The entire secret of all overt-withhold mechanisms is valences.

I have known for a long while that a profile on our tests is a picture of a valence.

If the preclear were in no valence, but was himself completely, he would have a perfect test response and would be wholly clear. In this statement we have one of the background structure points of Scientology.

This was an assumption point for some time, a point of departure, like “conservation of energy” in physics is the primary assumption point of 19th Century physics – if we assume this point then we have the “truths”, axioms and other data in elementary physics. The point, assumed and never proven (and not even well phrased) is the start point in physics from which all deductions are made. It is an “understood”, a non-examined theory. Physics was demonstrable truth, but only in a limited and finite sense. The moment nuclear physics, my dear companion that haunted my college days, came into action, the assumption point began to crumble and is not now considered to be truth. Hence while elementary physics works in a finite limited sense, it is not a considered true science any longer – it is only elementary science.

Freud, for instance, had as his start point (or assumption point), the Libido Theory of 1894 in which he based all on sex.

It is rare that a science ever embraces its own assumption point and resolves it. Freud was stuck with his Libido Theory, just as Newton’s successors were stuck with “Conservation of Energy”. So long as elementary physicists were concerned only with energy which “could not be destroyed or created” they tread-milled themselves into a dead-end mirrored in such things as inadequate costly engines, difficult construction and a complete lock out from space and other planets.

The great Einstein, not a physicist but a mathematician, established a new science which deserved the name of the physical science “physics”, a name already purloined by the natural philosophy of the 19th Century. Old time physics was the science of the age of fire and ended with the age of fire. It died to whimpering embers under the down blast of atomic fission. We are no longer scientifically nor politically in the age of fire. We are in the age of freed energy. We do not yet have an atomic physical science. We have only a number of guestimates like the bronze worker of early Greece who knew nothing of the facts of fire metallurgy. The fire age, begun by Prometheus, whoever he really was, is ending on Earth. The raw energy age has begun with all the teething troubles of any new era. Called the “Atomic Age” just now, it started with hints of others before Einstein but was actually born when Einstein wrote his Theory of Relativity. This, a crude guestimate, was yet a great departure point in the history of this planet. It has unlocked space to Man, promised him new engines, widened his scope. Unhappily it has also unlocked vast opportunities for political bungling – but I would rather say that it exposed political diplomacy as a bungling subject which must now urgently improve. Nations can no longer afford political ineptness.

Now the assumption point of physics, the science of the fire age, became disproved and the science is in question and the fire age is in fact over. The holes in physics have begun to glare. Some day a new science will be organized from the assumption point of Einstein’s work (no matter if he’s debunked, forgotten or becomes a legend like Prometheus, the professors of tomorrow can teach as a myth [Einstein stole the secret of eternal fission from a Heaven named Princeton where the goals.]) And ages hence somebody will prove or expose the basic assumption and the fission age will resurge or die, depending on whether or not the assumption is found to be true or false.

In Freud’s case in a lesser sense, a short and ineffective but highly interesting age of psychotherapy began with the Libido Theory in 1894 and began to disintegrate through lack of progress and development about 1920 although the subject itself became an intellectual football in the late 20s, an artist’s cross in the early 30s and a teenager’s subject in the late 50s. His contemporaries added nothing effective to Freud’s work and the subject, like psychology, which originated in 1879 and assumed men were animals, failed in all fields but wide popularity.

Back of all work on mental states, however, lie various assumption points, most of them hidden or undelineated, from which the remainder of the subject evolves and grows. If the cornerstone is proven only relatively factual, a long enduring career is guaranteed to the subject. Freud used as his assumption point more than his Libido Theory that all impulses and behaviors are sex-motivated. He assumed that if one were sex-motivated, then if one unblocked this drive by removing an early traumatic sex experience that was impeding the drive, the patient would recover from neurosis. All manner of interesting complications proceed from this: art, being considered a sublimation or aberration of the sex drive, had to be considered wholly neurotic: success, being most desirable as sexual success, was a product of a blessed neurosis if achieved in any other field. As treatment it was common for a Freudian practitioner to cut through the Gordian knot by ordering a patient to go out and have sex with everyone, prove his or her prowess and thus become well and happy. While this secured the popularity of the subject, it did little to reduce asylum statistics as these were on the increase throughout the Freudian age and were highest at its end, and indeed were higher in Freudian dominated areas than in others where Freudian treatment was not used. (Not my propaganda, just a recorded fact.)

The psychiatrist, following a Russian science, has a more basic and brutal assumption point which is that a shock cures aberration. The idea goes back a very long way, making psychiatry a long, if sporadic, age. Psychiatry ebbs and rises in use since it is a dramatization rather than a science. It springs from the same impulse that assumes punishment cures wrong-doing. The limited workability of this is apparent around us on every hand. We could do nothing socially about crime so we inhibited crime by striking at criminals. This gave us suppressed criminality and more criminals but it must be said that lacking any solution that worked well, then any solution that even seemed to work occasionally was considered better than nothing.

Perhaps at some early date in whole history this worked better, but all expedient cures tend to become a new illness. Alcohol, in any alcoholic, once cured something but now produces with amazing similarity the malady it once cured. These are stop-gap cures that do this, not cures in any absolute sense.

