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ENGLISH DOCS FOR THIS DATE- Counter-Emotion (DCL-1b) - L511227b
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CONTENTS COUNTER-EMOTION

COUNTER-EMOTION

A lecture given on 27 December 1951 Thought, Emotion and Effort

The line of advance of Dianetic processing has been, actually, very consistent. Dianetics took off from the knowledge of modern medicine — in some cases, I think, from well in advance of the knowledge of modern medicine, because I wasn’t burdened down with a bunch of postulates about how “he didn’t come to me soon enough” and so forth.

I had already assumed that modern medicine could do something for somebody. That was a mistake. Modern medicine can do something for somebody as long as they use biochemistry: penicillin, Aureomycin, sulfa, quinine and so on, and they can put somebody out of pain with the various sedatives.

They need to be coached up enormously before they are on the ball with obstetrics because they aren’t getting healthy babies born, and that is the purpose of obstetrics. Somebody ought to tell them about Dianetics, because we have got too many cases now of babies born Dianetics-wise that have just come up beaming and beautiful. I would bet you that if you took a maternity ward with a hundred women in it and one baby that had been born with Preventive Dianetics very definitely in mind, I could pick out the mother and the baby at a glance.

Maybe you haven’t had much to do with maternity wards. It is a pretty grim business. The last one I went through, over 50 percent of the women there had been damaged needlessly and were showing it very markedly. About a third of them had heavy postpartum neuroses, and one a postpartum psychosis. It was a fascinating business.

We shouldn’t have this in this society. This is our society; it is yours and mine. It doesn’t belong to anybody else any more than it does to us — something we are liable to forget when we are fighting a minority action. That minority action is getting stronger and stronger and it is becoming less and less of a minority action.

So, if we want to see the next generation snapping into it — healthier, a lot of these diseases prevented — we can just take off from right there on obstetrics.

The next level of medicine is orthopedics: the patching-up of bones. And the next is emergency surgery.

I knew these techniques fairly well, and I say it quite honestly because they aren’t very hard to learn.

We didn’t have any babies born on our corvettes but we sure had everything else, and I objected to men being at sea for six weeks without any further medical attention. The naval Bureau of Medicine and Surgery gives the captain of a corvette all of the textbooks he thinks he needs on the subject. They don’t limit him; you can go up to a hospital and say “I am skipper of the so-and-so” and they will hand you practically anything you want, at least during wartime.

We had no doctor, and I was on ship for a long time as the only one. The pharmacist’s mate was generally a kid who had come in and been made third class because they didn’t have any hospital apprentices to promote immediately; he was made third class and then he was made second class because there weren’t enough second-class men. And then he was promoted to first class immediately afterwards so that he could go to sea because the law said that he had to be a first class in order to go to sea on a solitary post as the one pharmacist’s mate on a ship.

But those kids had manuals and a lot of them had brains. I have seen some very remarkable things.

As far as medicine is concerned, then, Dianetics was begun with the assumption that more was known than was known, that results were better than they are, because I know that the results that were achieved medically on my corvettes were better than the average results turned out by hospitals. Why? Because we didn’t know any better.

Now, in addition to that, the navy is very careful in its indoctrination of what is to be done for what. Their manuals and so forth are very well adhered to; they do not issue a new drug without putting out a rather comprehensive proposition. The navy in many ways, like any large organization, may be a bit bureaucratic, but it nevertheless gives you information when you ask for it and tries to do a good job of it.

So Dianetics — as far as a process was concerned, not a philosophy — came out with the understanding that much could be done for the human body on the structural side of the ledger. I just give you that slight background because that was the viewpoint: a lot can be done structurally. You can stick a fellow full of needles and so forth. We hornswoggled people out of being seasick and everything else. We figured out a lot of things.

It was a misapprehension, because a review of this sort of thing demonstrates that an awful lot of these cases recovered on the mental side of the ledger, not just on the physical side of the ledger. This is interesting, but true.

We went into this technique of application, then, with the understanding, in its first development, that structure had something to do with it — that you could go in from the structural side and achieve some results. In other words, we advanced, from what was generally known and accepted, a little bit higher.

