I want to talk to you, give you a brief summary that we could call “Aberrative Incidents.” Aberrative incidents: What are they? What incidents in the lifetime of a human being can be considered to be aberrative? How do they look? How do they run? And how can you recognize when an individual isn’t running them?

Now, to any of you that haven’t heard too much of what an individual’s genetic evolutionary chain — something of the sort — might be, it might come to you as a surprise that there are facsimiles on record — that is, there are memories on record — which formerly in psychotherapy were considered to be “instincts.” Jung, Adler, many other people, have been carefully cataloguing these things in terms of human behavior, but they had no means of looking for them as incidents because they did not have the tools to handle memory.

Having the tools to handle memory and knowing that memory consists of thought, emotion and effort, that it includes all perceptics, that a person can be returned to it and run through it while fully awake and aware of what is going on around him, it became possible to reach into the strata which was formerly called the unconscious or subconscious mind and pick up from that strata the aberrative incidents which composed the basic causes of aberrated behavior.

Now, it has been a very interesting search, but I want you to understand clearly that this search is not newly adventured upon; it has been in progress for a very long time. Nobody ever had tools to get along with this search before. It is discovered rather clearly and demonstrably with a psychogalvanometer that there are a certain number of aberrative incidents — it is a finite number — which individuals would not ordinarily suspect were on file. And that which an individual does not suspect of course can exert its maximum force on an individual. It can remain hidden, out of sight, unanalyzed and un-understood to a point where it can wreck an individual’s life with great ease.

What are these incidents? Charles Darwin and others tried very hard to plot out the theory of evolution. The blueprint of man, they knew, was on file, because from the moment of conception and through the progress of the womb to birth, man progressed through practically every form that he had had on the evolutionary track — which is very interesting — which demonstrated that the blueprint of man’s growth, development and structure was on file.

We have played the rather incredible trick in this science of finding the file-card system. And today in running preclears we don’t have to worry too much about why little Agnes drowned her grandmother’s kittens (which was a major aberrative incident in Freud’s day); we are into very solid, large, charged incidents which are relatively patterned in their running.

The incidents which are aberrative to man are evidently those incidents which have found him at a loss, a complete loss in solving his environment. Yet somehow, by dogged determination and endurance, he came through these periods and arrived, a man. These incidents were not very many.

The first incident, which is a rough one, is before time begins. I am just moving from what is evidently one incredible into another incredible. And if I couldn’t show you this on a machine and show you well preclears after these have been run, I wouldn’t adventure to tell you about them at all. But they talk quite a bit in religions and so on about man having come into this universe. Well, they tell you interesting stories about it, but practically every religion tells you that man came into this universe. And it may be of interest to you that the religion from which Christianity was taken — or, that is to say, that Christianity owes the most to — was a very oldreligion, almost thirty-five hundred years old, which is in our hands today in written form (but, by the way, was not written for a long, long time). And its first written form — was written down thirty-five hundred years ago — is known as the Vedic hymns, the Medic hymns. Thirty-five hundred years ago in India these were first written down; they had been going for a long time before that. And they tell you about evolution, very specifically; I mean, this isn’t any Nostradamus monkey business. This tells you about evolution and it tells you a lot of other interesting details, and it tells you about man coming into this universe, and it tells you about man going out into the “great all beyond” and so on at the end of a long span of time.

Christianity in its writings has skirted the indecisive points on this by leaving it open to question, so that you can read, today, the New Testament in its various forms (and, by the way, particularly its newest translations) and you won’t find it controverting this. You look for arguments against these facts happening: they don’t exist and statements that it doesn’t exist aren’t there. It is left in a nebulous, translate-it-as-you-please state. That is interesting.

For instance, there is nothing in there that tells you that man is injected into life on this earth at the beginning of one life and dies and leaves at the end of that life — but quite on the contrary, tells you that Jesus was the first man ever to take off from Earth, specifically says so. And as a matter of fact, if you know what is lying in Dianetics now, you go back and look at the Bible and you will really get popeyed about it. How did they know so much? Well, of course, they didn’t, but they sure look wise! But that is very interesting, that it specifically states that he was the first man to leave — to go!

And earlier religions in the Christian faith were telling you continually that there will be a Day of Judgment someday, and you will all go to heaven on that Day of Judgment — all of you, all at once. And it does not tell you anyplace that you go to heaven exactly at the moment you die. But it says you kick around for a long time. And it doesn’t even tell you that, but it is sort of understood that, well, you sort of lie buried for a long time, and one day Gabriel blows that trumpet and the tombstones open, or something of the sort, and everybody walks forth. Except it doesn’t say that in the Bible. That is very interesting, that they have avoided such statements. The Bible can be interpreted in lots of fashions.

