In this lecture we will go more thoroughly into the subjects of valences and circuits. I am going to start by giving you a precision definition for a demon circuit.

A demon circuit is that mental mechanism set up by an engram command which, becoming restimulated and supercharged with secondary engrams, takes over a portion of the analyzer and acts as an individual being. That is a demon circuit. It is a specific thing — an engram command which takes over part of the analyzer and becomes an individual being. The missing words up to now were “becoming supercharged.” It becomes supercharged with the occurrence of the key-in of the engram command — the engram itself — and then by the receipt of secondary engrams on top of it. This makes a real live demon.

There are many such commands in a case, potentially thousands of them in the ordinary case, by the crude definition, which would be “any command containing ‘you’ and seeking to dominate or nullify the individual.” Any command addressed to the “I” which seeks to dominate or nullify the individual is potentially a demon circuit, but it doesn’t become a live one until it becomes keyed in and supercharged with secondary engrams of grief and communication breaks and reality invalidation’s. When that occurs you have a demon circuit. There are thousands of these in a case, potentially, but not all these thousands have become supercharged. A demon circuit will usually be a whole chain of practically the same command, restimulated. There will just be somebody’s dramatization, and a whole chain of commands of the same nature, more or less the same command.

Take the mechanism “You’ve got to think of the other fellow,” which is a sort of a valence shifter and a demon circuit all by itself. The person starts thinking of the other fellow, and then a real valence shifter is liable to come along and keep the person boosted into another valence. The valence shifter is not a circuit. Now, “You’ve got to think of the other fellow” occurs in the case many times. This was some aberree’s dramatization and it got into this person’s engram bank, and then life came along and took this thing and began to restimulate it. After it became very thoroughly restimulated he would have what he considered a stream of consciousness about the other fellow. “I” would be talked to and persuaded about the other fellow.

Some of these get up to a point where they have such a high power of supercharge and “I” is so robbed by all this that the individual will talk to himself. That is basically what this mechanism is. The charge and part of the analyzer is trapped in the demon circuit.

In order to get rid of a demon circuit one has to reach the phrase or phrases which created it and reduce that phrase or those phrases in the basic on its chain. That is the way you get rid of one. When you take the tension off this basic the whole chain will have a tendency to collapse up the line. But if this is a real live circuit, your chances of getting the basic off that chain are reduced by the fact that the individual has received many secondary engrams on top of this; therefore there is a charge there which fights against the “I” and the auditor. This charge is borrowed off the “I” of the individual, reversed in polarity, and roped off. And here we have the problem (this is your tough case right here) of getting charge off a demon circuit so that it can be reached and reduced or erased, and the problem of getting the charge off is very often one of reaching the demon circuit and reducing and erasing it. The demon circuit got that way by becoming supercharged, and in order to get rid of this demon circuit you have to reduce and erase it.

You are actually sawing against two things. Let’s say a demon circuit says “You’ve got to protect yourself” and there is lots of charge there. “I” is pretty well reduced. You try to get this “You’ve got to protect yourself” out of the case, but you can’t reach that because the preclear’ssense of reality is very poor, his sense of affinity is very poor and his ability to communicate is very poor. In a large measure, these things are very poor because that circuit is there and because charge has been encysted in that circuit.

Because it says “You’ve got to protect yourself,” every time the auditor goes into the case he is faced with this mechanical proposition of the thing being very highly charged. The person may be off his track, pushed away from his reality, and rather badly out of contact with his own past. The auditor is repulsed just like the “I” is repulsed every time it tries to approach this circuit. The auditor can’t get any of the charge off this circuit appreciably because it says “You’ve got to protect yourself.”

The full text of the circuit is probably “You’ve got to protect yourself, you’ve got to help yourself. Now, I’m going to tell you how to do this,” and lots more, but I am just giving you “You’ve got to protect yourself.”

