Preventive Dianetics is a subject which probably, in the long run, is even more important than the general subject of processing. It is fixing people up so they don’t have to be processed. And the way to fix them up is to catch them at conception and keep them engramless from there on out.

The entire program could hardly be put into effect overnight, but there are intermediate steps which can be taken. That is to say, we have a means of determining what steps we should take in order to cause the minimal number of accidents in the society, the minimal number of deaths because of engrams, and the minimal number of sicknesses because of engrams.

It is a very simple formula. Around a woman who is injured, who has been jolted, shocked, or who has just received news causing her great grief, say nothing! Around any person who has been injured or who is anaten, say nothing, not even “Sh- h-h-h!”

The second stage is to prevent the key-in of already acquired engrams by keeping things very calm; by not quarreling, for instance, in the vicinity of a child. If no disasters are striking in the vicinity of a child, he may have a large bank full of engrams and never for a moment suffer the consequences of any one of them. This is an almost impossible goal, but it is one which should be sought.

In addition, one should give consideration to the pulling of attention units up to present time on a necessity level. An artificial necessity level can be created by placing someone athletically in danger of his life; by, for instance, dropping him off a yardarm, 75 feet down into the sea. A person whose whole life flashes before him when he is drowning is coming up to present time. Hardly anyone is not better off for having been almost drowned, provided the drowning itself does not become an engram. Without you lay down these specifications, it immediately becomes impossible.

We are so used to an aberrated society where everyone in it has engrams, that we look at the reactivation and restimulation of engrams as the normal, average procedure. It has become a part of our educational strata that if you do so and so to a person, you get such and such results. Actually, such a generality is impossible. You will find out, in dealing with aberrees, that if you do such and so to “A” and do the same such and so to “B,” you are going to get two widely different reactions. But having read the novelists on the subject, and having been indoctrinated with the educational pattern, we erroneously agree that humanity reacts in a certain way. It doesn’t happen to be true.

We are educated into the belief that when someone comes in and says, “Your mother is dead,” the person replies, “Boo-hoo-hoo. I loved my mother very much,” and thereafter goes into a sharp decline. One could feel very sad about mother being dead and yet, if he had no basic engram, after the funeral be in excellent shape. The painful emotion engram depends upon the physical pain engram for its action; it cannot take form if there is no basic engram on which it could append.

Consider a person who has no engrams. He could have a childhood wherein practically every day contained a parental quarrel and every teacher he had in school disliked him heartily, but these things would have no lasting effect on him. He would get some odd educational data about the world, but he would calculate how to get around it, and he would probably be a rather likeable person.

The general breakages of affinity, for instance, would be almost impossible if there were no basic engrams. The breaking down of a person’s sense of reality would not happen. If an engramless person were told rather consistently by somebody, “Well, you’re wrong, you know; you’re not right. You just don’t know about these things,” he would give a reasonable response instead of breaking affinity and communication and reducing his reality. If he were a child receiving such communication from a parent, the end product of this would be that he would have the idea that his parent was not quite bright. Furthermore, the number of illnesses would decrease markedly.

The prevention of the engram, all by itself, would give us a brand-new society. If everybody agreed to keep his mouth shut around a person who has been injured, who is ill or has any analytical attenuation, within a matter of 35 to 40 years there would be an entirely different society. If society, by some means or other, even without knowing a thing about Dianetics, its techniques of application, would just agree that it was worse than killing a man (without knowing what it was doing to him) to say anything around a person who was unconscious, or to quarrel with or otherwise disturb a woman who was pregnant, within the course of a generation there would be a marked change for the better in the whole society.

It’s an odd thing that by accident somebody didn’t uncover this one. Man’s history demonstrates that he has stumbled onto all manner of mechanisms by accident. It’s interesting that he never set upon this as being immoral. Well, he never knew it was immoral. Things that are immoral are things which injure, actually, visibly; and the engram is an invisible thing. So he didn’t know about this, and it was never considered immoral.

But we are being too hard on Man because, actually, what has Man done now? He has all of a sudden uncovered it. Don’t overlook that point. Now it will probably enter into the moral structure here in the next few years. Beat your grandmother, rob banks, do anything, but for God’s sake keep your mouth shut around an unconscious person.

A young girl was in the hospital for an appendectomy. (One wonders why? Her mother died of cancer of the intestines — the girl was in her mother’s valence, and a situation containing grief was immediately followed by the necessity for an appendectomy.) After the operation she was running a fever, and a Dianetic auditor, a friend of the family, dropped in to visit her.

“How old are you?” he asked the girl.

