According to notes published in 1951 by the Hubbard Research Unit, Ron discussed plans for the Foundation during the first hour of the morning lecture. We have not been able to locate any recording for that first hour of lecture. A partial recording of the second hour was found, in which Ron answered written questions that had been submitted by the students, and the text of that recording is reproduced here. The last three questions and their answers were taken from notes as published with Ron’s permission by the Hubbard Dianetic Research Foundation in 1951. No actual tape recording for that final section of the lecture has been found.

“Is an ally computation’ or sympathy computations absolutely necessary to produce a psychosomatic illness?”

No. The preponderance of psychosomatic illnesses, however, do seem to fall in that category. The reason a psychosomatic illness sometimes requires considerable time to reduce in processing, however, is that a sympathy computation is quite usually the last thing in a case to come up and be eradicated. As a consequence, we have a situation there where the real cause of the psychosomatic illness lies in an engram which will only be picked up after one or two hundred hours of processing. However, by use of Straightwire and the techniques I have been giving you, you can expect about twenty percent of the psychosomatic illnesses which you address to disappear.

The fact that these things disappear is quite incidental. They are called “psychosomatic illnesses.” Now, I don’t know anything about a psychosomatic illness, to tell you the honest-to-goodness truth. I have read in some medical texts that there are such things as psychosomatic illnesses, and that is as far as I know.

I do know, however, that there is such a thing as a chronic somatic, which is caused by thought taking over some of the function of a human being. It has nothing to do with an illness, it’s just a chronic somatic. Somebody gets stuck, and if it is very bad he is stuck someplace on the track with a number of attention units; and if it is very, very bad, that thing has a holder, a call-back, a denyer and a grouper in it, all of which have been activated. That is a very serious chronic somatic. But it is just the somatic of some old injury.

I don’t know anything about psychosomatic illnesses. People say that they compose seventy percent of men’s ills. Well, I wouldn’t know anything about men’s ills. In Dianetics we treat exclusively the field of thought. This has never been investigated before and we are on a completely new field, and we would not think of encroaching upon medicine.

“What is the tone scale for affinity?”

This material will be published. There is a handout which is being made up which has in it the rest of the tone scales. We’re putting those things together in a new chart and we’ll give them to you.

“Is it detrimental to a case to push an engram into recession when it will not deintensify, or merely useless? Is this practice ever desirable?”

A recession, of course, is that state an engram is in when one has not reached the basic on its chain, and one has gone over it twenty, thirty, forty times, trying to just wear it out; the somatic still stays there and the content still stays there. That is a recession.

Doing this is very foolish. Hitting that engram and doing this sort of thing with it, pushing itinto recession, is not particularly super detrimental, but an auditor who would stop right there after pushing an engram into recession had better go back to see the instructor, because the basic on the chain is what you want and that is what you are trying to reach. If that engram is accessible enough that you can run it at all, you can certainly run the basic on its chain. There is no excuse for running an engram into recession.

There is a lot of interesting data about this sort of thing that hasn’t even been put out. It is data we found out two, three or four years ago. For instance, if you run an engram into recession and then wait for about three days, it will come back up again in intensity. You can run it into recession again at that time, and then you can bring the engram to present time and run it out. Then you wait about three days and run it out again in present time. It won’t give you any trouble anymore.

I thought you might find that interesting, but don’t use it. That is not part of standard technique. There is no sense in doing it; it is just a comment on the behavior of these things. It’s an endless procedure, actually, because it takes thirty, forty, fifty recountings to knock one of these things into a recession. It just finally sort of gives up and disappears and comes back in about three days.

Some of the people who make comments about engrams that suddenly reappear after they have been erased, and so forth, just don’t know when a person is out of valence, or they don’t know what a recession looks like. It is very easy to tell these things.

“In contacting and trying to break locks and controls using the method of ‘seesaw on the arc,’ is one apt to stir up a lot of rather unrelated but restimulative material?”

You don’t stir up material with Straightwire. That is the beauty and safety of Straightwire. You do not restimulate a case by using Straightwire. Everything which a person remembers is definitely deintensified just by the act of remembering.

