, the mind is hunting. It can’t extrovert, because the danger might be back there down the time track too. Just where is it? Is it this? Is it that? That is why people pick up associative restimulators and things like that.
On the second one, you will run into somebody, for instance, who is clutching to his bosom this fact that the reason everything happened to him was “because his libido was down.” It is all libido and the answer is contained in Sigmund Freud; it must be contained there, and it has to do with his libido, and don’t disturb him any because here it is and this is all that is wrong, and this is the whole environ, and this told him everything!
Now you just try to pull this out and say, “This is good writing and everything; it is done in English and it is published with hard covers and so forth, but why don’t you look around the environment and really take a look? You realize that your wife nags you and your kids get on your nerves and so forth — let’s go into this a little more practically and . . .”
“No sir! It has got to be this!” In other words, he has selected himself a point of reference because he can’t find out what is wrong. So he goes into the delusion of postulating that this is wrong.
You will also find that people will fixate on a cure. They know something is wrong, and then somebody comes along and describes this new disease called “bettahugen.” “Bettahugen is a terrible disease that invisibly attacks the cranial clavichord.” And the fellow says, “That must be me!” He knows something is wrong but he can’t locate the real source of danger as far as he is concerned, so he picks one up; this is the danger. First you sell him the disease and then you sell him the cure.
Psychiatry and medicine think we are doing that in Dianetics because that is all they have ever done. You postulate that this is what is wrong, and then you do something about what you have postulated. Whether it produces results or not is beside the point. It at least keeps a lot of people busy and interested.
Just giving something into somebody’s hand and saying “This is cause, and we are going to fix it up with this” — just doing that for somebody who is completely unfixed, who can’t fix on any menace in his environ — is therapeutic! You have said, “This is the danger.”
This fellow has had terrible stomachaches all of his life, and it is horrible and he hasn’t any reason for it at all. Somebody comes along and says, “Well, fellow, what’s wrong with you is very obvious. You have inflammation of the interior lufwuttapumps.”
And the fellow says, “I have? What is this caused by?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, it is caused by eating too much popcorn. Now, you just knock off that popcorn and take these pills three times a day — nasty-tasting things, aren’t they? — and you will be fine.”
As a matter of fact, for a while, this fellow will be fine. He will be perfectly satisfied to nail down all of these unfixed attention units for the environ into “stomach inflammation because of popcorn.” You could even train him up to a point where, when he walks down the street and sees a popcorn stand, he will go clear across the street rather than go near one.
You will see people who have been told it is poison ivy that causes that skin rash, when it is actually the measles he had when he was a child. The fellow will just see a picture of a poison ivy plant and begin to swell up. That is his good, solid selected cause, and when you try to take that one away from him, you are really going to have a time! You are going to have to show him another, more valid cause.
That is why people come along and tell you “You better run an engram out of me! “ They want to be rolled up in a ball right away. They want to have this cause. They want to have this proven to them.
You know what you are working with; you have seen enough of them. You have seen enough engrams and secondaries and you have seen what happens when they get relieved and so forth. That is good enough for you but it isn’t good enough for him.
That is where charlatanism starts coming in, in any profession: the demand of the public, the demand of the individual, to be given a cause which can then be cured.
The fellow who is fixated on a danger is not going to be persuaded out of the fact that that is his danger, but you can unfix him one way or the other. He gets to a point where he says, “Everything that has happened to me is because of rose petals,” “Everything that has happened to me is because of the Republicans,” “Everything that has happened to me is bankers,” “Everything that has happened to me is communists.” He will fix on this one item solidly, and he can’t get off the thing.
You could put a sign up saying “Republican,” and he would be afraid of that sign and fixed on that sign to the point where a saber-toothed tiger walking in from two points off his starboard bow could just walk in and eat him up.
These are both non survival attitudes: not to be able to find out what is wrong and therefore selecting something that is wrong, or actually having some menace in the environment which can’t be fought. A menace which can’t be fought will also produce this manifestation. You don’t dare fight Papa. You don’t dare fight Mama. That is where you get Papa and Mama as villains — not because they are really villains, but because they are menaces that can’t be fought. They demonstrated that a long time ago. They are suppressors — big, solid suppressors.