And we look at this: all of a sudden man was started out at the beginning on an evolutionary track, and some day he will get off of it. And the New Testament doesn’t give you a single argument — not a single argument. As a matter of fact, a lot of things make sense in it all of a sudden.

Yes, this was quite a trick. Jesus was the first man to get off Earth. He didn’t wait for the Day of Judgment. (I was reading the Bible the other night; I’m more up-to-date on it than you are!)

Now, evidently, according to incidents discovered on cases and what can be run off of a case and what makes a case rise in tone, the moment when you came to this universe or this earth is on record as Facsimile One. It is on record as Facsimile One — and that is Facsimile One. And it consists of you being ejected, more or less, out of where you were and having to come down here and go through an evolutionary chain.

The third echelon tells you why, and I am not talking to you about the third echelon. The closest we go into the third echelon is right over that borderline into Before Time as Facsimile One. And from there on and from here on out you needn’t question me, because I am not going to tell you any more; that is as far as we are going to button this up.

Here is point one. It is a very strange thing that any of you at this moment thinking “Goodness, that couldn’t possibly be,” I could take ahold of you and put you on a machine, an electronic device, and show you that this incident can be sensed, measured and experienced. And furthermore, if I persisted in my questioning on this, you would probably get a fear charge on it that would be very interesting. You can take a case, any point on the tone scale, and get this reaction.

But Facsimile One is mostly without perception, so that it is left to the preclear to run any perceptions in on it he wants to. As a result, he will get some of the wildest ones, as perceptions, because there is no perception there. It is just counter-thought. And all it does is carry you down the tone scale to a human being. And the complete map of it is found in the Chart of Attitudes. The complete map of what happens at Before Track is in the Chart of Attitudes in the Hand book for Preclears, and it wasn’t intended to be there at all. And that book all of a sudden becomes the most important publication we have, because if you want to run Before Track, what you do is run the reduction of each column, step by step, on Before Time.

A fellow believes he was cause just before he was sent here, and so you run the change from cause to effect. And he believed that he was; he had a high state of “I am.” And you just run him to the moment when he thought he was not. He was able to think — in other words, know and think. He was able to know, and you just run him down the line until he doesn’t know, on Before Track. Because what it is, is just a shut-down on all of those twelve columns.

There is one extra column that should be there, and that is “freedom” to “restraint.” And that is the task of having to take over and use and handle a body — and does an individual hate that!

This at the moment, of course, may strike you as pure mysticism or something of the sort; fortunately it is not. Fortunately — because the mystic has a tendency to fly out into the wild blue yonder and not land again anyplace. Well, this one lets a fellow get his feet on earth because it is his issue in.

And there are two things in that that you should watch for very carefully: You are not supposed to tell — there is a “won’t tell” and “won’t know” there, the like of which I have never seen, because the individual himself makes these postulates — the down postulates. The individual makes these postulates himself.

Now you are on your own. If you don’t want to run this, you don’t have to. And what happens when you run it, I am not responsible for. But that is BT — Facsimile One.

It is actually on record. But why wouldn’t it be on record? If a man is acting because of something or if something influences him, it is certain that that something has to be on record someplace. The thing of it is, we just found out where it was on record, that’s all! So we can run this incident, Before Track.

It gives a bump in tone. The first time I have seen a pc go off the top of the machine, just right on off the top of the machine, fast. The tone rise in it is just dial after dial after dial after dial of rise. I never saw anything like this.

Running this one incident thoroughly, bringing it in with every column, bringing it on full, might introduce capabilities into you, you do not even now vaguely suspect you have.

There is a lot to that incident; there is a lot you forgot. And you know these fellows that go around all the time saying “Gosh, if I only had this knowledge which is the powerful knowledge of something or other, and it’s just sort of beyond my fingertips; I can’t quite touch it, but I know there’s some knowledge there”? Well, that is the knowledge you are tapping. Now, if you run that out thoroughly, theoretically you ought to be able to tap that knowledge.

Of course, the preclear goes poof and disappears off the couch, but that is all right!

Now, as mad as this sounds, believe me, I was never more serious. And nothing is more easily demonstrated than that incident. You know these fellows with anxiety stomachs? As auditors, have you ever tried to cure up somebody’s anxiety stomach? He gets a quivery stomach whenever anything goes wrong, and he gets ulcers and so forth. Well, Before Track is underneath that quivery stomach.