Now, it’s an interesting thing that preclears, when they are run a great deal without any Straightwire and without running any pleasure moments, pick up the habit of returning instead of remembering. The difference between returning and remembering is that in returning you are sending, let us say, fifty percent of the available attention units of “I” back down the track, but in remembering you are only sending two of them back. So the preclear who is worked in reverie a very great deal will get into the habit of sending fifty just to remember what he had for breakfast.

The mind most efficiently and most swiftly operates not by returning but by remembering. The reason one returns is to make it possible to remember.

Therefore, you run a pleasure moment and then use Straightwire after every session to help him stabilize in present time and also to return to him the habit of remembering.

Returning is an educational pattern, rather than a habit.

So using straight memory is all right, but make sure that you are using straight memory. Some of the people that you will run into will do this trick: They have been worked quite a bit and their file clerk has been worked quite a bit, so instead of remembering the actual incident they will use their file clerk. They will get their file clerk to hand them the data as a flash reply. That is not the standard circuit on which memory comes in.

For instance, you ask the preclear “Have you run off any engrams about your father leaving your mother?” and he’ll say “Yes.” He got that yes as a flash reply. He isn’t thinking about it. What you want him to do is remember whether or not he has.

So, check people to make sure they are not using the file clerk on a flash-reply basis. This file clerk proposition is an interesting mechanism; it is very useful in processing and is part of the system of remembering, but it is not the standard system of remembering.

The other thing is that the person is liable to go back down the track and look. You will find that people, particularly those who have heavy control circuitry, will go back down the time track and look at something to tell you, rather than remember it. It is very obvious when they start doing this, by the way. They kind of look blank and they shut their eyes, and so on. They are going back down the track, they are not remembering.

Straightwire requires remembering, and if the person remembers, anything he remembers will not be restimulative. The act of bringing it into view, bringing light on it, puts it back on the time track and restores attention units to “I,” and it is not a restimulative process.

You can make a person remember everything.

The person who wrote this question, by the way, should be processed by his auditor into the early period of his childhood to find out where Mama was afraid of remembering things because they were just too horrible — ”One shouldn’t remember these things; they should be put out of the mind,” and so on.

“Can any amount of processing be given safely to a woman during the later months of pregnancy? If so, what is the effect on the child ?”

This question comes up continually. It is something which the auditor must judge.

In processing a pregnant woman, whether early or late in the pregnancy, if the mother is furiously morning sick or thoroughly aberrated on the second dynamic, or if that child is in considerable danger as a result thereof — for instance, the mother is miserable or birth is going to be really too terrible to bear, and all that sort of thing — then yes, it is better to process a pregnant woman. But if Mama can possibly last through this pregnancy and so on, get educated into what it takes in the field of Preventive Dianetics,’ get cheered up with some Straightwire (hardly any more than that), and brought through to the end, the processing should be done afterwards. It is easier on the child.

A grief discharge, a terror discharge or an apathy discharge will transplant the emotion, the words used and so forth, not through the umbilical cord, but directly on the basis of convulsions and tightening of the abdominal muscles.

Keep processing out of the reactive bank of unborn children because it will make it very hard on a future generation of auditors. For instance, the auditor will say “Let’s run over this engram. Go over it again,” and the preclear will say “Go over it again. Let’s go earlier now” when that engram gets triggered. He will actually auto-audit himself — his engrams will start auditing him. Auditing circuits will have been set up in him.

It will be necessary for the auditor, at that time, to use entirely different terminology. In fifteen or twenty years, you can expect Dianetic terminology to be entirely different than it is now. It will have to be.

There are some other systems of how you can describe time tracks and so forth, by the way. Rather than linear tracks, where the preclear is “going back” and so forth, you can consider them as concentric circles. In other words, we can dodge this situation. But the point is, keep these engrams out of a child’s bank because they will transplant. Use your own judgment on it, in other words. Is the child more in danger from processing or more in danger from Mama?