When you start to straighten up somebody along this line, you just talk to him about present time and you will be able to start his attention wandering off the fixed object a little bit. But if you try to educate him into the fact that this object is not the object, you won’t do it. Many auditors will waste time doing that. What they ought to be doing is building up ARC. Just that. It will unfix him. Don’t worry about these two manifestations. Those actually are the two categories of inability to think.
Necessity level is, then, extroversion toward a known, recognizable menace in an effort to do something about it. You will get remarkable instances of this. I think if man could be extroverted by the sudden approach of a recognizable menace three, four, five times a day, he would probably be so unaberrated that we would hardly know him as a creature. He would just keep snapping up to present time, snapping up to present time, and the next thing you know, he would be habitually in present time. Of course, he would be alert to an extreme and he probably would have extended hearing and look like something that is rather hunted, but he would reason well! I still think that is preferable to the vegetable mental condition I see in some places.
Now, I have been asked how Freud’s “death instinct,” or “death wish,” fits with Dianetic theory. As a matter of fact there probably is a relationship; most of Freud could probably be explained if you looked through Dianetics hard. We run into this sort of thing quite a bit.
You take a barrel with ten thousand beans in it. By some hook or crook you manage to reach in and, out of ten thousand beans that more or less look all alike, pick out the one bean that is important. This is the bean. You look it over and you start using this as the bean and find out you can really do tricks with this bean.
Then somebody comes along and says proudly, “Look. That bean was out of that barrel. That was nothing.”
The point is that the bean was in the barrel but it wasn’t evaluated for importance. And there were 9,999 other beans which could have been picked up with equal alacrity and which wouldn’t have worked. Why didn’t the person who filled that barrel with beans pick out the right bean in the first place? Why did he insist on pouring all those beans into that barrel if he knew what he was doing?
You are asked this question in the field many times, I am sure. “How does Dianetics differ? You have a couch. It must be psychoanalysis!” And they say, “You look back in Darwin’s theory, and you will find there that it’s by natural selection — the survival of the fittest. Now, how does that possibly differ from ‘the dynamic principle of existence is survive’? It’s the same thing!” It is not the same thing, because we have an aligned body of knowledge.
We have taken “the dynamic principle of existence is survive,” and then we have explored survival and found out where everything fits into the picture properly on survival. So we have an organized picture. There is a big difference between this and a phrase lying back there.
It is true that Dianetics has a great debt to pay to Darwin and it is true that Dianetics has a debt to pay to Freud. But it is very untrue that Freud or Darwin gave enough to put together what has turned out to be Dianetics. A lot of people tried to use Charles Darwin’s work as a therapy and as an understanding of the human mind. As a matter of fact, they have fallen practically flat on their faces trying to use Darwin in extrapolating and evolving a theory of mind. Therefore there must be other things in Darwin they were using that were not true, and obviously it was not properly aligned.
Now, Freud and Jung and some others did the work on the death wish, death instinct, and so on. There have been a lot of these fellows. This idea came in to Europe from India about 1750, and these fellows played with it from 1750 on through till 1940 or 1945. It was played with that long without an evaluation.
We put it down on the bottom of the tone scale and we say “It is succumb, and this is the distance and this is the direction and this is what it is,” and all of a sudden we can predict who is going to commit suicide and who is going to do this and who is going to do that. It is a different proposition but it stems exactly from that source. All knowledge builds in this fashion. People come along and they select out importance’s. They evaluate the information and fit it to the real universe. They keep selecting out information and fitting it to the universe, selecting out more and fitting it to more.
Men have been trying to crack this riddle for thousands of years. You read the papers of the Greeks on the subject of insanity and so on, and you will find a lot of valid material in there; you say to yourself, “Why couldn’t these people figure out an engram and run one?” You come up along the line and look at the work of the magicians up around the ninth and tenth to twelfth centuries, and you say, “With all they knew, why couldn’t these people possibly have figured this thing out?” They didn’t, though.
Then we look at the work of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in medicine, physiology and so forth, and say, “Look at all these people knew. Why didn’t they work this out?” There just wasn’t enough data yet, that was all. Pretty soon, though, you collect enough data and fit it together in the right holes, and the next thing you know, you have a working proposition.
People try to subdivide all this stuff and they try to compartment it all out into their own slots. The horrible part of it is that these data did not work well in these separate slots — in this frame of reference and in that frame of reference. Somebody had to come along and change their frames of reference, put them together, sum them up and find out what difference it made.