In a reevaluation of what wasn’t known, we found that we had been too optimistic. So we started backing up. We got a little bit higher than structure and we found out there actually wasn’t too much known in that area, so the first postulates of the first handbook stress function. It was the first graduation from an age-old belief that structure has a lot to do with it. We went over into the field of function, but we did so in the misapprehension of stimulusresponse activity — an automatic stimulus-response mechanism.

Now, a person low on the tone scale does operate this way. This was Dianetics low on the tone scale and growing: stimulus-response mechanism — the engram, the key-in from the environment and the operation against the mind of the individual.

Nothing, by the way, alters that situation. An individual who is low on the tone scale operates that way. You can still run that sort of thing.

The next few discoveries, which came just in time to get included in the first handbook, had to do with handling emotion — secondaries. We found out that blowing a secondary has quite a marked effect on an individual. So we said, to quote the first line of the chapter on emotion, “Emotion is a theta quantity” — not known, but it does something.

We graduated up the line from there and we went into the fact, after that book was published, that Straightwire is very often effective. We were thus up into our first echelon of thought.

The next line of advance was handling thought much better, as represented in the technique of Lock Scanning. You can handle thought very rapidly by Lock Scanning, and this was a big jump.

We began to examine thought on that echelon and we found out, after we had summed up these various levels, that the upper level is self determinism and that an individual who falls for a stimulus-response mechanism is low on the tone scale and is not very self-determined. Fairly high above that level you discover self-determinism. The upper level, as far as we can reach it, is self-determinism.

Now, this gives us a package that is in three echelons. If we look at them backwards — that is to say, as they developed — we can see they consist of structure, which is action or effort; the next echelon is emotion, or the mechanisms of stimulus-response; and the next echelon is just ordinary, run-of-the-mill thought. Then there is self-determined thought above that, but we will just take thought as one package; there are actually two steps in thought. This is the line of advance in Dianetics.

The advance of Dianetics has paralleled the advance from structure on up to thought.

Now, the new third echelon, which has not taken place and which may or may not take place, would have to do with the identification of the overall control of the body, because it is very interesting that these self-determined postulates themselves are actually dependent on former structural action. We already can identify the fact that there is a prime thought which rides along with the individual all the way through: the prime thought “to be.” There is an upper-level action taking place there.

Since you learned about Postulate Processing, you may have gone around thinking to yourself a little bit, “Well, I shouldn’t make this postulate and I shouldn’t make that postulate, and I should do this and that in regard to this.” What is telling you not to make that postulate? That is the boss. That would be the boss mechanism. Something else must be making the postulate.

So we are just to that degree inside the third echelon, and that is the borderline. What we are talking about now is what we will call the second echelon of processing; this includes effort, emotion and thought, and believe me, we can handle all three. That is the first thing you should know — that there are three subdivisions. And you should know how those subdivisions are interactive.

There is a drawing in Hand book for Preclears that shows “I,” and then the motor-response mechanism, with the glandular switchboard in between.

“I” puts out an order and it evidently is translated into the physical universe by means of a glandular reaction of some sort. Your thought is an intention which translates into an emotion which goes into the switchboard of the body as an effort.

Your intention and the thought stemming from the intention may go into the motor switchboard immediately or it may simply be filed as something nice that you imagined.

And there is a reverse mechanism of the physical universe or your environment hitting on the motor level, kicking back up into the glandular level and then kicking back up into the thought level.

There are those three steps and, believe me, that is very simple. That is how thought gets to be action and how action can kick back and become thought, via emotion.

We also know pretty well what emotion is; it is pretty simple. With an emotional curve you can certainly manhandle the devil out of emotion; you really can. By running emotional curves on an individual you can get some of the doggonedest things. It is a very simple mechanism. The change from one level on the tone scale to the other is the emotional curve.

We find that the mind is engaged in the estimation of effort. The resolution of problems, the posing of problems, the observations connected with problems and their solution, have to do with that central button, “estimation of effort.”

