I have a few things to tell you about Dianetics. It takes quite a while to tell everything there is to tell about it. After all, it was 15 years in development.

There is a school of thought running in the country today that says that Dianetics is such a miracle it can do anything. I have heard two people arguing about Dianetics, neither one of whom knew anything about the subject. One was arguing for it, and the other one against it. And the one arguing for it said, “Dianetics being what Dianetics is, you could actually take a sharp ax and chop a man’s spine in half, and if you picked up the engram immediately, it would grow together once more.” This is not true.

I had better start by telling you how it came about that it was developed. People ask me this question. “How did you ever think of Dianetics?”

Dianetic processing is a fairly precise art, but it is still an art. It is something that one does with a full knowledge of the principles and the practice of it.

It doesn’t seem to me that it required much more than the cultural question itself, which has been with man now for perhaps fifty thousand years: “What makes man tick?” “Why does man act as he does?” These questions are found in the oldest literature we have.

A professional auditor can go into a case rather rapidly, open it up, roll it, and get places with it; whereas a person who has merely read the Handbook is sometimes so afraid of hurting somebody, or is practicing tacit consents to such a degree, or is so slightly conversant with the principles (they were there on the page, but they just weren’t quite picked up), that I could imagine somebody running five or six hundred hours and accomplishing relatively little.

One looks back into the days of, let us say, ancient Greece, and finds there the Aesculapian school attempting to answer the problems of the mind. Man had already become very conversant with the problems of man by the time Greece was Greece. The Aesculapians, for instance, were trying to cure insanity with convulsive shock. They used a drug called hellebore, which produced much the same results as the electric shock used today.

For instance, one gentleman has a wife who is rather afraid of him and he has some engrams that tell him if he just lost it he would die. As a consequence he is rather resistive.

The various methods employed to cure insanity of course form only a small part of man’s efforts. Man isn’t wholly concentrated upon insanity, and in Dianetics we certainly aren’t concentrated upon insanity or neurosis, or even psychosomatic illnesses. We are trying to do something about the activities of the normal man, and about conditions which in the world today are considered to be normal conditions.

But he will lie down on the couch and she sits there and writes down everything he says.

For instance, it is quite a normal thought that the Russian people have a perfect right to atom-bomb the United States. And it doesn’t give people in the United States any great shock to think of killing off a few million Russians with atom bombs. What is conceived to be the normal course of affairs is very far from optimum.

She will even tell him to go back down the time track. Of course what he is doing is staying in present time, running dub-in. When I found out how long they had been at this, I almost passed away. They had done it for five hundred hours! What a fantastic waste of time.

Dianetics is mainly leveled at the solution of the problems of man’s activities, not just at the problems of his psychotic and psychosomatically ill brethren.

So a professional auditor went into the case. It was sitting on top of a big grief charger and a terror charge, together with three or four painful engrams that had to be resolved. This preclear went about four feet off the couch, practically knocked pieces of plaster off the ceiling, and used up a full box of Kleenex! Then all of a sudden his tone began to rise and people could start living with him.

However, we have to start somewhere, and it is a very important thing that in the United States alone, according to the figures issued by President Truman, there are very close to two million human beings in institutions. There is another half a million human beings in criminal institutions. These people are held out from society because they might damage it.

Someone at the Foundation invented the term “patty-cake” to describe this type of ineffective auditing. I’m not responsible, really, for the terms in Dianetics. I have tried to keep it scholarly and pure. Once upon a time engrams were called comanomes. Then there was the word garbage, which isn’t used much now, but it meant “dub-in.” These are very colloquial terms. You introduce a very fine term, it has several syllables, it rolls nicely on the tongue, one can look rather pompous when he says it, and the professional auditors will look at you and say, “Hm-hm”; and then the day after tomorrow you find out that they are calling a chemical assists Guk.

And so we have to start along this lowest echelon.

Here is something new, and it definitely has its own language growing up around it which is spontaneous and native to it. This language isn’t something somebody laboriously thinks up. It’s simply “There it is. What do we call it?”

Then, people are not as healthy as they might be. We have such things as the common cold; we have arthritis and bursitis; everywhere we look we see glasses on people’s noses. The current level of health in the society is far from optimum, and it is at this stage of attack against aberrations that we find our main objective to be mental and physical health, although that is not the end product of Dianetics.

For instance, what term would someone use to designate a case that is wide open, has sonic recall, visio5 recall, no pain shut-offs,6 and to whom you just say “Go back to the earliest moment of pain or unconsciousness” and the fellow goes, you run it out, and it erases? They have begun to call this the “pianola case” because it plays itself!

Man has been thinking for a very long time about man. I was in the Orient when I was young. Of course, I was a harum-scarum kid; I wasn’t thinking about deep philosophic problems; but I had a lot of friends. One such friend was Commander “Snake” Thompson.

The difference of auditing skill is enormous from person to person. I have seen people who have merely read the Handbook who are excellent auditors, yet the worst professional auditor compares to them like light and darkness. There is a great deal of technology, evidently, which grows up and gets into the subject completely outside the Handbook. The Handbook works; you can read it and do the auditing in it, but there are degrees of how fast and how well. I don’t mean to crush anybody who is working with the Handbook.

He was a very interesting man. He signed his name Thompson by drawing a snake over the top of the T. He was quite unique. He is still very well known by repute in the navy today, but he has been dead, I regret to say, these many years.

Unless you are content just to sit there and write down what somebody says, you will get processing done. It is how fast you get it done that counts. Sometimes cases bog down and the Handbook isn’t too adequate on starting them up again. The first bulletin of the Foundation, which released Standard Procedure, does more but there is even more that can be done on that. Dianetics is very hard to keep pace with. It can be reviewed every 30 days and it will be found to be very much in advance of what it was 30 days before. Each time one reviews it one says, “Well, it can’t get any better than this,” but 30 days later it has altered again.

He had studied under Sigmund Freud, and he found me a very wideeyed and wide-eared boy. He had just come from Vienna, and his mouth and mind were full of associative words, libido theories, conversion, and all the rest of it. He had been out into the Polynesian group, and had dug up ancient skeletons of a race nobody had ever suspected existed before. He had served as an intelligence officer in Japan during the First World War. This man had a tremendous influence upon me.

In Elizabeth, we had to cut the Research Department off from the school because the curriculum couldn’t be set up accurately. The Director of Training would put together a beautiful curriculum and give it to the Professional Auditor instructors, and they would go in and start teaching the students very nicely. Then somebody down in Research would say, “Have you heard about such-and-such?” or “You find out the meanest person in A’s life, and you keep finding out the time when this meanest person was the meanest possible to A, and you start running this out and the first thing you know, you find an ally — somebody protecting A.” Ah, this is very smart; and the next thing we know, it is in the school but it isn’t in the curriculum! There sit the students waiting patiently for something to be said about how you reach an ally with this new method, and then they tell the instructor, but he has been so busy he hasn’t had time to read about it yet.