People who are slamming against Dianetics don’t realize that they are kicking their favorite philosophers in the teeth. For instance, somebody will stand up to you and tell you, “Now, Korzybski really had some ideas! Korzybski this and Korzybski that…” Fine! Alfred
Korzybski’s work contributed an enormous amount to Dianetics. Nobody in Dianetics contests this in the least. The whole semantic line that we have been working on is a refinement of general semantics.
Then somebody else will come along and say it is all from general semantics or it is all from Freud or it is all from Darwin or it is all from someplace else.
You are dealing with people who either can’t fix their concentration or have to fix it to escape thinking about it. They have fixed their concentration solidly on one subject, one small subject, in an effort to escape an ignorance on a tremendous number of subjects. That might be called an insanity to which the analytical mind is prone.
Another thing I wanted to call to your attention is the existence of past deaths and past lives, in a proper frame of reference.
Here again is phenomena. A scientist who refuses to look at the evidence of his environ because of prejudice or argument or somebody’s prohibition against it is not a searcher after truth. At best such a man would be a paid hack working in some laboratory or university. He would not be a scientist. He has been told to cleave to a certain line, so he does. He is not a searcher after truth, then, but a follower after gods. Past lives and past deaths showed up uninvited; preclears started to land in them. Exploration demonstrated that the manifestation from preclear to preclear was quite similar. Also, it has been demonstrated that there were dub- in past deaths and past lives, and that there were evidently real ones. A tremendous amount of material has showed up on this.
Now, “It is something that one shouldn’t yell about too loudly” is the general consensus of opinion. So it was put out in Science of Survival more or less as an invitation to people in the field to write in and tell us all about it. “We think we have found something there; would you please look?” That is the way past lives and so forth were presented in that book. There was really no effort to slug anybody over the head with them. If you look over the notes and so forth about them, you will find that that is about the attitude: Send in your data; there is more evidence in favor of some sort of immortality for man than there is against it. But there really is not very much evidence at all, and if you have any we would be very pleased to hear about it. Man has thought there was a human soul and immortality for more years than he thought there wasn’t one.
Let’s be bluntly practical now. The truth of the matter is that you can latch a case up faster than fire drill by running him into a past death and not running it out, and by not knowing about past deaths. You can really fix a case up thoroughly! Run him into a past death too far up the chain, say “This must be just dub-in,” and go off and leave it or run it out improperly, and the next thing you know, your preclear is developing somatics the like of which he has never had before, and off you go. This case bogs. Nobody can quite understand why it bogs.
It would be a funny prejudice that made an auditor ignore data which would make his preclear sick if he didn’t use it. And yet lack of knowledge of what can exist in past lives and past deaths can do that.
The extent that running them helps the preclear has not been measured accurately enough for anything to be said about it. There have been a few psychometries run on it, and some slight improvement was noted in these very few after running out several past deaths and so on. The change was rather uniform, but the number of cases run was not significant. So there has got to be a lot of data gathered on this. This is a tremendous field of research.
Recently somebody has come and told us that they have run material out on the genetic line. They go back through the sperm so far and they run into Papa, then they run into Grandpa, and they run back on the genetic line.
I have never run anyone on the genetic line so I wouldn’t know about this. But I have run many people on the theta-body line. By using this phenomena properly you can produce some interesting effects and sometimes get your preclear unstuck from the time track where he is badly stuck and do other things worthy of notice. So if your preclear starts handing up something like this, or if you get him back into it, you had better not neglect it. You had better do a good job on running it out. If he starts asking you whether this is true or it isn’t true, don’t invalidate it for him and don’t validate it for him. It is his case! That is the attitude.
I want to show you that there is a distinct difference between a death engram and a current-life engram. This has to do with the changes in the depth of anaten.
Take, for instance, an impact engram: the person’s awareness goes down suddenly and then he gradually becomes conscious. First there is a blow, so the person goes very unconscious, and then the unconsciousness gets less and less until it is gone. That would be the result of a blow.
Then there is an anesthesia pattern. First he is conscious and awake, then he is given anesthesia and he gets down very low. In the middle of the engram nobody is giving him anesthesia; he stays unconscious through this area and then comes on up to consciousness again.
An operation combines these two types of anaten. For instance, you can have an anesthesia engram which would follow that pattern but, because of physical pain, would go off into the impact pattern. A knife stroke or something like that would take it off the anesthesia pattern. It would deepen the unconsciousness at that point because of further pain.