The effort could be parked as a future effort or it could be an immediate effort or it could merely be an estimated effort to relay by communication to somebody else. Your problems resolve on these estimations of effort.

Emotion takes place in direct ratio to the correctness of the estimation of effort, correctness being a gradient scale. If you were estimating your efforts just beautifully in all directions, you would be happy. But if you were estimating them incorrectly you would go down into the misemotional band. That is the connection between emotion and thought and that is the connection between emotion and action. On one side it can be balked by counter-actions or it can be interrupted by new intentions.

You walk up to a drawer, you put your hands on the two knobs of the drawer and it slides open very easily. How much pressure did you have to estimate to put on the handles of that drawer? How much pull did it require for you to slide that drawer open? How much residual tension did there have to be in your body in order for you to stand up straight while you opened that drawer? All of these are various estimates of effort. If the drawer slides open easily, you are perfectly cheerful and your tone does not change at all; you go on and pick up what is in the drawer. That, because it stimulates a thought or something of the sort, might change your tone — if you want it to. But as you open up this drawer your tone would stay along a level.

However, if you reach up to the drawer and start to open the drawer and you haven’t estimated the amount of grip that these two fingers have and they slide off the knob, that is that much of a drop; you become just a little bit annoyed and you grab hold of it again and hold it more solidly. You probably hold it more solidly than you have to. A miscalculation of effort in one direction causes you to miscalculate a little bit in the other direction.

If you open the drawer and as you start to open it one side of it sticks — it won’t move — you struggle with it, you might cuss at it a bit, and you go down the tone scale with regard to that drawer. If the drawer won’t open at all, where do you wind up? You say, “Well, I didn’t want it anyhow.” That is apathy.

So, there is your range of the tone scale. This is interesting phenomena, and by the way, this is phenomena which had hitherto been unobserved and unstated. You can actually take an unsuspecting individual and put him at an action which you have triggered to go wrong, such as a sticky drawer with slippery handles and so forth, and watch this individual’s tone as he starts to handle this drawer. Don’t set it up as though it is an experiment; set it up as though something valuable that he is supposed to have is in that drawer. And then fix it up eventually so the drawer won’t open at all. Don’t help him out, but watch him go down the tone scale. You will see him at every step on the tone scale as he goes down.

This has to do with the fellow’s estimation of effort, doesn’t it? But what is the drawer doing? The drawer is doing something; the drawer is the environment, so the drawer is imposing upon him a counter-effort. Even if the drawer opens with great smoothness there is still a countereffort in that drawer. Do you see how that would be? But if it opens very roughly, there is a bad counter-effort in the drawer — that is to say, a counter-effort in the drawer which inhibits one’s emotional response.

So, there is effort and counter-effort. There is a person trying to make an effort come out and the effort not coming out. The effort which opposes an individual’s efforts we refer to always as counter-effort. That is the language. That is counter-effort; it could also be called, for your understanding, environmental effort.

Every moment of a lifetime has, contained in it, counter-efforts. There are the balances and imbalances of exterior and interior atmosphere: There is fifteen pounds per square inch playing all over your body and there is fifteen pounds per square inch inside your body to balance the fifteen pounds per square inch outside your body. When you go up in an airplane, your ears pop; that is just the fact that the pressure has dropped to thirteen pounds per square inch outside of your body and stayed at fifteen pounds inside, or something like that, so your ears have to adjust to it. The Eustachian tube is doing that, but also your whole body is doing that and every cell is doing that.

Then there is gravity. You always have gravity. The first fellow who gets into a spaceship somewhere between here and the moon at zero gravity is going to have an interesting time; we actually don’t know quite what is going to happen to this individual emotionally because he has a certain stability in his gravity. You use gravity; gravity doesn’t use you, but it can use you.

The last time you went down the stairs and didn’t estimate that there was one more step, gravity gave you quite a shock. The last time you went down stairs and thought there was one more and there wasn’t, that gave you quite a shock too. That would be gravity on a misaligned counter-effort — in other words, gravity at non optimum. When you fall out of an airplane and fall five thousand feet and splatter, that is non optimum gravity doing it.

