The computation of a case is of number one importance in that it gives you the mechanical basics and a method by which you can take a set of factors in the case and understand the case, as opposed to attempting to go through just the routine of putting a person in reverie, sending him back down the track, finding nothing, and bringing him up to present time.

In this lecture we will go further into the subject of accessibility. I have drawn an Accessibility Chart which complements the Standard Procedure Chart, so that one can look at any case, spot it on the chart and know what to do. This chart is for any person in any stage of processing.

The Accessibility Chart tells you how to compute. There is no variation in Standard Procedure. The chart just gives you a method of computing the state the case is in.

There is probably nothing more destructive in an inept auditor’s hands than repeater technique — or you might call it right-back-at-you technique. The right-back-at-you technique is highly destructive to the preclear’s pride and actually lays into the case a communication break lock.

1. Personality accessible for conversation

The fellow says, “I can’t get anything.”

So the auditor says, “All right, repeat ‘I can’t get anything.”’

The preclear as a human being has told the auditor “I can’t get anything.” Yes, it may be out of an engram, but when the auditor has said “All right, repeat ‘I can’t get anything,”’ he has told the preclear in effect that the preclear hasn’t any thought of his own about it and that he isn’t communicating with the auditor.

So it becomes doubly important or doubly destructive. By throwing that phrase back at him, the auditor is also breaking down the preclear’s reality because he is saying “You can’t think,” which is part of the preclear’s reality.

There are two divisions to a case: one is the mechanical trouble with a case and the other is the statement trouble with a case.

Language has gotten into the engrams and as such is very important.

That is the statement side of the case. Engrams contain statements which can accomplish practically all the trouble that anyone could figure out. “I can’t see,” “I can’t feel” and “I can’t hear” are examples of such statements. So there is the statement side of the case.

The fellow says, “I can’t get at this, I can’t get into it,” and the auditor is assuming that all that’s wrong with this case is a statement, whereas most of the trouble with this case is over on the mechanical side of the ledger. That has to do with the mechanics of mind operation: too much emotion on the case, the person invalidated too often, the mind’s effort to reach this and that in the case, and the way engrams are stacked up and crossed over and scrambled, just in terms of other perceptics than statements.

You can see by looking at this chart that there are various points of entrance. This chart covers all cases, even the psychotic. It is the first time we’ve paid any attention to the psychotic on a Standard Procedure Chart. He belongs there and he always has. He sits at this first point, “Personality accessible for conversation,” and above that point he is inaccessible. This is simply the matter of a man’s personality being accessible, and we have to work the case until the person’s personality is accessible. That is the point of entrance on a psychotic.

For instance, a piano playing hasn’t any words in it, yet sometimes an engram will contain a piano playing. It is just a perceptic of sound. It doesn’t say “I don’t like music,” yet we notice that this preclear does not like music. So if the auditor says “Well, let’s go over this phrase ‘I don’t like music,”’ he is assuming immediately that it is over on the statement side of the case.

The wrong point of entrance on a psychotic is to try to hit engrams before the personality is accessible. Sometimes you have to, but get the personality accessible first if you possibly can. That is the proper procedure and you do it by establishing any communication with him. You establish any awareness in him for the world around him (communication is awareness). You establish any affinity with him, and that could be by sympathy or by mimicking him and getting him to mimic you to some degree. Establish some reality with him on the lines of agreement — getting him to think about something, getting him to agree with something — and you can establish that by agreeing with him.

About eighty percent of what is wrong with this case is over on the mechanical side. In this instance it is the perceptic of piano music that he is objecting to, because it restimulates an engram.Now, let’s just for a moment wipe out language and everything it means as far as aberration is concerned, just abandon it for a moment as aberrative, and we will find out that what we have left on the case is pain, tactile, the whole category of the perceptics, too much emotion, invalidation’s and numerous other factors — in other words, we have the mechanics of mind operation.

You enter the case of a psychotic by touching on any one of these three points, and you try to pick it up, even just a little bit, because the moment you do, the other two points are going to increase as well. If you can get a psychotic’s attention, you can sometimes just tell him to come up to present time and he will come out of the engram in which he is held.

As a matter of fact, a person can actually have invalidation’s without any recourse to language whatsoever. For instance, a girl is cooking a cake, and she is very proudly going along. Of course, she is getting flour on the floor and so forth. She has just cracked her second dozen eggs when Mama comes in, takes one look at this mess, shoves her aside and goes to work cleaning it up. Although not a word has been said, that is an invalidation.

So in order to process a psychotic, or a person who is not willing to go along with you on what you are trying to do, you have got to establish affinity, reality and communication with his personality.

The action says, “You have no place in this kitchen. You can’t bake a cake.” Furthermore it says immediately, “I haven’t enough affinity for you to be tolerant of your actions.” As a result there is a mechanical situation which, although it hasn’t any language in it, is a perfectly valid lock.

This goes further than just dealing with a psychotic. When you begin to audit a person who has been rather outraged as to processing, start establishing a little communication, affinity and reality, and just by talking to him and picking up these points you can bring him up to where he will be willing to work with you.You can pick up reality on some people simply by convincing them that what you are going to do works.

Another example would be a fellow who is knocked down. Somebody comes along and kicks him, and there is the sound of shoes, the tactile of being kicked, the pain of being kicked and the kinesthesia of being kicked. Somebody else walks along and kicks him some more. Another person picks him up and slams him into a chair someplace, cuffs him a couple of times and walks away. There hasn’t been a word said, but there is an engram. This engram has got physical pain in it and it has got an affinity break in it.

So, by communicating with a person you can bring him into processing. You wouldn’t argue with him, because reality depends upon an agreement, and arguing is disagreement. Regardless of whether what you are saying makes good sense, a person with whom you are arguing is not going to permit you to process him.

The person couldn’t talk back, nobody tried to reason with him in any way, he had no purpose for being there and he was helpless, so there is a break right straight across the boards. It is understandable how, as a mechanical engram, that would in itself give a person a certain hostility. So the next time he is tired and he hears a foot scuff or a kicking sound, the engram becomes restimulated and he feels that human beings are kicking him.