I was brought back by my father very summarily from my wanderings; I had neglected to go to high school. The last formal school I had attended was Grant School in Oakland and my father said I had to go to university, so he sent me to a prep school in Virginia where I studied for about four months and took the New York Board of Regents and got into George Washington University. They regretted it from there on because I never seemed to stay with the curriculum. At last they said, “Well, after all, you’re not going to practice engineering. We might as well pass you in a few of these courses.”This was a great relief to me, since my father was bound and determined that the only measure of excellence was A. My only measure of excellence was whether or not I learned anything about what I wanted to know.

So, the chaotic condition of instruction there was such that we had to put the school and the Research Department out of communication because they were continually upsetting each other.

Fired initially by Commander Thompson, I took up a search for life force. This is a rather strange and esoteric thing for a young man to take up, but we had to hand Professor Brown, an excellent man. His pupil, Gomez, the man who later catalyzed the entire atom bomb project, was there too. Professor Brown was teaching, for the first time in the United States, atomic and molecular phenomena. That may sound very much of an ear-cracking subject, but we didn’t even have a textbook. We had nothing but the old rules that Halley had laid down.

One Sunday morning I was bored, and I had heard people talk about early lives several times. There was a young man who had been hanging around the Foundation for some time and, with his agreement, I decided to see if I could go back and find a time when he had lived before, using straight reverie. So I sent him back to a time when he died, by saying “The file clerks will give us the last time you died,” wondering what I would get.

People were very impressed with atomic molecular phenomena, and I took the course because atomic and molecular phenomena might possibly give us some sort of a clue to life force. After all, we were studying rockbottom energy: What was energy? What could it do?

And I got a death. There he was, lying on a field of battle with the horses stepping on him and the men-at-arms screaming around him; oh, he was having a horrible time. The preclear lay there writhing on the floor. I finally got wise to the fact that something was going on here that I wist not of before. This seemed like a real engram, so I said, “The file clerk will now give us the death necessary to resolve the case,” and I got a death at 35,000 B.C. when a saber-toothed tiger was chewing on him. There was something wrong with this because there weren’t saber-toothed tigers and men alive simultaneously according to anthropologists; and furthermore the language in the engram reduced as English, and I don’t think they were speaking English in 35,000 B.C.

For instance, occasionally in class somebody might hazard the fact that somebody, someday, might split an atom. This was unheard of, and they called these people wild radicals.

Then we contacted another engram and ran that one, which was supposed to have happened over in Ireland. It reduced in English too, so I said, “Now you will come forward to the time when this happened in your own life,” and immediately he was square in a prenatal engram which he had always avoided before, but this time we had taken the edge off it. So we ran out these engrams. They were valid engrams but he had put new salad dressing on them, and his imagination had so completely avoided his present life that he had gone back into antiquity, on the theory that if you get far enough back it won’t hurt.

In just such a radical way I was trying to find out, what is the fluid flow along the nerve channels? What is the memory storage device of human cells or of any cells? Can they remember? Obviously they must, but how? I used an old Koenig photometers with a gas flame. Today they have oscilloscopes to do this work. Professor Brown thought I was utterly mad puttering around there, but another man didn’t, and that was Dr. William Alanson White.

Here was an early life technique. It is not a valid technique or part of Standard Procedure, but it got into the school. We found out that the dub-in cases were very eager to run early lives. (Dub-in, by the way, is caused by control circuitry. ) They would sit around and do nothing but run early lives, and one of them spent about a week trying to run out the battle with the Persians at Thermopylae. It was so disruptive that the Director of Training came down on it very hard and we had to compartment the two areas.

The old man was very skeptical that a man studying atomic and molecular phenomena would ever come up with any sort of an answer about human memory storage, until I showed him one day that it was impossible for existing knowledge of structure to be accurate because the mind obviously could not store memory. There was too much memory, it required too much storage space, and there were no known sizes of waves which could, in themselves, come into the brain and be stored in some fashion.

But it means that the curriculum changes in some respect about every 30 days because new things keep being found. I get an idea and I try to work it out, and suddenly somebody whips it out of my hands and they are processing it down in Tampa, Florida. Then somebody at the university there writes in saying they have just found out that if you do so-and-so, it resolves as such-and-such. There are many minds working on this science now, in lots of universities, in lots of places, and the data comes back to us rather fast.

For instance, within the last year a navy scientist was trying to figure out this problem. He was building a big electronic brain for the navy which was to figure out strategy, and he had to do some figures on the human mind to find out how much memory it stored. He found out that even if it remembered only the most important things, it couldn’t possibly store more memory than is contained in three months. In other words, every three months the whole standard bank would have to be dumped in order to make room for the new. So, we know practically nothing about structure.

Usually in a university they start by saying, “Well, Dianetics can’t possibly work. After all, look at those who say clearly that man has a death wish. How does this agree with Dianetics?” Well, we are not interested in how it agrees. We simply want something that works.

In spite of the fact that in the beginning I started out trying to isolate life force, I still find myself balked. Perhaps we will be able to sense, measure or experience this thing called life force, to put it on a meter, or perhaps pump it into a corpse. Who knows? But it seems to me, the further I go into the problem however, that religion has a lot to say in its favor. I don’t know where memory is stored in the mind, I don’t know where the personality is stored, I don’t know how these things come about; but I do know the various errors and their mechanics which cause the human mind to think incorrectly, aberratedly.

As one doctor of physics from Columbia told me, “The trouble with Dianetics is that it is so diabolically accurate. You predict these things and then they happen.” Then he said, “What are you doing to the field of psychology?” I am not doing anything to the field of psychology. I can’t help it if the mind operates a certain way. So he comes over and tells me about this, and he goes back (maybe he learned some new technique), and the next thing you know, the Department of Physics goes into a huddle with the Department of Psychology, and I hear later that they have just worked out that so-and-so and so-and-so are happening, and they are now investigating this theory.

In Dianetics we know, in short, the bug that gets into the machine. We can trouble-shoot the machine. The state of Dianetics at the present time falls far short of knowing all there is to know about man, but it is far in advance of what we knew before.

Trying to keep all these ideas together, trying to keep them coordinated, is one of the biggest jobs that the Foundation has at the present time. They come in, in an avalanche, and the more people that know how to do this, the more ideas you get, the more refinements you get. Some of the finest minds in the United States are working on this now. In the past week I have heard from a series of prominent people concerning Dianetics and what it could do in various fields. Dr. Frederick Schuman, the authority on political science, wants to orient Political Dianetics.l He is being financed by an entirely different group than Dianetics. They are in on it too. And out of this will certainly come many refinements in Political Dianetics.