“I’m nine,” she answered, although her present-time age was obviously in theteens.

Her grandmother, who had attended her during the time she had had mumps,was there in the hospital, just as she had been in those past days of sickness when she had said, “Well, now, honey — I’m going away, but I’ll be right back to talk to you.”

So the auditor asked the girl questions about the time she had mumps. She suddenly recognized the similarity of her present illness to the feeling she had had during mumps, and came up to present time. The doctors who had been treating her with penicillin returned to administer another shot — but she had no fever; she was in excellent condition. There were some very puzzled people there for a while.

What had happened? Here was the cure: an age flash. Age flash — straight-line memory as to what occurred at that age, and then up to present time. Down went the fever to normal almost instantly.

The indoctrination of people into silence in the presence of sickness is very, very difficult, until suddenly they experience something, such as the nurse who attended this girl during her appendectomy.

While the girl was under ether, one of the nurses had walked into the operating room and started to babble about the next patient scheduled for an appendectomy. The girl’s father, present at the operation because he himself is a doctor, and knowing his Dianetics, motioned angrily for silence. The nurse reluctantly broke off conversation.

Later, he walked beside his daughter as she was wheeled from the operating room, and at this point the same nurse again approached, insistent upon getting her message off as soon as possible. The girl was not yet out from under the anaesthetic when the nurse remarked: “She can’t hear anything. She’s unconscious!”

The father glowered at the nurse and barely restrained himself from striking her.

The nurse only stared stupidly at him, probably making mental calculations as to the father’s degree of balminess.

The girl came out from under ether while the nurse was busily buzzing around her room. The father was there still. The nurse, perhaps thinking to squelch the old man once and for all, spoke to the father:

“What were you talking about? You know that people who are unconscious can’t remember anything like that.”

The girl looked over and smiled at the nurse. “Were you talking about somebody talking?” she asked.

The nurse, smugly sneering, said, “Yes, I was. Now, do you remember anything about what happened back there in the operating room?”

The now thoroughly conscious girl replied, “Oh, yes. I remember what you said. You were telling the doctor something about the person who would be operated on after me.”

The nurse, looking very ill, walked out.

There are several general conditions of anaten, and thousands of situations wherein anaten is present — a person, for instance, who is just recovering from an operation is in a very perilous state. Apparently conscious, apparently able to speak, but at best, usually, in amnesia trance, he will come up into a light trance; and here is pain, and everything else.

To give you an example of this, there was a lady in a hospital who had delivered a child. She was hemorrhaging rather badly, and she continued to hemorrhage for several days-lightly, and then heavily again, and lightly. And people were getting concerned about her life, because one can’t keep this up forever.

I gave her a few quick questions on this order: “Whom did you see immediately after delivery?”

“Nobody,” she answered.

“When did this bleeding start?”

“About two hours after delivery.”

“Whom did you see immediately after the bleeding started?”

“Nobody... nobody... oh, yes! The nurse came in and said... said something, I’m not sure what. And then she said, all of a sudden, ‘I’ll roll you down, now. Now just lie there, quietly.’“

I dipped back on the line, ran that thing out, brought her up to present time, took her out of that tail end of the incident, and the hemorrhaging stopped. It looked like straight magic to the MDs who didn’t know Dianetics.

Here was an instance of a nurse placing a human being in danger of losing her life. It is not a light thing; it is deadly serious. All the post operational complications could have been prevented completely. Just those little words—”I’ll roll you down, now. Now just lie there quietly”—left unspoken would have made all the difference.

Preventive Dianetics enters the field of industry very solidly. Let us take a person who has worked for several years in the same area in, say, a steel plant. Naturally, every time he has been injured in that area, or every time he has been slightly anaten or restimulated in that area, he has received all the environmental perceptics. There is the roar of the furnaces, the odor around there, the feel of the floor and so on.

One day he hits his head and somebody says to him, “Come over here.”

The possibility of keying something in at that moment is great, but we key it in with the additional bundle of all the environment where this person works.

Next, some weeks later he burns his hand; somebody says something to him — could be anything — and the environment is once more keyed in.

Finally, one day he comes to work not feeling so well. He has an engram in restimulation, and the restimulation of the environment, of course, is very responsible here. He throws the wrong lever and two men die — two men leading different lives, who have no connection with him whatsoever but just happened to work in the same place. It doesn’t take a very big mistake in a steel plant to kill someone.