Suppose the fellow says, “I know very well what causes my trouble. I have a libido complex on my left udipis.”

Another example would be an automobile accident where a man looks in through the car door and finds his wife dead. Not a single word has been said. There is the physical fact of her death. That is a grief engram, but it doesn’t contain the statement “You have to feel sorry.”

You say, “Well, that’s probably very true; that’s very interesting. Tell me more about it.”

These are the mechanics of mind operation.

He does, and you say, “Well, you know, some of the people we’ve found very often did have this sort of thing.” And the first thing you know, he is willing to have some auditing.

A man cannot go back down his own time track which is supercharged with emotion and be inside himself all the way back down that track. That is a mechanical inability. There is no statement preventing it. The thing is just too highly charged.

If the person refuses to talk to you the first time you see him, sometimes if you just go away and see him later and you are always nice to him, soon you will find that you can talk to him a little bit further — enough to get him to agree with you about something and for you to agree with him about something. Pick up these three points, and you have got his case started. But you won’t do it by arguing. You won’t do it by hammering around at him.

You are trying to get off the charge.

You won’t accomplish a thing unless you go according to these affinity, communication and reality tenets.

Let’s say that every time your preclear, as a little boy, started to cry, somebody came up to him and hit him without saying a word. That is a control circuit on a mechanical level. The person is actually saying “You can’t cry,” but he isn’t verbalizing it.

So, what is meant by point 1 on the chart, “Personality accessible for conversation,” is a person who will actually sit and answer questions on an inventory or talk to you about his condition without being highly antagonistic toward you and what you are doing. This is an actual point of case entrance which you have to establish, and if that case entrance point is not known to you, you won’t try to establish it. That is the first thing you have to establish with every person you process, no matter what his magnitude of neurosis is.

That is how engrams work.

Once this person will sit and talk to you, you want to be able to do some Straightwire. An inventory is the entrance into Straightwire. You start giving this person an inventory and suddenly he is actually working — he is being processed. It is supposedly just an inventory to be filled out, but he is being processed, he is in communication with you, and you are demonstrating to him that you are interested in what has happened to him in his life. The affinity level will pick up and his accessibility will come way up. This applies to anybody.

Dogs, for instance, have very full engram banks, and they have never rationalized a single word in them. The words in them are just that much more sound. Did you ever see a neurotic dog? There are lots of them. There are neurotic and psychotic horses as well. No language in there says “You are crazy.” The horse is just crazy. He gets crazy on a mechanical level. He has been beaten, punished, manhandled and mauled about until he finally gets up to a point where he is crazy. If you get on this horse and start to run down the road, beware! He is likely to run right straight into a tree, head on. Then people will look at you and say, “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know how to ride?”

The second point on the chart is “Memory accessible for Straightwire.” You can ask him the proper questions that constitute Straightwire. Find out whose valence he is in, who his wife reminds him of, who the last person was that insulted him, and so on. If you are doing your job well, this person will be getting lots of relief and will go into a slight tone 4 and be able to laugh about things. Just by working with him in this fashion you are releasing attention units and bringing more and more of him up into present time. You are getting the materials with which you are going to work in terms of circuitry, and you’re finding out some interesting things about him.

That horse is crazy. He isn’t crazy because you said something to him while you were riding him that restimulated him. Just the kinesthesia of having somebody on him and the tactile of having a bit in his mouth were enough to restimulate his engram.

In picking up the materials of circuitry, you want to find out who the people were who surrounded this person, what they had to say, what they did, what their dramatizations were and what their relations were between each other and with the preclear And you want to find out if possible the exact words with which those people expressed themselves. In this way you will learn a great deal about the engram bank of this person. Try to find out specifically who on the case is the dominant, which is to say, a person who seeks to dominate.

We are dealing with twenty-six perceptics. Language is just an. incidental. It is a special aspect of the perceptics of sound and sight.

A case becomes difficult when the childhood of the preclear was spent with other people than those who surrounded his prenatal period. A lot of the data is missing. However, this person will still be selectively affected by the people who have surrounded him later, so you want to find out about those people too. You may be able to find out about early material even if his parents died when he was two years of age.

Words read off a page are occasionally much less aberrative than words which are heard, because there is a mechanical force to the sound of a voice, there are actual sound waves to it, whereas sight waves seldom glare enough. But if you get a big, glaring electric sign, you will very often get a very heavy impact off a written word.

You want material there so that you can start to put together your picture of the preclear’s case. When you have gotten straight memory working fine, then start into the affinity, reality and communication locks, and run them. This is something you do on any case; it is point 3 on the chart, “Affinity, reality and communication break locks accessible.” Either by straight memory, or by putting the preclear in reverie and sending him to the moment, you are trying to take the tension out of the breaks of affinity, the breaks of communication and the breaks of reality.

We pulled a circuit off a fellow once who had been standing in a penny arcade with his hands on an electric shocker machine, and right above him was this sign in neon lights which said, in effect, “Learn to control yourself!”

Naturally, on an affinity line you may find yourself working, not with a lock, but with an emotional engram. You may just be able to slide into one and get it off the case. At that moment, that is the thing to do, because at this point you are testing the case for circuits. Here, at point 3, you are not only restoring to the case a great many attention units so that this person is more alert and more aware, but you are finding out whether or not this material is available and whether or not there are any circuits on the case which would suppress grief and apathy engrams.

You occasionally will get a computation on a case which says that the written word is aberrative and the spoken word is not. Therefore everything that that person reads becomes aberrative, but spoken words are less aberrative to him.

So it is at this point that you put the person in reverie and try to get some grief or apathy off the case in order to raise the general tone of the case.

Speech is a specialized portion of sound and sight; it is a subdivision of two of the twenty-six perceptics. That should give you an idea of its relative importance.