So, we have this environmental effort. And the conflict with it is composed of these categories: your effort to remain at rest or to remain in a state of motion — your effort to remain at rest or accomplish motion, to put it more aptly — and the environment’s effort to remain at rest or remain in a state of motion. And that is all the conflicts there are in an action category. That is all the conflicts there are — your effort to remain still when something is trying to move you, and your effort to remain in motion when something is trying to change you or influence you.

There are actually start, stop and change as three categories, but change is just a combination of start and stop. Nevertheless we will list them as three categories.

You make a physical effort to remain at a state of rest, to remain in a state of motion or to change. And the counter-effort would be that effort from the environment which inhibits your remaining at a state of rest when you want to, inhibits your remaining in motion or inhibits your changing. Counter-effort would be the effort which you would have to overcome or handle, but do not necessarily overcome or handle, in the environment around you.

Now, emotion is a translator medium. It demonstrates how much activity is necessary to address the situation. It is a monitor, a meter, on the way the body should run in a certain situation. If it is running low on the tone scale, that means that the conflict between countereffort and effort is getting tremendous.

Emotion goes down from zero upset — no upset, no conflict, in other words — to all conflict. When it is all conflict you are dead, and when it is zero conflict and you have all these conflicts completely resolved in that degree, you have taken off for Valhalla or someplace in body.

Those would be your extremes, bottom and top, on this tone scale. And in the mean, in between, you have all of these descending reactions. We had this in “Ten Lecture Notes.” They were worked out, just empirically, before this was fully known. They give you a person’s responses between action and counter-action — that is, effort and counter-effort.

Anger is an emotion which is trying to hold everything still. For instance, an angry person, if you try to walk away from him, wants you to come back. If you try to stay near him, he wants you to go away. It is destruction because it is no-motion that he is trying to accomplish. The angry person is trying to destroy — hammer, pound, yell, scream or do anything he can think of in the line of effort to cause zero counter- effort . Zero counter- effort is what he is trying to accomplish, because zero counter-effort is death. The angry person destroys.

The way you destroy and the only way you can destroy anything is to cause motion to cease to exist in it. Zero motion is death.

When you come down to 1.1, you have fear.

Now, there is a little demonstration that goes along with this. Let’s take anger’s reaction to counter-effort. We have an angry person and an environmental effort which comes along and hits this angry person. Actually, if this succeeds in doing much motion around the angry person, he will move up and stop it. But the counter-effort in motion, hitting an angry person, causes him to try to hold it.

That comes out this way in Effort Processing: If you get an individual who is at anger on his intentional level and he is struck by something, you will find him holding that right there. He is holding the motion. His physical body is actually damping out the motion. He will hold anything in suspension that is in the body. He will try to stop everything in the body. That is where you get calcium deposits; there is depository illness at 1.5. It is holding motion right still. If a person is at 1.5 on the tone scale he will have depository illnesses, and that is all there is to it. You can handle these chronic somatics in two ways: you can drive him down the tone scale or you can pull him up.

Now, as he drops down the tone scale to fear, when motion hits him he has a tendency to go with the motion a little bit; he is undecided whether to flee or not. It is an indecisive state. When motion hits someone in that band it will cause a motion, but it causes the motion in this way: The countereffort hits a person who is afraid or at 1.1 on the band — he moves away a bit and he will be ready to flee; but as soon as this counter-motion goes away, he will make sure that it is not going to be there and then come back.

The little boy who goes whistling past the graveyard stops often and looks for the ghosts. He is ready to flee but he doesn’t quite. He sure would if there were anything there. In other words, any time a counter-action appeared in the environment, he would flee. This is covert hostility. That is why covert hostility is there. Motion comes along and the person says, “Well, yes, I’m here. I’ve been put back.” There is where you get propitiation and so forth.

This person is so low on the tone scale that he will go with motion. So there is a certain level there where you get sympathy; in this whole band you get sympathy. The counter-action is going in one direction and you can actually get a person at that point of the tone scale where he can watch that counter-action and start going the same way himself. Have you ever observed that? You may have observed it particularly amongst human beings where one gets nervous and shaky and somebody else gets nervous and shaky too.