An engram in restimulation in one chap caused him to practically cut his hand off. The engram, which said something to the effect that he had to cut his hand and said which hand, too, went into restimulation, and during a period of about three days he managed to do things with that hand which injured it three times. The last accident occurred when he endeavored to raise a stuck window with a broken pane and succeeded in carrying out the command of the engram. That is just an example of what an engram will dictate and a person unknowingly follow.

A doctor known to the Foundation suffered a dislocation of his shoulder. “I would feel so much better if I could get it out” was the engram at the bottom of that pile, as was found in a subsequent auditing session.

Have you any idea how much horsepower it takes to actually disjoint and disrupt a shoulder? It took him three years, but he finally found a way. Of course, he didn’t know he was obeying an engram, but all of a sudden it came to him during processing. “That’s why I had to get my shoulder out,” he said, suddenly. “It was said at birth... ‘If I can just get this shoulder out, he will be all right. ’ “

The “accident” in which he succeeded in satisfying the engram happened in this manner: He was in a hospital one day and happened to note that one of the X-ray machines had developed a short circuit, and that this machine stood within a few inches of a cold-water pipe. He playfully touched the X-ray machine and the pipe, lightly so as not to make too good an electrical contact. He seemed to be one of these inexplicable people who enjoy the feel of electricity.

Three days later, as he stood near the same machine talking casually to another member of the staff, he leaned on the X-ray machine and grabbed the water pipe with the other hand. He yelled for somebody to pull him off, but he had a very firm grip on the pipe. They pulled his shoulder out of joint during the rescue.

In the whole field of Preventive Dianetics nothing is more shocking than watching the curve of accident rates. In one industry they go up by two or three, and then fall off and none will occur for a while. You get the old railroad superstition: “There’s been a wreck? There’ll be two more.” And there will be! It says so. There’s the superstition which runs through the field, and a couple of guys will take it upon themselves to have the responsibility of getting those two other wrecks. And this is the reactivation of engrams, whether it is on an alarm reaction level, or whether it’s on a mechanical restimulation level, or anything else.

It doesn’t take many hours of research into accident reports to discover a very strange fellow, the “accident-prone.” He walks around trying to find an accident, and when he fails to find one, he has one all by himself. He is the man who keeps hospitals, morgues, and cemeteries in business, although the unfortunate part of it all is that he causes so many injuries and deaths to others before he himself is finally removed.

Some of the data assigned to accident-prones, although not thoroughly checked, seems to demonstrate that there is a sort of telepathic thing about accidents, just as there is a sort of telepathic thing about mass hysteria. It would seem that an engram is the best broadcaster in the field of telepathy. All the evidence I have of telepathy announces that this was an engram which was broadcasting. The reactive mind and the animal body, you might say, long since developed an alarm system for the herd; and having developed this alarm system for the herd in that bracket, it now functions best in that bracket.

We are in the same spot, where alarm reaction telepathy is concerned, as with the mathematician’s two-dimensional worm: he’s busily crawling along on a two- dimensional plane, and one day he bumps into a post. He crawls on and says, “Nope! That would have to.... There’s just no post there, that’s all. There couldn’t be!” He comes by another day, and he shoulders it again. He’s aware of the existence of something, but of course he would be unable to think in the third dimension. We know there is something there — we keep nudging this post.

Did you ever walk into a room where people had been quarreling? Now you’d think, perhaps, rationally, that it might be just because you don’t like to see these people, but there’s an actual sort of impact involved in it. I don’t know what it is unless it is this form of alarm telepathy.

Sometimes two people who are strangers become involved in an argument. The first person will say, “Yeah, go soak your head!” and the second will come through with the other half of the engram, the other valence: “So’s your old man!”

We have a tone scale operating, and we could draw a spectrum of affinity on it, starting at the top with love, cohesiveness, and going down through fear and terror to where affinity was a reverse charge and became grief. Toward the bottom of the scale, where we had a herd, for instance, which would have to be alerted toward some danger, we would get a fear shock reaction which would broadcast and cohese the herd into flight.

I am just telling you about this alarm reaction telepathy here in passing. It is not a necessary postulate to any part of Preventive Dianetics.

Preventive Dianetics is the heart and soul of accident prevention on the highways. It is an old, old saw with traffic departments that ten percent of the drivers cause ninety percent of the accidents. I’ll go further and say that one hundred percent of the accidents are caused by engramic restimulation. If it’s a mechanical failure, it means somebody failed in design; his ability must have been inhibited a bit for him to have failed so signally in design based upon principles in which he was so thoroughly educated. Or a mechanic might have had a headache that morning when he was fixing the steering apparatus, and so didn’t quite seize down the bolts. Or the highway department might have been just a little bit careless about all this: a couple of engrams on the subject “Well, it doesn’t matter anyway,” maybe, on the part of some workman, and the sign that should have been there isn’t there.