Here is an example which shows how important this is. A person had three psychotic points on a Minnesota Multiphasic, and an auditor was given orders to do nothing but blow a grief charge on this case. Just one grief charge was blown, the person was brought back and retested, and lo and behold, two of the points of psychosis had dropped out of the case.

However, our language gets rationalized by the analyzer and goes back and reevaluates engrams. They are restimulated, and because we deal so much with speech, and so many people are so worried about speech, and these mechanical actions are translated so easily into speech, speech has a special aberrative value all its own.

The aberrative pattern of this case did not change. There was just so much less of it because of blowing that one grief charge that it became something with which the person could live quite safely.

Speech is learned by mimicry and the observation of action. A baby hears the words get out and sees somebody leave. He thereafter learns, when this is seen several times, what get out means. Or somebody says “Get out” to the baby and boots him out, so that is what it means. It is a special sound accompanied by something going out; and there’s kinesthesia, tactile, visio and all sorts of things mixed up in the definition of get out. The words mean an action. The person knows that now, and when this reappears down in the engram bank, the earlier engram can get restimulated mechanically.

Charges on the affinity, reality and communication line are so called because they charge up the engrams. The engram is sitting there all ready to roll, but it is not going to have any terrific effect upon the case unless it gets charged up. Later on, life, by losses and so forth, charges up the engram bank. The engram bank without any later incidents would not be charged up at all — it would be null. But the later incidents furnish the energy, which goes into the bank, activates it and makes the engrams very serious in their effect upon the preclear

The mechanics of restimulation belong at a mechanical level. Any sound or perceptic can restimulate an engram, not just speech. For instance, a person is kicked and knocked out. The next point of the engram is the sound of footsteps and there is also the smell of some onion soup cooking. Then there is some music playing off in the distance and an old car driving up the street somewhere. That is the total of the engram.

As an analogy, imagine a ten-thousand-volt short circuit, with the current running in the wrong direction. Should one just throw a hand grenade into the machine to stop it, or should he try to bleed off some of the current which is pouring into the short circuit? He would try to bleed off some of that current. Similarly you would try to run out these affinity, reality and communication engrams to get the charge off the engram bank so the engrams would not then very badly affect the person.

This person may then go on for a long time without that engram being restimulated. Then one day he is very tired.

So, between point 3, “ARC break locks accessible,” and point 4, “Circuits accessible,” is the first point on the chart that you put a person in reverie; you are trying to see if you can get off a grief engram or a communication break engram. If you can’t get these things off the case easily, you go straight into the problem of circuits because the only things that suppress engrams are circuits, such as “You must not cry,” “You must not show your emotions,” “You can’t be yourself.” So at this point on the chart you are looking for circuits, and you are looking for the dominant person in the preclear’s environ.

A person has to be a bit weary for an engram to key in. Therefore it is tough to key in the first one because the child’s analytical awareness is very high; but as engrams cut in, his analyzer, as its standard state, cuts down more and more until engrams are very easy to restimulate, because the engram bank only restimulates when the analyzer itself is attenuated in its awareness. Sometimes children go until they are four or five years of age before they get any engrams keyed in. Then they start into the dwindling spiral, and after a while get to be adults!

There are ways and means of blowing circuits. You can knock out circuits with the preclear out of valence. Circuits are usually charged up, and you have to get line charge or other material off the case to discharge them. Try to get points where Mama said “Don’t cry” and so on. I’m not referring now only to control circuits; they are a rather special type of circuit. You are also looking for commands like “You’ve got to protect yourself,” or “I’ve got to protect you from yourself.” With that type of circuitry in a case the person is being protected from himself, he is protecting himself from himself, and he is not going to be able to get to any of himself. The circuit is an interposition there, and so that circuit has got to be run out.

So this person is tired, he hears some footsteps and smells some onion soup. We don’t need the car or any of the rest of the perceptics, or even the kick. Because he is tired, he has analytical attenuation. All of a sudden this person feels nervous; he feels he should leave or do something, and he can’t quite focus his attention on what is wrong. Actually that is the trouble with engrams: they don’t tell the analyzer what to fix the attention on. So the person’s attention scatters. He knows something is wrong in the environment but he can’t find it and so becomes nervous.

I want you to understand that when we say circuitry, we are talking about “you” commands, like “I’ve got to protect you”; and when we talk about aberrative commands in general, we are talking about “I” commands, such as “I have a cold,” “I am stupid.” Those are not circuits. They are just aberrative.

After that, when cars go by which sound like that old car, he has a slight awareness of something, but it is merely a fear of the unknown because he cannot focus on what it is.

“You” commands are circuits. They come from the mouths of dominant people in the vicinity of the preclear and have to be picked up as early as possible. You often have to run circuitry completely out of valence just to deintensify it.

That is how an engram keys in. After that, any perceptic which is in that engram can key it in some more.

Blowing circuitry out of a case is the most skillful operation in Dianetics. It requires a full knowledge of running back a chain of engrams. If you don’t know how to do it, you are not going to be able to crack anything but pianola cases. The difference between a case which presents a problem and a pianola case is chiefly a difference of circuitry. Circuitry includes as a subheading “control circuitry”; you are shooting for the whole field of circuitry.

You’ll notice there was no speech in this. If we start to add in the speech, we find out that this engram would have been much more serious if it had had a “Stay there” or a “You can’t feel anything” or something similar in there. Now we are adding in the statement side of the engram. And that is why human beings can evidently go crazier than horses; the statement side can be run in over on the mechanical side and it just compounds the felony. So statements should not be your main point of concentration.

So we get the circuits out of the case, and then we go back and break some locks. We just keep oscillating between knocking out circuits and breaking locks, and then trying to get out some ARC engrams to get the charge off. That is the next point on the chart, “Affinity, reality and communication engrams accessible.” If we aren’t successful in that we go back and break some more locks, shoot out some more circuits, and then try again to get some ARC engrams. And we just keep doing this.