Now, don’t run anybody into this one lightly without running them on through with it, because your computing psychotic is sitting with that one in full restimulation and the guy who won’t tell is sitting with that one in full restimulation. That is an interesting incident.

The next incident up the track from that, that has magnitude, volume — is really the first mitosis — what we are calling the Helper. This is when the split occurs. The individual, you see, as a cell, procreated by splitting exactly in half, and the problems of interpersonal relationship actually have their root there; because every time he splits, he is he although he is split, but he is somebody else, and he gets this into tremendous confusion. And if you run out a few of these times when something went wrong with these mitosis splits, you are going to find, throughout the rest of the track, overt acts and so forth fly off of this. There is interesting material there on that Helper.

You might find a minor one just ahead of that — two minor ones actually. There is when the photon converter is hit by a cosmic ray. (I hear somebody was running a nova exploding today; it was probably a cosmic ray-photon converter.) The other one is “waiting for dawn” — these people who won’t go to bed (such as me!). The photon converter practically died through the night, because it lived on sunlight and chemicals. So it waited for dawn, and then sometimes dawn came and it was a cloudy day so it died anyway. Rough deal.

Now, that is not, however, a major incident. The Helper is one. We have, now, Before Track and the Helper.

You can distinguish the Helper because it has full thought, emotion and effort on it, but the emotion is not dammed up by tears, because the tear block comes later on the track than the Helper. It comes on with somatics of people splitting down the middle. It is quite serious and severe in its somatics. After the split, sometimes something goes wrong and one of the sides dies or becomes incapacitated and the other side feels a great deal of regret on having split. Very interesting incident — easy to find, fairly easy to run.

Your next incident up the track that has any magnitude on, is the half a million years that man sat out of the surf and on the beach — as did the Glob in the recent issue of Life. Here man was breathing air, he was poorly protected, he was beset by all sorts of weird things. He got his food out of the waves; he was not mobile enough to get back in a hurry. And we call this the Boohoo (slang term) because it is the tears shut-off and it was reached by trying to figure out what a person was doing spilling salt water and feeling better. That was silly. You see, it is very silly that an individual would spill some salt water and then gain markedly in tone. Everyone knows if you get a release of affect, or if you can get a preclear to cry, he will feel better, and that incidents that have caused him to dam up tears are quite aberrative to him. So how do you get every preclear to cry?

Well, the tears shut-off, and the reason he cries and feels better, is in this Boohoo. His eyes are actually inside the shell. He opens up the shell to get a wave to take on some water, and then he has to pump it out in an awful hurry so he can get a breath of air, and then he gets hit by another wave and he gets some food out of it, and then he pumps it out in a hurry and he gets some more. He keeps this up, and it must have been awfully bad doing this for a half a million years.

But sometimes he had some remarkable incidents happen to him. And it is the remarkable incidents in the Boohoo area that you are looking for. On some beaches in some parts of the world, birds had actually gone on the evolutionary track ahead of man. So that you had the Boohoo being picked up by a bird and dropped. And of course the shell would break and the bird could eat. And you will find preclears getting into the valence of the counter effort — the bird — and trying to run themselves as birds.

Now, the Boohoo never had any contest with the pterodactyl and it didn’t have a lot of other things, but it sure could worry a lot. Take the bird: Now, what does this Boohoo do? The only weapon he has got is to be able to close his shell — bang. So, a bird reaches in with a claw to hook him out and so he closes the shell, naturally, and this clamps down on the bird’s foot. Well, that solves the problem for about two minutes, and then the bird gets frantic and flies. And he gets way up, in a terrific altitude, and by this time the Boohoo says “We’re going too high” and lets go — crash! And that is the end of him.

Other things happen there to the Boohoo. For instance, lightning storms will short-circuit a beach. There were lots of lightning storms in those days; man has passed through four volcanic periods while on dry land, so there are lightning storms and they can short-circuit a Boohoo. It is electric shock! Lightning strikes the beach someplace, the Boohoo gets short-circuited.

And, of course, most psychiatrists have been on beaches like that getting short-circuited! I am sure that’s why they do this. Because it sure doesn’t do the Boohoo any good. I don’t know why they think it would do a human being any good, but that is their business.

