November the 4th, afternoon lecture.

All right.

This afternoon we are going to take up that subject which has long been neglected, called Straightwire. And I'm going to show you that there exist ways and means that are dreamed of in his books, Horatio, on the subject of Straightwire.

The advent of Straightwire came about some thousands of years ago when somebody said to somebody else, "How are you?" and the other fellow didn't answer automatically; he really thought about it for a moment and he said, "Say, you know I feel terrible." He discovered at that moment how bad off he was and we had the therapy known as Straightwire - in its embryonic form, of course.

In 1894, a fellow by the name of Sigmund Freud announced his libido theory, went off the rails and went into the ditch. It's an interesting thing that Sigmund Freud had a psychotherapy and deserted it. He was working with a fellow by the name of Breuer - impossibly spellable name - impossibly unspellable name - I mean, possibly spellable.

Male voice: Impossibly unspellable.

I thought I'd key in a talking circuit like I was talking about this morning, but what it came out with and it - that's the first thing it said to say, so I did.

Well, a fellow by the name of Breuer had been fooling around for some time with hypnosis. Hypnosis is the work of, oh, a period of about 1835, mainly a fellow by the name of Charcot. But nobody had psychotherapy in mind; all he wanted to do was just figure out a lot of things.

Utterly fantastic - and has not made sense until this last year - what Charcot did in the name of hypnosis.

From 1835 - I have to look this up sometime and find out if Charcot really was 1835; it says so in the medical books and I don't believe them - Charcot had some fantastic things which he used to do routinely with hypnosis. He would hypnotize a subject and then have the subject feel the temperatures of things some distance away or discover the contents of various liquids in various bottles which were otherwise hidden from view. He would have people read nameplates on the other sides of things, which they obviously couldn't see, and went through this enormous amount of hocus-pocus, as it was thought that day, that neither he nor anybody else had any inkling about. Fabulous!

What was he doing? Well, in any hypnotic trance you can tell the person to be someplace else and if it had actually occurred to anybody to tell anybody to be three feet back of his head, in any good hypnotic trance it would have occurred. And if any hypnotist did anything else but talk, he would have found out from the preclear that there was such a thing as exteriorization. But this communication never went on.

How - how did Charcot do these things and what is this all about? Well you, today, working with a preclear wide awake, knowing exteriorization and the other phenomena you will encounter in the mind, will be able to do exactly the same things, and much better, that Charcot was experimenting with a hundred and fifteen, hundred and twenty years ago.

It's interesting, isn't it? Because that technology was so thoroughly lost that in modern books of hypnotism you don't even vaguely discover anything resembling the work of Charcot. In books printed in 1890, you discover nothing of this character. Books of 1890, 1880, on the subject of hypnosis had lost it already; books just about a little bit earlier than that still had it; and any hypnotist could have done it and done it with accuracy.

If we had two bottles, both of them black bottles - they're tightly corked one of them contains alcohol, the other one contains water. We hypnotize the person and ask him which bottle contains water and which contains alcohol and he names them correctly.

We start to deal cards and we ask him what the next card coming up is. And then we go off on some wild monkey business about reading the future and prediction, as Rhine is doing. Only subjects which have eyelid flutters work on this prediction stunt which depends, essentially, upon the person being well enough exteriorized to see the bottom of the card before it is turned over and is visible to the operator.

You get what impossible combinations have been worked out by lack of observation and lack of communication on this subject. Nobody knew about exteriorization and so they go around and put people to sleep and put them under drugs and do all sorts of things with them and call it psychotherapy and fumble. And then all of a sudden, peculiar things would happen. And they had no clue to engrams, they had no clue to facsimiles and they'd just promptly go get lost. And the techniques themselves would turn up and become lost again. Same way with Straightwire.

Simple questioning - as done by medicine men for thousands and thousands of years - making the patient recognize something of his own difficulties, has been the only actually workable psychotherapy on the whole time track. The rest of it ended in something else than psychotherapy.