It happens that this whole society is just a little bit aberrated on the subject of language. It should be. English is one of the most aberrative languages that exist, except for Japanese. Japanese is just crowded with homonyms and its slang is something to wonder at. It is worse than English, but English is right behind it. Take any English cliché literally and it means something else, so the language is a sort of double- or triple-talk language. To the reactive mind it means one thing, to the analytical mind it means another.

When an auditor first puts the preclear into reverie — between “ARC break locks accessible” and “Circuits accessible” — he should find out if the preclear will go into his own valence in the basic area and run and erase an engram, because sometimes he will. A certain percentage of cases will promptly go down into the basic area, pick up sonic, go into their own valence and start erasing engrams. However, the better proportion of cases won’t. But even though the preclear is out of valence, you run out what you contact, deintensifying and reducing it. You get the basic on its chain, reduce that, and then you come back up the line and knock out some more circuits.

The way one would deaberrate a language would be to fix it up so that its literal meaning and its analytical meaning were identical, so that no analytical phrase, when read literally, would do anything but define — differentiate.

If the preclear can’t run in the basic area, it means that the bank has been charged up by affinity, communication and reality break engrams to a point where he cannot get into the basic area and be himself. The standard manifestation of a very seriously affected case is exteriorization as he goes back down the track. He is not in himself, he just sees himself.

There is an appalling lack of differentiation in pronouns in the English language. A language should be built on the basis of exactly defining every pronoun. If a fellow’s name is George, his personal pronoun I should probably be George-A. And when somebody is speaking to him the phrase would probably be George-E. And if you were speaking to a whole crowd, you would address one person in it and say George-E-plus. In this fashion you would get a relatively unaberrated language.

Occasionally, people who are exteriorizing badly as they go back down the track will get into themselves merely if you tell them to, and at that point they can run affinity, reality and communication engrams. They cannot discharge one of these ARC break engrams out of valence.

So we are dealing with the mechanical side of the case, divorced from language, and then we put the language on top of it.

It is standard to start running a highly charged engram with the preclear out of valence, but by the second or third pass over it you can get him into his own valence, at which moment he will run off the charge. Sometimes cases are just out of valence and exteriorized at these great emotional moments or blunted reality moments on the track, and interior in themselves at the other points on the track. A very serious case is out of himself all the way down the track, including pleasure moments. It isn’t safe to be in himself, so he is standing outside of himself, and there is a terrific amount of charge on the case.

But let’s keep them divorced for a moment more. Here we have this person who was kicked, and the engram has been restimulated. Then one day this person has his dog kicked to death before his eyes. All right, there is grief. There has still not been a word said along this line. The early engram had to do with kicking and with footsteps, and the same perceptics appear in the killing of the dog and there is now a grief charge. The original level at which this first engram could operate was not very high. It wasn’t supercharged; it just had some pain in it and so on. But now we get a grief charge there and the intensity, or charge-up, of the engram comes way up.

That is the mechanical reason a person is exteriorized. The computational reason is continuous commands from somebody to the effect of “Watch yourself,” “I can’t be myself around you,” and so forth, which are actual valence shifters and can shift him outside himself. But supercharged emotion, communication breaks and reality breaks can charge up the bank to such an extent that the person is continually exteriorized. When you get a case like this, work to get the person interiorized before you do too much else with him. Even that person can sometimes be gotten down into the basic area to run out an engram.

If we take off the dog’s death in processing, the tension on that engram goes back to where it was before. This is why you take the grief charges off the bank. It is mechanical.

Our next point, then, is to knock enough circuits out of the case to get the preclear into his own valence.

Here is an engram of somebody being kicked, with certain perceptics in it, and here is a grief charge with similar perceptics which intensifies this earlier engram way up from five volts to five thousand, immediately.

I have been asked whether, if the preclear can be gotten into the basic area at this point, you would go ahead and work him there, or whether the auditor should nevertheless go after circuitry.

Even though no pain has taken place in this second engram, it is a terrific loss and there is physical pain on which it can append. But there has to be this first engram. If the dog-being-kicked-to-death incident couldn’t latch on to an earlier engram, it would be an incident which could be taken apart more or less analytically. A person would feel bad about the dog being kicked, but he wouldn’t get a psychosis or neurosis as a result thereof. He would just have a reaction to the dog being kicked, and after that he would probably not react because of it. He might say, computationally and otherwise, “I don’t like dogs being kicked. That was an awfully good dog, and I think I will go get another dog.” He could stand up to it. But having the earlier physical pain under it, it supercharges the lower engram.

The only reason one would be working the preclear in the basic area at this point would be so you could get to the circuitry. Don’t think you are making an erasure on a case at this point. He is not erasing; you are getting deintensification.

That is why you have got to get these affinity, reality and communication break engrams off the case, because it takes the tension out of the bank. It is still mechanical.

Just because the preclear can get the text of an engram does not mean he is running engrams. I have seen people run scores of hours without anybody trying to get the circuits off the case, and what happens is the case will finally ball up to the point where the preclear starts yawning when sent back ten minutes on the track. In other words, the whole bank gets so loaded up with anaten that when you send the person back to last night’s dinner or something he’ll yawn. There is unconsciousness coming off inconsequential moments.

The statement side of the engram compounds the felony. For instance, after this fellow has been kicked, and then his dog is kicked to death, someone comes along and says, “You can’t cry,” “You have to control yourself,” and “You have to be a big boy like Father,” giving him a valence shifter and a shut-off and so forth.

The only reason that you would go into basic area engrams and run them out of valence without the proper somatics and so on is to get the circuits off the case. The target is to get the circuits off the case so that you can discharge some of the charge out of these affinity, reality and communication engrams. Any time you can discharge some of these ARC break engrams you are moving the case closer to the own valence step on the chart. That is your goal.

In processing this person, the auditor finds out about the dog and finds out that there is probably an earlier engram in there that this one is appended to. He tries to get the preclear to go through this secondary engram and nothing happens, because it is held down by a standard type of circuitry — ”You can’t cry,” “You have to be a big boy,” and so on — which suppresses the charge. The auditor is trying to get this charge to blow so the bank will deintensify, and it doesn’t; so he has got to find out why it doesn’t blow.