Naturally, the auditor who comes into the circuit isn’t going to be able to find out what its core is. The whole trick is trying to find out what the computation is and what phrase or phrases compose the bottom of this circuit. Once he gets those phrases, he will be able to take some tension off the circuit by hitting an engram even two or three up from the bottom on the chain. If he can get the phrase and go back on it to get the basic on its chain, that demon circuit will be very shaky. The next time he tries to go into the case this circuit will not be protecting itself too much, and the charge which it has picked up can be bled off the case.

This is your contest. This is why you look at some of these cases and say, “Oh, my, this is a very tough case, a very tough case.” But if you put it in the phrase “It’s a very tough case,” you are sort of left staring at this thing as something which is unsolvable. So let’s not call them “very tough cases”; let’s just call them supercharged circuitry cases.

Nothing in any field of skill should ever be named a name which does not in itself lead to the solution of the problem. That is to say, if you can possibly name something in such a way that it indicates the solution of the problem, that is a good name. That is good classification and good labeling. This argues against the tremendous program of Latin or Greek nonsense that many of the old branches of the sciences, natural philosophy and so forth, used to engage in. They would call phenomena by a fancy name just to have a label on it. Then they would say, “Having named it, we now know about it”; only they didn’t, and it barred knowledge of this thing.

We could very well call the supercharged circuitry case the lingo turol case, which would leave everybody blank. It would probably be a very nice name from the standpoint of derivation of words, and we could justify this and be very learned, but we would not be three seconds closer to the solution of this case. To call it a “tough case” is to use an equally useless name. So let’s call it something on the order of a charged circuitry case or a supercharged circuitry case. If you want to be very conservative, call it a charged case.

Now, you should recognize that the reason the preclear can’t reach his reality, can’t develop affinity and has a hard time communicating is because “I” has been robbed by a circuit. You get into this interplay of you trying to get the charge and the circuit going into action, or trying to get the circuit and the charge going into action. You try to get these two apart. You can start robbing this circuit of an attention unit here and an attention unit there, and start to rehabilitate “I” with Straightwire. Then as you go a little bit further you can get recalls on who used to say what. If you get enough attention units back, all of a sudden the person is going to run into the computations if you as an auditor have the patience to look for this. Having run into it as a computation, then you slam it with repeater technique, walk it right on down the bank and find it at the earliest time that you can find it. Get earlier and earlier on this same phrase, even if you have to run it a few times every time you find it, and you will finally get down to the bottom. The chances are that his sense of reality on it is not going to be too high because you are still fighting against charge. He may be way out of valence, but he can still run this thing and take some tension off it.

Having upset this circuit and deintensified it, you can start rescuing from it the attention units which secondary engrams captured from “I,” and you can go ahead and try to get a little charge off this case.

It would be completely erroneous to say that there is one central computation or just one circuitry computation on a case; there are many. But there is one circuitry computation on a case which you have to reach first. Right at first with one of these cases this is a needle-in-a-haystack proposition. You want to find out what is wrong with this person and you have to punch around for a while until you finally discover it. It consists of the dramatizations of the persons who surrounded his prenatal period and childhood. Get these dramatizations into sight. Get some recall on these dramatizations and you will have the data you need to spot circuits. Take the dramatization and look it over carefully, see what part of this dramatization most closely approximates the behavior of the preclear while you have him under process, and shoot it out of the case.

It would be very foolish to tackle one of these tough cases just on the basis of “Let’s go into the basic area and see if we can find an engram. Yes, I know he’s all out of valence and he can’t be reached, and when he does reach one, why, he doesn’t know whether it’s an engram or not anyhow, but we’ll just keep working on this basis.” That would be very foolish, because it simply restimulates the case more and more. The stuff being reached is not really reducing and new locks are being laid on to the case. You are stealing units from “I” by doing this, if you happen to slip and leave a couple in very bad restimulation. The odd part of it is that you can slug away at a case like this without hurting the mental health of the individual and sometimes even improve it. But the point is that your progress is on a very shallow upward curve, measured by hundreds of hours per inch. We want a technique that produces sharp improvement, and this one of reducing charge and finding the circuit computation with Straightwire, and then running out its chain, will do it for you.

