Before I go into Step Three extensively, I should tell you that in the running of engrams there are quite a few tricks and observances. These can be learned mechanically; they are a mechanical arrangement of engrams.
For example, let's take as part of an engram "I can't feel" (a somatic shut-off). We go into "I can't feel," but it doesn't lift. Any time a phrase like that doesn't lift it is because it has phrases before it. We don't dare abandon this chase if we hare gone this far with it (we have run "I can't feel" several times and it didn't lift). We have already learned that when an aberree says something once, he will say it again. This was, perhaps, Mother's dramatization. So, we run "I can't feel" down the bank.
Once we get into the basic area the chances of lifting are better, but we may run across a condition whereby we send the person to the earliest "I can't feel" and he lands at the fifteenth or twentieth and has to have that run for two or three turns before he can get to an earlier one. It is as though we were unstacking, and we don't see the lower one until we get a higher one off.
However, in doing this, any time that you find the preclear is in a convulsive state, he starts to jump around, take the charge off that engram right there because the convulsions will come off and it will deintensify. But keep on going down until you finally get an "I can't feel" that reduces. When the "I can't feel" reduces, you can reduce the whole engram. You want the material just before "I can't feel" and the material just after "I can't feel." It is not necessary to come back up on this "I can't feet." You got the lowest one on the run and you deintensified the sequence. If you try to go back up, having gone lower and lower on just one phrase, you are going to run into the situation where, not having much out of the basic area at this time, phrases higher in the bank will not reduce and you will restimulate these things enormously. For instance, the engram phrases from the top to the bottom might be
"I can't feel, my shoes are too tight" may not reduce because the basic on "my shoes are too tight" may be lower and earlier than the first "I can't feel." So you would find yourself in an interlocked complexity.
The solution on this is to reduce the earliest "I can't feel"engram that you can find, reduce all of it, and then start in on something else.
We are trying to work into the basic area. If we find, for instance, a lock, the dramatization "I can't feel anything. I am just heartbroken, I am numb," when someone is moping over a girl, perhaps we can start to run this dramatization of his mopeiy. Having run it a time or tw'o to get him into it nicely, we tell him to go to the earliest engram containing these words and he will quite often windup at the bottom of the track on a skip. So you don't have to walk down the bank, you skip down. Walking down the bank is very difficult.
Then there is the running, without the preclear telling you anything about it, of a moment of sexual pleasure or courtship up in the adult or teenage area. After he is settled into the incident, if we then tell him to go to conception he will quite often wind up in the conception sequence.
In such a way we can treat any dramatization. If we can find a place where Papa is telling him "Yap, yap, yap, yap," we can run the yap, yap, yap, although it is merely a lock,get his emotional tone up a little, then tell him to go to die earliest time his father said these words and he is liable to wind up at the early part of the track. This gets engrams out of people much faster. But you will find in lots of cases you can do nothing but walk down the bank.
Searching for control circuitry and looking for and knocking out valence shifters is the most skilled operation in Dianetics. When we go into analytical demons, demon circuitry and valence shifters we are entering the most delicate and most fraught with difficulty stage of processing.
You should connect the methods just described very intimately with control circuitry, analytical demons and valence shifters. By running a dramatization and then telling the person to go to the first time this appears in the bank, he will often do a skip and go right down to the first time. In trying to find a "control yourself" circuit someplace in the case you may need to start tracking down the bank.
Your biggest target, and your greatest difficulty, would be getting enough Straightwire data to find the late dramatization — the lock — in order to run it and go into the first time it appeared in an engram. Simply running the lock isn't going to give anybody any therapy, you get a momentary release sometimes on locks, but it's not honest-to-goodness therapy. You run the lock with the preclear in reverie, and then you say, "The file clerk will now give us the first time this is said. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of the incident." This gives us away of locating a bad source of trouble and making it surrender as quickly as possible.
For instance, Mother chronically says, "Control yourself. I'm ashamed of you foraying, control yourself," and she says it continually throughout the preclear's life. We finally crack into this sequence by Straightwire. Then we run the incident we have discovered. The preclear has this in full view (it's a lock) and we run it two or three times just as if it were an engram, taking very careful note of the wording because it may not be just "control yourself"; it may have some other phrases salted into it like "Get a grip on yourself," "Fight it down," "You've got nerve, now calm down and stay calmed down," and so on. We run that then as a luck, as a dramatization, and we jump by telling the file clerk, "File clerk, give us the first time this appeared in the bank."