Circuits are not run just because they are aberrative. They are run so that the case will resolve. In fact, in the bulk of cases you can’t discharge affinity, reality and communication engrams until you get the circuits off the case.

He asks the preclear “Who in your family didn’t like tears?” “Who in your family didn’t like to cry?” and so forth, and traces it back, and finally finds the dominant on the case. He traces the circuit phrase back as early as he can on the case and deintensifies it, and then he comes back to this engram. He doesn’t just abandon the thing and say, “Well, fine, we’ve got this fellow’s emotions turned on.”

These circuits say, “You must not cry,” “You mustn’t show your emotions,” “You’ve got to be strong,” “You’ve got to be brave,” “You mustn’t ever be yourself,” “Don’t do that, now,” “You mustn’t be weak,” “Little boys don’t cry,” and so forth.

There is only one reason the auditor is trying to turn these things on, and that is so that he can get the five thousand volts out of the situation. So, he gets rid of the circuits “You can’t cry” and “You have to be a big boy like Father,” and when he has got the worst of that off the case he comes back and addresses the moment the dog was kicked to death; the fellow cries, and the case deintensifies. The bank is then not as highly charged, so the person can go back down the track more easily.

This type of thing can be on the case so heavily that, for instance, when you run the preclear back to the point where his dog died (and you know that this fellow’s life just practically went to pieces at that moment), his chest heaves but he says off-handedly, “Yes, my dog died. Oh, well, you know, little boys have dogs and they get attached to them, and the dog died.”

This is so significant that there is no psychotic or severely neurotic person in existence (unless it is by virtue of having had his brains hacked up or shot out) who didn’t get that way through a dominant — a person trying to dominate him or other individuals, someone seeking to control other people. The worse the dominance and the heavier it is, the more liable is the individual to psychosis and neurosis — because that’s the circuitry; that’s what keeps the bank charged.

You look at this preclear and say, “Are you inside yourself?” “Well, no.”

If the person could have seen the dog kicked to death and then just sat down and wept about it, he would have deintensified it right there and gotten off probably about eighty or ninety percent of that charge, leaving only about ten percent for the auditor to pick up afterwards. Even if he could have gotten off fifty percent of it, it wouldn’t have assisted, to any marked degree, his future aberrative pattern. But because of charge suppressed in the past by control circuitry or other types of circuitry, he has a very tough bank. It has been supercharged by all this emotion which is inaccessible to him, having been curtained off by circuitry.

Run it several times, through and through, and try to get something off the case on this dog’s death, because that is a charge. It is this kind of charge that charges up the engram bank. If one could get all the charge off a case, the engram bank wouldn’t be able to do anything to the preclear

When you start into a case and the fellow says “I can’t get into that,” give him the benefit of the doubt. Don’t go into statements. Look at it from the mechanical side of the case. This has to do, mostly, with the mechanics of mind operation.

So the fact that this fellow can’t cry about his dog alerts the auditor to the fact that somebody told him not to cry about his dog. That is a bit of a circuit which may lie in the same engram, and you can try to shoot it out. If you can’t get that, then try to find out what the major circuits are on this case about displaying emotion, and find the dominant who was saying “Control yourself,” “You mustn’t cry,” and so on. Somebody was laying circuits into this case. Find those circuits and start to run them back down the bank, and run out the basic engram which contains those circuits to get a reduction on it. Run it out of valence or any way you can, but get a reduction on it and the tension will ease.

Take an auditor who pays attention to nothing but mechanics and an auditor who pays attention to nothing but statements, and find out which one of them can resolve a rough case. You will find out that the auditor who pays attention to nothing but statements will not be able to, and the auditor who pays attention to nothing but mechanics will be able to resolve the case. That is the difference between these two things.

You will usually find that if you have got the circuit that is holding up the case, you can run it right down the bank and the preclear will go “Yow! Yow! Yow!” and really blow the charge. This circuit is lying on top of that charge. And if you are on the right circuit which if deintensified will resolve the case, that engram will blow. This is known as an exploder. It is not very hard to get the tension off one of these super circuitry engrams.

This does not mean statements are not important. It would be impossible to separate these things completely, but the auditor who paid attention to nothing but the mechanics — the charged bank, the physical pain on the bank, the perceptics and so forth — would have a better chance of resolving the case than a person who paid attention to nothing but the statements. Actually, to resolve the case you have got to pay attention to both.

The first time that the engram is run, and as you come down the bank looking for the earliest time, you may not find any charge on it. But if it’s the right one, that earliest one will have some sort of charge on it because it is being run up against its locks. The engram is getting the charge out of its locks. The preclear is out of valence and is crying somebody else’s tears. You are trying to settle him back into his own valence and trying to peel off those locks. A person in the prenatal area in his own valence does not display emotion. He does not display any emotion during that whole period. If he displays any emotion in the basic area, it is because he is out of valence or because a lock is lying right on top of the incident. Run it and the lock will pry off.

So pay attention to these mechanics of the case, of a bank supercharged with grief. Pay attention to the existence of the engram as something received personally rather than out of valence, and to the value of picking up, for instance, automobile sounds and pianos and so on out of engrams, because they’re all sounds. Then take the statement side of it and add that in to make a complete picture.

Anybody who is getting a head somatic in the basic area is not in his own valence. The basic area comes before the first missed period and at that time a zygote doesn’t have a head. So if someone has a localized somatic, he is running a command somatic of some sort or he is running way up the bank and the file clerk is giving the wrong answers.

When somebody says “I can’t get into it,” don’t ever say to him “Go over ‘I can’t get into it,”’ because you would be laying in a lock. You might just as well kick him!

The circuitry on a case interposes between the file clerk and “I,” so the file clerk is apt to give you almost anything for an answer. You can’t get straight answers off the case.

