The main thing to know about stalled cases is that cases get stalled. That is a truism that sometimes misses people. A case can be running along very nicely and suddenly cease running. Many things can happen.

Occasionally as you take a preclear up and down the track he is liable to hit a manic. A manic is an engram which is highly complimentary. Any compliment which it contains will be obeyed to its most literal and fullest extent.

Someone at the Foundation got into one of these manics. It was an engram that didn’t amount to much. It said, “I’m sure that the child will grow up to be a fine, upstanding young man.”

This was a prenatal, and whoever was running him got him back down the track and clipped this thing and he became a fine, upstanding young man. He became so upstanding that the muscles across his back contracted and he was walking around like a ramrod. Normally he wears glasses, and suddenly they didn’t fit him and he could see perfectly. It was a beautiful manic. “Gee,” he said, “now I’m clear. Now I know how it feels.”

I let poor Johnny suffer along under this delusion for the better part of a day and then I decided something had to be done about it; so I took him back down the track and knocked out that engram in the basic area in which Grandma, an ally, was saying “fine, upstanding young man.”

Once in a while, for instance, you will find somebody who has been “cured” by snake-root oil or something. What has happened is that a manic has been restimulated. You want to watch these manics because they will usually fade out in about three days when triggered in therapy.

You should know this about all of these engrams. If an engram has been hit and restimulated badly and the case is merely permitted to go about its business, the thing will settle out and the case will rebalance in about ten days; but if you keep forcing at the case continually over this period of ten days, you are just going to get a restimulation of more and more engrams.

So, if a case gets rather unmanageable, if you have hit an engram that will not reduce (you have run it several times and you realize it is not going to come up), you can’t find the basic that lies under it, you can’t find an earlier engram, it is full of bouncers and you get yourself into what looks like a lot of trouble, let it settle for three to ten days and it will come out all right.

But it won’t come out all right if you are running your preclear under sedation or amnesia-trance hypnosis. Once one of these engrams is restimulated while the preclear is under the sedation of a drug such as phenobarbital or sodium amytal, then it won’t settle out.

A warning on this is that if you are ever called upon to work a psychotic in an institution, a common practice there is to use sedation. They want them quiet, so patients will have a vast quantity of sodium amytal in them. You go in and start to pick up engrams and every engram you hit, when it goes into restimulation, will stay that way. So you want to be very leery of this.

The main thing in running cases is just the knowledge that as long as you are running them on Dianetic Standard Procedure you are not going to have anything that won’t settle out in three to ten days.

The three day period is standard. If you run a preclear every four days, for instance, you will have gone across the three day stretch, the case will settle and it will be like starting the case all over again. But if you work the case every two or three days it will work very easily.

A time track gets “greased.” Return a person down the track and back and forth across an area enough times, session after session, and you will eventually get the material you require out of the case. This is the saving grace of all these stalled cases. Just keep working at it and you will get results.

What happens is that the preclear gets used to going up and down the track. He is coming across various areas and the material which you are running out of the case brings it up a little more and a little higher. Attention units are more available.

Now, let’s say you get into a late life engram — you are ill-advisedly trying to pick up somebodyb exodontistry or his mumps — and you start going over and over it and all of a sudden it disappears before your view; that is a recession. You can do this with a case and three days later have a stalled case on your hands, because this engram that you have beaten away at so many times comes back into full play in three days.

You should know the difference between a recession, a reduction and an erasure. A recession is like trying to kill a snake with a matchstick. You keep running it and running it. The somatic maybe gets worse and worse, and you have to run them sometimes 75 times to beat the whole engram into recession. It is a very poor way to spend your time. If an engram isn’t showing marked change and the somatic isn’t disappearing after six or seven runs, there is something wrong with this engram.

That is another reason why you should sample the beginnings of engrams before you run the whole engram. For instance, if you get the person into birth, run the first few contractions three or four times and find out what happens. If those appear and you can get the perceptics out of them and the somatics seem to be reducing, you can keep running that one section. If that will run into a reduction, the whole engram will. If the first end of it starts to beat into a recession, the whole engram will beat into a recession; and you don’t want these recessions because they are going to reappear sooner or later. In other words, this reduction takes place; it’s unmistakable.