Just as there are supercharged circuits, so there are charged valence cases. This is another point of entrance into a case. A valence is a commanded mimicry of another person or thing or imagined entity; that would be the technical definition of a valence. It is the mimicry, commanded by engrams, of a person or an object or an imagined entity. A person can have all sorts of these valences.

The valence is not the circuit; they are two different things. The valence is a whole person, a whole thing, or a large number of persons or things. It doesn’t say in the engram “You have to smoke cigars,” but the person who is fixed in the valence of somebody who smokes cigars will smoke cigars.

The circuit is a sort of an identity all to itself that doesn’t have anything to do with human beings. It has sort of come in and taken over as a parasitic identity in the individual. But that is not a valence; a valence is the whole thing.

You could have a multiple valence shifter that would shift somebody into the valence of the whole human race. This would be very interesting and would cause some complications. But your interest normally lies in the case who is in one, two, three, four or five people. You are trying to get this person out of a series of valences, or out of the valence of a dog, or even out of the valence of mon petit chop anything there that has changed his whole identity.

This subject of valences is interesting. Whereas the circuit robs “I” of attention units, the valence transplants “I.” It takes “I” and puts him over someplace else. “I” now becomes Grandpa or Grandma. The valence or valences, human or animal, can be charged, a lot like an engram. “I” moves over into other identities and can be bounced out of these identities or fixed in them according to the action commands. You can even have a valence shifter misdirector, such as “You don’t know who you are” or “From person to person, day to day, you’re just like everybody you talk to.” A valence shifter type of command that just bounces a person out of any valence he tries to get into is “You can’t be anybody.” It also bounces him out of his own valence, so he is sort of in a never-never land. This is not good for reality. So, valence shifters transplant “I,” and these valences can be charged.

Now, let’s say that when little Lulu was five Grandma died. Up to that time, people used to come around and say to little Lulu, “You’re a nasty tempered little brat. You’re just exactly like your grandmother.” And earlier, they used to say to little Lulu’s mother, “That temper you have, it’s just like your mother’s. You get more and more like her every day.” This got down into the early engrams. And then they tell little Lulu this, which swings it in and charges it up. But in spite of all this, little Lulu likes Grandma very much, which creates a sympathy with Grandma. A sympathy engram is very tough. A sympathy valence, then, is very tough.

So when Grandma dies, little Lulu becomes Grandma. It is a supercharged valence. It is very mechanical the way it happens; there is nothing very mystical about this. Over goes little Lulu into the valence and down comes the charge.

Now, to get little Lulu out of that valence while you are processing her, it is necessary to knock out this computation. But you can’t reach the computation which makes her Grandma because it is protected by the charge; you have to get the charge off the valence in order to get the com- putation engram. The two points are working against each other. So you start robbing the valence a little and get “I” moved over just a shade by breaking some locks and some minor secondary engrams, not necessarily on this valence. You toughen up “I” a bit, bring up the individuality of the person, and work away at the circuitry. Finally you hit this charge and get it off the valence, and the person gets over into his own valence.

There are two things. First and foremost, of course, are circuits. These are actually more important than the valences, merely because the circuits are a little harder to work with and there are more of them. Then come the valences.

Now, if you can’t get a circuit off the case, try to get the case in valence. Try to get a valence charge off and the case moved over into his own valence. Work at it that way. But recognize that you are working on a specific variety of charge.

A psychotic girl I ran into one time was in the valence of a collie dog. In order to get her out of this valence we had to get the charge off the dog’s death and several other incidents with the dog. Getting the death of the collie was very difficult because it was very occluded, the circuits were stirred up and there was a lot of control on the case. I fished in there until I discovered that the dog had been sick for some time and that the little girl had been quite afraid it was going to die. After we got up this chain, we were able to get at the charge of the death. In other words, we had unburdened this collie dog valence enough to get to the “I.”