And so it was with Breuer and Freud. They were using hypnotism and they had already lost the work of Charcot or didn't know it well. And they were putting people in a trance and then asking them to remember things. Just exactly why they had to go into a trance to remember something is a little bit difficult to figure out because they were trying to make the person… Well, the goal of the work of Breuer and Freud was … It isn't really fair of me to put a goal in there, is it? Well, I tell you, the truth of the matter is they never said, and I wouldn't go so far as to say they didn't know. But it was a lot of fun, anyway.

But what they called, later on, free association - if you will excuse the phrase, verbal diarrhea on the part of the patient - was nothing more nor less than a concept built upon the much earlier idea of physic, from which we get the word physician. And these people were dramatizing - as Freud adequately demonstrates in his work - a prenatal constipation engram. And they thought by relieving this constipation by - I'm sorry that it goes this way, but it's just as grimy as their work really is. This verbal diarrhea was supposed to cleanse.

Even their terminology, when taken from the original language in which they were doing it, and so on, is the exact duplicate of just that. They had reversed around the idea and they thought that the mind needed a purge of some sort. Well this is the idea they came to. And do you know they never had any success from the moment they came to that idea on forward to 1954 when it's still going strong. This is what's known as free association; and other phrase, and so forth, came up with it.

But their original work was nothing more nor less than straightwire while the patient was hypnotized. We don't know why they had to hypnotize the patient; that's something else they added. But the original work was just Straightwire. And then they slid from Straightwire into this idea of mental catharsis. See, instead of - instead of giving him physic physically, why, they gave him physic mentally after that. And they were getting desperate and the tremendous quantities of material which they uncovered were written down carefully on paper. And we had this fabulous dramatization take place when these people were right on the verge of actually accomplishing something.

Today, physicists who are working in the field of modern nuclear physics treat the MEST universe more or less in the same fashion: They give it a shot of voltage in order to make the MEST universe regurgitate some data. In fact, you've kind of got this dramatization all the way up and down the track. Well, it's the wrong way to go about something. Now, we were doing that in 1950, but that was kind of in agreement with everybody else that had been doing that work.

Well, it wasn't until we pulled cleanly out of that - then we started to make some progress. When we started to take a look at the factors involved and got away with [from] the idea of physic, why, we started to make a lot of progress.

Freud was making progress as long as he was working with Breuer and hypnotism and stopped making progress the second he got into this same idea of physic: The preclear has got an awful lot of things in him and we're going to administer this mental catharsis and get them out.

Now, we were doing that with engrams. If we could just run enough engrams out of the guy, why, he'd be in good shape. True enough, it worked many, many times - many times over.

But let me show you something about this. With a few Straightwire questions … Once one student here - I mentioned this earlier in the course - came in the office, one day, at 42 Aberdeen Road. Had a headache, I think it was. I asked him a few questions in Straightwire. The headache disappeared. Then I showed him there was an engram under it simply by lowering him back into the engram and the engram reappeared. Remember that? Very interesting. I think he had the headache for days afterwards. But I'd gotten rid of it by Straightwire.

What is Straightwire? It just means stringing something from a present time consciousness to a memory. Like stringing telephone lines. So we get communication open between the past and the present. And that, in essence, is its definition. That's why it's called Straightwire rather than recall or something of the sort because there could be so many kinds of recall.

So we have this highly specialized kind of recall and it's this simple level of processing: The preclear is in present time and in contact with present time and we simply ask him questions which restore to him certain memories. Now, that was the original definition of Straightwire. But that is not the best definition for Straightwire. You can define something, really, only when you know what it is doing, and if you know what it is doing then your definition, when known, should make it possible to relieve or work with what is defined, That's an action definition. All right. We haven't had an action definition of Straightwire until this past year.

Straightwire is that process which restores the self-determinism of the preclear in placing incidents and relationships precisely in space and time. That's Straightwire. But that's also the definition of everything we're doing.

It tells you that probably the best process under the sun would be just that process - Straightwire. I don't tell you right this minute that it is, but it sure lines up with exactly what we're doing. Because in the present time he locates himself in other times and places (past), and same time (present), and future (future time). He just locates incidents in himself, negatively and positively. And what do you know, you key out, banish and blow up practically every single engram in the bank - if you know how to do it.