An erasure also is unmistakable. Don’t ever, under any circumstances, ask a preclear whether or not the engram is erased. He will always tell you yes. He starts through the engram and if it is going to erase, new material will appear and old material will drop out. Certainly, somewhere in the vicinity of ten recountings, if it is going to erase, it will start disappearing.

Often, but not always, yawns will come off as the unconsciousness lifts. That is an erasure and that engram won’t return.

In order to start getting erasures, you have to get into the basic area and recount engrams all the way up to present time, one by one. Miss one and the engram in the middle that you didn’t touch will hold up the next one. So you will get the odd situation of finding, after you have had erasures on the case, that you are getting nothing but reductions. Incidents are not erasing. You have skipped an engram and the proper thing to do is to get that engram and erase it.

Sometimes engrams are held down by late grief charges. This is a primary cause of bog-down in a case. You have started an erasure, let’s say, and you have erased just so far and then suddenly strange things start to happen to these engrams. You touch one and it disappears; it doesn’t erase and the person starts skidding badly on the track. Somewhere up above this level you have brought into view a grief engram, and that grief engram is all ready to bleed, right there. So, you should erase as long as you can, and when you can’t erase any further try to find grief in the case.

It also works the other way around. If there is grief available on the case, take off all the grief you can get and then go into the basic area, and you will find there are engrams there ready to erase. In other words, go from the basic area to grief, back to the basic area, to grief, and so on. In some cases that have stalled, if you get to a point where you have discharged several grief engrams, get down in the basic area and see what you can erase down there; and if you are erasing in the basic area and all of a sudden your case appears to stall, there is a grief engram. Every one of these grief engrams depends on physical pain. There has to be physical pain for there to be a grief charge. So, when you start running out a grief engram, it is very usual to run it several times and then find the prenatal or the early physical pain engram it is sitting on. In fact, every time you run a grief engram out, you can go lower and find the physical pain engram it is sitting on. That is one of the clues on bogged cases. That’s the technical side of it.

There are two other reasons why cases bog down. First and foremost is bad auditing, and the other one is a poor or nonconducive environment. In the case of an auditor error, the auditor has either broken the Auditor’s Code or he has made some fundamental error in auditing, the most fundamental of which is failing to pick up and reduce an engram.

I ran a psychotic very recently who had been run by 15 consecutive student auditors. I don’t know who did this to him, although he was better being run than not being run at all, but one auditor after another had worked this case. Finally I took him on. The poor man had four engrams in restimulation: his conception, his birth, a hypnotism sequence and a time he was scalded — a late life engram when he was very severely burned. A boiler had blown up in his face and his wife had stood there alongside of him saying, “Hold on to me, dear, I will stay with you. I will not leave you. Now go ahead and live. As long as I am here you will live.” A couple of years later she decided to leave him, so naturally he went into a psychotic break. He had this as a big engram.

His wife had started auditing him in the hope that she could free this up and get rid of him. So she went into this late life physical pain engram as the first thing in the case. She didn’t even ask the file clerk. Here was a case that would have run pianola; but instead of that she said, “Go back to the time when the boiler blew up in your face,” ran it four times and decided that she wasn’t getting anyplace, so she went someplace else and ran something else, and so on.

After that this poor man got a long parade of student auditors, one right after the other. And they would audit him for a while and someone would say, “I wonder what’s wrong with this guy? I’ll try to get some grief off.” No grief would come off, so he would say, “Let’s go back and see if we can run out birth.” But birth was not much good, so he would try to reach conception. He would run four lines out of conception and then say, “That’s good enough for today. We’ve got to quit and have chow, so lets go.”

I ran this preclear, and the first thing I found on the case was that he was running on a high paranoid reaction. Nobody had thought to hit this one and this had kept all of his engrams grouped on the track. Everything had been pushed up to present time. The engram said, “Everybody is against me. Everything is against me. I can’t go anyplace.” That was a standard dramatization. So, “Everything is against me” put all the engrams against “I” — the interior world. I ran down the track on this “against me” and found it in the basic area and got some yawns off it, but his case didn’t improve. So I got into the history of the case a little bit more, and I found out that the fundamental error had been committed of hitting an engram and not reducing it.