The whole problem of therapy down through the ages has been that it kept falling over the fact that the human mind could record when it was unconscious, yet that fact was not known. In fact that is the first thing which people seem to contest in Dianetics. I thought I was the first one that had discovered this, until a very short time ago a psychiatrist from New York City was sitting in my office and he said, “You know, I’ve been searching the literature and I find out that a psychiatrist in 1914 did some experiments on an unconscious person and recovered the content of that period of unconsciousness through hypnosis.”

Dianetics can do quite a bit. It can alleviate psychosomatic illnesses if the body has not reached the point of no return. It can also pick up a person’s abilities quite markedly.

So, here was a man who did an isolated piece of work 36 years ago, and it lay there forgotten. I am finding, as I go along in Dianetics, reaching here and there, that material which was predicted to exist has, in most instances, been discovered already and forgotten.

It is interesting to me that our first psychometrics data coming out of the validation project after a week to ten days of student auditing, from a series of 80 people, showed that their IQs had jumped in that time from 2 to 26 points. This was not my conclusion, nor my testing. These tests were made by Gordon Southon, a graduate psychometrist. They were supervised by Dr. Ibanez who studied with Freud and who is a graduate of the Sorbonne.

For instance, I recently found out that tremendous amounts of work have been done in the field of morphogenesis.’ Hooker, who is well known in this field, has found out that a 5week-old embryo, when touched on the back by a hair, will do a complete flexion straighten up, and then curl up in a ball again. In other words, there is nervous action. But that particular piece of work is, in itself, unknown except to a few biologists.

We asked for validation and they decided they would give us a heavy battery validation — the kind which can’t be disputed.

Now, Dianetics is an organized body of knowledge. According to scientific definition, a science is an organized body of knowledge which, proceeding from certain definite axioms, is able to predict knowledge, where, when you look, knowledge will be found.

In other words, somebody can come up to me and say, “How high will a person’s IQ go if you process him on Dianetics?” And I can tell him, “I’ve had it go up 50 to 60 points in people over a period of four or five months of processing.” And he can say, “Where are the records?”

That is a science, an organized body of knowledge. It doesn’t have variables in it. In Dianetics, what we know doesn’t have variables, therefore we can call it quite legitimately a science.

These last few years have been pretty hectic, and there has been no time to keep stenographic notes. So my records are in little notebooks, mostly scribbled in pencil.

But out in advance of it is a tremendous field of philosophy, as yet utterly unexplored.

Names, addresses, doctors’ certifications and so forth have been lost, and people have moved. It has been a chaotic picture. Dr. Benton, who came into the Foundation back East asking me for notes and clarifications, trying hard to integrate the picture of validation, finally threw up her hands in horror and started in on the project, clean, all over again early last summer, because it has to be done in such a way that nobody can dispute it.

Philosophy, one might say, is the great unknown of knowledge. Science, as Will Durant said, is the advancing front which is catching up with philosophy. Philosophy always seems to lose ground, science always seems to gain ground. Dianetics came straight out of the realm of philosophy, actually, since none of these facts could possibly have been integrated if we had not had a central pivot on which to hang them, and that central pivot was the word suruive.

If somebody won’t believe my word about Dianetics, they won’t believe my case histories.

It seems incredible to people that man could only be surviving, until one begins to realize the utter abundance necessary for survival. It isn’t enough to raise one bushel of wheat per month if one is only going to consume one bushel of wheat. One has to raise enough bushels of wheat to take care of all emergencies. And if he raises enough, then he survives.

So let’s put it into the hands of people whose word can’t be disputed — people like Columbia University, or the National Rorschach Instituted or medical doctors who have no connection with Dianetics. If they say “I made a test on such-and-such a date, and made another test at a later date at such-and-such a time on such-and-such a human being,” anybody saying “No, you didn’t make this test” would be challenging such an authority, or the reputation of the institution.

But raising enough wheat and having a great enough abundance would in itself be a pleasure. We find out that survival, then, proceeds into pleasure. Infinite survival as an organism, a personality, a spirit, through his children — however it is that he survives — is a pleasure; and the act of trying to attain or the attaining of that goal is a pleasure.

This is the type of validation, then, that we have been doing now for months. Our results on this have got to be thorough. There are many people who like to say, “Well, Dianetics won’t work; everybody knows you can’t do anything with the human mind.” So, the evidence has to be incontrovertible, and we have been picking up that evidence as fast as possible. The pressure that we have put on these research and validation projects is enormous. People are working on these things 15 to 16 hours a day of hard work.

On the other side, non-survival, we have pain. Pain is the warning light that says “Don’t go in this direction any further because there lies death.”In other words, the rightest one could be would be to have infinite survival for himself, for his children, for his group and for all mankind, and the wrongest one could be would be to be dead. It works out into a simplicity.

Little things keep tripping us up, too. We had 20 people that had been selected by a psychiatrist down in Los Angeles, but he hadn’t bothered to inquire what their addresses were, and they had come from anywhere from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to Houston, Texas.

The basic mathematics of Dianetics are actually considerable and are causing headaches right now to a graduate mathematician from Columbia who is going over my notebooks trying to integrate it and has had to study topology in order to integrate it further because the work is done with symbolic logic, transfinite cardinals and topology. It leads an enormous distance, but actually, when you look at the whole problem, the distance is hardly any. We have advanced perhaps a few inches into the great unknown of philosophy.

We managed to trace 10 of these 20, but through this administrational blunder, we were deprived of half of the benefit of a research project which was costing us about $10,000!

Out there, still waiting, is life force. What is it?

And yet we are going forward with testing, and we have a planned validation project which will carry forward several years and which will include 3,000 cases.

In the problems of Dianetics, then, we now have to hand the captured territory. We know that a man (because this can be subjected to very definite laboratory proofs), when rendered unconscious by anesthetics, injury, illness or delirium, records everything which goes on around him.

The tests being done of course include Rorschachs, TAT, medical examinations and so forth. It takes about half a day to give a Rorschach and a day to evaluate it. Rorschach is a very high order of intelligence test. So is the UCLA California Test of Mental Maturity. It doesn’t compare in any degree with the Rorschach, but it is one which shows up what is happening very swiftly. It is very carefully delivered and consists of pages of testing. It was devised by Elizabeth T. Sullivan.

He has an analytical mind. We can call this, as well, the conscious mind, although the only trouble with calling it the conscious mind is that it is the only mind which is ever unconscious; so we had better call it the analytical mind. The analytical mind, then, shuts down and what we call the reactive mind begins recording. The reactive mind might as well be called the unconscious mind, although, again, calling it the unconscious mind is bad since it is the only mind which is always conscious. It is comparable to what Freud and others were trying to get past the censors toward. We don’t find any censor there; all we find are these recordings.