It is true that a person who knows he has engrams will begin to look for these engrams’ reaction in his awake speech, but as an auditor don’t coax him into it. Assume that in present time, with his analyzer on, he does not talk out of his engrams. Don’t ever throw at a person the fact that he is talking out of his engrams, or try to convince anybody he has engrams, because you are working right at the heart of insanity.

A person can’t lay circuits or an engram into himself. You can have a person who has a command “I have to believe what I say” or “You have to believe what you say”; then later, if he learns autohypnosis, for instance, what he says will become locks. But somebody has to have told him these things. Straightwire’s first law is that a person does not aberrate himself. He is aberrated by others.

It is relatively true that a person who is in present time — or even when he is stuck on the track — walking around in the workaday world, is not reacting to any enormous extent out of his engrams. Sure, he gets upset, and sure, he feels he can’t sit down and write a letter to anybody, and he isn’t doing so well, but just leave him alone as far as his having engrams is concerned. Don’t try, yourself, to assert control over other human beings because you know they have engrams. That is an Achilles’ heel, and it works both ways. That is an effort at controlling another human being, to try to convince him that he is doing what he is doing out of and because of his engrams. You would be invalidating him as an individual, by saying in effect “Aha, you haven’t got any ideas of your own. You’re nobody. You only talk out of your engrams. You only get these ideas from somebody else.” You could work on a person like that and probably wind him up in an insane asylum.

Ask someone, “Who in your life used to say ‘Control yourself’?” If the person looks at you for a moment and says “Well, I do, all the time,” and he can’t come up with anyone else, realize that he is so solidly in this other valence that he doesn’t know where his own valence is.

It would be even worse to feed the fellow’s statements back to him in processing for the purposes of repeater technique, because at that moment he is depending on you as an auditor. You are in solid communication with him. You are trying to punch up to him the reality of his past life, but there is no need to feed back his engramic commands to him to get processing done.

So at point 5 on the chart we are working affinity, reality and communication engrams. The auditor starts getting the charge off a case until he can’t get any more. Then he tries to run him in the basic area to get the person into his own valence and run out real engrams. With these, he runs out the whole engram, but if he can’t do it at that time, he comes back up and tries to run out some more affinity, reality and communication engrams. If he can’t get these, then he gets some more circuits off. When he gets the circuits off, he goes back and runs out some more affinity, reality and communication engrams. Then he returns the preclear to the basic area to try to run out some engrams. The auditor keeps this up as a continuing rotating process until he can run out an engram in the basic area with twenty-six perceptics.

He knows he is going back after engrams. What you should do is consult his file clerk. The preclear says, “I can’t get into it.” What you don’t do is say to the file clerk “Is this the phrase which is keeping us out of the engram?” The file clerk will probably say yes, but it is possibly about twenty-two engrams up the bank from the one you want. So you are evaluating, then, to pick up that phrase which the preclear has just used and feed it back to him. That would be preempting the duties of the file clerk.

One doesn’t run engrams as a steady practice until he can run them with twenty-six perceptics and get a complete and full erasure in the basic area.

Now, this is the right way: The fellow is lying there and he says, “I can’t get into it.” The auditor thinks it is a statement that is keeping him from getting into it. So the auditor says, “The file clerk will give us the phrase which is preventing an entrance into this. When I count from one to five that phrase will flash into your mind. One-two-three-four-five (snap!).”

So, first the auditor gets enough locks off to get this person shaken loose on the track. Then he puts the person into reverie and moves him on the track, and tries to get off some emotion or some communication breaks. If he can’t do that, he tries to get the basic area. Sometimes the preclear will go into his own valence and run out a full engram. If that doesn’t work, the auditor knows he is dealing with circuits. So he finds out what the circuits are, generally by Straightwire, and runs them out. In running out the circuits he will go into the basic area, but all he is after is circuits. He is not going for an erasure; that is not his purpose.

The fellow may or may not come up with “I can’t get into it.” If he does, his file clerk gave it to him. And if he compares it to what he just said, he usually says, “Ha-ha, I was talking out of an engram.” The auditor doesn’t punch it up. He doesn’t tell him “Oh, yes, you were.” The auditor lets the file clerk work with him on it, and the preclear won’t mind it a bit. The chances are pretty good that the phrase that will come up is “There isn’t any door here,” not “I can’t get into it.”

An auditor working in the basic area and just running people out of valence and so forth because he can get context doesn’t know his purpose. At this point the purpose is to find and deintensify circuits so that the person can run in his own valence and so that the auditor can reach the affinity, reality and communication engrams.

You get the actual material that is in the engram you are trying to reach by getting the flash answer from the file clerk. If the preclear’s file clerk isn’t working, there are other ways to go about it.

This is Standard Procedure.

The person who, while actually in the engram, tells you suddenly “I can’t get into it” is probably informing you analytically that he can’t get into it. The chances aren’t even fifty-fifty that he is talking out of that engram. The chances are very good that he is talking out of an engram that is someplace else on the track, and that by making him repeat that, you will jump him into another engram — completely aside from the fact that you will lay a lock into him by forbidding him to speak. That is saying, in effect, “Nothing is coming out of your analyzer; it’s just out of your engram bank after all, you bum.” There goes affinity, and you won’t get much processing done that way.

Now, you have gotten to where engrams are accessible for erasure, so you run them in the basic area for a while and start to get an erasure off the case. You erase engrams for a while and you’re doing just fine, and then suddenly the preclear doesn’t seem to be in his own valence anymore and is not doing too well. When this happens you should go right back over the whole process again, because what has happened is that you have taken a layer off the available engrams. Engrams lie in stacks like sandwiches, and the meat of the sandwich may be the engram, but the bread of that sandwich happens to be affinity, reality and communication break engrams. Now you have to get some charge off the bank before he can run some more engrams.

The latitude which has already been used on the subject of picking up the preclear’s words and feeding them back to him is, even at its narrowest, not justified by the results, because you can get a flash from the preclear and you very often get an entirely different phrase that explains the whole thing.