People don’t realize that the first time across an engram, all the content will be there. But if it contains a bouncer, the next time you start to put him across the incident that bouncer is reactivated and up the track he is going to come, and he won’t be able to find the engram. Of course if the auditor, instead of suspecting that the person has bounced out of this engram, says “Well, I guess it has erased,” he will go off and leave it.

This exact thing had happened to this preclear. Conception, which is very aberrative, was run one night at 10:30. At 8:00 the next morning he woke up curled up in a ball, frozen on the track and in terrible mental condition. I went down the track and found conception, which was noncoitus, and it just went on and on. There must have been three or four hours of chatter with bouncers throughout it, and I had to get each bouncer, one after the other, then a denyer, then a holder.

The way you run an engram is very specific. You get the somatic strip down to the first part of the engram. The somatic strip will try to go to the earliest part. Sometimes it can’t make it.

Sometimes there are four or five phrases earlier than this, and they are so situated with so much pain on them, and there is so much unconsciousness on them, that some tension has got to be taken off this area just by running it from where it is. So you tell the somatic strip to go to the earliest part of the engram. It does its best. You accept what it says is the earliest part and start to run the engram.

Now, if you merely get phrases like “You are a donkey” or “I like candy” or “Men are so nice,” such phrases are not action phrases, they are simply aberrative. We are not interested in those.

What we are interested in are action phrases — bouncers such as “Get out” or “I have to find out” (which is a bouncer because he has to find out so he will leave the engram), “Go ahead” or “Go on.” Anything that will make him move out of the engram is a bouncer, and if as you run along this engram you all of a sudden hear a phrase which, literally translated, would boost him out of the engram, right there make him repeat that phrase several times until it is desensitized.

Then run the engram a bit further and maybe you will contact a holder which says “Hold me tight” or “Stay here” or “I’m going to stay here” or “I can’t move.” As the auditor, you have got to recognize such things and be right on the ball when you are listening to engrams.

If the preclear is running and all of a sudden says “I can’t move,” that is a holder and if you try to go beyond that, only a few attention units are going to come with you. His sonic is liable to turn off. The attention units get caught right in this holder and it is harder and harder to get early or late in this engram. He is liable to be held up in the middle of it. He can’t go either way. So when you hit something that sounds like a holder, such as “I can’t move,” have him go over it again and again and the attention units will then be able to flow on along the engram.

The same way with a denyer. If you run across a denyer the first time and it says “I can’t tell,” you have activated this phrase. Of course, whatever else it may mean in an analytical sense, “I can’t tell” means simply that: “I cannot tell.” So, you start over this engram a second time and you will find out that the preclear is trying to talk but is unable to. He can’t tell. The person’s jaws will sometimes lock up on this subject even though he will try to talk. That is a denyer. It says, “I can’t tell.” Stop right there on that denyer and say, “Go over it again. Go over it again.

Go over it again. Go over it again. Go over it again.” Take the tension off it, then continue with the next line which may be “All automobiles have red suspenders,” which you don’t have to worry about because it is not an action phrase.

Then perhaps you hit a phrase that says all of a sudden, “I don’t know whether I’m coming or going,” “Everything that seems up is actually down,” “I don’t know whether north is south today,” or something of the sort — these are misdirector phrases. A common misdirector occurs in birth when the doctor says, “I’ve got to turn him around now.” I have actually seen a preclear start to run an engram backwards, just like you run a piece of movie film. He hits this “I’ve got to turn around,” and the next thing you know, he is backing out of the engram, phrase by phrase.

The instant something strange happens, you want the cooperation of the file clerk. You say, “The file clerk will now give me the phrase necessary to correct the running of this engram,” or “The file clerk will give me a yes or no on any of the following: bouncer (snap!), holder (snap!), misdirector (snap!), denyer (snap!), valence shifter (snap!),” and the file clerk will come forward with one. You have him repeat that several times, and you will get the “Turn him around” phrase that you may have overlooked earlier which will produce action in the case.

Action phrases are directional. For instance, the bouncer says “Go up”; and there can be a kind of a phrase which says “Go down,” so that he will go down the time track from the engram.

That is a misdirector. “Don’t know whether I’m coming or going” creates indecision. A holder means no direction, and a valence shifter means “be somebody else.” “You’re just like everybody else” is a valence shifter, or “You’re like your mother,” or “If I were you”; there are dozens of these things. Anything hit in the engram that indicates the person should be somebody else is liable to shift his valence right in the middle of the incident, the somatic may turn off and the person is liable to lie there with somebody else’s somatic.