“Assuming the preclear has sufficient ‘I’ in present time, may he enter occluded areas in late life without the aid of an auditor? What are the elements for and against this procedure?”

There is a statement which can be made about this: Anybody who audits himself is so heavily control-circuited that he is not auditing himself. One of the first things that an auditor looks for, actually, in his inventory is “Does this person audit himself any?” It means heavy control circuitry.

One never, under any circumstances, permits his preclear to go in for self-auditing by sending himself down the track and trying to run out his own engrams. Any time he finds his preclear doing this, he should take every possible measure to make him cease and desist. There is never sufficient “I” to run out an engram by oneself, because when the attention units get into the engram they suddenly get fuddled up and the person wanders off to another engram. There is a blank-out, because that area of the engram is a blank-out area. It means analytical attenuation. When “I” gets down into the area, the analytical mind experiences analytical attenuation. It shuts off, some of the attention units are captured, the engram gets restimulated and he wanders off and gets into another engram. There is no auditor there to send him through these things. And he will never reduce one, he will only restimulate them.

There is a method of self-auditing. I went over this with the Director of Research and asked him to turn out a paper on it for a bulletin in the very near future. This method of self-auditing is very easily explained when I tell you that there is such a thing as self-straightwiring. A person can be taught rather easily how to straightwire himself. When he does this he has to refrain completely from the use of repeater technique on himself.

It is gruesome to watch one of these people who uses repeater technique on himself. He has a headache and he says to himself, “You know, I think that’s probably from an engram where I have a headache. Yes sir, I bet that’s the phrase. ‘I have a headache, I have a headache, I have a headache....”’ He trails off, then sighs. “I wonder what I was running. Must have been something.... Boy, I sure don’t feel good. I have a stomachache. I wonder if that’s the phrase. ‘I have a stomachache. I have a stomachache. I have a stomachache. I have a stomachache. I have a stomachache.’ Oh, my head! Oh, my leg! Well, it couldn’t have been those. It must be ‘I am sick, I’m so sick.’ Yeah, all right. ‘I’m so sick. I’m so sick. I’m . . .”’ So he puts himself in the hospital and sends for an auditor.

Right next to “I have a headache” he may have had phrases like “Well, hold still, dear, and I will stroke it away if I possibly can” — a holder and a bouncer; “Come back to me, dear” — a call-back; or “I’ll be right back. I won’t leave you” — a call-back and a holder. Only he is not getting any of these phrases, he is just getting this one comment. And the scanner travels ahead of the contact one makes with the engram and restimulates all the way up the line.

Supposing when he was running the “I’m so sick” engram, right next to “I’m so sick” was “Everything happens at once and everything happens to me,” the time track would come rolling right up into a bundle. Then the auditor going into the case has to sort out a case which is all bunched up; he has to get flash replies and so forth — if he can get them, if control circuits haven’t been activated. But there are heavy circuits on this case, because this person wouldn’t do this unless he had those circuits. The auditor somehow or other manages to untangle all this and get the groupers out of the case and run earlier engrams off the chain.

Sometimes it is just a race between the auditor and the preclear. The auditor has to clean up as many things as the preclear has restimulated and, in addition to that, has to pick up enough control circuitry so the preclear will stop doing this. It is rough sometimes.

You do not put a person like this on freewheeling, by the way. As a matter of fact, you should not put anybody on freewheeling and then ask him for answers. If you put somebody on freewheeling, put him on freewheeling and then leave him alone, and if the fellow gets stuck and the freewheeling stops — so he got stuck! When you audit him, just use Standard Procedure. Stop the freewheeling by bringing him up to present time and then start Standard Procedure on him again.

So this problem of self-auditing is an interesting one, but you can tell anybody who is doing this how to do it. He wants to make himself better and so forth — you teach him how to straightwire himself. Make him remember things about himself, give him the sorts of things to remember, teach him about the triangle and set him up with a graph for doing the circular system of Straightwire, and make him remember specific things.

I made a little experiment when I was back East and sent people off to straightwire themselves who were heavy control-circuitry cases and found that they work it out.