Each person being tested goes up before a notary public who certifies that this is the person that the test is being administered to.

Once we know of the existence of this mind and know its modus operandi, we can do various things with the human mind. We can make it run more efficiently, and we can enhance and preserve the native personality of the individual. More importantly, the reactive mind content has a perceptic6 which the analytical mind doesn’t have — the perceptic of pain. That is the essential difference between these two minds. They are separate minds. They react biochemically, independently of each other.

Inspecting a random sample of these tests, I see that this person is an optometrist. There is a red graph of a test which was administered on the twenty-fourth of August, and a blue graph showing the second test which was administered a couple of weeks later on the eighth of September. During that time the person had received rather minimal Dianetic processing, and yet this graph goes up; and we find that non-language factors rose from 89 to 103, that language factors rose from 147 to 155, and that the total mental factors rose from 124 to 136!

It is interesting how fast we go in Dianetics, and how far these things extend beyond where I chopped off Dianetics in order to write the Handbook. ‘ That book, for instance, is Dianetics as of January 1, 1950, and in these intervening months so many things have been discovered and integrated that although all the facts as represented in the Handbook are quite true and applicable and the therapy works, we have gone way beyond it.

Another test is the Johnson Temperament Analysis Profile. I am fascinated right now, as is the research and psychometric section of the Foundation, to discover better and newer tests that will show us where the engrams are and what we have to hit to resolve the case. For instance, Rorschach is a wonderful test. It will invariably show up a paranoid. The engram that causes paranoia is the “against me” engram — ”They’re all against me.” And when we know from a Rorschach that a person is a paranoid, we can then go into the case immediately and look for the “they’re all against me” engram and we will find it.

For instance, it was not known at the time the Handbook was written that biochemically one mind reacts entirely differently from the other. We can affect the analytical mind with chemicals which leave the reactive mind in full power and working order, and we can affect the reactive mind independently of the analytical mind so that it leaves the analytical mind in full power and working order. They are two different minds working on a different bioelectrical-chemical system, although they are both performing more or less the same function.

Perhaps there is one for a certain type of schizophrenia, and there may be a certain type that causes manic-depressives. There may be a whole catalog of engram types, and that is the type of psychometry we are trying to do.

Apparently man, as he came up the evolutionary scale, once depended exclusively upon this reactive mind. But the more sentient and rational he became, the more he had to have a mind which would differentiate. The reactive mind does not differentiate; it has an unconscious reaction. It says everything is equal to everything else. It sees no essential difference between the sentence “He rode a horse”and “He rowed a horse.”It is perfectly willing to conceive any identity. Its thought processes can be written with the equation A=A=A=A, and of course that is insanity.

The psychometrist uses these tests to demonstrate what happens in the mind. They are used in universities, and they are very ably administered and very thoroughly authenticated.

In the same engram we could have a skyscraper and an ice cream cone, and it would be nothing to the reactive mind — this moronic survival from somewhere in the deep, dark past — to say that the skyscraper is the same as the ice cream cone.

Now, I want to tell you a little bit about a couple of cases. I received the following testimonial recently: “My dear Doc, I was looking for to see you for a long time, but you never came back. Now maybe you don’t even remember me. But when I saw that article in Time magazine, I figured maybe I’d better write you and thank you for my leg.

It takes the analytical mind to make these differentiations. Every animal has some tiny piece of an analytical mind. Man has a fairly big one. Next below him, the elephant has a fairly large one, and then they fall off rather rapidly and become less and less sentient.

“You remember a day three years ago in Hell’s Kitchen when they were going to cut it off and you told them to go to hell? I still got my leg. I feel fine. Hoping you are the same. Joe.”

The analytical mind is, in itself, a very highly complex organism. It is magnificent. If we tried to duplicate the analytical mind by building one out of electronic tubes and wires and dynamos, we would wind up with something which required as much power to run as the city of New York requires to be lighted. It would also require as much water to cool it as flows over Niagara Falls and, in addition to that, if it had a million dollars’ worth of vacuum tubes, each tube costing one cent apiece, the total time it could run would be about eighteen-twentieths of a second without a breakdown, simply to accomplish what you do every day: think, pose problems, resolve them, imagine, and solve the various problems related to your own life and survival. Every day you are using a machine which, if built by electronics, would be that big and yet your machine is portable. So, we really can’t call this thing a machine at all. It is something so vastly wonderful that when we try to reduce it to machine terms, it immediately goes astray.

It was one night at eleven o’clock, in an ambulance clanging down in Hell’s Kitchen in New York.

Many of my engineering friends are fond of saying, “Ah, yes, but the human mind makes lots of mistakes.”The analytical mind, itself, does not make any mistakes. It gets its solutions on the data it has — its solutions are no better than its data — but it makes a very good job out of that, and within that limitation makes no errors. We don’t build any computing machines that good as far as accuracy is concerned.

There has been a lot of adventure along the line of this research. There is also a lot of satisfaction in this work, but that is personal satisfaction to me; that isn’t psychometry.

But the reactive mind, unable to think, lying on a substrata of this, can act against the analytical mind like an adding machine would act if you always held down a 5. Let’s take a computing calculator and put on it 1 times 5. The proper answer is 5. But supposing we had an electronic short in it and it always multiplied the answer by 5. So, 1 times 5 equals 25, 1 times 10 equals 50, 1 times 2-equals 10. That would occur if you had a held-down 5.

Another one is a letter I received today. A young girl, whom we will call Dot, was going to a university. She had a love affair, and her lover beat her, hypnotized her, then beat her again and then drugged her. This we found out after a lot of research. A fantastic thing to happen to a human being! So, we had an extremely hard time taking it apart.

Incidentally, don’t think this can’t happen with these electronic computers. A friend of mine at Harvard was tremendously intrigued with my first use of this held-down 5 as an example because he had had a held-down 5 at Harvard, and it had taken them about four days to tear this machine to pieces, trying to find out what was wrong with it. It was giving wrong answers. Of course, it was giving answers in terms of high mathematical values; it was doing fantastically complex problems like figuring out the position of the moon in 1958, and it suddenly started to give wrong answers. They finally found out that a small drop of solder had fallen across the leads, and 5 was being multiplied into every answer!

This girl was thoroughly psychotic. All she would say was “I’m a top dog. I’m the top dog around here. I’m in the saddle. Calm down.” And she would walk around in a circle in the room and then she would say this again. Then she would scream, go around in a circle in the room and say it again. She had done that week in and week out for a long time. Her husband was a certified public accountant, a very brilliant man. He had no idea what could have happened to her. He knew that she had had several psychotic breaksl in the past and that she disassociated very easily. But suddenly, one night, she had come home in this state and he brought her up to the Foundation. I had very little time and I was only able to work the case for a few hours. Yet I was able to pick out enough of it to take the tension off the case so that she wasn’t walking around in circles and would at least sit down when she said “I’m the top dog.” It was very hard because she was inaccessible. I finally got her to a point where she would say, “Well, I’ll do it if you want me to.”