Have you ever noticed that in the vicinity of an accident, other accidents happen? Some foolish traffic department someplace started the practice of putting up crosses wherever a highway death had occurred. All of a sudden, the crosses would just pile right up there in that one spot, one after the other. They did away with the crosses, quick. The cross was a suggestion that there was death. Anybody coming by with one of these things to trigger said, “Yep! Here’s my chance.” Another cross.

That’s one level. If you’ll notice too, the observance of a sudden accident will cause other people in the vicinity of the accident to make mistakes immediately afterwards.

Joe Jones is driving down the road. He has an engram which makes him get exorbitantly drunk. And the same engram says, “I can’t see straight,” and “You don’t know what you’re doing.” By some perceptic or group of perceptics this engram goes into restimulation, and screech! Across the road, into another car. Three or four people die in that other car — three or four people who had nothing whatever to do with Joe Jones’ engram.

We are being, actually, as thoroughly brutalized and calloused on this subject of automotive accidents as were the Romans looking at the arena. We get in every year practically as many deaths as there were in our own army in World War I. And these aren’t light accidents. They are destructive to lives and property.

People say, “We have to make the highways better.” If you had people driving those highways who weren’t emotionally disturbed in the direction of accident-prone, you could hang the highways at a 45-degree angle and no one would fall off them.

The ambitious young engineer who wants to make a good name for himself and build big cloverleaf’s because they look so pretty, wants to see a great big highway project. He wants to see the state legislature hang on to the taxpayer these billions and billions and billions of dollars of highway improvement, and one of his chief arguments is “We are going to prevent accidents.” But do they? No! We check over and find out how many accidents are now on this superhighway, and we find out there are more.

A small change in the licensing of automobile drivers would do away with about 99% of highway deaths and accidents. A very small change. It would merely be an arbitrary selecting out of those people who had had accidents. When a driver has had an accident in which somebody was injured to a point of having to be hospitalized, revoke his license, and make it one hundred years in jail for anyone driving a car with his license pulled. After that the highway death toll would become negligible, because people who have accident-prone engrams would have been selected out. Highway accidents would then just about cease to happen.

A particularly important phase of Preventive Dianetics is encountered when dealing with the pregnant woman. People ask, “Should you audit a pregnant woman?” The question cannot be answered “Yes” or “No” unqualifiedly. If the woman’s aberrations are causing her to do and be things which are injurious to the child to the point of costing its life, yes, audit. But if she can get by till after the child is born, leave it alone; you can give her a little bit of straight-wire without hitting grief discharges.

If the woman is encountering severe nervousness, morning sickness or debility, the auditor may find it necessary to process her, as she may give the child a very bad birth, or the child might be in danger of its life due to an abortion attempt. The auditor has to weigh these things, judge them and bring to bear a lot of thought on the particular situation. If the morning sickness is relatively minimal and she can suffer through without a great deal of injury to the child, he had best stick to Preventive Dianetics. He must realize that any engram he might run — particularly a grief engram— may transplant.

If you have ever seen a preclear undergoing processing roll up in a ball suddenly, or leap convulsively on the couch, you will understand that the intra- abdominal pressure is increased. When that pressure is increased, even mildly, we get a transmission to the unborn child. We particularly get a transmission in a grief engram. When mama cries convulsively, sobs in grief, that grief charge will transplant, and it will have the very interesting data in it, “Let’s go over it again. Let’s go back to the beginning. When I count from one to five, the phrase will flash into your mind. Come up to present time.” These are very uncomfortable commands to have in an engram; it means that when a person gets to some part of the engram, he will have a tendency to go over it again.

Twenty years from now some poor professional auditor running this child, then a young man, will say, “Let’s return now to the moment when—”

The fellow will say, “Owww!”

And the auditor will say, “What’s wrong? Return now to the moment when—”

Preclear: “Owww ! “

Then the auditor will say, “Who died?”

Preclear: “Nobody. Nobody died.”

The auditor will check through carefully, find that no relatives are missing; they’re all present, and yet there’s a death there — somebody’s dead. Somebody is dead all right — in one of mama’s engrams. Maybe her great-grandfather, which puts the incident back three generations from the bewildered preclear. He couldn’t possibly have known this great-grandfather, and yet he has an engram about his death.

If many of these grief engrams are run on a woman who is pregnant, she will give birth to a child who will give every evidence of having had a great deal of sorrow in his life.