As the earliest punishment was the production of a shock in the offender whole track history continues to repeat the treatment for misbehavior as a dramatized action, not an intellectual undertaking. If a person misbehaves, he should be punished. Thus if a person misbehaves insanely he must be punished. Psychiatry is not, then, a science, but a legalized, at present, dramatization. And this is the very dramatization that makes this a cruel universe when it is. Punishment is unworkable as all the statistics show. Punish the criminal and he becomes, too often, a confirmed and hardened criminal.

All this, however, is based on a yet earlier lie. The last two years of my researches have been devoted to establishing or not, as the case may be, whether anything could actually be done to a person, or whether it was not the person himself who did it. I “knew” the latter was theoretically true but I had not found means to demonstrate it – and indeed was quite prepared to discover that something could be done to a person without his being prior cause. This work will be found under all 1958-59 data released all overts and withholds.

The earlier assumption to punishment is that something can be done to another being.

By evidences to date, odd as it may seem, it appears, by all processing tests, that one becomes aberrated only by means of his own, not another’s actions. I do not say that nothing can be done to a person or a being by another person or being. Obviously communication exists. I am only saying that all aberrative effects of action are created by the person who has them. Indeed none could be processed successfully through a burn or engram unless he himself were holding the aberration there – for the fire, location and other people are not consulted and are not even there in fact at the time of processing. A preclear being audited on a past incident can recover from its ill effects. Therefore it seems conclusive that he himself must be causing the ill effects in present time or he could not eradicate them since the “sources are not present”. Thus they must not have been the sources of his “ill effects”. The preclear must have been.

Inspecting the assumption points of Dianetics and Scientology one finds now that what was originally assumed is fact. Thus we are to be here as a science for a very long time.

As no science before ever proved its assumption point that I know about, we are suddenly unique in that our results tend to verify more than our basic truths. The further we go forward, in other words, the more basic are the assumption points. Unlike, then, physics or psychoanalysis or other sciences, we have examined and improved our assumption points.

We assumed in Dianetics that if we removed engrams, life would resurge and become good. This assumed that a being was all right until injured and that eradicating the injury would find him all right again. This is not the same as Freud for Freud never assumed goodness or rightness in Man, but on the contrary seemed to warn that we had better not go too far, art and all that depending on the madness of us all. As God seems to be blamed for most of the art work in this universe this seems a most impudent evaluation of God’s sanity on Freud’s part, although I do not think he ever displayed an actual professional sign saying “S. Freud, Psychotherapist by Appointment to God”.

The Dianetic assumption that Man is basically good and is damaged by punishment holds valid in practical practice and in some tens of thousands of cases (and we’re the only ones in history that validated our findings by strict long, long precise testing on cases); we find that the more we process successfully, the kinder and more ethical our people become. That disposes of the vile nature of Man by staggering poundage of evidence. The assumption that “all art is derived from aberration” is discounted by the numbers of singers and artists who sang better and painted better after they were made saner by us.

The basic psychiatric assumption that enough punishment will restore sanity is disproven, not only by psychiatric statistics but by actual observation and removal of the effects of “punishment” by processing.

That a being, without aberration, would be good, ethical, artistic and powerful, is still a basic assumption in Scientology. It has just been demonstrated as factual for our practice. This is news. Our assumption point has just become a basic truth. It is not just an assumption. Therefore we will now find ourselves on a new plane of progress, perhaps with new teething troubles, certainly with even further goals.

The truth was demonstrated in this wise:

I knew valences, those mocked up other-beingnesses a person thinks he is, were the source of test profile patterns.

When we rid the pc of an undesirable valence his profile rose on the graph and he felt and acted better. When we did not alter the valence in tested cases the profile remained much the same. If the preclear were driven into undesirable valences by experiment, his profile worsened apparently, although this is more difficult to verify, since the tone of the existing valence was undoubtedly dropped as well.

Now from this I have found the mechanism by which a being gives himself pain that is actually self-inflicted but is apparently other-inflicted. And this is a vast stride for it resolves O/Ws and we can consider it a broadly completed cycle of research ending two years with a victory for our assumption point.

By being a valence, not himself, a person confuses the source of pain. Inflicting it himself upon the valence he is in, and by experiencing the pain from the valence, a being can counterfeit the effect of being an effect of punishment. By being Valence A, he can conceive the environment is guilty of striking Valence A, but as this is in fact an overt by himself against Valence A (if only by failing to protect it) he feels the pain of Valence A. As he thinks of himself as Valence A, he can then feel his own pain.

The conclusion is that to feel pain and for pain to persist one must be in a valence.

The remedy for pain, illness, aberration, insanity and the lot, then, is to free the preclear of valences. Apparently, freed of all valences of an unconscious level, the preclear would yet be able to experience, but would not be involved with pain, etc, except by postulate.

The way to free him of all valences or unconscious counterfeit beingness is not the purpose of this paper.

Here I only wish to examine with you the aspects of assumption points of subjects and sciences (each of which has one, usually unknown to the originator) and to pass along the interesting intelligence that our former assumption point of “remove the aberration and you have a worthwhile person” has become demonstrable in practice and can be considered truth.

This means a new level has opened to the future with new certainty.

An overt recoils upon one because one is already in a valence similar to that of the being against whom the overt is leveled.

The mechanism is exposed. And as it is exposed, we find it is not needed since a being without valences is basically good. Only a being with valences has his overts recoil upon him. Only a being with valences commits overts harmful to others as he is behaving as he supposes the “evil” valence would behave but as no unvalenced being does.