So you get some charge off the bank. You run some more circuits off and maybe find some other dominant person on the case. You straighten it up again and get some charge off — get off some more affinity, reality or communication engrams — and then you get down into the basic area again and you’ll find out that the preclear has some more engrams. You continue to erase in the basic area as long as you can with the preclear in his own valence, and when you can’t do that, you again get late life charge off the case (anything over two and a half years old). When you have actually blown some charge off the case, you again return to the basic area and continue the erasure.

It is true that a man running through an engram is more likely to use phrases out of that engram than he is out of his own analyzer, because his analyzer is shut down. So the reactive mind can come through much more easily when he is in the engram.

The whole process of clearing from beginning to end is an alteration of these two things: getting charge off and getting engrams off. You run the engrams out only when the preclear is in his own valence, but you can deintensify an engram with the person out of valence.

Very occasionally when the file clerk can’t get through well and the preclear is having a bad time, you know that the preclear is obeying some phrase — for instance, “I can’t talk” — because he has just used it. But he has used maybe fifteen or twenty phrases since then, so you fish back to the phrase “I can’t talk” that you know explains this and tell him to go over it. Probably the preclear won’t connect it with what he said before.

You run circuitry engrams so that this person’s auto control is deintensified. You want to get charge off so that you can run affinity, reality and communication engrams late in the case. You get these charges off later, and then you go earlier. An alternation from one to the other will finally accomplish the erasure of a case.

But don’t use it consecutively. Don’t pounce on him. Let the phrase go by. For instance, a person habitually says, “Oh, I don’t know, I just can’t see that,” and all of a sudden his visio goes off while he is running an engram. Say, “Could it be the phrase ‘I can’t see that’? Give me a yes or no,” and the person says, “Yes!”

Anyone who starts to try to erase a case which is consistently out of valence, out of contact, with no sonic or other perceptics, is not doing Dianetics.

Even in the present-time social concourse never say to someone “Oh, you’re just talking out of your engrams. You know that’s in an engram.” That is bad Dianetic manners. And never feed a preclear back his own conversation, because the preclear will go into a relative state of apathy. A case can be halted in its forward progress by too much of this and too much use of repeater technique. The chances are that the trouble with the case is mechanical anyway, unless you are shooting for circuitry.

The Dianetic auditor, when he finds out his preclear is not in good enough shape to run his engrams properly, is right in there trying to get off the heavy affinity, reality and communication engrams (which usually occur late). You have known these before as grief engrams, but there is more than just grief you can go after. The auditor runs these ARC engrams off to deintensify the bank so he can get at it.

If you are trying to get out basic area engrams and this person has a lot of difficulty trying to get phrases, then you haven’t got this case in a shape to erase engrams.

If you can’t get off the ARC engrams, then there are circuits and you get the circuits out, and in order to do that you have to run engrams out of the case.

Usually, if you can get the person into the early basic area and into his own valence, he will thereafter just run right straight on through the engram in his own valence without bouncing or getting misdirected None of the action phrases will really have any effect upon him, because he is listening to two people quarreling, or to Mama complaining, and he understands it for what it is. He’ll go through it three or four times, and it will be gone.

It is a continuing process and that is practically all there is to Standard Procedure. There is no other Standard Procedure.

When he is out of valence, however, and somebody says “Get out,” he gets out, because he isn’t well differentiated as to himself and other people. He has got himself confused with Mama, so he is in Mama’s valence.

Anything else that you are supposed to know in Dianetics as far as processing is concerned is how to accomplish one of these points. How do you get a circuit off? How do you trace a line of circuitry engrams down to the bottom and deintensify one there, and then what do you do after that?

Insanity is too close an identification. An identification of himself with another person makes him react to commands given to the other person.

This may seem somewhat different to Standard Procedure as you have learned it. I have tried to communicate it in the past as well as I knew how. Sometimes I find new methods of communicating it more easily. I generally discover these by analyzing what I myself do with cases.

For example, a person is running an incident in which he is being dragged along a hospital corridor, and a nurse says to an intern, “You had better go back after it.” The person’s lack of differentiation makes him think he is being talked to (he would have to be pretty well out of valence for this to happen), so he promptly goes earlier on the track in response to the nurse’s command.

It is a standard thing for somebody to come up to me and say, “I’ve got a case that’s running so-and-so and so-and-so.”

Action phrases are only action phrases when you are working people out of valence. But they are very important to watch because most people in the early parts of the case are out of valence.

And I say, “Yes, and he’s also doing this and this, isn’t he?” And the auditor says, “Yes; how did you know?”

A person who was solidly in his own valence would have a rather hard time getting and keeping a chronic somatic. But practically nobody is in his own valence because pain, all by itself, can knock a person out of valence.

So once in a while I ask myself, “Well, how the devil do you know?” It isn’t by instinct or by shooting dice. It has to be analyzed. Once in a while I can break down the analysis a little more closely. Then I can make it more easily communicated and shape it up a little better by finding out what hasn’t gone across to people.

This is the mechanical side again. Pain itself is a valence shifter. Grief charges are also valence shifters, all by themselves, without any valence shifting command.

The Degrees of Accessibility Chart makes it go across more easily and puts it where an auditor can look at a case and say, “Ah, this person is out of valence.” Or someone will come up to him in a nervous, fearful manner, stuttering and stammering, and instead of starting into the case on “I can’t talk,” the auditor gets charge off the case, because this person is suppressed on the tone scale to a point where his communication line is almost zero. Therefore the auditor knows his reality is bad.

None of the aspects of the mechanics of mental operation could be created by language alone. The mechanical aspects of the mind, such as bouncers and denyers and so on, have their actual beginning over in the mind’s mechanical operation, and the words merely designate some point of it. The person in the society, through learning the language, has agreed that a certain statement means a certain mechanical thing in the physical world, so when this statement appears in an engram, it approximates the mechanical thing.