The machine, of course, to all intents and purposes, was psychotic because it didn’t give correct answers. The same thing happens in the human mind when the reactive mind is restimulated and puts some of its erroneous 5s into the computation.

And I would say, “Well, all right. I want you to.”

For instance, take the question of black cats. Somebody is superstitious. He has an engram that says black cats are unlucky, and to him black cats are unlucky. His wife buys a cat-hair coat and he gets allergies. That is insanity. It has nothing to do with black cats being unlucky, if there is such a thing, but that mind now has the held-down 5 of “black cats are unlucky.”

“But you didn’t tell me where you wanted me to.”

In such a way the engram bank can move in on this beautiful calculator, the analytical mind, and can thoroughly ruin it as far as its computations are concerned. But the analytical mind is so good that although enormous numbers of people have enormous numbers of engrams, it can still turn out solutions and this world somehow goes on, even though every once in a while somebody comes up with some gruesome solution such as “the thing to do about the political and ideological situation of the world, of course, is to wipe out everyone in Russia.”

“Well, I want you to there.”

We are victimized in this society by many of these engrams. There are certain standard ones that run through the society. People confuse these things with morals. Morals are something else. There is no place in the world where something which is moral is not immoral somewhere else. Yet there is a high code of morality possible and many people try to adhere to it. They know what is best. The optimum solution would give maximal survival and minimal pain, not just for number one, but for posterity, for the group and for mankind. When we talk about war, we are immediately knocking out the fourth dynamic’ — mankind.

“That isn’t the right place.”

It should be apparent that the engram in Thomas Jones who is driving his car down the street can influence us, because he has an engram that says “Whenever I get drunk, I can’t see.”When he was unconscious at some time or other, somebody around him said that.

She finally got to a point where she would say these things in addition to her dramatizations which was an improvement.

Now when he takes liquor it restimulates that engram, so when he drives down the street he can’t see and he turns sideways straight into your car. Then there is the repair bill and maybe hospitalization.

Her husband was an auditor and he continued to work her. She was at the George Washington University Hospital and she was quite noisy. They put her under very heavy sedation and she became a bit worse. I thought this case was hopeless; I couldn’t understand what had happened to it. It was the one big imponderable on the whole record, the one case nobody could do anything for. Her husband took her down to the Virginia Medical Center across the river from Washington. He asked them down there to give her some treatment, and to run Dianetics on her if possible. And one of the young internes said, “What else do you think she will have here?” (This was a surprise, since we hadn’t heard that Virginia Medical was on the bandwagon.) They took her in there and today I got a letter from her. It says: “Dear Ron, I remember so well your standing there trying to help me, and I tried to tell you how much it would mean to me to be able to break through. But I couldn’t. I haven’t been able to for a long time. But I’m all right now, and I’ve been all right for a month. They are going to discharge me next week.”

We are living in a very close-knit society, and the aberrations of one very strongly affect the aberrations of another. In fact, all of any one society can be considered an organism which can be said to have its own engrams. The Republicans say that the Democrats are an engram in the society, and the Democrats say the Republicans are. It is a matter of viewpoint.

They broke the case with Dianetics down at Virginia Medical Institute. So that was a big load off my mind. She will go home to two children and a husband who love her.

That should give you a cursory glance at the background of Dianetics. In researching Dianetics, we have been harnessed with very many incredible things. When I first discovered engrams, I thought the first one would appear maybe at 2 years of age. Then I found somebody who had a real, valid engram at about 6 months of age, and this harassed me. Then I found a fellow running birth and I said, “This is incredible! This can’t happen to me. Nobody can do this to me.”I went out and found his mother and put her delivery of the child on a tape, and then I had recordings of the two of them side by side, word for word, instrument click for instrument click all the way down the line, and the story which she had told him about his birth was a complete lie. He thought that he had been born at home. He was not, he was born in a hospital. Father recalled this — ”Yes, he was born in a hospital.”

I got a report on another case a few days ago. This was the longest, most solid case history that has been witnessed by doctors and psychiatrists to date. She had the nickname “Lady Lazarus.’’

But I wasn’t going to buy birth off just one person. Maybe I was dealing with telepathy or something. So I ran five of them and got comparisons, one to the other, and then I said, “Well, this is very wonderful. Now we can have people who have no aberrations, because everyone has a birth. All we have to do, of course, is just find and erase everyone’s birth.”

A medical doctor at the Foundation picked up this case at the Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. Prognosis: death in one month. Weight: 80 pounds, down from 115 pounds.

Then one day someone began running something down the tracks in his mother’s womb, and it went on back earlier and earlier and earlier without reducing. I was working on a proposition that late engrams are the hardest to reduce and the earlier you find an engram, the easier it is to reduce, until you get down to conception where you find out they erase very easily. Once these are erased, the later engrams start to pick up.

Tone: apathy. He worked her for two hours in Dianetics. He went back a week later and he worked her another two hours and sprung the central engram. She walked out of the hospital weighing 85 pounds and ambulatory. Her weight came up to 90 pounds, then she went into a slight slump. Her psychiatrist in New York City was quite astounded by all this and started to follow the case rather carefully because he knew nothing of Dianetics. He called in consultation on her and they went over her again. They restimulated her pretty badly and she went into another little slump, out of which she came. She undulated along that line for about two months. She was well all this time, though, and her outlook was good. Her case finally stabilized, and it is still very stable. She is coming up toward clear now, being worked by her husband, and that case is getting along just fine. But the Presbyterian Hospital and the doctor have evidently been very close on the heels of this case, because I keep getting letters from them every once in a while.

It challenged my imagination as much as it does yours. If it hadn’t been for the work of Hooker and several other biologists, together with some of those people quoted by Count Korzybski, I would not have been able to credit the sentience of a single cell. Evidently a cell is sentient to some degree; it has some method of recording. Or, if we want to become mystical (and I don’t know any reason why we shouldn’t become mystical — all other answers fail), maybe the cell has around it some sort of an electrical field. Somebody in Harvard, not too long ago, was measuring an electrical field at some distance around a cell.

We have, throughout the country, many people on the-bandwagon now that we did not have before, such as a doctor down in Beaumont, Texas, who is running a hospital there.

And when any doctor comes in to operate, he says, “Do you know your Dianetics?” If not, he gives them a fast course of indoctrination in Dianetic surgery, and he won’t let anybody operate unless he has these basics. All of his doctors are having processing, as well as he himself, and he says his mortality rate has dropped markedly since he instituted this.