It happens that sympathy can occur on any band of the tone scale, but we must then define our words a little more correctly. We would say that sympathy, as a word, is that which we assign from 1.1 to 0.5 on the tone scale. It is an interchange of misemotion; that we will call sympathy.

But the society appreciates sympathy differently. When they think of sympathy they think of somebody all gimping along and everybody is sympathetic toward him; when there is a loss in the family, people are sympathetic and so forth.

What they are arguing about on the rest of the band is merely coaction. Somebody is happy so somebody else gets happy; that would be coaction or co-emotional response, rather than sympathy. So let’s be more precise in our words since the society was not sufficiently precise before us.

Now, grief on the tone scale is very interesting. You can do anything you want with a person in grief — anything you want. Motion hits them and they just go where the motion says. That is grief.

But apathy is something else; the person isn’t even there. The motion comes in, the countermotion in the environment comes in, and the person isn’t there. Apathy — the motion goes through.

This case, by the way, may be running on a vivacious sort of a manic’ or something of the sort, where they appear pepped up every once in a while and so forth. But you can take an apathy case — let’s say a girl — and put her in a chair. She sits in the chair and if she is a real apathy case and you were to come along and pick up the back end of the chair and tip it, the girl would go right off on the floor. In other words, the emotion goes through. They sort of feel like anything goes through them. Their whole virtue is that they can endure, and “endure” is apathy. So if you want to cure an apathy case get them to run some “endure” out. Get them to run anybody who endured and themselves enduring and everything they have to endure and every time they thought they had to endure and all the things they have endured and so forth, and you will find that they are coming up the tone scale. An apathy case is busy enduring.

Do you see how motion fits with emotion? Very simple, isn’t it?

Now, the person in grief has a tendency to be a little sodden on the apathy edge of the grief band. But on the upper edge — if we take this experiment with the chair — if they are sitting in the chair and you pick up the chair and dump them, they have a slight tendency to come up and stand. They just stand and then sort of adjust themselves a little bit — particularly if you adjust them. You can pick up a person’s hand if he is in grief and put it up to wipe his eyes and he will go on wiping his eyes.

Let’s take a person who is in fear: You come along and pick up the back of the chair he is sitting in and start to dump it, and this person catalyzes the reaction. He does it quicker than you want him to; he comes right up. Then as soon as you aren’t watching, he will sit back down again.

If he is in the lower band — the little lower band just below fear — he won’t even question you as to why you did it.

In apathy, by the way, the first remark is generally “Oh, that’s all right.” They haven’t got any conception of why you have dumped them on the floor. They say, “That’s all right.”

A person in fear won’t even ask you. But about two or three minutes later they will say, “You know that last book you wrote? I was talking to a fellow the other day — a good friend. He’s all in favor of this. He’s very authoritative and so forth. ‘My,’ he said, ‘it was terrible!”’

Now take anger: The person is sitting there in the chair and you come along and pick up the back of the chair. He will sit there and hold — he is not going to be moved.

We go up the band a little bit and get to 2.0. This person is sitting there and you come along and start to reach for the chair. The person at 2.0 is usually very alert; he will just guide your hand off. If you touched the back of the chair and started up, he would take a relatively selfdetermined action to come up and prevent you from dumping him off on the floor. The handling of motion by a person at 2.0 is, as it comes in, to change it and get right rid of it. At

2.0 is where we find “Anything you say to me I’ll say right back to you; I will show you” — pugnacious echoing. Echoing is what it is, because any motion that comes in he will put back out again.

As you come well up the band, you will find that an individual starts taking the motion, looking it over — quick glance — to find out if he can use it or not and then dumping it, using it or doing anything he wants to it.

So, there is emotion against motion, and there is emotion plotted against action. Do you understand that? You must understand that because you must be able to look at a human being for about two seconds and know where he is on the tone scale before he even talks. After he talks, you have the Chart of Attitudes and you have the chart in Science of Survival. But you must know where people are on the tone scale if you are going to do some fast action for them, because there are specific things that you do for specific levels of the tone scale now. It has gotten awfully precise, like carpentry or something.