You can suspect a valence shifter, for instance, when your preclear is running along curled up on the couch and all of a sudden he stretches out for no good reason. Ask the file clerk, “Give me a yes or a no on this: valence shifter? (snap!)” If you get a yes, you ask him to give you the valence shifter: “The valence shifter will flash into your mind when I count from one to five: one-two-three-four-five (snap!)”; and it’s something like “You try to be in my shoes,” and immediately he is in Papa’s valence.

When a person goes out of valence, his own somatics turn off. You can run engrams out of valence all you please and it will do the case some good, but nothing like getting him into the basic area and really getting him in valence — not being Papa or Mama or Grandma or Grandpa or anybody else. As a result, when you run through an engram, watch for these phrases which will cause a person to change identity. Every time you hit one — whether you see the action take place or otherwise — suspect that action may take place on that phrase and immediately make him repeat it over and over until you are sure that that phrase is deintensified.

Sometimes as you run through one of these engrams it is a great temptation to go sweeping right on through. That is not the correct way to run one. The proper way is to start at the earliest moment and move through, spotting action phrases and reducing each one as you hit it.

And, of course, as you reduce one of these action phrases you may find that you are too late on the chain, so you go earlier. Go through that engram, deintensifying each phrase that is going to cause him to do something peculiar, and when you have got all of these phrases deintensified say, “Go to the earliest part of the engram you can now reach,” and try to run it again.

Now, if you have reason to suspect that there was a solid blow, or you haven’t got all of the engram, you say, “The somatic strip will now go five minutes before this took place,” and you are liable to get your preclear to relax. You can say, “The somatic strip will sweep forward one minute, two minutes, three minutes, four minutes. Now it is going to sweep forward until the moment of the bump,” and you will see him get the jar. That is getting the front end of it. What you should do now is work on the front end of the engram, because all the rest of it trailing out behind actually depends on the pain in the front end of it for its activity.

So, after you have gotten all of the bouncers and denyers and so forth out, you can work over this front end really well, and try to get the thing completely knocked out and then sweep on down the rest of the line, and you will find your job is pretty easy. That is the correct way to run an engram.

Most cases that are bogged down are bogged down for that specific reason: The engram has not been run correctly. The preclear has been allowed to go through an engram, has hit several bouncers, maybe even just one bouncer, and has bounced off it again. The auditor did not even know that he had bounced and didn’t pay any attention to it; maybe he went into another engram further up the track and the whole context changed. If the preclear is held down in the lower engram and another engram is run closer to present time, and maybe you let him bounce out of that and he goes further up the track — and there are holders in all these incidents — all of a sudden you won’t be able to get him up to present time. That is the way you stall a case. The following will happen sometimes: You run an engram and the first time through it you get lots of action. The person maybe cries, his toes wiggle and he trembles and rolls up in a ball, and you are getting all this action as you run through it. Suddenly, the next time through you are not getting action. You may suspect that this has reduced, but that has not happened. No engram I know of will reduce on one recounting. Even on an erasure you normally have to recount twice. So, if after just one of these runs this person all of a sudden lies there and fairly calmly goes through this engram, several things could have happened. What you should expect has happened is he is almost on the site of the engram but not quite. Something is saying “Come back,” so there is a call-back bringing him back to the engram. There is probably also a holder in the engram and a bouncer, and all of these things are operating so that he is riding just off the engram without getting any action out of it.

I have seen a student who ought to know better run somebody through an engram and then the second time through it get no manifestation but get content. The person had bounced and been called back off this engram and was running just above it. The way to solve that is to say, “Give me a yes or a no on the following: bouncer? (snap!)” If you get a yes, you say, “When I count from one to five the file clerk will give me a bouncer. One-two-threefour-five (snap!),” and the preclear will say, “Get away.”

“Go over the words ‘Get away.”

“Get away, get away, get away, get away, get away.” All of a sudden you will get all of the manifestations again. You are not too interested in the call-back at that moment because you have got him running the engram now, so you let him run through it and in this way you reduce it. But to let him go into an engram and then carelessly decide that because he bounced out of it it must have erased will bog a case.