By the way, I want to call this to your attention as auditors: An inexpert auditor can start the engram after the impact and run it out to the end, not realizing that the heaviest deposit of anaten is earlier, and the phrases are harder to get at the beginning. The level of unconsciousness depends on this impact, and if you can just get the impact off, the rest of it more or less goes. By a time shift, moving the preclear to one second before the impact or to ten seconds before the impact and shoving him on through it, you will find the moment of impact. The beginning of the engram generally shows up, though, as being later, when you first contact it; there is too much anaten right after the impact.
Remember that in an anesthesia the anaten goes in gradually and deepens. Then during the operation period, when the person starts being cut up, hacked up, chewed up, gnawed and so forth, the unconsciousness will deepen, so there is a period in there where there will be a disguised phrase. And then the anaten will gradually wear off.
Actually, the tapering off of unconsciousness is such that it sometimes extends for a day or more before the fellow is completely rid of it.
A past death does not have either of these patterns of anaten, and therefore it is possible for an auditor to make a mistake on running one out. A death has a different pattern; it starts — whether by impact or otherwise — and it gets deeper and deeper anaten until it is over, and then you evidently get a separation of theta and MEST. That is death. An auditor will run this and the first time he will get content up to a certain point, so he will say that is where the fellow kicked the bucket. Then he will go back over it again, up to the same point where the person kicked the bucket, and then he will run it a couple more times and think it is all erased now — he got some yawns off it and so forth — so he will go find something else.
But the toughest part of this death is still there and is now restimulated! And the auditor keeps wondering after that, “I wonder where that curious somatic comes from, where he feels his back has been cut open?” That was the end of the engram, when the undertaker started in or something. Every once in a while you will run a past death where the fellow was not thoroughly dead.
But the depth of anaten of a death is very great. If on an impact he can come down to one level and on an operation he comes down to a deeper level and he is still alive, how deep does the anaten have to be to get him dead? Fortunately, the past death is not on a MEST organism. Therefore, if you run it at all well, it runs off fairly easily. So what you want to do is run it out to separation.
Now, it is a funny thing that there is a separation point at the end of the death — at least this has been the observation of most of the auditors running past deaths. The fellow will run all the way through and then he will go up someplace and take a look at the scene and say “So what?” Then you start him in at the beginning again, and there is his mother crying and there is his old father and his sisters, and there is a lot of heavy emotion. Then he says, “Oh, I’m dead!” and there are tears and so forth. Next, he brightens up and says, “Ah well, I wonder what they are doing?” Then he goes back to the beginning and goes through this terrific emotional surge, and then he says, “So what?” You can expect this to happen. Just because he gets to the so-what stage doesn’t mean that this death is deintensified. It is not. You have got to take it back through again.
You will find all sorts of weird things; you will find valence shifters (“Oh, if it could only have been me! If I could only have died in his place!”) and so on.
Now, these things will lay in with very heavy somatics, and if you run into one of them in a preclear, for heaven’s sake, run it out. If you have a preclear who is mysteriously stuck on the time track someplace, don’t pull your punches too much, don’t just stand off forever because of a prejudice; go and see if he has a past death that has been too thoroughly restimulated, because that will stick him on the time track.
The test for erasure or reduction on one of these is that it is all gone; he is all the way through it. He has gotten over to the theta body and out. If this manifestation starts showing up, he knows where the end of the death is and you just run it out until it is consecutive. The difficulty is when the auditor brings him deep into the death and there is no separation and the auditor just says “He must be dead now,” and starts him back at the beginning and then comes up to only partway through. That is the danger. If you can get him through to the end at all, the thing will run out. Past lives quite occasionally show up on low-tone-scale people, where you wouldn’t think ordinarily that you could run an engram at all. What are you going to do with it? You have to run it; if you have to run it you have to run it.
Now, there is another aspect of this: what talking movies have done to the human psyche! If this material didn’t bog down cases, I wouldn’t pay much attention to it, actually, because I haven’t any proof that it really increases the level of cases. But every once in a while you will find a case bogging and you have to do something about past deaths.