A horrible thing takes place sometimes. If you ever run across a young girl who is pregnant and who is unmarried, check up on this one. Is she wearing something, lacing herself in such a way that her pregnancy will not become obvious to others? If she is, that poor child she is carrying is receiving a continuous engram for every moment it is laced in too tightly.

Cases of moral turpitude should never be handled in the fashion employed by society. The system is utterly wrong. No matter how wrong the act may seem, there is no reason to ruin the health of a girl and the sanity of a future child just to be moral. As many doctors have gotten into trouble by saying, a good contraceptive is more efficacious in these matters, and a knowledge of contraception is far better than an ignorance of sex. Some of the most serious cases to come to the auditor’s attention will be people who have been born of a woman who conceived them out of wedlock.

Preventive Dianetics definitely enters the field of morals. Morals come about to reform harmful practices. Everything that is now immoral was at some time or other harmful to the race. A moral code is set up and goes forward in the society by contagion, even beyond its useful life span.

For instance, a lot of our present-day morals came into existence because venereal disease moved in on the society. Nobody could do anything about venereal disease, so they shifted the moral code so that it would take care of some portion of the venereal problem. Now we have penicillin and sulfathiazole, but the moral problem comes up against our wiping out venereal disease. Morals are initially practical considerations; but they have practically nothing to do with spirit. I’ve never been able to find morals aiding and abetting spirit. It’s not that we want an immoral society. We want a rationally moral society, and rational morality at this time demands, for instance, that venereal disease be brought into the open quickly as a disease, and that it be treated, because it can be stamped out of all the societies in the world now that we’ve got the weapons to do it.

That is where a moral, going forward by contagion, becomes in itself a social aberration. And, actually, the main part of your social aberrations that are carried forward now are old fragments of morals which we have even forgotten as a race. It would be difficult to trace their inception. First they were practical considerations, used for very definite purposes. Then they came forward, and broke up as their use was outmoded; but they came forward as a set code to become, then, an aberration, because now they are not rational any more. And what is an aberration? It is an irrationality.

Morals are fine. However, morals are not understood by this society today. Dianetics hopes to make them a little better understood, because it’s a vital problem.

You look up “ethics” in the dictionary (this really stands a philosopher’s hair on end) and you find it means “moral sense”; then you look up “morals” and you find it’s “ethics.” But morals are not ethics at all! Ethics have to do with a code of agreement amongst people that they will conduct themselves in a fashion which will attain to the optimum solution of their problems.

Morals, on the other hand, are things which were introduced into the society to resolve harmful practices which could not be explained or treated in a rational manner. So you had to create an artificial sort of a law which went forward, which would not be an optimum solution, but would block this and block that in an effort to keep something from happening. In other words, the morals were jackleg solutions all the way along the line. Didn’t know what caused it, couldn’t stop it in any other way, let’s prevent it, let’s invent a moral: that’s actually the history of moral codes.

In this society today, if a moral code injures the life of an individual and does not enhance the life of any other individual, that morality is destructive and should be struck from the culture of the society. It’s an unfortunate thing that several of those kicking around today hinder the society without aiding it. They get to be a rather involved problem, usually running into a severe financial burden, since an agency must be hired to enforce them. Blue Laws are legislated. Vice squads are recruited. There has even been an Organization for the Suppression of Vice Squads.

A certain vice squad had an ulterior vested interest in the morality of a community in which it operated, to the extent that it waged blackmail from information it gathered during enforcement of Blue Laws. The “vice” squadders waxed rich from their racket, until the organization for its suppression was formed.

Morality is more than questionable when it takes a high school girl, sends her to a doctor’s office for an abortion, wrecks her glandular structure by so doing, and impedes her dynamics. It is more than suspect when it gives that same girl a deep sense of guilt, along with an engram which, kicking around and festering in any reactive mind, will undoubtedly trigger the majority of the other engrams in the bank. If we as people say this is necessary, the dwindling spiral of aberration has descended further than we might have guessed.

The auditor will often run across a case where a girl has been handled in this fashion. Usually, it is the high school girl who has gotten “into trouble.” She becomes a juvenile delinquent and a label is put on her so that she becomes a moral liability to society. Her parents sometimes ship her out of town to have an abortion. Sometimes a judge on the bench will declare that a “legal” abortion be performed on the girl, “in the interests of justice.”

On the other hand, if she has the child, the secrecy, the grief and the talking during the lowered anaten of the girl all add to a very nasty engram bank for that child.

As the auditor works back through one of these engram banks he will find himself wishing to God somebody had shot that judge