Many of you may be called upon to start some case that you know has been worked rather indifferently. The first things you want to look for are engrams that have been hit and out of which the preclear has bounced. The way to do it is to run the former auditor’s auditing. You may find all sorts of Auditor’s Code breaks.

For example, if the auditor suddenly says, “Well, I don’t see why you’re so mad at your mother. She had her engrams too,” the preclear at that moment is being attacked by Mama and the auditor simultaneously, and he goes into an apathy state. If the auditor agrees with the antagonist who is attacking the preclear that will stall a case right there and is a serious Auditor Code break. Or the auditor says, “Are you sure this isn’t imagination?” and all of a sudden this fellow’s sense of reality goes out on him, and we have to run this Auditor Code break.

So, when you pick up somebody else’s auditing and the case is bogged down, handle it as an engram by saying, “Go back to the first time you were audited. Now what’s being said?” and run this thing out. Sometimes you will find some peculiar brands of auditing. Run this material for a while and you will find that here and there engrams have been hit. Go back to these things and see if they have been cleaned up. If they haven’t, go early and get the basic on the chain and knock it out. By and large, what you will find as the primary error is that the preclear has bounced out of the engram and the auditor hasn’t gone back and picked it up. He has just carelessly walked off, and there is the preclear stuck on the track. You can do this or you can wait a few days and the case will settle out. Sometimes that is easier. In any event, an Auditor Code break won’t settle out. That has to be run out. And you can spend quite a bit of time patching up a case that somebody else has ruined.

Once upon a time I thought that it was possible to so thoroughly ruin a case in Dianetics that it couldn’t be patched up. I know now that this is not so. Of the two cases of which I am thinking, one stayed in a state of bog for about three months. This girl had been insane and had been worked on under sedation, and finally an auditor had worked and worked with her until she got up the material. He ran out the sedation periods, and suddenly, in spite of the fact she was not even very accessible, the case started to move, they got engrams out of the case that should have been gotten in the first place and she went on her way.

The other case was a girl who had had bad auditing. The auditor — her husband — had gone down the time track to an engram, run it once, decided that it wasn’t important, gone to something else, decided that wasn’t important, gone to something else . . . So this case was stalled for two and a half months. The husband had some sort of an engram that said he had to keep moving. So not only did he move from engram to engram on his own time track, but when he started to audit his wife he wouldn’t let her stay in an engram long enough to reduce it. After he had run about 30 engrams on the case, his wife’s basic personalityl said, “No. I am not going to be audited anymore,” and that was the end of that. Auditor after auditor tried to work this girl. But about three weeks ago I was told that her case was now open; they had run out basic area engrams, she was moving on the track and everything was fine.

Those are the only two cases I know of that were in bad condition because of bad auditing and they both came through. So evidently Dianetics can undo these things.

Another auditor error would be to let the preclear get away with just stating the concept: “Yes, here I am on the football field. Yes, somebody just hit me in the stomach with his head. Here I am lying here.”

“Oh, yeah? Oh, well. Let’s go off someplace else.” That is simply running the concept without the content, and that is almost fatal. Basic personality will suddenly say, “The dickens with this. Here I am doing my best and no cooperation is given me — well, I’m not going to cooperate anymore,” and he goes on strike. One of the best ways to clean this up is to run out the auditing if you can reach it. Normally you can. The environmental problem is the next reason why cases bog down and this can be very serious. We have preclear Jones who has somebody in his vicinity who doesn’t like him much and who quarrels with him about what has been happening between him and his auditor. Jones goes home and says, “You know, I ran out a period in birth where the doctor was saying“

“How do you know it was birth?” the person says snidely. This doesn’t help a case.

I had someone on a basic area erasure. He had erased about ten engrams up the basic area, and this had been a very hard case to start. It had taken about 25 hours. I had finally gotten into the basic area; I was getting erasures and coming back up the track. He went away as happy as a bird. Then he came back for his next session, lay down on the couch and couldn’t contact his finger tips. His reality was gone. He didn’t even know if he was alive. He had gone home and said to his wife, “We hit basic-basic.”

She had said contemptuously, “Yeah?”

And he said, “But we did.”

“Huh!“

“Honest, we did. I mean we got into the basic area and its all going along fine and I feel a lot better.”

“You don’t look so good.”

“Well, really, honey, I did.”