It is fabulous to watch the consistency of human beings on this thing. You sit down at your desk and offer this person a cigarette and he takes the cigarette rather mechanically, although he doesn’t smoke. That person is down there around grief or the upper band of apathy.

If you give him a cigarette and he doesn’t react to it for a considerable little space of time and so forth, he is in apathy. That motion can go right on through him anyhow — ”It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.”

A person who is angry will see you start to offer him a cigarette or even see your hand move, guess your intention and stop you. He will stop you from talking, he will stop you from acting, he will stop you from moving. Generally the people around individuals who are in chronic anger have been held to motionlessness and are finally pushed right down to the bottom of the tone scale, because the angry person demands no-motion and, by the way, demands no emotional response except complete stop. The angry person says, “You must do this and you must do that.” Go ahead, just try and do these things; the second you start to do either one of them you have to do something else.

A little child who is around an angry person is in apathy very badly, quite often. You will find these children very sick. If he wants to run outdoors and play, that is what he mustn’t do. If he doesn’t want to run outdoors and play, he has to run outdoors and play. But the 1.5 won’t let the child get up and put on his shoes and start outdoors and play because he can’t go outdoors. It looks like there is a lot of reasoning behind it, and there is a terrific amount of rationalization as to why they mustn’t, but the whole end goal at 1.5 on the tone scale is to just stop the motion. Obey, act — only God help you if you move!

Now, as you come up the tone scale these other manifestations are there. But you can watch people. You can watch them as they walk, you can watch the way they sit. You can suddenly realize how they are handling motion, and right away you will pick them up. And that will be right across the boards for you, and you know what to run if you are doing something fast for them.

So, there is motion as it impinges on emotion; there is that bridge right there.

There is another little gimmick which, unless you have looked at Handbook for Preclears, you haven’t heard of yet. It is not in Advanced Procedure and Axioms. There is emotion and there is counter-emotion; and you guessed it, there is thought and counter-thought. Effort-countereffort, emotion-counter-emotion, thought-counter-thought — those are the six categories of life manifestation in the physical universe, and that is evidently all there are. It is that neat.

It is very interesting: You take an individual and tell him to start running counter-thought and he will pick up more stuff in less time than any quantity of earlier styles of processing will do; it just pours in by the bucketful.

Counter-thought: He thinks a thought and somebody else thinks an opposite thought. How does it fit with his thoughts? It isn’t necessarily that these counter-thoughts are opposed to the individual.

What happens to a person with a low-tone-scale crew if he agrees with them all the time? What happens to a salesman who goes out and sees Blitz and Company and Smog and Company in Los Angeles and so on? He goes around and the fellow says, “I like golf,” and the salesman according to his instruction book has to say “I like golf too. How is your golf game, Mr. Snide?” He has to continually agree. This is counter-thought, but where is it on the tone scale? If you plot counter-thought on the tone scale, having to agree with everything that somebody says puts you on the tone scale pretty low unless you are agreeing on a level of natural or logical action.

For instance, you see that weights and balances act in a certain way, and the professor shows you that weights and balances act in a certain way, and you come along and you say, “Weights and balances act that way. Yeah, I agree with that.” You are not agreeing with somebody; you are not agreeing with his mode of presentation. You are agreeing with a physical-universe fact. You are just observing that fact. You look at that fact and there is the fact.

But if you go along agreeing with everybody you meet — if you just try that for twenty-four hours — I guarantee that you will go out the bottom, because this is sympathy on ARC level. You act as they act and it gets to be pretty grim.

That is why salesmen crack up. Nearly all of the hot boys that go out selling and do a great job for the first few years eventually head for ulcers and migraines and everything else. They start to drink — anything — to snap themselves out of this. They don’t know what is holding them in there; it is counter-thought.