This poor girl would run yapping and barking and it would just about cave in one’s eardrums. She was a real screamer, and this chain would get mixed up with birth where Mama screamed, evidently, for about forty-eight hours. The girl would get into birth and start screaming in Mama’s valence and then she would get into a little bit later life, into the collie dog’s valence, and she would bark and scream and howl. We finally found out that the dog had been run over and she was dramatizing its dying. So she alternated between dramatizing a woman giving birth and a dog dying, back and forth, and all in all it was a very noisy case.

The preclear’s being afraid for the valence is legitimate bait for the auditor. Let’s say it is Grandpa’s valence; being afraid for something that would happen to Grandpa or something that happened to him is material the auditor can use on this valence. He should not just go charging for the death if he can’t get it easily — if he tries to get the death. and gets this grief suppression reaction instead.

If your preclear is in Grandpa’s valence, this valence has to be unburdened, and it is unburdened by running Grandpa’s being afraid about various things or the preclear’s being afraid for Grandpa. You can actually regain enough attention units on this valence to finally get it up to a point where it will blow the death.

As a comment on the side, the first death ready to come off a case is that one which makes the person breathe hardest. You will see the chest agitated, and the first death ready to come off will usually cause the greatest agitation.

I wish somebody would engage in a little refined piece of research, whereby he would just take a case that is easily spotted as badly out of valence and that still has quite a bit of charged circuitry, and not paying any attention whatsoever to the circuitry, just shoot away at the fear, apathy, sorrow, grief and so forth on this valence. He would just shoot at the valence and see if he could finally blow the grief charge without touching the circuits. I think this could be done. I’ve never tried it.

An auditor usually works to regain some material off the valence till “I” is a little bit stronger, then he goes over into circuitry. He works with circuitry for a while and gets some locks out and maybe some charge off the circuitry — perhaps a secondary engram or something else that has happened to the person. Then he goes back to the valence and works for a while, and he goes back over to the circuits and he shoots down to the bottom of the bank and blows out the chain on the circuits. He goes over and he unburdens the valence and gets the person into his own valence, and then he goes back and runs some more out of the circuits. He plays one against the other, back and forth, back and forth.

So many points can be hit in a case that anybody who sits idle and looks at a preclear and says “Well, I just don’t know what to do next on it” is an auditor dramatizing an apathy. It is not based in fact. A skilled auditor should be able to take one of these cases and start knocking out enough locks and enough secondary engrams, running some of this and some of that, and opening up memory, to get “I” rehabilitated to the point where he can just run the devil out of the circuits and the valence commands and so forth.

Don’t expect one of these cases to start fast. Be fully prepared to spend twenty or thirty hours on Straightwire. If this case is very bad and has a very bad sense of reality you are actually saving time to go at it in a good systematical way. The test of progress is normally whether this person’s memory is opening up. The preclear is happy to have his memory open, it makes him a little bit satisfied. And as the memory opens, more data keeps coming to light.

Now, if you can keep opening and expanding and deepening a person’s recalls, you are on your way; you are gaining with this case. Let’s not be impatient. Sometimes the only thing one can do is to unburden the case with Straightwire. A case which is very, very thoroughly out of contact with reality, poorly in communication with the world and has a rather low affinity is not going to resolve ordinarily in two minutes. After all, it took some of these cases twenty or thirty years to get that way. To resolve this case to where the preclear is feeling fine and running very well in twenty or thirty hours, I would consider a pretty good line of advance.

I worked a gentleman recently whose case was not terribly complicated but who was stuck in a measles engram. He had been there so long that his eyesight had very badly deteriorated; in fact he was practically blind in the right eye. Carcinomas and so forth generally generate in measles engrams, and these engrams restimulate birth. Somebody in this engram came in and said, “Well, if you don’t keep all the blinds down, if you don’t keep this room awfully dark, and if you don’t keep him very quiet now, he’s going to go blind.” Naturally, there were holders and all sorts of things. People used to worry very terribly about children when they had measles because measles were pretty bad. This also applies to scarlet fever. When you get into the incident, of course, the person is blacked out.

This preclear was stuck on the track and there wasn’t anything one could do about that measles engram at that time except to unburden the case with Straightwire. I used a system which puts no great strain on the auditor’s imagination; he sort of sits there like the Tibetan who does all his praying by spinning the prayer wheel. I’ll go into that system a little later.