“Look, I know it’s all imagination. You should know it’s all imagination. Now stop kidding yourself!” This really hit him right across the face. She was his wife, only everything she said had to be taken absolutely literally as she was pseudo-Grandma. And exactly what she had said there, for some peculiar reason, latched up on an engram that was halfway up the bank, and it stopped him right there. It took about 15 days for this case to settle out. We tried to run out this lock and did most everything to it, and we finally managed to start the case running again, but I was very relieved when wifey went off to the Mlrgin Islands. The case ran beautifully after that.

I am not giving anybody the advice that he should advise the preclear to get divorced or any such thing, but it does happen that a person’s friends very often victimize him, particularly now when Dianetics is in its very early stages and validation has not been broadly offered. People are just now, in the high academic fields, getting down to a point where they-will really look at validation.

You can expect your preclears to get upset with this sort of thing. It is quite serious. It is the invalidation of material in the environment. Furthermore, they may be living in an environment which doesn’t necessarily invalidate the material but which is so thoroughly restimulative that the case bogs down. You are running this preclear and he is running fine. Then all of a sudden on Tuesday one week he comes in and his case is not moving. What you want to do immediately is find what happened to him between the last time you saw him and this time, and run it out as a lock. Sometimes by straight memory you can do a better job than by running out these locks as such. You can make him go back over events until he finally remembers the exact moment when he started to feel bad. Maybe it hung up on an earlier lock. Try to make him remember the earlier lock. Get down to the first lock on this engram rather than trying to run the engram, because sometimes an engram lies in the middle of the bank. An engram doesn’t care where it is on the track when it restimulates, so you may have an engram in restimulation which can’t be erased or reduced.

This shock happens to him, keys in the engram and gives him a lock. In this case try straight memory or try to run out the lock in reverie and you will get the case started again. If that doesn’t happen, wait for a few days and then try straight memory again, and with this lapsed time his tone will improve which will make him feel better. Or you can try to run a series of pleasure moments to get him moving on the track again. Pulling his attention units out of this new lock and putting them in a moment of pleasure and then bringing all the attention units up to present time will sometimes work.

Concerning the environmental case — for instance, if you are trying to work a child and the child goes into an abusive environment every night or goes to a school which is highly antagonistic to him — it is like the frog that is trying to climb out of a well. It climbs four inches by day and falls back five inches at night. Try and do something to keep the child from being badly restimulated all the time. Talk it over with the parents, if you are working them, and you will have better luck.

The environmental problem is serious because you as an auditor can’t regulate your preclear’s environment, but sometimes it is necessary to take the preclear out of a restimulative environment. This is particularly true of children; usually adults can stand up to it. Children don’t have quite that much luck.

Bogged-down cases will sometimes scare loose with the use of Benzedrinel or the chemical assist. Benzedrine seems to work best when you are trying to blow grief charges, but Benzedrine is a drug and must be administered by a physician. So, if you are giving anybody Benzedrine, certainly do it with the knowledge of his physician and administer it in that fashion.

The chemical assist, on the other hand, has no drugs in it. It is a compound, however, and in giving it you should also do it with the knowledge of the persons physician, in compliance with state codes.

All of these bogged cases have in common the fact that somebody is stuck on the time track. So don’t ever be guilty of bringing somebody up to present time and then not checking it. Don’t merely say “Come up to present time. Canceled,” snap your fingers and say “Be alert.” Don’t be content with that. Bring him up to present time and say, “How old are you? What’s your age? Give me a number.” If you get all three the same, he is in present time. If not, he is stuck on the track someplace, and you should spend a little time trying to free him.

You may feel that it is going to take all night to get this person into present time. If this case is chronically stuck on the track anyway, of course don’t waste the rest of the evening trying to free him, but at least get him into a state where he is fairly comfortable and keep working on bringing him into present time.

You can accidentally stick a case on the track so that the case will be quite uncomfortable.

Always try to get the preclear to present time and always check it. You can get the case bogged down by failing to bring him to present time.

Another thing that can happen is that you may have tripped an engram in getting the preclear up to present time and something back there in the engram says “Come here.” So you say, “What’s your age? (snap!)”

He says, “Thirty-six.”

“How old are you? (snap!)”

“Thirty-six.”

“Give me a number. (snap!)”

“Thirty-six.”