All cats, for instance, get born able to wash their faces. Those cells are being asked to keep the pattern of washing faces and growing whiskers and so forth. That is hard enough, but add to that the burden of carrying forward remembered pain: When the cell is hurt, it evidently records, or something around it records, and then it does something remarkable.

What we are doing right now is carrying Dianetics well forward of where it has been. A study of many activities requires more than one mind and one set of hands. Sometimes I feel rather despairing about trying to find people who can run things so that I can turn my back for a moment. I had a trip scheduled to go to Asia Minor this fall for a vacation; I was supposed to leave on the first of October, but I am a long way from it. Our whole battle is to find good men, put them in good places, get processing done, make them better, and carry forward something which will make this international picture a bit smoother. You may think this is a little conceited on our part. Well, maybe we can’t, and maybe we will fail, but we can at least try.

When a cell divides, it hands to its progeny all its own personal identity and memory, so that we have cell A dividing and becoming cell A’. Now, cell A’ knows everything that cell A knew. Cell A’ divides and we find out that cell A” — the third generation — has the personal identity of cell A and cell A’. It records everything.

I will now answer some questions which have been asked:

This is fairly easy to prove. You can go into a biology laboratory, take cells and condition them (that is to say, you can give them engrams), and they will pass along the information.

“In your book you say that psychotic cases can be treated by any auditor, but recently you hare said that such cases should await physicians trained in Dianetics. Has new information made this warning necessary?”

The first recordings occur in the basic area.l Here is also a person’s genetic personality.

No, it is not that a terrific warning is necessary. But perhaps at first I may have underestimated some of the slightness that would be given to the data in the Handbook.

Here is the cat washing his face. Here is the fact that the son has the blond hair of the father or the grandfather. All these characteristics are carried along, and right along with these characteristics comes any moment of injury.

More importantly, it might be possible to make a psychotic worse. I don’t know of any psychotics who have been made worse by this type of auditing, and I certainly would have been the first to hear about them, but such a possibility exists.

So, as these cells keep dividing and filling out more and more to become a whole body, they have as their content everything which they need not only to build but to alert the body in times of danger. They have certain signals. This is all right unless an analytical mind is going to be built there, too. As soon as the cells started to build an analytical mind they held back some of the power so that when this organism started to go into danger the cells could clip in with pain and force the analytical mind to either run away, avoid the pain, become angry, attack, or do something like that.

Another thing is a burying of the hatchet with psychiatry. At first I kept quite an aplomb about psychiatry and psychoanalysis. I said, “I don’t think these people are against me” (I didn’t have an engram to that effect); “I think that they will welcome this as soon as they know about it.”

The cell kept the whip hand. And if we are going to go into any newer, higher form of evolution, it will be with the cell dropping off its command power on the analytical mind.

People said, “Get yourself set for a terrible battle. This is going to be awful. They’re going to run you off the face of the earth. You’re flying in the teeth of authority.”

The analytical mind will become more and more in charge of the organism. Actually, in Dianetics, we have the artificial severance, an actual step of evolution.

I didn’t believe it, and I think I was justified, since those psychiatrists who have studied the techniques, and particularly those who have cared to apply them, have become very enthusiastic about Dianetics.

Now, let’s say a person gets operated on for tonsillitis. People stand around this young person and say, “Well, there he is, unconscious. He can’t hear anything, he can’t see anything. Thatb all right.””Don’t worry,”they say to his mother, “he’s just writhing. They all have convulsions.”Then they say, “Well now, wake up! wake up! We’re all through.

There was one at Missouri State Institution who was very open-minded about Dianetics. A Dianeticist talked to him and the two of them got together on a schizophrenic, a young lady who had been insane for quite a while. They worked her for several sessions, and then one day when she got up off the couch she was sane! This psychiatrist was no longer open-minded about Dianetics. He knew that he had something new with which to treat his mental patients, and so he started to work with it.

You’re all through now,”and they take him off, somebody feeds him some ice cream, and they say, “Well, you poor boy, you’re going to be okay now.”

Naturally, when some engineer and mathematician suddenly walks up to men who have studied the human mind for 12 years and says, “I have the answer,” they say, “This is impossible!” because he is not a specialist, and arguments ensue. But if these gentlemen test it, they go ahead. Therefore, I don’t try to sell Dianetics to any of them. I don’t have to sell Dianetics to anyone. I wish sometimes that I didn’t have quite as many people interested in it! But the information should be available.

This whole incident is unremembered by the analytical mind, but it is very definitely part of the reactive mind. This should tell you some of the content of an engram. In this tonsillectomy example, the analytical mind starts out doing fine, and then thereb the pain.

It is very good medical practice and very good psychiatric practice when a person is severely ill that a psychiatrist or doctor who is interested in this case be consulted about it.

First we get a little unconsciousness from the ether. (Unconsciousness and pain come together at the same time, but this tonsillectomy is complicated by the addition of ether.) The person sinks down into deeper unconsciousness and then somebody cuts his throat up, so here is pain coming into this. Buried underneath the unconsciousness, obscured by the pain itself, we get a full recording of everything that is in this engram.

An auditor should not go in just because he knows Dianetics and suddenly steal the case away and make a big show out of it. What we are doing here is trying to instill some good manners into the professions.

Let’s take an engram which has to do with a blow where a child falls down. A bell rings.

“How does one resolve oneself to enter therapy, even when the prospect of being clear is appealing, when one is greatly afraid of all aspects of contacting even the simplest engram?”

Perhaps the child is told that he is very naughty to be running around and falling down.

This problem isn’t just with Dianetics. There is a certain apparent survival value in the hypochondriac, for instance. And there is the mental hypochondriac, the man who feels that by being ill he has an excuse for his social errors. This is the manifestation of it, but actually down at the bottom of the engram bank somewhere there is an engram that says “If I lose this I will die,” or “I can’t go into it, it’s too painful,” or “I don’t dare change myself; he likes me as I am.”

Maybe he is still a little bit unconscious, and there is the touch of the rug under his hands and the smell of household dust. There is the temperature recording. There is the pain in it, the headache that he got when he hit his head — all recorded. It is like a movie and is about as sentient. It doesn’t think; it simply lies there hidden below the analytical mind, inactive.

There are all kinds of engramic computational that forbid an engram being touched or even forbid a case being opened. A skilled auditor can sometimes look at one of these cases, listen to the preclear for a few minutes, hit the engram, and after that the case will roll.

Then one day perhaps he falls and hits his head again in the same place and maybe smells some of the dust. It doesn’t hurt him much this time but it keys inl the engram which now becomes alert.