I got the case unburdened a little. It was interesting; this fellow was stuck in the measles engram and he would develop the fever and become very hot and so forth the second that you got him to touch any part of this. He had been there for years. There was no use in trying to budge him out of it or put him back into it; he was stuck there. But one could get him more thoroughly there by putting in more attention units than were there previously. The second I did this, his fever would turn on and he would feel the fever and the hot flush. I tried to get him up to the end just by running the somatic strip out of the engram — ”The somatic strip will go to the time you got well.” I did that a couple of times, but it didn’t work. So I sent the somatic strip earlier and the fever turned off, just like that. Trying to bring him up to present time would not turn it off. Sending him earlier turned it off. This gives an idea of what was happening there: This measles engram was perhaps five or ten engrams up the chain, so of course it was not going to reduce. It was on a chain of illnesses.

I was very interested to find out that this person was born with a very serious skin disorder. With measles, of course, he would have an irritated skin, and this was a restimulation of birth and undoubtedly went on down the bank. The basic on that measles holder was way down at the bottom of the case someplace, but I couldn’t get him down to the bottom of the case because his file clerk was not working. This whole chain had “Keep still, keep quiet and don’t say anything” on it and this was acting as a suppressor against the file clerk, so there were no flash answers.

I took this preclear down the track and then brought him back up by skipping measles, and got him into pleasure incidents in spite of the fact that he evidently had a suppressor on pleasure. Pleasure incidents could be borderlines. We could get near them by going to a point where somebody gave him a good, solid push and shoved him into the swimming pool, and he was sort of mad about it. The preclear could get this close to pleasure. Anyway, I got a lot of attention units up and got him to present time. The number of call-backs on the case, though, resulted in different age flashes at various intervals — first a “six” age flash, then I would bring him up to present time and get a present time age flash, and a couple of minutes later get “eleven” for an age flash, and so on. I finally brought him up to present time and ended off hurriedly. We could have kept this up all night.

It is legitimate, if a person was stuck anyway, to leave him in that state. That is the way you found him, after all. You try not to worsen the case any by leaving him this way, but there isn’t any reason why you should invest twenty-four hours of auditing trying to resolve this case right now; that might be what you would have to do to get the person up to present time, so it is legitimate to leave him there.

I don’t think that preclear had been that far out of measles for a long while.

So when you get a case that is stuck in an engram, don’t despair if a few hours of auditing don’t resolve it. Try these other things. Just bring him up into a few pleasure moments. If you can’t do that, get some recall; put in some Straightwire, and then try and run him very early and come back up the track by skipping the engram chain in which he is stuck. Some of his attention units will go over it and come on up to present time. In other words, you try to work him out of it, but the way you are working him out of it is by restoring attention units to “I,” not by addressing the engram in which he is stuck.

Being stuck on the track is just another symptom of a robbed “I.” It means that “I” doesn’t have the force, the pressure or the power to overcome the charges on the bank or to move ably on the track. “I” is not necessarily held in an engram just because the engram has a holder. It is true if this engram has a holder that in order to get the person out of this engram it is sometimes necessary to pull units out of other parts of the track and restore them to “I,” and then you will finally get him out of the engram.

Of course, deintensifying the holders and the call-backs and so forth in which the person is stuck is a standard method of getting a person unstuck. But actually one shouldn’t labor this too hard. If you can get these things readily and deintensify them rather easily, you get the person out of the engram. But in a rough deal, where the file clerk won’t give you any of these things, where you can’t get any visio on them, where the preclear is just blanked out and you can’t get moving and you can’t get any data off the incident, you start to employ at that moment these other techniques. These are the basic techniques of getting the case resolved anyway. You don’t employ much different techniques in getting a case moving on the track, actually, than you do in breaking up charge and restoring “I.” But by being too insistent and by dreaming up holders and call-backs for this fellow to repeat, you can repeat the preclear into four or five other engrams, and you can drop a few more attention units out of “I” which “I” can’t afford to lose. You are just working against yourself when you do this to a case.