“Okay, canceled. Be alert. (snap!)” Then you say, “How old are you? (snap!)”

And he says, “Three.” That is caused by a call-back mechanism, so give it a double check.

A person who is stuck on the track isn’t much affected by a canceler. The canceler is most effective when the person is in present time, and usually when a person is stuck on the track I don’t use one.

In getting a case moving originally, you should follow Standard Procedure very closely. Give him the inventory, then start Step Two. Follow it exactly. Run engrams. And at any place where you all of a sudden aren’t getting any further, go to Step Three, straight line memory.

Try to discover the circuitry in the case. Try to find the person’s standard dramatizations.

I resolved one case by making the preclear go back to a time when he was bawling out his children. That was his own dramatization. Actually, I didn’t take him back to this moment. I just told him to imagine he was bawling out his children and he went back to a time when he did. I said, “Well, pretend you are bawling out your children.

What would you say to them?

What has this child done?”

“She’s spilled the milk pitcher.”

“What do you say to her?”

And he said, “Yappity, yappity, yap.”

“Now, who in your family might have used those words?”

“Nobody but me.” We instantly had the fact that he was in somebody else’s valence.

This is the dramatization; he is in that valence and that is what he is using and what he thinks of as himself. Using repeater technique on that dramatization wound him up around the age of 2 and revealed that he was in Papa’s valence. He didn’t work well as himself, so I regressedl him up and down the track as Papa. I said, “Now Papa will go here on the track and do this and that,” and he was perfectly willing to go back and look at himself and play checkers with himself and spank himself and so on. He was solidly in Papa’s valence. The first clue to this was asking him, “Pretend you are Papa and go back to the time when you are spanking the child.” No, he wouldn’t do that. So I asked, “Well, let’s go back and be spanked.”

“No.”

“How would you go about lying across somebody’s knees and being spanked? How would it feel?” — just trying to get him moving, trying to get him to do something.

“Well . . .” he said reservedly. He wasn’t lying across anybody’s knees at that point, because he was Papa.

I finally found out that Mama’s screaming dramatization was “You are getting more and more like your father every day. You will always be like your father. Oh, how discouraged I get.”

When he finally shifted into his father’s valence through other engrams keying in, he had gotten extremely discouraged. And there he had been for a long time in Papa’s valence, and Pop had been a terrible failure all his life, so we had a failure from that moment on. I finally got him out of Papa’s valence and moving on the track, and then he would move on the track as himself. In short, just follow out Standard Procedure.

If you find a case that is badly bogged down, use straight line memory on it and see if you can’t free up some attention units. Straight line memory has a law behind it: An aberree never says anything once. He will dramatize what he dramatizes many times, and that is one of the Srst and foremost laws of straight line memory. This is important because if you find one of the parents saying a certain thing in the childhood of your preclear, you can be fairly sure that that is also in the prenatal bank. So you want to find these dramatizations. You would have to use some sense on this, of course. If Mama and Papa were both killed when he was 2 months of age and he was raised by somebody else, you don’t have their dramatizations to draw on. At that moment straight line memory breaks down. You can still do something with it but it is not as effective. So you take straight line memory on these bogged-down cases and you will find things like circuits and valences.

The patter on straight line memory is as follows: A person is sitting there, his eyes wide open, and you say, “Who is your worst enemy?” He doesn’t know. “What’s been worrying you lately?”

He says, “Well, as a matter of fact I have been awfully worried about money lately.”

“Who in your family used to worry about money?”

“Nobody — well, my father. Ha-ha. Yes, he used to worry about money.” When you hit the gong with straight line memory you will get a smile of relief or a little chuckle. It doesn’t amount to much, but you know when you have hit it. When you haven’t hit it in straight line memory, you don’t get that. That is the tester — the little meter that you watch for. If you key out a lock, you get a smile. That’s your pay. Leave that subject at that moment, go on to something else and key that out, and so on. You can knock out circuitry, various types of engrams and their locks, and return this person to present time. Then, after you have got him straightened up on the subject of straight line memory, you take him back down the track again, restimulate the engram, and it is just as before. So, you have to run out engrams.