Now, another point that happens there: there can be volcanic interruptions of the calmness, and I suppose occasionally there could be a tidal wave. In short, the adventures of the Boohoo — you will find maybe two or three of them on one case, but this is an area and you consider it more or less just one incident. It is, evidently, the sonic and visio shut-off to a large degree. It is a big shut-off because of the shut shell.

The next one up the track is the trouble we had with snakes. Now, in addition to the record which we already have about the Garden of Eden, man did have a lot of trouble with snakes. And you will find that man on the evolutionary track gets snarled up rather easily with snakes - either as a tarsus, a sloth, a monkey, something like that.

Any one of these may be the motivator area. There is somewhere in that area the basic motivator for violence. Later than the Boohoo there is a basic motivator, and right after the motivator will be the basic on overt acts, and that is five incidents. So you have got an overt act - the individual trying to kill somebody with his teeth or his claws or his hands or something of the sort — and that is the last on the chain. Earlier than that is where he was being killed in some fashion or other with tooth or claw, and which he dramatizes to kill somebody else and then regrets; earlier than that, the Boohoo; earlier than that, the Helper; earlier than that, Before Time.

Now, I am not saying that this is all the incidents you can find on a case. You may find a certain percentage of cases have off-track incidents. But don’t run man as a bird; man was never a bird. Don’t run man as a snake; man was never a snake. What the preclear is doing in that case is running the counter-effort; he is running the thing that hurt him. And he is being very careful to stay over as a snake and kill the monkey, not be the monkey and get killed, because, you see, that is non survival.

So, how do you find out if these things are haywire? It is very simple to find out: there is no charge on a psychogalvanometer on such an incident. And if there is a charge, the operator of that psychogalvanometer, the auditor, had better ask some specific questions about this thing, and he will get the answers. For instance, “Are you a bird?” Sure, he can say yes and get a charge, because what he is getting charge on is “bird.”

“Did a bird get you?” would be the next question, and then your psychogalvanometer should take a terrific dive. It was maybe only moving ten degrees down before, and now maybe it moves fifty degrees down. You get the idea? So these things should be scouted, if in question. The things that can go wrong with these incidents of course - are the things that can go wrong with any case. A very low-toned case or a case which is sitting on a very heavy emotional charge will dub rather than run the incident.

You shouldn’t lightly accuse people of hallucinating, however, especially when there is a machine handy. But you should be able to tell, because an individual runs hallucination in peculiar ways.

You see, delusion runs under certain laws, just like engrams run under certain laws. An engram repeats its effort cycle over and over and over and develops more and more data, whereas delusion wildly develops more data and won’t repeat the old data worth anything at all. It gets lots of variations; he gets lots of “changes” on it that aren’t there. And he will run the same kind of an incident many times; he will just keep imagining it. Any one of these dub-ins is actually running over the top of a real incident. And so you run the case, actually, until it runs down to what is really a real incident, or you put them on a machine and check for the real incident.

Now, a preclear was just telling me that merely by twitching his toes he could get the machine to operate. Sure. No trick about that. But boy, is the auditor stupid that is letting him do it. The trick is, you see, that he can restimulate fear on his case by wiggling his toes, because there is a fear charge in an incident where his toes wiggle. So instead of answering the questions mentally, all he has to do is wiggle his toes and he will get a charge.

An auditor should be able to differentiate this with great ease — nothing to this. This machine is not behaving in an orderly fashion; it is not being constant or consistent; it is getting charge on everything. So there is something awfully wrong. A machine operates in a certain fashion: just a little bit of charge sometimes and then a little bit more charge as you get closer into it. It is consistent in its operation; it tells you a full story. And when the machine doesn’t tell you a story, you haven’t got the incident. And that is the long and short of it.

Don’t ever walk away from a psychogalvanometer which has only dropped a degree or two and think you have the answer to this case. Of course, you may operate on the idea that you are so clever that you couldn’t possibly have failed to think up the right computation for this machine. But the horrible part of it is, the machine didn’t act — you didn’t think of the right computation.

I have worked a preclear for some little time on one of those psychogalvanometers, worked him hard and been very imaginative about the situation and never got anyplace — particularly trying to locate a specific kind of overt act. And finally in desperation — the machine was ducking two little divisions — I would say, “Well, that must be it.” And then, being fresher another time, I would pick up the same preclear and ask another line of questions and all of a sudden start getting terrific dives on the thing. I was just not asking the right questions. And all of a sudden, all the strange reactions, the wild reactions, I was getting before that couldn’t be answered up would fall into place and become logical. That machine is awfully logical — far more logical than an auditor. That is why we use the machine!