Of course, that lock is sitting squarely on the engram. So actually when the file clerk gives us the first time the phrase appeared in the bank he is not doing any jump, the line is riding right on top of the engram. Although the lock might appear to be chronologically in one place, by returning the preclear to it, we actually find out that the lock is sitting, perhaps, on top of its basic area engram.
If the case has dub-in, the only thing we can do is to knock out the control circuitry. Control circuitry is the basic cause of dub-in.
Then we knock out the valence shifters. We find that Mama has a dramatization that says "I can't be myself around you." We run that, then we skip down the bank to the first time this appears.
The Standard Procedure Chart is set up in such a way that any place the case stalls you go immediately to Step Three. For instance, if we try to put the case in reverie and he comes up immediately off the couch and says, "Get out of here, I don't want to talk to you, I've decided not to go through with this," just do Step Three. We sort of surround him. We want to know something about his history. We get him to talking quietly. Perhaps we manage to establish a rapport with him and everything goes well, but the instant we tell him to lie down and close his eyes he keys into the opening run on a rape engram which usually starts, "Lie down."
One of the reasons why the psychiatrist is so often plagued with a psychotic's belief that he has been raped while he was under narcosynthesis is that the psychiatrist has restimulated a rape engram by saying "Lie down."
There are lots of rape engrams. They are not rare. I suppose there are parts of this society, such as the Christian Temperance Union, who would like to have us believe all is sweetness and light in this world, but unfortunately, at this stage of our barbaric civilization, it is not true. If you go out in this society, down on south Main Street in Los Angeles for instance, or down to the detention homes, and if instead of walking on the boulevard which is all polished and clean you were to walk along the back streets, you would find out that there is a tremendous amount of mire scattered around this world. We walk by people every day who have the most fantastically involved and brutal personal histories; yet there they are, they are still alive. Just because something is against the mores of the society is not a reason to believe that it does not happen. Your credulity will be stretched very early in your career as a professional auditor.
On working with Dianetics in a small town in the southern United States for a period erf time, it was veiy remarkable to me that the Negroes who came to me, who were supposed to be on the seamier side of life, were mostly open-hearted and cheerful. Perhaps they were a bit sad over something, and life hadn't been treating them quite right, so I would run a couple of grief charges out of these people and then we would run down the bank and get, not necessarily conception, but a basic area engram which we would knock out and thereby deintensify the case. We would even pick up an AA or two occasionally. (They had a habit of trying AAs with turpentine!) But these people were not very badly off although they were poor and lived in shacks.
In other words, measuring the background of life in terms of outward manifestation is very unreliable, because the very bad cases I got came out of the very nicest homes. Here we got someone who was a drunkard and had absconded with the funds; he had done a lot of things. We started running this fellow's case and we found Mama's lover, then Mama's other lover, then the A A done by the minister and the rape accomplished by the scoutmaster! And there we have the mores of the society violated violently.
I am not saying that the nice facades invariably cover the worst people, but I am saying that there isn't any common denominator by which one can judge.
There is something about the pattern of contagion, for instance, where the most sincere parents may yet express things around an injured person in such away as to make that injured person extremely aberrated. You don't get a constant contagion.
As you start into cases, you are going to find a lot of secrecy, a lot of cover-up, a lot of malfeasance, mayhem and arson that you maybe never suspected of the human race before... And as you go further and further into cases, you will occasionally find a case which is a chronic "I'm ruined" case where he will run off the 26 times that he was run over by a railroad train, the 462 times that he was shot and the 875 times that he was stabbed in the back. However, you will find that there is a consistency to these engrams. In other words, he is doing a royal case of dub-in.
Sometimes, he has a command which makes him cry over everything although he is not feeling grief at all, merely dramatizing an engram wnich makes him weep, and when you finally run down the five or six engrams that he has been running in twenty or thirty guises, you will find there were folk there each time.
If he keeps talking about having been run over and then says, "There was another time I was run over. The wheels ran across my chest and stove it in, and broke both my anns," we find out that in each one of these things somebody pulls him out from underneath the wheels of the truck. There is an engram there someplace where he was rescued from some vehicle by somebody. And although he may have run it off in many guises at many ages, there is a basic on this delusion chain.