The level of reality gets kind of bad because the fellow goes back and he says, “Oh, that’s Apache Drums. Oh yeah, that’s a scene from Apache Drums. Well, I guess I don’t have to worry about that.... Let me see. No, I guess the picture was Fort Apache. “
You start running back and you get the U.S. Cavalry’s arrival, the U.S. Cavalry’s arrival, the
U.S. Cavalry’s arrival — tremendous quantities of locks. Locks from when he was a boy of twelve reading Altsheler’s works — we get all these off and then we get back earlier and we get the Books of Knowledge out. We are looking for something. Certainly this person did not get an engram from looking at a picture. He gets into the past death, and all of a sudden he will run it or the basic on its chain, and the rest of this stuff will just go on off.
But when he hits a bouncer in a past death, he will very often bounce into these darn fool locks. The U.S. Cavalry’s arrival, this, that, anything — costume historicals, books, movies, motion pictures.
Just look at a theater audience as they come out of a costume historical sometime. I have gotten a kick out of this by standing alongside the ticket box and watching a few of them come out. Boy, are they restimulated!
But the tremendous numbers of locks which you will pick up in this society, which has such an enormous number of pictures, books, costume historicals and so forth, is wonderful.
For instance, you push him back into an incident, and he is looking at a geography book in his class and there he has before him a picture of Roanoke, Virginia, the way it must have looked. You start to bring him out of this thing, but he is low on the tone scale and he doesn’t budge. Say, “Have you ever been in Roanoke?”
“No.”
“Does your family come from Roanoke?” “No.”
“File clerk, can we go to Roanoke? (snap!)”
“Yes.” The fellow says, “What? What’s this all about?” “Let’s go to Roanoke.”
The preclear I did this to went straight to Roanoke and let out a pale scream, because at that moment a hatchet was sinking straight across his brow. It surprised him! The real benefit which I have seen accrue from doing something about past deaths has been strictly on the line of unsticking somebody on the time track. I found a girl once who was stuck at the declaration of war on December 7, 1941. Nothing had happened to her at all; it was simply that war had been declared. It was latched up on an incident in 1688 where war had been declared in France. This had meant the end of her English lover and she had blown her brains out. She had been in a complete apathy. All I know is that when I found she was stuck on December 7, I could find nothing happening on December 7, and it wouldn’t reduce or run out. So I said, “All right, let’s go to the incident necessary to resolve this situation.” She wound up in France in 1688. We ran the incident there, then we had to run an earlier incident, and we came back and exhausted the first one completely and brought her on up the line. As far as I know, as long as she had been in Dianetics she had never been above December 7, 1941, and this time she came to present time like a shot.
She was speaking French back there in the incident but she couldn’t speak French in this life.
Sometimes you get a fellow who is fairly well up the tone scale around 2.0 or 2.5 and you can generally do something with scanning on past lives. However, this is something that should be approached with grave trepidation. Certainly above that level you can scan them. But I did this one time to a fellow who was at 1.0 with the most remarkable results. You see terror come off a case occasionally, but I have never seen a case like that. One leg of the couch was a tiny bit too short, and the terror came off this case with such violence, as a result of scanning through past deaths, that the whole couch vibrated and started to play a tattoo on the floor that sounded like a pneumatic drill. People were coming around to find out what was happening.
It came from one specific incident. By scanning his past lives, I latched him up in the incident and then ran it. That was probably a very dangerous proceeding. But this fellow had never had anything run off his case before and nobody could touch anything on his case.
Standard Procedure used on secondaries during past lives or on past deaths — standard running of engrams with this in mind — accomplishes the results and should be done if you trip your preclear into one of these.
But anything about past deaths and past lives is experimental in the extreme. Right now we don’t know anything; we are really ignorant on the subject. God knows what lies along that track! People spring up with it spontaneously. They don’t have to have heard of it from the Foundation or anything. For instance, some fellow kind of sidles up to you and says, “You know, out in Minnipugla, we had a funny experience. We had a preclear out there” (he is very embarrassed about this whole thing) “and this fellow ran out a flock of past deaths.”
So you say, “Well, sure. So what?” He looks so relieved!
And then he tells you confidentially, “Well, actually, we have run them out of about half the group, and one was run out of me three days ago.”
I have been asked how you tell a real past life from a dub-in. An auditor is far too prone, I have found, to assign the label dub-in to some preclear’s incidents. There is only one real test for dub-in: Does the preclear go through it again with the same somatics, and with more or less the same content? Does it sound like an engram? Is it an engram? In other words, is this the sort of thing that would have happened when he was unconscious — people talking back and forth and so on — or is it just a monologue of some sort? Sometimes you will get a preclear who will run nothing but Mama’s monologues, without much in the way of somatics or anything else, just on and on. That is not valid; it is dub-in.