Now, in running these incidents, let me give you a brief rundown on how these incidents run - very simple. The Before Track incident runs as you being fetched up and having a lot of counter-thought thrown at you, being reduced down the line, being very puzzled as to why you are there, being quite resentful, not wanting to leave and so on. You get all sorts of strange things there, but mostly you get “I won’t tell. You can do anything you want to me but I won’t tell.” That is definitely there.

The tribunal is a fascinating setup. Almost any tribunal we have had here on Earth is patterned exactly after it. It doesn’t matter whether it is a savage-tribe tribunal or a court of the French Revolution or the Wichita County Courthouse brand of law down here, or anything of the sort: it is more or less all the same kind of a tribunal. And man really picked up his law practice from there. Fascinating, the constancy of this particular incident.

I won’t tell you the whole story, what goes behind it, because I am not going to discuss it anymore. If you want to find it — the whole story behind it — well, more power to you.

There are two of you standing there, by the way, right and left, and there is some more scouting you can do on that. There are some variations.

The Helper just runs off on the fellow swimming along and he is one, and then all of a sudden he starts dividing and he becomes two. And the ones you will find that have charge on them are where he got hung up and couldn’t quite separate; or where he was hung up, couldn’t quite separate and started going into surf or something of the sort and then he couldn’t get apart; or where he was being dragged down by the other one and finally had to do something terribly desperate to end it all, as far as the other side was concerned on the split. But it is run with thought, emotion, effort — very heavy somatics — and is the basis on all sorts of interpersonal systems, particularly marital. The sexual chain is landing on top of the Helper.

There is very very deep anaten in both Before Track and the Helper. You can expect a preclear to boil off for hours — that is to say, go into a semi-unconscious state. Then he will come up and he will think he has just blinked out for a half a second or something: he was lying there for three hours, just boiling away. He will come up; he is still in the incident, still running it. There is anaten on Before Track and that Helper. I have never seen quantities of anaten like you will find there.

Now, on the Boohoo, the way you get a person into the Boohoo is tell him to cry. And he says, “I can’t cry; I never have cried.”

And you say, “Well, get your shoulders to shaking and your tongue to going and your voice box to going and start shivering around, and . . .”

“Well, I’m not . . . I just . . . I don’t feel like crying when I do this.”

You say, “Go on and go through the motions. Not the emotion — let’s just go through all the motions of crying: boohoo-hoo-hoo-hoo; throw-yourself down on the bed and put your head down on your arm and let your shoulders shake, and sob and gasp and . . .” Make him do it.

Charges that he should have been running a long time ago will start parading by while he is doing this, if you have really gotten him to do it. Well, keep it up with him and he will land in the middle of the Boohoo. All of a sudden, there he is with his eyes inside of his shell, looking out at the beach or pumping out salt water or doing something of the sort. And if you don’t find the real incident that you are looking for there in the Boohoo, right now, scan him through all the Boohoos and he will latch up in it. He will stick in the incident. Then you run it through and until you get full reality on the thing and you wear it out, and strange things will happen to him.

By the way, eye somatics are in there; various mouth disorders are in there. There are all sorts of things in that Boohoo. And above all else, there is occlusion in there. There is also occlusion Before Track; there is a tendency to shut down Before Track because you are not supposed to know.

Okay. Now, in running all of these incidents, expect boil-off. But expect, if you are really in an incident, for large numbers of present-life and earlier life locks to start coming off. Lots of them will come off — hundreds. If you are really running an incident that is hot, it will just keep pouring out locks, locks, locks, locks.

Now, in some cases you will find, if you ask them to do these things, nothing quite happens. You put them on a machine: you don’t get large charges on the first three of them. If you just can’t make anything happen on these first three incidents, what you have got is an individual stuck in an overt act. So you just go through the technique of having him kill something or hurt somebody — fight somebody or choke somebody or whatever he looks like he might have done. You know, a fellow looks like he has done something; if you put him on a machine, you just start fishing for an overt act, and then you fish for the overt act until you get it — big dips on it. You run that overt act and the rest of the track will show up. But the rest of the track sometimes won’t show up until you run an overt act off a case; something for you to know.

Now, as far as low-reality cases are concerned, they are low reality because they are stuck in an incident, and the incident has low reality on it because the individual is way down tone scale in the incident. There is nothing more simple or mechanical than reality. If a person’s reality is low on an incident, it is because he wants it to be low on this incident because it is too much for him to face.