The first Straightwire that we had required a cleverness which was diabolical. Fortunately, our present Straightwire as we are using it in Scientology - we've never used this word before in Scientology, I call to your attention; we used it in Dianetics - in present time, as we're using it in Scientology, it is not being employed with diabolical cleverness. You had to be pretty slippy sometimes. But all you're doing - all you're doing, in essence, is taking over other-determined spaces and making self-determined spaces out of them. That's all. By what? By making the preclear look. All you have to do is make him look. And he'll find out two things immediately: He isn't there and it's not important. These two things he finds out immediately.

The only reason the preclear is not in his body - I've been hitting this now all this time we've been here - the only reason you can't exteriorize him easily is he's not there. He's on inverted dynamics. What inverted dynamics are there? There are eight dynamics; any one of them can become inverted. Well, how do you reinvert dynamics easily, fast? Straightwire is the answer.

All right. You lead him to look. And the less duress you have to place on him to lead him to look, the better off you are. But remember this: that there's an optimum duress under which you put a preclear. And that's always, always - I repeat: always - plus-duress for the preclear. It's always more duress than he is accustomed to, whether from terms of speed or pressure or otherwise. You have to add your potential to his potential to push him anyplace. Now, I don't mean by that you get inside his head and look for him. But he's got to know that he's being shaped up there and stood up and made to act.

So let's lose the idea right there that Straightwire is a permissive technique. We are not interested in permissive techniques any more than we are tremendously interested in brutal techniques. There can be too much duress, always. But the only place the auditor fails is in too little - too little duress.

He said, "Well, do you remember that?"

And the fellow says, "Well, no. Well, no, no, no”.

"Well, all right. We'll go to something else now," obviously.

What's the matter?

Male voice: That's awful strange.

Yeah.

Well, you see there rather quickly that - that you - the best place to have the auditor is in present time. That's the best place to have the auditor. What's the best place to have the preclear? Ditto!

If you could get all of your preclear into present time, you'd say, be three feet, be fifty feet, be a thousand feet hack of your head and on the other side of the moon and he'd come buck and hand you a couple of beams of stardust as a present - if you really had this licked, see, nothing to it.

Now, preclears who have been processed by older techniques in Scientology come up against this little pat-a-cake, light feather-touch, hit-on-the-head technique and stumble and fall on their faces. What is it? It's just Straightwire. Well, it's very funny that somebody who's been processed and processed and processed and you suddenly come up to them - and they feel a lot better for having been processed and all that sort of thing - and all of a sudden you do this technique.

Now, we're going to call this technique "Orienting Straightwire" - differentiate it from Dianetics Straightwire. And you do this technique called Orienting Straightwire and you'd just be flabbergasted.

The first thing he's liable to say to you is - like I was telling you the other day about certainty; these lectures are very consecutive here (more luck than plan but they are) - and he tells you, oh, he's here and he's there and oh, you've just been having a good time and you've just been chasing him all over the universe and you just got everything all keyed out - you know you did, and so forth - and he's in good shape and he looks better and he looks not even vaguely human, he looks like something alive. And you say, "Gee, we're getting someplace." And you say, "We've asked him if he was certain of this and certain of that and certain of something or other."

Now, that was that little stumbler there the other day and I saw you stumble on that one: How certain is certain? There were two or three cases in the class that just - made kind of miserable about the whole lecture. How certain was certain? Well, how certain can you be that the preclear is certain? Well, then, how certain am I? You know, that kind of a thing? You'll say, "Now, are you certain of that?"

Honest, you would swear, this preclear is functioning; he can go all right, not crazy, nothing. See, we aren't just onto something else, we're onto the center pin of what we're dealing with. This prelogic about the function of theta; it's locating things in space and time and creating space and time in which to locate things. And if you don't bail him out of spaces and times in which he thinks he is, he's not going to be able to create a thing. He's just as young as he ever was so that not even age is a bar to this process.

Well, all right. When we've got this preclear sitting there and he says, "Can anybody be certain of anything?"

And you look at this preclear. This preclear's been doing Change of Space and doing hurdles across the moon and has been three feet back of his head and everything and all this has been going on and you all of a sudden ask him that question and he suddenly bogs like that. Well, can you be - can anybody be certain of anything? Don't be silly. Wide-open case, see, wide-open, some wide-open case - you run into him and you say, "So-and-so and so-and-so."