“Please clarify the distinction between recession and reduction.”

That is done ably in the Handbook. I just gave you a moment ago the definition of a recession, and a reduction is something off of which, on a few recountings, the somatics disappear and the word content is left. That is a reduction.

“Can you get a satisfactory reduction of a prenatal engram on a circuitry case if the person doesn’t get somatics?”

You can try to take some tension off one of these things if it is low enough in the basic area. If the person doesn’t have somatics, there is a pain shutoff, or the person is out of valence, or mechanically the whole case is so supercharged that the person can’t get next to the engram. Those are the three ways that somatics are shut off. They are shut off by a pain shut-off or a feeling shut-off, or they are shut off by a person being out of valence, or they are shut off by the case being too heavily charged with secondary engrams, locks and so on. If a case is that heavily charged and so forth, you would be using Straightwire on it anyhow, or running off grief. You wouldn’t be in the prenatal area.

“Please discuss how to attack a chronic psychosomatic.”

Now, I don’t know what these psychosomatics are. I know about chronic somatics.

I want to give you a little warning about this: Never under any circumstances go into a case to reach a chronic aberration or a chronic somatic. Always work the case as though you were carrying it on through along the line. Maybe after a tremendous amount of experience you could go into a case and potshoot it, and you could actually knock out of the case its heart trouble or something like that, but it is not a safe or easy thing to do. It isn’t something which I would do. I would just start following the case.

If a case has a chronic somatic, you can be absolutely certain that the file clerk will give it to you at the earliest moment it can. The easiest way to work on this is to just work with the file clerk and follow Standard Procedure. Don’t go after these specific aberrations. If this fellow thinks he is a goat, don’t go after the engram which makes him think he’s a goat. Get enough charge off the case, and get him to the basic area and erase engrams. Its an interesting thing that as you start straightwiring a case chronic somatics very often will fold up, and after you have run a few secondary engrams and so forth, enough tension will come off the case so these chronic somatics will deintensify themselves, even though you didn’t touch the engram in which they occurred.

This, by the way, often produces the strange phenomenon of a person who has recovered suddenly. You have touched no engram that would explain this sudden recovery, you have not even touched the somatic that would explain it, and all of a sudden the person recovers and just feels fine. Six weeks later he may have a slight re-experience of the illness. You can count on any very severe, chronic somatic to restimulate from time to time on a case, in lighter and lighter fashion, until you get the actual chain of engrams that it is locked up in. Most chronic somatics are caused by a whole chain, not just one engram.

That should give you the idea that you should not go after specific engrams or aberrations in a case, as a matter of precaution and, incidentally, as a matter of efficiency.

However, there is in First Aid Dianetics an assist. The last engram hasn’t had a chance to gather any locks and is normally lying there for anything the auditor wants to do to it. It can be run out, usually, without touching anything earlier in the bank. That is a happy and fortuitous fact.

All of this requires a lot of laboratory work, you might say. We are going to post an auditor in the receiving room of an emergency hospital to catch the people as they come in and knock out those somatics. We’ve got one back East that was all primed up to do this, though I don’t know whether he started on the project yet or not. We can then compare the times of recovery of those patients to any other period in the past for the same period of time, just to get how swiftly this could be done.

So, you can usually reach the last engram.

An interesting thing occurred back in Elizabeth a short time ago. A child was hit in the head by a car bumper and was knocked unconscious. This child didn’t know Dianetics. But it was an auditor who hit him and the auditor got out of the car, picked the child up, put him in the car and said, “The somatic strip will go back to the beginning of this incident and will continue on through to the end of the incident,” waited for a moment, then said, “The somatic strip will go back to the beginning of the incident and go on through to the end of it.... The somatic strip will now go to the point where the head was hit by the bumper, will continue on through to present time.” All of a sudden the child became conscious and woke up. Now, that isn’t remarkable, because this child could be expected to wake up in a very short time. The auditor continued with this and ran the child through with the content, but the somatic was already very definitely deintensified, and he ran it out so the child did not have a headache after the accident. The child was perfectly fine and comfortable.