I hope you have the demon circuit and the valence clear in your mind. There is no reason at all to confuse them. I have stressed them as separate entities because you have to know their anatomy in order to do something about them. Both of them require that “I” has to have attention units restored to it.

The theory of the attention unit is that “I” might be considered to be potentially composed, or was initially or genetically composed, let us say, of a thousand units, and that every key-in, lock and secondary engram on the case has robbed “I” of a few of these attention units, until “I” has less and less potential. The system of resolving a case can be looked at on the basis of restoring attention units to “I.” When you have restored to “I” all of the attention units which are on the bank, you can consider that your case is clear. This is another definition for clear.

You could actually go ahead and knock out all the restimulation off a case, knock out the key-ins and take the grief off a case, leaving a complete bank full of unrestimulated and no longer keyed-in engrams, and you would have a person who would pass for a clear. Unfortunately, the next week or the week after, an attention unit or two will be robbed from “I” by these engrams. They are the villains of the piece, but they have to have the rest of the mechanical setup in order to act. That is to say, they have to have a key-in, and they have to have locks and secondary engrams in order to be charged up.

Now, for instance, you go down the bank and run an engram that has never been hit before. Let’s say there is a pretty live somatic on this engram, and you run this engram through once and then bring the person up to present time. What you have effectively done is artificially key in this engram. It is not a terribly serious key-in, but you have keyed it in all right. This engram is now active where it was not before. You can lay this in its grave rather readily and easily by running a pleasure moment. Because those attention units were just then put into the engram, you can pull them back out again a little bit by pleasure. And with the person in present time now, you make him remember the processing. This thing will blow out as a lock.

You are in trouble with a case where you just run an engram here and an engram there and you don’t do anything to ease the case, you just run the engram once or twice and get the case all stirred up, as one auditor used to think one had to do. What was he doing? He was just pulling attention units off “I” and making the preclear very uncomfortable, and- accomplishing no processing whatsoever.

There are lots of engrams in restimulation all the time. An auditor does not to have to have a restimulation in an engram before he can erase it. The idea, which people have sort of picked up along the line and thought might exist, that if an engram were not in any way restimulated it could not be located is not true. The technique of sending somebody back down the track, asking for a flash of the first words and so forth, will pull what might be called a sleeper right straight through and you can run out this engram. In other words, whether the engram is restimulated or not the auditor can reach it. But if the engram is too thoroughly restimulated and pretty badly charged up, then it gets very difficult to locate or to pull up unless one unburdens some of its charge.

As you tackle a case, look at it in the mechanical terms of a valence or possibly a series of valences, and at circuits as something else. This “I” is being told things continually by circuits or being “guarded” by these circuits, and he is being shifted around into these various valences.

It could be said that a case is easy to resolve in some ratio to the fewness of circuits and valences; there is an actual curve that is followed.

When you are going into a case, pay very thorough, close attention to the person’s sense of reality, the ability to communicate and the ability to develop affinity.

The trouble with affinity is that engrams and the society force a person to display it very often. So a person might appear to be relatively friendly, yet it is just a sort of dramatization. He isn’t friendly at all. That is a covert hostility at work. The psychiatrist is very bedeviled by this covert hostility. Most neurotic people evidently hang below the anger tone band, so they go between fear, anxiety and covert hostility. They oscillate on those points on the reactive level.

Estimating the reality of the individual by his ability to actually accept what is in these engrams is not a very fair test, looking at it bluntly. This is something you could hang on an individual, that he has got a very poor sense of reality because he doesn’t believe so-and-so. This rather invites the auditor to enter a computation upon this case and say, “Well, you ran that engram; the reason why you don’t realize it is you just have a bad sense of reality, that’s all.” That would be very, very bad manners. If I ever heard of anybody doing that, I would have them up before the Board of Ethics and Standards fast! That would be laying a serious lock onto the case.