So I'm not trying to persuade you to buy everything a preclear tells you, but I am trying to prepare you in advance for the fact that the data you get in Dianetics is very often highly incredible, and it may give someone a tendency to invalidate somebody's data. Don't do it, because on a point as critical, let us say, as Mother's lover, an invalidation almost ruins the preclear
A rape engram (an engram which is occasioned by rape) usually has a lot of charge on it, be it conception, mid-prenatal, as a child or as an adult. It has got all sorts of denyers in it, "Leave me alone, let me get up," and so on. You put this person down on the couch, try to get him into this engram, and he bounces off the couch again. Don't sit there and try to persuade him. You have just triggered the engram. You started to put him back down the trade, you told him "Lie down," but the next words in the engram were "Let me up, I don't trust you?' It isn't that this person is naturally skittish. In fact, you can take that "naturally" delicately by the tail of the X hold it up, go and find a garbage can, and drop it in. Saying that somebody behaves "naturally," or "He just naturally didn't like this." or "He naturally didn't like that" is not true. Unaberrated conduct is quite obvious, and anything that is not unaberrated conduct is very far from natural. It is caused by engrams.
So, never let yourself be persuaded by a preclear as he tries to rationalize, that there is something wrong that he just naturally doesn't like. If you then go along this line you will try to make some sort of an adjustment for him and the instant you do that you are saying to the engram, "Okay,you can have him." Further, you shouldn't go on restimulating this engram by asking and saying the same things that triggered it. Take a different tack. In a case where you say "Lie down" and he bounces up, immediately go into Step Three. Don't say to yourself, "Well, look-a-here, I have to do A:1 and A:2 before I can go to Step Three, therefore it is absolutely necessary to get this person to lie down."
Any time this case interrupts anywhere along the line of Standard Procedure, for instance, if you can't get an inventory on this case, go to Step Three.
Actually there is another division for Standard Procedure that was not written up because it belongs to the field of Institutional Dianetics. Institutional Dianetics has the continual problem of accessibility, and it takes a clever auditor to deal with it. We are still working on Institutional Dianetics. We have got to put a weapon into the hands of people running institutions in order to create this accessibility and create it rapidly.
A Dianetic auditor working carefully with any one of these people can produce results. Accessibility may be on the order of the psychotic tearing around the room, but on every fifth whirl he will look at you and repeat what you tell him to. He is going around saying, "Oh well, calm down, calm down, calm down, calm down."
Maybe he won't pay attention to you that time, but the next time you get his attention you say:
This is a problem in accessibility.
Eventually you can get this person to say "Calm down" if you keep at it and you are very calm about the whole thing, and very much in possession of yourself. And if you get him to say "Calm down" a few times, why, you may get a little laughter off the incident.
Of course, "Calm down" is a terrific suppressor. And then you get the holders and the bouncers and so forth out of it, because psychotics are running an engram all the time. Just get them to repeat those things and then get them into another valence and so on. In this way even a catatonic can be worked, but it is a problem of accessibility.
The person who bounces up off the couch every time you ask him to lie down is also a problem in accessibility. Accessibility leads the list. If we can't get an inventory on a person who is at all approachable, who is normally fairly rational and who can perform routine tasks of one sort or another, we would just work them by going to Step Three.
"Put preclear on straight line memory and look for demon circuit and valence commands in memories of parents and possible allies," and so forth. You are trying to inventory him, you are trying to ask him what happened to him. The odd part of it is that there are a lot of dodges that you can use to try to get him to talk about something.
Take it up on this order.
The first thing you know, you will have him remembering. You sometimes have to work quite hard to get a person to remember something. It sounds foolish to you perhaps, but there is always this method of creeping up on it. You take a tiny portion of what you want him to do and make him do that, and then you extend that portion out further and make him do that. Then extend it further still and make him do that, and he keeps reaching, reaching, reaching.
In a case which refuses utterly to remember, there are fear and grief charges in this case that are very heavy, and actually "I" has been chased out, and keeps getting chased out. He is actually frozen on the track, but "he has the feeling that he simply can't touch any of this material. "If I start remembering, I'll be overwhelmed." So you coax him into it and you are demonstrating to him that it is safe to remember. That is all you are doing.
You can even carve it down to the point of saying, "Well, you remember me, don't you?"
If, for instance, the person refuses to remember names of four or five years ago, you can boil it down to a point where you ask him to remember your name, and if he can't do that, ask him to remember his own name. At any one of these points you can say to him triumphantly, "Now you see, you can remember names." He can remember a name. Now let's make it two names. Now have him remember your name. Now have him remember his wife's first name. Have him remember his children's names, and in such a way his boss, and this one and that one, and it will get ridiculous to him after a while. Here he is reciting name after name. He has told you all this time that he can't remember names. After a while he surrenders on the whole thing and says, "Well, yes, my first grade teacher's name was Elsa."