But if you are going to give a person straight line memory and call it an alleviation and say this person is much better, don’t now put him in reverie. Leave it alone. He feels fine. The instant you put him back down the track you are going to start hitting engrams, restimulating him and giving him new locks. Of course, you would have to bring him back up to present time again and you could do the same thing — knock out these key-ins; but you could keep on going like that for a long time.

You could make a persons headache disappear, for instance, with Straightwire just by making him remember pleasant things in his past. Another way would be to ask him, “Who died of a headache?”

The person says, “Oh, I don’t know.... My grandmother had migraine headaches but she didn’t die of one, certainly. Let’s see — why, she fell downstairs when she was 82 and died of a fractured skull.” He chuckles lightly. “Well, think of that.” All of a sudden this person is quite amused that Grandma fell downstairs and died of a fractured skull!

The next step would be to say, “Who used to tell you you were like your grandmother?”

“Oh, she did. She said, ‘You’re just like me, aren’t you, honey?’ She always used to say this.”

“When was the first time she said it?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“You can remember this. You can remember a specific incident. Where would she be standing?” Actually, they can remember the concept easily, but to remember the exact moment when one of these things is happening is the other part of it. First you get them to remember the concept and then the exact moment. That is straight line memory. You want to find out who told them they were like other people. You want to find out who used to say “Control yourself,” “You have to mind,” and so on. You want to find out who is dead. That is important, because if this person is in the valence of a person who is dead, that death has practically frozen him into that valence. It is as though life desired Grandma to go on living forever, so when Grandma died, life decided there should be a continuum of Grandma and threw this person over wholly into Grandmab valence. Grandma’s death, then, is enough to fix the child, who was slightly in her valence already, fully in the valence. Tonight I was on KGOTV, and as I stepped off the stage there was a very pretty young lady leaning up against an icebox which she was going to display in another ten or fifteen minutes. She had a bad cold, so I said, “Well, close your eyes,” and I took her back down the track. She was a pianola case.

She went back to the time when her first boyfriend kissed her and the most beautiful look came over her face. She was running this off very nicely and I said, “Well, is it inside or outside?”

She said, “Oh, it’s outside.”

“How does the air smell?”

“Gee, it’s good. I’m really smelling it!”

She knew nothing about Dianetics, and to find this happening to her for the first time in her life really startled her. So I ran her through three or four more pleasure moments up and down the track and back to the time when she got her high school diploma, and a few other things, and brought her up to present time very nicely. It was about time for her to go on the air, and she said, “You know, this Dianetics is very interesting. I bet it could cure my cold,” and she tried to blow her nose but it wasn’t running! “Where’s my cold?” she said. “I’m going to tell people about this as soon as I get on.”

You can use Straightwire as a booster up the time track, or you can stop a bogged-down case from being bogged down by making the person remember something pleasant early in their lives. Don’t run them back to it, just make them remember it, and they sort of build back up to present time in this fashion.

You can open up a whole time track with nothing but straight memory. You can take a psychotic and work on nothing but straight memory with him, day in and day out, for a few minutes every day, and the first thing you know, this person gets very sane. Don’t work it for very long periods. Fifteen minutes of straight memory is just fine. Tell the person he is going to remember something tomorrow. Sometimes it takes a little while for the file clerk to get the drawers out. Ask the same question tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, and all of a sudden he has got the answer. It takes three days for deep-seated, lost and occluded memories to come into view.

Ask somebody today, “What is the specific gravity of mercury?” He hasn’t heard about this since he was in high school. Ask him tomorrow, then ask him the next day, and he will say, “13.546.” He has remembered it. But that is because you kept insisting that he remember it.

The other way that you stop a case from being bogged down is to run pleasure moments. Take him swimming, take him horseback riding. Make him feel the hair of the horse. Make him feel the water, taste the chlorine, listen to the girls laugh, do this, do that. Run him through the incident so he really experiences the pleasure, because one of the functions of the analytical mind is to obtain pleasure for the organism. It is more important to attain pleasure than it is to stay around pain because the organism is supposed to get away from pain. So you run him through these pleasure moments, and very often you will bring a lot of the attention units up and the case will suddenly start running again.

Sometimes when you try to run a pleasure moment something very gruesome happens, such as a death or wherever he was latched up on the time track flashes into view, and you get off a terror charge while you are asking for pleasure.

In short, I hope that the stalled cases that are around at the moment, if there are any, can be restarted again using these principles which I have given you here.