You can actually do this trick: you can show a person how reality decreases. Do you know that you, as individuals, can look back at a period in your life when you felt the whole environment just shut down in brightness and everything else for you? It was when somebody left you or when you were tremendously invalidated in some way or other — and you can just feel yourself go down the tone scale. The whole environment sort of collapses; it sort of contracts. As a person goes up the tone scale, he feels his environment expanding; as he goes down the tone scale, he feels it contracting.

And there is an interesting technique in this: if you make an individual feel the environment contracting on him and then expanding on him, and then contracting on him and expanding on him, and contracting and expanding again, you will land him in at least one of the central grief charges of the case. You will eventually land him there, and you will pull off, as a lot of locks in the process of doing this, times when he has been disappointed and upset. Because an individual who is suddenly given bad news has the sensation occur of the brightness going out of the day, the brightness going out of the colors in the room, the nice tones going out of music. All of these things happen to him sad d envy, and everything lowers on him. The intensity lowers — even the feeling of pain. And this is one of the reasons he wants it to go down — so he won’t feel the pain of it. So he lowers everything; he lowers the whole environment’s brilliance.

What is wrong with a person’s eyes when he is wearing glasses is, first, the Boohoo, and, second, a number of incidents where the world closed in on him, where he didn’t want to look at it anymore, where the brightness went out of the world. A color-blind person has had this happen to an extreme. And a blind person has had it happen to an extremity which you as an auditor will have to be very careful in handling, because your blind people are lost, and your blind people’s level of reality is terribly low. And you have a hard time with a blind person.

You can charge into this case, maybe, and you think you can produce these remarkable results. Oh, no. You have got to build him back up the line; you have got to find him, for him, first. You have to use the handbook or Self Analysis on him, work him carefully, carefully, build his tone, build his tone, give him confidence, give him confidence. And all of a sudden the incident you will find for his blindness will be about as explosive as an A-bomb. You can’t tackle that incident directly; blind people are too closed down on reality.

But this sensation of one’s reality shutting off is actually the sensation of going down the tone scale.

Now, as you work individuals, you gradually learn what to expect and what not to expect from preclears. And as you associate with human beings, if you know the tone scale we have in Dianetics, you eventually understand what to expect and what not to expect from people on this tone scale. You should be able to get good enough on a tone scale so that you would be able to predict the behavior of anybody around you with ease. Because that is an easy one — that is a very easy one. There is a very rough, short tone scale in Self Analysis. In Science of Survival there is a complete extrapolation of the tone scale. In the Chart of Attitudes in the Hand book for Preclears you have evaluation of people, and you will see there many people that you know. But going up and down the tone scale is going up and down brightness, love of life, love of being, and so on. You can feel these things, and you can see these things happen in a preclear. And we have got techniques now that make a person go up and down this tone scale so fast that you can actually sort of watch him glow.

If you have run one of these major incidents all the way out, by the way, and have not seen a marked change for the better in a preclear’s face, that incident isn’t all the way out.

Remarkable, the changes that take place in people’s faces — the physiognomy. The physiological changes of the body are just as remarkable. So that you know when you are getting results as an auditor. There is no question about that: this person is either changing for the better or isn’t changing for the better. If they aren’t changing for the better, you are just not working the case.

There is a new checksheet out for what you ran out of an incident (they have them at the college; I’m sure they would be very happy to hand them out if you want them) — showing what you run out of an incident. Interesting checksheet.

Well, this is roughly what the track consists of as far as incident is concerned. In the old days we had to sort of let anything happen; we had no real way of checking reality. But now we have two ways of checking it. If, after you have run the incident, you don’t get a marked change in your preclear, what do you do with this incident? It wasn’t the right incident, for one thing; there was something wrong there. And the other one is, if it isn’t one of these incidents - if it is something wild and strange and peculiar — why you might as well either get him to a machine or try something else. Don’t let preclears run as pterodactyls and dinosaurs and so forth; they just aren’t on the evolutionary track, that’s all. What they are doing is running out of valence, if they are running anything.

Now, there is one caution I would like to read to you: There are lots of people who are terribly frightened of the genetic-facsimile line. The reason we have to put them into a genetic-facsimile line is quite often the overt acts on the case are so heavy that your preclear will not face them unless the earlier incidents that I have named to you tonight (Before Track, Helper, Boohoo) are run out. They will do anything rather than face an overt act! You get some preclear who is low on the tone scale, who has in some earlier existence committed some crime, and you ask them to go through this crime again and this preclear will beg — he will back up on the bed.