There’s an interesting occurrence. That is an isolated datum. I have given it to you as a little experiment which was performed by one auditor on one case. There is a lot of data waiting to be found out in the field of First Aid Dianetics.

“When a preclear is close to the bottom of the dwindling spiral of accessibility, how can one prevent his preclear from receiving two locks from his environment for every one lock the auditor blows?”

Well, an auditor that couldn’t blow more than one lock per session ought to have his head examined. It will generally run on the ratio, if you are working on the affinity, communication and reality lock techniques and he’s being worked fairly well, of blowing out twenty, thirty, forty locks in a session.

“What is the value in attention units gained of yawns or boil-off alone when the engram itself is not yet accessible for reduction?”

That would be a very interesting question all by itself. You can’t assign a numerical value, but believe me, the boil-off and material of that character is the thing which is suppressing the analyzer. There is the unconsciousness, and getting the unconsciousness off the case always returns attention units. But there was a condition put on this question — ”the engram itself is not yet accessible for reduction.” Believe me, if you get a lot of boil-off on a case, there are engrams underneath that boil-off, and they can be contacted.

“Can key-ins occur before birth?”

I actually could not answer that question with any honesty, I could just give you a lot of theory, because I have never been able to audit a fetus yet.

“In telling us about the new method of Straightwire, you said not to concentrate on one subject too long. Is this not apt to restimulate many things in the bank?”

Well, this is very interesting. I just answered this question a moment ago. You do not restimulate people by using Straightwire. If a person restimulates when you are trying to straightwire him, that person is going back down the track. He is moving into engrams. He is moving on the track, not being straightwired, and you cure this by keeping him up in present time and making him remember.

“After key phrases are found as to controls, ARC breaks and so forth, in what way are these phrases used to the best advantage?”

There is a trick by which you run the dramatization. You have found the dramatization and its phrase by straight memory — for instance, Mama using a control circuit or something of the sort. Go back to that time in reverie and run the whole thing two or three times in order to get it in full view, and then just tell the preclear sharply to go to the earliest time this occurs on the case or the earliest engram in which this appears. Quite often he’ll skip on down the track.

Of course, remember that when you’re running a control circuit, or when you suddenly hit a control circuit in a case, the preclear sort of goes out from under the auditor’s control. When a control circuit gets restimulated, the preclear’s control circuit takes over and more or less takes control away from the auditor, and the file clerk shuts off and all sorts of interesting things happen. So the thing for the auditor to do is to be very persuasive when running through these control circuits. You’ve got to be very insistent to get the things, because the preclear will dream up all sorts of reasons why not.

You tell him to go to the earliest time this occurs in the bank, the first engram in which that occurs. Take the engram and run it, ascertain whether or not there are any earlier ones and run those, and get on down to the bottom of the chain on this circuit. Run out the whole engram at the bottom of the chain. That is the way it is done and that’s the way one uses a dramatization.

“If, when running a grief charge, the auditor stops and then the auditing is continued in a day or two, will the grief be lost?”

If you get the preclear into a grief charge, you ought to be shot if you don’t run it all out. If you get a terror charge, run it out; it would be very difficult to get him into it again. It is very hard on the preclear to bring him up to present time when he has been put into an engram. The great crimes in processing are invalidating data and failing to run every engram presented. This includes secondary engrams.

“Is it absolutely necessary for a grief engram to rest on a physical pain engram?”

It just happens to be so. There is an area of turbulence between life — thought — and matter. That area of turbulence has to be addressed again by thought before it means anything. The secondary engram takes place only when the analytical mind is influenced by this turmoil and turbulence. A person goes all through the tone scale, reacts, and recovers. If a person’s own child dies, he’ll feel grief — even a clear would — but with a clear it would not fix him up so he would have a bum leg, for instance, for the rest of his life.

“When should we run late life accidents, or late life physical pain engrams?”

Avoid them like the plague unless the file clerk hands one up. If the file clerk hands one up, the person is stuck in it. Run it and reduce it. If it doesn’t reduce go to the basic on its chain.