By estimating the sense of reality, the affinity and the ability to communicate, you immediately get an estimate of the valence and circuitry and charge difficulties of this case. If the three corners of the triangle are poor, you know immediately that there is lots of charge on the valences and the circuits. And you know that you had better pull some of the charge out of the valences and circuits, and get rid of some of the valences and circuits if you can, as your first order of business in this case.

Restore “I” to its proper position, which is the valence proposition — resolve the valence. You don’t even have to find the valence shifter to deintensify a valence. If you could deintensify the valence, “I” could come over to his proper position. As a valence charges up, a person gets more and more fixed in it — or more and more repelled out of it if it is the kind of valence that is set up as a bouncer: “Your mother was a good woman; you never could be like your mother. You can’t be like your mother; you’re entirely different than she is. She was a good woman, she was honest, she took care of the family. She did all of these things. She worked hard — and you can’t be like your mother.” People say this and then they wonder why this little girl is a juvenile delinquent. It is because she can’t be like the one model she had of a good person. The avowed purpose of the person who was saying all this to her, perhaps, was to make her a good woman. Of course, it had exactly the opposite effect.

That gives some kind of an idea of a charged valence. Now, that would be a bounced-out valence, but if you start to discharge Mama’s valence and get the charge off it, “I” can finally get into it a little bit now and then, enough to mimic with it. You will see an enormously changed pattern of conduct of this juvenile delinquent. (This is an actual case, incidentally.) This person will be able to be a good woman because the valence out of which she shifted has been discharged, and Mama can now be imitated.

Therefore charges on valences are very important, so you discharge them. Remember that each valence can be said to have its own time track. As a matter of fact, you can send the preclear back down his whole track as his father, if you want to, and discharge all of his father’s sorrows. You won’t get much charge on the thing, but every time you can spring one attention unit up you have gained. Measure the amount of good you have done the case or the number of attention units which you have gotten back to the case’s “I” by the amount of relief displayed. For instance, take a case which is basically pretty apathetic; he just brightens up a little bit when he remembers something. But every time he brightens up a little tiny bit or you get a new memory on the thing, you have restored a unit. He only has to brighten up just a trifle, just for an instant.

If you restore fifteen or twenty units all at a crack the fellow will chuckle a bit. The fifty-unit release and restoration would be “My God! What do you know! Ha! Ha! Ha!” — a real line charge.

Sometimes a whole case is just completely solid with locks, and if you can get it blowing locks from one end to the other, the person will laugh uproariously and unrestrainedly, sometimes for as long as forty-eight hours. Anything you give this person to read, he will read a little bit and all of a sudden hit a word which is contained in one of his locks (he is not blowing his engrams, he is just blowing these locks) and it will blow the whole lock, and he will see another word and blow that lock. He will just get going on this.

I’ve seen two or three auditors sit around and practically torture a preclear to death when he was running a line charge. The preclear would run out of line charge at the moment and then one of the auditors would say, “Now go over ‘I’m dying.”’

And the fellow would say, “‘I’m dying, I’m . . .’ Ha! Ha! Ha!” and he would be off again on “I’m dying.”

“Now let’s go over the phrase ‘Your mother is dead.”’ “Ha! Ha! Ha!”

“Now lets go over the phrase ‘I hate you.”’ “ ‘I hate you, I hate you.’ Ha! Ha! Ha!”

This blowing of line charge is a very interesting phenomenon. It can be very hard on people’s nerves. Sometimes a couple of people who don’t know much about Dianetics will see somebody going through these convulsions and they’ll think he’s nuts! If a psychiatrist saw somebody doing this, he would probably want to lock him up immediately, because it is absolutely uncontrolled; a person can’t stop laughing about these things. I saw one fellow whose stomach got so sore from all of this laughter and so forth that he had an awful hard time of it for about a week.

A case will do this if it is very, very heavily charged. You won’t get a lightly charged case to do it, but a very heavily charged one will reverse these polarities just madly. The amount of good this does to a case is very marked, but I have never had psychometry done on it. I would like to have some psychometry on somebody just before he started to blow this type of line charge and again after he has blown it. The only trouble is you can never quite tell what moment the person is going to start blowing it.