Also, a good salesman hits counter-emotion. Any emotion he finds in his environment he will agree with. He finds the boss mad at democracy and he will get mad at democracy. He uses that type of counter-emotion; he agrees with any level of the tone scale in which he finds his potential buyer. And by the way, he really sells them too. But if he keeps it up too terribly long, he will practically polish himself off.

A good salesman will even go into the level of effort and counter-effort so that he will be the effort for every counter-effort. At the risk of making you blush, that is generally the way they sell a lot of orders in New York City — using girl salesmen.

Golf is a typical example of that. The salesman goes out and plays golf with somebody in order to sell him. He plays golf, not because he wants to play golf, but because the fellow he is trying to sell likes to play golf and he agrees with this fellow he is trying to sell. So he is putting out an effort to match up the counter-effort.

That gets pretty grim because he is putting himself on the tone scale at the level of every individual he is trying to sell, and some of those people might be as badly off as “normal.”

So, counter-thought merely means the thought — the opposing thought. It can come before or after your own thought. It is just the environmental thought — however voiced, however written, however felt.

If somebody thinks we are going into mysticism, it is just about as mystic — this whole thing — as the fact that a table is full of holes, which it isn’t. (By the way, it actually is, but that datum comes out of nuclear physics, not mysticism.)

Now, you can extrapolate this further up and say, “Well, then there is ESP and there are these other various things.” That is in the field of para-Dianetics. If you want to investigate that on thought and counter thought and so forth you might get somewhere, but believe me, you don’t have to do that to get action from a preclear on counter-thought. You just start running “Run all the times when somebody else thought something different than what you thought.” Of course, you are running anger if you do that, because that is completely opposite.

“Run all the times when somebody got afraid at the things you thought.”

“Run all the times when somebody expressed grief at the things you thought. And get the counter-thought — get what they thought about it.”

“Run all the times when it didn’t matter what you thought” — complete apathy.

Just run counter-thought — just run their thoughts on this line — and you will get a lot of action out of a case.

Some individuals can only do this one, and that is about as light as you can get.

Now, let’s take emotion. Emotion is a little bit stickier. There are two bands to emotion: the one which goes into thought and the one which goes into action or effort. The bottom band is communicable, and that is what causes mass hysteria.

One girl in the factory says “Nyahh!” — she has seen a mouse. Then 560 women say “Nyahh!” and they don’t know why, and they all dash outside.

Somebody walks down the street in a southern town and he sees a white girl with a black man and he gets very emotional. All of a sudden the whole town is in a total uproar. That is mass hysteria.

Only let us not make the mistake which was made in the past of calling it hysteria, because it isn’t there on the tone scale. Hysteria sort of says that it is fear and upset and so forth. That just happens to be very easy to communicate, because that is where this mechanism apparently came from. Man is a pack animal. So are deer and other herd animals and so on. The leader all of a sudden sees something that gives him a jolt and you see the whole herd go alert simultaneously. He doesn’t whistle or spit or anything. They aren’t watching him — they have their backs to him, grazing and so forth.

This was a very handy thing as man came up the generations: The leader turns a corner with great self-confidence and runs smack into the teeth of a mammoth. It would actually build up on the genetic facsimile line that the fellow in advance would very often be injured and the others would see it and so on. Therefore it gets into the lower band.

If anything broadcasts, it is not thought but emotion. We know emotion broadcasts. It is more solid than a radio wave.

Counter-emotion, then, can be at apathy. An individual is walking along, happy and cheerful; then he comes into a crowd of people and they are all sitting around in apathy. After a while he goes into apathy too. The counter-emotion gets him.

An individual is perfectly happy, free and cheerful. He has just learned about a death — maybe a member of the family — but he doesn’t feel bad about it at all. Then he suddenly walks into the house and everybody is crying, and he slides right down into grief.

This can happen with fear, anger and on up the tone scale.

The same thing happens in a crew of men. The top man in a crew is in a certain tone level emotionally, and the whole crew will be this way. A ship, for instance, has a tendency to feel that all the way down to its last rivet, and it all acts that way.

This is very interesting. Take a ship where the bulk of the upper strata are pretty jumpy about the situation and so forth: you can look down on number one gun and you can see the boys down there getting jumpy too.