What has happened there is that "I" has crept back down the track with a few attention units, like a child fumbling in the dark.
Using Straightwire on that basis you can reach enormous quantities of data. You can ask the person to remember this and that, and creep up on things that are easy and then things that are a little harder to remember. I daresay if this were set up as a research project and a person were worked on nothing but straight memory, let us say for 50 or 100 hours in small installments on the basis of maybe half an houror45 minutes a day, you would probably have him up to a point of rehabilitation as far as memory is concerned where you could say, "Well, what did you eat on August the fourth, 1916?" and he would answer, "Spinach. That was for supper. Maybe you meant breakfast? That was shirred eggs."
By whip sawing him between making him remember things and trying to find out "Who said that you had a bad memory? Who had a bad memory in your family?' you are trying to find a source of contagion.
It is important to understand the principle of the contagion of aberration. You will find it covered in the Handbook. In straight line memory it becomes very important to understand those principles. The contagion is in the exact words.
If somebody says "You know, I am awfully apprehensive," don't look for an earlier moment in the person's life when somebody said "You have an anxiety complex," look for somebody saying "I am awfully apprehensive." Or, look for a valence shift to somebody who said this continually.
In order for a person to feel the aberrations of some member of the family there is usually some sort of valence shifter at work. It may be the kind of a valence shifter which shifts them precisely into the valence of that person who used to worry. It may be a valence shifter which Shoots them into the valences of all the members of the family, and it may be a valence shifter that shoots them into the valences of everybody in the human race, or out of a human valence entirely and just lets them idle, in a synthetic valence of no specific individual.
I have seen people fast and solidly in the valence of a dog. It is often commented upon that dogs and masters very often look alike. Of course the dog is very devoted to the master, but the master is also very devoted to the dog - Here is an ally, and it is very common to have the ally picked up as a valence.
The contagion of aberration is very much complicated by valences. There was one young lady who said, "All of my friends had the same experience. We were psychoanalyzed all right. But when we came out of it you know we still hadn't regained any vivacity." "All of my friends" was very much a generality, so we started to tie this thing down and we found out that, well, she felt it anyway. And then we tied it down a little further and we started to find out that she had lost her vivacity because she went into the psychoanalysis. She had mislaid that point. And then as we went further in this case we found out that her mama was not vivacious at all. Further research found that Papa left Mama when this girl was seven months postconception. She had never laid her eyes on Papa.
But Mama said not to be like him. Papa was vivacious, everybody said she was like Papa. She had just heard a description of Papa and of course she had a lot of engrams back there early that she could emulate, and then Mama said not to be like Papa. And of course there is your suppressor setup.
All this data is very interesting, but we couldn't do much for the case just with this. Straightwire in this case didn't happen to give her any relief. I found all sorts of early circuits and locks, but she just kept sitting there wringing her hands.
This is peculiar to a case which has had a definite and large, sweeping shift in her life where the personnel present during die prenatal period have changed postnatally, or in very early childhood. So you don't have a trace really on the dramatizations of one of these persons. Somebody has probably keyed in these engrams, somebody like Papa, but maybe hundreds of people have talked to her and one after the other keyed in something. But we don't have Papa there. We don't have any of Papa's locks. So we can't find what Papa actually said. All we can find out is what Mama said. It is better than not having any parents around the child as far as processing is concerned because we can now find some of these locks and discover some of Mama's chronic dramatizations.
We run the risk in this case, however, of having Mama shift valence once Papa left her so that she is not pulling off the same engramic language she pulled off when Papa was there. Maybe Papa reminded Mama of Grandpa, and the valence of Mama around Papa was the same as it had been toward Grandpa. Tliat might be Grandma's valence she is in. After Papa left her we may have a long period of Mama sorrowing. Maybe she was in Aunt Agnes's valence, who was an old maid, and then all of a sudden Jamison Thorpe, shows up and curls his long black moustache and Mama shifts over into somebody eIse's valence. Actually Mama can shift all the way over into her fonner husband's valence. So w'e don't get constant dramatizations up the line.
This case responded to straight line memory just exactly as you would suspect that it would; without enough data on the engrams, although the engrams were restimulated, we didn't have specific targets. We found a couple of times where teachers had spoken to her and had restimulated some of the basic engrams, and yet by straight line recall nothing happened. This girl just sat there continuing to wring her hands. Yet she turned out to be a pianola case. She should have simply been put down the track into basic area.