And they say, "Well, it's as much reality as I have on anything." How much reality is that? Well, one small candlelight burning in a vast and dark desert, badly needing snuffing: that's how much reality they've got. This tiny, tiny little flicker.

What do you ask them? And here we gimped in on the technique itself.

Well, what do you say to such a thing, "Can anybody be certain of anything?" You think you're going to hear this seldom. You think this is something that's very peculiar, that we're going to dig up this case out of the ragbag and hold up just one case on this and say "That's how tough they can get." No, that's routine. You say, "Well, then …" What do you say? "Are you certain that nothing can be certain?"

"Yes."

"Then you're certain of something, aren't you?"

Trapped! And that's what I mean by too much duress. Because that's the way this technique is run. You don't hammer him with the fact that he is certain but you handle him into a certainty. He right away becomes more certain. Now you say, "Now, are you certain that you're not here?"

"Yeah. Kind of certain I am not here, either. In fact I'm pretty sure I'm not here, but I'm not very sure."

"Well, where aren't you in the past?"

"Well - well, I guess I'm pretty much everywhere in the past."

Oh, oh. Somebody's buttered all over the universe. Not very serious because you can bail him out of it awfully fast. Theta can be everywhere. Nothing to that. All right.

You say, "Well, all right now, where aren't you in the future?"

"Well, I don't know. I guess I'm pretty much everywhere in the future."

"Isn't there one place you're not?"

"No."

"Oh? Well, where aren't you in present time?"

Remember what I said about getting buttered across half the universe on an inverted dynamic - inverted 7, inverted 8, that's what you've walked into: religion. It was Bishop Shenanigan that was at the bottom of this one, Lord knows how many spirals ago, when he was a devil for which he's now atoning.

You say, "Where aren't you in present time? Are you over in the corner of the room?"

"I guess I am. Well, I'm there just as soon as you mention it."

Uh, oh. Well now, there's a way to take this one up and I'll give it to you in a moment. This is a very specific way to take it up, but this is not the time to take it up. And this, my children, is what I'm trying to convey to you: Sometimes the simplest techniques are the ones you ought to be handling; and the wisest and shiftiest techniques are very effective but sometimes you're just overshooting the course. You're something like on the order of Galli-Curci singing to the coyotes.

This is a wonderful technique, you see; it's just gorgeous. It has color, flash, dash, daring; and you as an auditor are just tremendous. And you turn it loose on this preclear in a sparkling cascade of pure starlight. Throw a few sunbeams in, wave your hand magically through the air so that the preclear is now Clear, and he says to you, "Well, I can touch all the walls in this room. I've always been able to do that."

In your great adroitness, you say, "All right. Now, how about some mockups?" And you dash your preclear through this vast and romantic and colorful parade of mock-ups, so beautifully, with such deft voice, with such tone - such beautiful tone. And when you've finished all this - he did all of them - you say, "All right. Now be three feet back of your head."

And he says, "What head?"

He did all of these mock-ups but he seems to be getting worse! In other words, what you're doing is trotting out - you're just plain trotting out artillery and everything else and you're shooting at something that isn't there yet. That's just your anxiety as an auditor. You put on a beautiful show in an auditorium which is completely empty.

Well the trick is, if you want to put on a good show (and you ought to as auditor), make sure you've got an audience - namely a preclear.

And the way to get an audience is to start in on Straightwire. Now, I've just given you a case - given you this case. And today we're talking about him; we're opening up the gun on Clinical Procedure Step I. Clinical Procedure is different than Standard Operating Procedure. Standard Operating Procedure is something we hand out to the folks,

Clinical Procedure is - and well take this up far more lengthily but just in passing - is that technique which is to be used in a clinic to maximum result with minimum time on the worst possible preclears. And on the assumption that anybody who comes near you is "What room?" You just assume that.

They walk up the steps, you say, "They don't know anything about the room." In other words, we're going to enter it on sub-Step VII. We're going to enter it at Step VIII. And Step VIII is going to be every case we look at.

Guilty until found cleared!