Of course, you can say “Well, this happened because of the sound-power phones, l and this happened because of this and happened because of that,” but believe me, it happens.

Now, you start running counter-emotion on the various band levels of the tone scale for an individual and you can eventually coax him into feeling it. The lower a person is on the tone scale, the more trouble you are going to have in putting across counter-emotion.

In apathy the individual can endure. You ask him to run counter emotion and he says, “Well, doesn’t bother me. Goes on by. Oh, no, there couldn’t be any such thing as counter-emotion — I don’t understand what you’re talking about. You mean I go into the valence of the other person and feel that sort of thing? I feel their anger, right?”

“No, no. As you’re standing there, can you feel the emotion of the other person? Very simple.”

They say, “Oh, you mean am I going into their valence?”

“No. Nope. You’re standing there and you feel an emanation. Here is a pinpoint — that’s you — and here is the other person. Now, we’ll pretend he is a light bulb and it throws out rays and they hit you. Now, we want you to feel those emotional responses. This other person is angry and we want you to feel that anger coming at you.”

“Oh,” the person says, “you mean I go into their valence.”

You have a hard time explaining it unless you tell him to run “endure,” and then he knows what you mean.

Now, you can coax somebody into feeling the counter-emotion of an individual they love very much. Maybe they can’t find it for a little while, but all of a sudden they will find a time when it was different from what it is normally, and then they will feel counter-emotion. You can just coax them into finally feeling counter-emotion.

You don’t have to coax anybody into feeling counter-effort, by the way. You can demonstrate it.

Counter-emotion has some interesting manifestations. But you should know what we mean by it. It comes from another human being, a life form or any part of any dynamic, and you can feel an emanation from that somehow or other. I don’t care whether you call it “atmosphere”; sometimes you just start calling it “atmosphere” and an individual understands it better.

Actually, any dynamic gives an atmosphere to an individual. We don’t care how this is sensed — whether the person is seeing it, feeling it, hearing it or how he is receiving it. He may try to analyze how he is receiving it, but it is always the same thing. (He isn’t seeing or feeling it, by the way.)

The upper part of this emotional band, however, is all on the subject of thought; emotion is in between thought and effort. Thought does not have impact value of its own, but thought, by monitoring an individual’s own emotion, can have an impact value. And thought, by being transmitted to another individual and entering into his emotional system, can have an impact value.

So these are the methods of communication of emotion. But individuals communicate with individuals more or less with some emotion connected. Pure communication by thought, no matter how done, would be without emotion.

Individuals are quite often very happy to work in the physical sciences because they don’t have to have anything to do with anything that has a very strong counter-emotion. They duck on such a thing.

The only real liability to an individual in auditing is not counter thought but counter-emotion. Some auditors, for instance, are scared to run grief; they just won’t run grief off a preclear, and that is that. They just don’t want any of it. They know that a counter-emotion will hit them on it.

What are people afraid of? The auditor is not afraid that the preclear is going to get up off the couch and hit him over the head with a brickbat. And he is not really going to be terribly afraid, unless he has a bad engram on the subject, that the preclear has thoughts about him.

By the way, there is a whole psychotherapy that has to do with a psychiatric psychosis where the psychiatrist says, “Now, you’re thinking about me, aren’t you? You’re doubting me, aren’t you?” And they are only happy when they can get the patient to think or doubt or something.

But what are people in the world at large afraid of? When I say “afraid,” that is right on that hysterical band, isn’t it? What don’t they want to face in the society around them? Nine times out of ten, when you say “Well, you don’t like the feel of somebody being angry. What don’t you like about somebody being angry?” they give you a lot of explanation about it, but what it is, is that they don’t like the “feel” of it. And they don’t like the feel of somebody being scared.

It has been said that dogs can smell people who are scared. You know as auditors that you can smell somebody who is scared, because people get very scared sometimes. But there is something more than that; it is just an impact.

All available recordings of this lecture end abruptly as this point. We have been unable to locate any recording or transcript for the few minutes of lecture that are missing.