If you go back and ask him to repeat it, he can’t. But he will immediately tell you about another incident that he thinks is earlier or which he has to get first, and he will run that one. That is dub-in. Very often if a preclear is really loopy, he doesn’t know when he is dubbing. If you as an auditor continue to accept dub-in and so on, you are really validating dub-in. You are validating delusion, and when you validate something it comes true. If you validate enough delusion and enough dub-in on a case, you will eventually find that this case will run nothing for you but delusion and dub-in.
This doesn’t mean that you should invalidate, but it does mean that you are using too heavy a level of processing on this preclear. That is all it means. If you find a case dubbing in, it isn’t up to you to go charging into this case and try to make him run a real engram. If he is bad enough to be dubbing in and doesn’t know he is dubbing in, he is in such bad shape that he had better be audited with very light techniques.
In other words, you assign his proper position on the tone scale and use the type of processing that will fit that position. Usually if a case is dubbing in badly — if a case will dub in without knowing he is dubbing in and does really nothing but dub in — an auditor had better get that preclear in contact with present time and use a little bit of Straightwire.
Now, we have two possible lines here: the theta line and the genetic line. The theta line doesn’t follow the genetic line.
These are the lines which have been explored. First is current life. You have, on this, the time track between conception and present time. We are familiar with this one. We have agreed that this exists and has reality and that you are you and I am me, and so on. We have some good agreement on that. By the way, though, we haven’t got any more evidence that this exists than that past lives exist!
In back of this are the sperm and ovum sequences Some people have been telling me lately that there is a genetic line that starts going out earlier than this, back through all the ancestors. There are lots of engrams back there! Frankly, I haven’t run into this, but I have been told about it, and this leads to all sorts of things. It leads to a theory of prime valences which says nobody can be in a valence that isn’t on his own genetic line. That doesn’t happen to hold. You have run a lot of preclears who were in the valences of dogs, and as I have said before, the fact that you ran the preclear in the valence of a dog does not necessarily put the dog on the genetic line.
The idea is that if you keep backing up into the sperm line you can start running into Grandpa’s engrams and all of Grandma’s engrams, and so on back down the genetic line. You can have that one. I hope nobody opens that up in any case I have anything to do with — if it exists.
And then we have the theta-body line. The theta body is a consecutive life line. This would be just the theta part of the organism. I don’t know how the theta body gets there, but it is simply a sequence of consecutive lives, and sometimes a hitch where two theta bodies will make up one of these lives or something like that. There are foul-ups of this character. The file clerk cannot extrapolate and alter the Gregorian calendar into the Chaldean calendar and so forth, so date flashes are not at all reliable back along the line.
You can find lots of material on this. There are tremendous quantities on this theta-body line. What it will do for a case I don’t know, beyond lousing it up if it is ignored. I loused up five cases before I decided to accept the evidence of the real universe. Then I went back rather apologetically. I didn’t ever get my hands on three of the cases again, but I heard recently that one of them had been untangled.
All I did was go into a past death and say, “Well, gee whiz,” and go back and find another one and say, “Gosh,” and then say, “You better come up to present time!” It was done to me too; I still think I have a hang-up on 410 B.C. ! Somebody ran me back down there one day, and it was near the end of the session; the last thing I remember was a large body of Persian cavalry charging.
Now, while we are on this line of the theta body, there is another aspect we haven’t looked at too heavily yet: theta perceptics. The theta perceptics open up an enormous field of study. How much can be perceived of the theta universe, how much there is to perceive, how it is perceived, and so forth, are fields which occultism, spiritualism, magic and various groups have been playing around with for thousands of years. There is a tremendous amount of accumulated observation data — some of it valid, some of it not valid, some of it pure hoax and some of it very good scientific observation. It is wonderful the amount of accumulated data that has just sat out there, detached and unrelated to anything with the scientific world — because they couldn’t relate it to anything — saying, “No! No! No, no ghosts! No spooks! Don’t do this to us! Now we have everything all figured out and it is all MEST, you understand? There are no ghosts.”
What you will find out there, I don’t know. This is the trouble with Dianetics: You go into the field of human thought and you have a nice orderly idea of making people a little more sane, and the next thing you know, the horizon has opened in all directions on some subject that you didn’t want to have anything to do with in the first place!