“If the reactive mind can be influenced so strongly while unconscious, why couldn’t a person be put under an anesthetic and told a lot of good things which would drive out all the bad engrams?”

When the headache starts in, these perceptions are all bad. He is driven away from them.

The reactive mind doesn’t think. That is the trouble with it. You are trying to make one engram reason with another engram, and neither one is reasonable. Experiments have actually been done along this line. In hypnosis one is trying to put in a good engram to counteract bad engrams and it doesn’t work. Anesthetic hypnosis is wonderful, but not other types. Anesthetic hypnosis can be picked up after the fact.

The cells are trying to tell the organism in a very crude, irrational way that the organism is in danger and should move out.

“Are alcoholics especially difficult cases?”

So, here is this engram. It can be restimulated by the environment, time after time after time. This mechanism accounts for hives, headaches, and even the common cold (which usually comes from birth).

No, they are not. But they are certainly messy sometimes.

Suppose this engram contains the words “I can’t think, I’m stupid.”If the person then hits his head again, these words will reactivate as part of the engram and run through his head, because they are now inside him. There is now an interior world of these things and an exterior world which he confronts, but the analytical mind doesn’t know the interior world is there. It wasn’t there to edit this when it went in and file it properly. So, it sees one thing in the environment and catches something else back of the environment, and that is the way it functions.

“Modern psychiatry has evidence that children exhibit neuroses before they reach an age where they know the meaning of language. How can you explain this when the child could not know the meaning of the words contained in its engrams?”

The analytical mind sends orders down to the body. In the bottom strata of the analytical mind there is the somatic mind, which records training patterns and is what you use when you drive a car and are thinking about something else. You learn how to drive the car on an analytical level, and finally you know how to do it so well that the analytical mind can just file this thing as a training pattern in the somatic mind and it will activate any time the analytical mind says, “Well, let’s go drive.”

I remind you that the only reason words become active in engrams is because the analytical mind knows what the words are. Engrams are bodies of perceptics. Words have no meaning in the reactive bank. I tested a baby 3 weeks of age that I knew had an engram containing a swearword. I remembered this mother having received that engram, and when the baby was 3 weeks old I went over to the crib and said this swearword to her. The baby flinched. Then I said several nonsense syllables in the same voice tone and the baby did not flinch. I said the swearword again and the baby flinched. Obviously the baby was reacting on this word; but she was just reacting on syllables. It doesn’t matter what the word is. An engram is like a phonograph record. It doesn’t think. The dropping of a spoon, if contained in an engram, will reactivate the engram.

The analytical mind can change this. It knows it is there. It laid it down. It can shift a training pattern with great ease, and it can put in a new training pattern. It is no trick for a man to learn how to drive a Model T Ford and then shift over to a gearshift car and then go back and drive the pedal Model T Ford again, one to the other, and then, maybe, drive one of these old Buicks with a reverse shift. The analytical mind can do all these things very easily because it can select the training pattern, activate it, and let it run.

“What is the difference between reverie and light hypnotic trance?”

But that is not what happens with engrams. These came in when the analytical mind was not there. And if the words in the engram say “All cars are driven by pushing pedals,”a person is going to have a very hard time learning how to drive.

There is a world of difference between the two, and I wish to caution you that we don’t any longer use counting in Elizabeth because we occasionally induced one of these light hypnotic trances inadvertently.

Supposing someone is knocked out in an automobile accident, and the policeman on the scene says to the other driver, “You blunderer! What do you mean, causing all this trouble?

To induce reverie, all you do is tell a person to close his eyes. And that is not a light hypnotic trance. If you count to a person who has been hypnotized before by counting, he is liable to go into a hypnotic trance, so avoid it.

You can’t drive. You’ve never learned how to drive.”Here is this innocent bystander lying unconscious with these words going into the engram bank. Maybe a year or so later he gets a key-in, and the next thing we know, he is having a very hard time driving. The reactive mind is pretty stupid. It didn’t know who the original words were addressed to, and it didn’t even know where the commands were coming from. With Dianetic processing we can pick those up, but that is how it operates.

If a person were completely analytically awake, he would be in an optimum state of mind.

If he thinks he can drive when the engram bank is saying “You can’t drive,”he will get a restimulation of the injuries he received in that automobile accident. Maybe it had to do with a crushed hip, which means that sooner or later he will start to pick up arthritis in the hip.

If he had his full analyzer, he would be fully rational. In Dianetics we are trying hard to wake people up, not put them to sleep, and that is the 180-degree difference between hypnosis and Dianetics. One tries to put people to sleep and the other tries to wake people up.

The blood flow is cut down and there is pain present in that hip. His analytical mind tells him to drive but the reactive mind says he can’t drive, so he is going directly counter to a command in the reactive mind because of the pressure of circumstances. Finally the reactive mind says, “No, you can’t,”and exerts more pain. If he still drives, it puts on some more pain in its effort to throw him away from driving.

“Please describe an experiment which could be performed by any medical man to demonstrate the existence of reactive memory during anesthesia, without room for scientific doubt.”

Animals, perhaps, operate fairly well this way but man doesn’t. The cells built the analytical mind too well.

This is a very easy experiment. One puts a person under sodium pentothal or some sedation, inflicts some pain just to make sure that he has an anchor point there to go back to (like pressing hard on the person’s chest), reads some nonsense syllables to him, lets him wake up in the normal course of events, and then puts him in reverie some days later and goes back and picks up the nonsense syllables. He will get them. The best way to do it so as to prohibit such things as telepathy between the person who is doing it and somebody else is to let a couple of doctors install this engram, and then let an auditor who wasn’t even there, and who has no knowledge of it, pick it up later.

So the engram bank does have a large influence upon the body. In an optimum state, the analytical mind pretty well handles the body. It can even handle the endocrine system and heartbeat. If you don’t believe this, you can look up records on some of these Hindu fakirs that so bemused the Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins a number of years ago, until the Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins found out that they could put a person into a light hypnotic state and do the same thing.

Although this experiment is very easily done, I warn you that it is very dangerous. Make sure it is done on a person who has full sonic recall, otherwise you may have to process him for 20 or 30 hours before you can get that late on his time track in order to pick up the data.

However, the engram bank handles the endocrine system and the fluid flows of the body on a bypass circuit and can cause psychosomatic illnesses, suspension of flow, overgrowth, undergrowth and so on.

The last time I tried this experiment was in Elizabeth, and it was the last time I will do it.

It is an odd thing how stupid this mind is. One recent case had very bad circulation in his legs, and it was found that his mother continually said, “I can’t stand it.”Of course, Mother meant that she was unable to bear it, but to the engram bank “I can’t stand it”meant to shut down circulation in the legs. The proof of this pudding, of course, is in the processing;l you pick up one of these incidents and suddenly the fellow can stand it. This isn’t postulated philosophy; this is thoroughly testable.