You could say, “Well, go ahead, stick this butcher knife in the baby’s throat.” And they will go ahead and they will stick a butcher knife in the baby’s throat; there is nothing on that. You say, “All right, now let’s choke this woman.”

“NO!” and they will back up clear across the couch. Some of them will even run out the door on you. They will beg, they will plead, they will get down, they will weep — anything but run this. “No! No! No! No!” And what have you asked them to do? You have asked them to do nothing but reach out and close their hands around somebody’s throat. And they won’t do it! There is a terrific overt act there — terrific. And it would blow all ways from the middle if you could get them to run it, but you can’t get them to run it. And the reason why is because that act is supercharged by these earlier four acts: the motivator behind it — when it happened to them - the Boohoo, the Helper and Before Track.

So it is actually a great relief to have these earlier incidents rather than having to buck a preclear into these overt acts, because that is almost impossible.

Do you know that auditors can’t run very many of these overt acts out of a preclear? We are talking about highly charged incidents; no incidents of this character have ever seen this magnitude before. I have never seen incidents of this magnitude. An auditor audits two or three out of somebody, and the first one he just does fine; the second one he gets by with, maybe; and the third one — by that time his somatics are jumping so and he is so uncomfortable he is ready to fly through a ten-foot wall.

As a consequence, an auditor can run one. He can probably run two of each before it really gets him. But then he needs running. And so an auditor should fix it up, on any kind of running like this, so he has at least three people, one working on another, and keep himself swamped up as he runs this stuff. It is deadly. I am not trying to make it worse by telling you so; I am just warning you. But you can run a couple of them through before you fold up, and you don’t fold up very bad. So you get a jaw ache; so somebody has to pull a wisdom tooth or something on you — so what? Relatively easy.

Now, people will go to the point of avoiding these things though, to the point of saying they aren’t or saying they are hallucinations that come out of birth.

Now, this is all very well to talk about birth. You see, I happen to be an old hand about the birth engram. Anybody who wants to know about births, any obstetrician who wants to know about births, why, let them come around and I will give them a full dissertation on birth: its aberrative effects; the thousand and one ways of mismanaging a birth; the pat phrases, the clichés in three languages, that come out of births; the various troubles that babies have in getting born — the troubles before getting born, the troubles after getting born; the various stories that doctors tell nurses while waiting for the baby to finish coming down the canal. I can give you, authoritarianly, ad nauseam, all these details. If birth were an aberrative incident, I would be telling you to run it. There isn’t anybody in Dianetics knows as much about birth (for one thing) as myself.

Now, somebody claims birth produces delusory results. I have never seen a birth that did. How do you like that? Birth is too light to produce much delusion. Birth is about as aberrative as dropping a soccer ball on your right foot. I can tell you the day when my fondest hopes rose and soared: I had found that people could run birth, and now everybody would be in beautiful condition because we could run birth. So I started running out births out of a lot of people — and I still had people.

There are incidents before track which, if you run them, will peel off all the births there are on the whole track.

Birth doesn’t do it, but I can give you a technique that will run every birth that ever happened off of a case if you want it sometime. The only trouble is it doesn’t make the preclear any better.

Would you like a technique that you can run off all the births there are in the whole case from beginning to end — deintensify all the births there are? I will give you one: it is the Helper — only the births are so light, lying on top of it, that you would have to coax the preclear to take a look at them as they went by. They are this unaberrative compared to the Helper. Think of how many times a man must have been born if there is a genetic-facsimile line. Look at the thousands and thousands of births that you could get off of a case — just rows of them.

You can doubt the validity of wild material off the evolutionary chain — and rightly. But you stack up the incidents which I have mentioned against a psychogalvanometer — fascinating. They run just as hot — they are very highly charged incidents, and they run a preclear off the top of the machine when they are run. You run them all the way out and the preclear will go off the top of the machine. The machine, in other words, which is supposed to measure human beings, won’t measure them anymore. This fellow has ceased to be a human being, naturally; I mean, it proves that you have created something new!

Now, not to belabor it any, but the incidents are quite standard; they behave, each one, very similar to the next one. The preclears, on the techniques of thought, emotion and effort — each one behaves very similarly to the next one. And there is not much doubt about what you ought to be doing with a case or how the case ought to be behaving. And nobody ought to be running anything very off-track. The only reason a person would be having to run something off-track is if he was afraid to run something that was on-track. And, in all sincerity, that can happen. And I frankly would not blame an auditor for diving into a nice comfortable birth if he had a good, hot Boohoo that he was trying to run away from, himself.