Cases which haven't had the parents around are more apt to be pianola than cases which have. It is a great commentaiy upon the American home!
She had heavy control circuitry, but just the same she would work. Her control circuitry was so heavy that although she was on track with full perceptics, when you asked her to remember anything, she didn't remember, she returned, and she had all of her life.
She was returning down the track. She was not remembering at all.
But the control circuitry was operating in the auditor's favor. She was coasting up and down the track. The reason why she had a hard time in analysis is not very hard to discover. The analyst was running a case in reverie.
So of course the analyst had a patient coasting all over the time track, going into anything and everything. Naturally, sooner or later some engrams would get restimulated and she would be worse off for having gone through the experience.
I have run into several cases like this where all the analyst would have had to do was say "Go to the earliest moment of pain or unconsciousness" and he would have gotten conception immediately. Wouldn't that have surprised him! He'd have told her it was delusion.
Two people at Columbia University about a year ago had gone to a psychiatrist and they were doing this automatic return, coasting around on the track, and the psychiatrist ran into some prenatal The psychiatrist simply told them, "Alt is delusion, after all," so they got furious with him and went home and thought this over. Then they said, "You know, it might do a great deal of good to remember these incidents," so they worked on each other, and they had pains here and there, but they didn't know what they were running or how to run it. One of our basic course students discovered these two characters doing what they called remembering one to the other in a strange job of coauditing. They were down in the prenatal area remembering this and that, and of course they didn't know enough to go through the incidents a few times or to try to find the earlier engram. They didn't know anything. Here was a locomotive running on the track with a wide-open throttle, so the student auditor sat them down one after the other. They were in terrible shape. One of them was very close to a psychotic break and the other had developed spinal arthritis. He worked for five hours, two and a half hours on each one, got them straightened out, got some material off the basic area and knocked some grief off their cases. Then he put a copy of Dianetics in their hands and said, "Now it says right here this is the way you do it," so they went off and sinned no more.
I don't know how many cases of this character there have been in the past, or how much of the trouble that has been attributed to psychoanalysis (such as "It's well known that psychoanalysis can trigger a neurosis") had to do with this automatic return proposition. But it must have had a lot to do with it because I have found a pretty good proportion of people are skidding around on their tracks without knowing what they are doing, with their perceptics full on but discharging nothing, yet the bulk of them have doubters as to their own data or what they are reading. They have phrases in restimulation such as "I can't believe it," or something of the sort. For instance, they can see the Handbook, they know that it is a book, but they can't read it. They have a hard time.
You are sometimes going to get Straightwire cases that are not doing Straightwire at all but are returning on die track, and you are not going to get much therapy from them; but any time you have somebody who is returning that easily on the track, you don't need Straightwire. All you do is send them into the basic area, run out conception, the sperm sequence, the ovum sequence, the cough chain, the morning sickness chain and keep on. By the time you have run five, six, ten engrams, the rest of them will start to erase automatically all the way up the line. Then you get up some grief discharges, you run those off, you get back and run off the early material and you have got a clear.
This is a pianola case in earnest. Actually, most pianola cases do to some degree control themselves — they have still got circuitry in them.
Straightwire is the process of recovering data, springing locks by straight memory and setting up the case in such a way that it will go into reverie.
If you have a case which is very recalcitrant, you can generally do something for this case on straight memory, getting the earliest locks, getting him to remember this and that, or who said the bad things he thinks about himself.
You get the data, springing locks at the same time and opening up somebody's recalls.
Don't let the person wander. You want specific data. You want to knock out the key-ins on the aberrations that are preventing this person from cooperating with you. You want to free enough attention units. You want to turn on the analyzer enough so that it will work with you. If the case breaks down and you can't get accessibility in any other way, try to get it with straight memory. If you can't get an inventory go into Step Three and try to find out if you can't key out some data which prevents this person from telling you.
It may be that he has a tremendous secret of some sort, and we find out eventually that he had a secret all right but the engram causing it was "I don't dare tell you about myself, you wouldn't listen anyway," or something like that. We can key this out enough to clear up the case, and the first thing you know, the person is in reverie and you are running engrams on him.
The cycle then is that at any point in Standard Procedure where you are Unable to proceed, you go over to Step Three. You put him in straight line memory and get the analytical demons in sight, and the "control yourself" mechanisms like "You've got to get a grip on yourself," "You've got to do it yourself," "I have to do it myself" and "You've got to learn how to do it yourself too." That is all control circuitry.