Two psychiatrists sent a young man over to me who had been so treated, and I was supposed to pick up the nonsense syllables. (This was a long time ago, when Dianetics was very much in question and validations were few.) It would have been all right if they had simply read him the nonsense syllables; but they also mentioned the reading of his blood pressure, respiration and so forth. They talked around him, then one of them sat on his chest, and they read the nonsense syllables, cuffed him in the face and then said, “Well, he’s certainly unconscious, isn’t he?”

This life regulator function handles the endocrine system, heartbeat, respiration and so forth in conjunction with the somatic mind, but the engram bank can really influence this and cause disruption of optimum function in the body. These points are quite demonstrable.

“Yes. He is unconscious. He won’t be able to remember any of this, anyway. I don’t know why we’re being so careful. He’ll forget it a long time before he is in Elizabeth, even if he could remember it. And this fellow Hubbard won’t be able to do a thing with him! “ Now, because this incident had a forgetters in it, the young man came over and sat in the Elizabeth railroad station for nine hours. I couldn’t find him. I knew he had been sent to me, but it was eight o’clock at night before I discovered him sitting huddled in a corner. He had come over in the morning! I picked him up and took him back to the house and worked on him for 18 hours. He was a non-sonic cased I had to take grief off the case and bring the fellow up, actually, to some sort of a fair releases before I could touch this thing. And I didn’t dare let him out of the house before I had picked it up for the good reason that he was in amnesia. So I recovered the incident, put it on a record and sent it back over to New York with considerable disgust. And I won’t do it again. But with those provisos, that test can be made. Make sure it is a sonic case, don’t say anything else but those nonsense syllables, and be sure to inflict a little pain so it is easy to find. Anybody can do that experiment if he is very careful.

The more engrams a person gets, the less able he is to combat life and survive.

“What are the requirements for being a Dianetic professional?”

The person goes out and gets a job. There are certain things in life, like the weight of concrete, that make it hard for him to perform the job, if he is in the business of pushing around concrete. Concrete, to that effect, is a suppressor. And then there is the irascible temper of the boss. That is a sort of suppressor to his doing his job. Then there is the hot day and other things that make it difficult to do a job, and these all make up the suppressor functions.

The requirements are to be bright and alert and to have a fair educational background. We would dearly love to have had the educational backgrounds of psychologists, but we find out that they do not necessarily make the best Dianetic auditors. Many times their basic purpose is good; but the best Dianetic auditors, to date, have been writers, although there are not very many writers!

The engram bank lets these suppressor functions get inside, so the engrams are acting as suppressors to the survival of the individual. The thrust of the individual is upward. At the bottom would be death and at the top would be infinite survival. Normal would be in the tone 3 band, with savage anger and rage below it, dropping down to the catatonic schiz state of complete apathy.

We have a psychiatrist from Huntington, Long Island, who is a very good auditor. He has got a certain cool, calm detachment. He was working a paranoid schiz once who, that particular day, had brought a gun with him. The paranoid schiz rolled over suddenly and cocked the gun, and the auditor calmly took it out of his hand, put it over on the dresser and told him to go back to the engram. This man is the coolest hand with a psychotic I have ever seen. That is his natural business, and with all of his vast knowledge and experience in psychiatry, that man is invaluable.

Here, also, we have the opossum, who has turned apathy into a survival mechanism. It merely says, “I’m dead. Go away.”So these things have rational uses too.

What makes a good Dianetic auditor is, of course, a person’s own alertness, his ability to think and so on, rather than his educational background. There is a sort of natural aptitude for it.

Sanity persists in the tone 3 band and above, and when suppressed below those bands by engrams, the person is, on a tone scale, insane.

“Is it advisable to practice therapy on your own children? If so, what age are they most receptive?”

A person has a very high tone when he is young, usually, and then he goes along into his teens and maybe his tone is still pretty high, and then perhaps he gets married and his tone drops. Marriage causes key-ins, by the way, because nearly everybody has a lot of engrams about being married. Papa and Mama have talked about being married and so forth, and if they have had a lot of trouble with their marriage, you can be absolutely sure that in the earliest part of this bank you are liable to find engrams about marriage being horrible. So the poor fellow goes along, completely unsuspecting, throughout his teens.

I would hate to have to cover Child Dianetics here. But a child generally can’t be processed very much before he is 8 to 9 years of age. However, there was one exceptional case who at 6 years of age could go all the way back down the time track and run out incidents. He was picking up in alertness and 90 forth. They got birth off the case and a chronic set of sniffles stopped, and he worked pretty well. But that is very unusual. Many children wouldn’t be workable perhaps until they were 12, 13, 14 or 15. However, you can do Straightwire — a new technique of direct memory which occasionally keys out engrams — on any child at any age from 3 on. You can nearly always pick up some grief off a child.

He meets this girl who is absolutely gorgeous, his life is going to be a beautiful dream, and then he gets married. There is nothing wrong with the girl. There is nothing wrong with being married, but there is an enormous amount wrong with having an engram which says “I hate marriage.”All of a sudden this thing clicks in, and after that he can think about nothing but the divorce court.

They are seldom very badly shut down. You can certainly better a child. But stop and think of some of the things that are in the reactive mind and the engram bank, and of taking some little girl of 8 or 9 years of age and sending her back down a time track to an engram bank which, if left alone, would make a psychotic out of her when she was 20. If she gets into it, she can’t handle it. It is just too much. She doesn’t understand it. Therefore children should not be handled too young, but if a child can handle himself ably in life he can handle his engrams.

The time track consists of continuing moments of “now,”but if we were to put a theoretical magnifying glass on it, we would find perceptics in terms of seeing, feeling, hearing, and so on. “Now”is communicated to us and we are communicating to “now”via these channels, and the time track is actually a bundle of perceptics from beginning to end.

“Once cleared, can a person record engrams and be influenced by them following future physical unconsciousness?”

People get some of these things shut off by engram commands, such as sonic recall.l They are put out of phase. So they might be able to see something but they wouldn’t be able to hear it as they went back down the track. Sometimes there is such utter occlusions that the person doesn’t even know where he was the day before yesterday. You will find such people in the insane asylum.

Undoubtedly. We ran a couple of experiments on this and we found out that a person could still receive engrams, but they were on the order of blowing one’s nose — snuff, and they were gone. The really aberrative engrams are those which are very early in the bank. Later engrams, if they have nothing on which to hang, have nothing to hold them down.

I have given you some idea of what Dianetics is, and the direction in which it is going. In the next lecture I am going to tell you what Dianetics can’t do and what it can do.

There are too many questions here to try to answer them all, but I will try to answer them in my next book.