These auditors who have been running birth I do not believe could stand to running a Boohoo. They just couldn’t stand to it. Because I had a couple of these auditors that were running birth and I was running them through some incidents — just some light overt acts — and I could not get them to do any part of the overt act. Another auditor and I were running them through them, but we couldn’t get them close to those overt acts. Argument, argument, argument, argument and then they would say, “All right, I’ll cut off his head once more” — click! “Well, I just don’t want to do that any more. I just don’t see that that’s important in the case,” and so on. “Well, let’s do it once more.”

Quiver, shake hand — “No! No.” And these were the auditors who were specializing in running birth.

Now, the avoidance mechanism can be done, then, by an auditor, and it can be done by a preclear. But an auditor that knows what I have been telling him now, and a preclear that can stack up on any kind of a machine — on a psychometer — that combination shouldn’t let anybody get off the track very far.

What we are trying to do in Dianetics is make people as healthy as possible, as capable as possible, as fast as possible. And anything that doesn’t promote those goals should be dropped by the wayside.

The Chart of Attitudes in the Handbook for Preclears is very, very important. Let me emphasize that to you. Did you ever see these cartoons where a little rabbit or something of the sort is tearing along and he is supposed to stop at a certain place and go in? And he is running so hard he keeps on going, you know, and then he starts running backwards and you see his feet smoke and hear the tires scream? That is what I did with the Hand book for Preclears. I went clear past this point — it is way back here. I went way on down the track someplace doing a lot of other things and picking up a lot of new data, and all of a sudden turned around and looked, and here sat the Handbook for Preclears — way back there. It is terribly important. Sitting right there are the thirteen buttons necessary to run Before Track. And the biggest resurgence you will get in any case is by running those thirteen buttons, in whatever style.

And there is even a therapy around those thirteen buttons. You can take that chart, each and every line on the chart, and just sit there and figure out all the times you have tried to convince somebody else on this basis. Just sit there and try to convince somebody else of each line. You had your own special phrase by which you were trying to convince somebody of this, like “I’m important.” Now, just get all the times in this life (or get some of them at least) when you tried to convince people you were important. You have got a therapy in that chart, just like that.

Now, we go Before Track and we find out that that reduction of those thirteen buttons down along the line was the most significant thing that happened anywhere on your time track.

And by the way, don’t go around saying you “know” unless you have gotten BT and found out, because you don’t know. Boy, when you do know, that is really interesting; that’s really interesting. But it isn’t just an empty saying to yourself “I know.” There is having all the data. When you have got all the data that occurs in Before Track, you have your hands on the wildest adventure that man ever undertook. We thought there was quite an adventure in examining your past lives; we thought there was quite an adventure earlier in examining your engrams, but boy, that adventure out there now really runs like “opry.” The only trouble is, the most conservative individuals imaginable will sit down and run this, much to their horror and sorrow — because it is a very hot incident.

The “I know” button, if attained, the “I am self-determined” button, if attained, and so on, are tremendously high. I couldn’t begin to describe these because we would immediately go out of communication on how high these things are. Anybody who has reached up toward that point at this time is pretty high, but it is something like having stepped over the sill of the Empire State Building with the rest of the Empire State Building to rise on. It is that much of a surge up. Tremendous — great surprise to me that it was, because I didn’t know there was that much to be known. How conceited I was!

Now, a therapy plotted on you just sitting down and saying “I know” is liable to fail, because what is going to happen to you is you are going to flick into the wrong valence on BT. The whole conflict of the society is the right or wrong valence on the Before Track incident. Fascinating stuff — very fascinating.

If any of you want to try this and fool around with it, why, my blessings upon thee. And if I ever see you again, why, let me know how it comes out! You probably won’t tell anybody what you know either after you have run it.

Finding out where man came from, finding out where he is going, finding out why he knows what he knows and what he is trying to do is, of course, the greatest adventure that man can have. This is a pretty conservative and apathetic period in the world’s history. It is very conservative and apathetic because it is not reaching in any great numbers toward the greatest adventure possible, and that is the adventure of man’s past and man’s goals, where they are really known, not just guessed at. Because there is higher, wilder adventure contained in this than anything I have ever read anywhere, and I have read some wild ones — and written some too. (I was a piker!)

Thank you very much for coming down this evening. And don’t think I am completely mad. Just look over some of the things I have said to you, but don’t try to test and run them by yourself, because we are awfully short of auditors right now.