It has been hard to measure a person’s concept of reality in the past, but if he communicates on that level you know his reality is poor. And if you look over his affinity level you will find out that that is very bad as well. When the preclear talks in this nervous, fearful manner, and he tells you “I like people, I like people,” he is talking out of an engram, because the mechanical charge on the bank is saying that people are very dangerous; what he’s telling you is just a defensive mechanism. So you would work on picking up affinity by finding out who broke affinity with this person. In addition, you would find out who smashed his concept of reality.

You couldn’t turn a person into somebody else just by a valence shifter unless the person already had a mechanical gimmick in his mind that let him turn into somebody else. There are plenty of horses around in some other horse’s valence, and there are plenty of dogs around that are in their masters’ valences and vice versa. That works both ways.

If someone is saying “I’ve often thought to myself, ‘The Russians are liable to land on the coast tomorrow,”’ you can see that his reality is bad and that what he is going to tell you is probably a little bit off.

Standard Procedure is as it is. It is unchanged. These points are all in Standard Procedure. However, this outline tells you how to compute on a case so as to know when to use the various points of Standard Procedure.

If a person is wearing glasses, his communication line is low and you have to pick up affinity and reality. Glasses don’t mean a very low communication line, but they mean it is down just that much. I would normally not start processing anyone who was wearing glasses by simply running them down the track into basic area engrams. I would pick up a lot of charge off this case first.

I have advanced your knowledge of Dianetics to the point of being able to look over a case and know at what point to enter the case. You ought to be able to take the Accessibility Chart, look it over and look over your preclear and say “Well, this case starts here.” In other words, if it has lots of grief on it, and no particular circuitry, this case starts at point 5. Or you can look at a case that is just a bit tougher and say, “Well, look, we can start this case by breaking circuits right now.”

I want to tell you again that every session of processing is concluded by running pleasure moments and by using Straightwire on the session of processing itself (unless you were doing Straightwire in the session, in which case you would omit it). But if you have placed the person in reverie at any time during the session, make sure that when you bring him up to present time you run a pleasure moment and then Straightwire, with him in present time, making him stay in present time and remember the past. In this way you will get rid of the artificial locks that build up, and you’ll keep a case happier and far more stable.

The auditor sees that this fellow is super-controlled, so he asks him, “Do you ever cry? How did you feel when your father died?”

We want one hundred percent of the people who go through a certification school to be able to crack the toughest cases that walk. At first, when we first started teaching, maybe only twenty-five percent could have tackled a tough case, but it has been increasing since then. With the introduction of this Accessibility Chart we may get that up to eighty or ninety percent case-crackers. That’s what we’re trying to do.

“Well, I guess I felt pretty bad but I didn’t cry about it.”

As a matter of fact, he will look at the auditor and a couple of moments later his chest is heaving. The auditor thinks to himself, “Suppression of affinity, reality, communication engrams — circuits.” So he starts this case off by getting circuits. If he can’t get any circuits, he has to start breaking a few locks.

“When was the last time somebody told you you were a liar?”

The preclear says, “Oh, I don’t know. Nobody really ever — oh, yes, my wife. Yes, she is always saying I’m a liar.”

“Let’s remember the first time your wife said you were a liar.”

Down the track he goes on Straightwire, and the auditor starts knocking communication break locks off the case.

Or he says, “When was the last time somebody told you you were blind?” “Nobody would ever say anything like that to me.”

“Okay, when was the last time somebody said that you just couldn’t see anything?” “Oh, ‘couldn’t see anything’ — that’s my boss.”

And up come some attention units into present time, because that is of course another communication lock: he can’t see. Remember that communication is perceptics.

Start this case by breaking some locks, and after a while you’ll get it to a point where the preclear can remember some circuits. Get him to do that, and then run some circuits and shoot them off the case. Then maybe you can run some ARC break engrams.

You work another case a few sessions, or maybe even just one session, and you see that he is pretty badly occluded. Well, just see if you can get some memory off him. “Do you remember the house you lived in when you had measles?”

And the preclear says, “I never remember where I live.” “Well, do you remember one of your school teachers?” “I never remember people.”

“Do you remember a comic strip character?” “I never remember people.”

“Who am I?” “Oh, you’re Joe.”

“Well, you remembered me. So you can remember people.” “Ha! So I did! Yes, that’s right.”

That is how Straightwire is entered on that echelon.

If you are talking to somebody and you say “What did you have to eat for breakfast?” and the person keeps on going “A-a-a-a-a-a,” and you say “Well, how do you feel?” and he says “A-a-a-a-a,” that preclear is out of communication! So you enter his case above point 1 on the Accessibility Chart, and you just ask him about this and that, and maybe pick up a matchbox and give it to him, or offer him a cigarette, or just sit with him there. Or if he is going “A-a-a-a,” you can go “A-a-a-a,” too.

The person may look at you and say, “That’s wrong with you too, is it?”

And you say, “Yes, I’ve been troubled with that most of my life. It’s terrible, isn’t it?” Try to jockey in there and get any contact.

To take a worse case, you sit down and say, “You know that epizudic which you have consistently? I think I could do something for that.”

And he says sneeringly, “Yeah? Well, doctors are no good.” “Well, this isn’t medicine. This is Dianetics.”

“Yeah, one of them quack things.”

“Well, I think something could be done for this.”

“Aw, what are you talking about? Nobody can do anything for this. That’s my epizudic.”

Well, you have got a job of reaching his personality, because he is not there. He is accessible only to disagreement. But talk to him a while and you might finally find out that he is violently interested in horse racing. So you say, “You know, I won five bucks on a horse once.”

“Yeah, you did?”

“Yeah, it was out at Tanforan, and the horse’s name was Heartbroken.”

“Oh, old Heartbroken! You know, I won twenty-four bucks on Heartbroken one time! It was back in the spring of 1925!”

You have gotten into communication. You go along the line a bit further, perhaps seeing the person on many occasions, and the first thing you know, this person is accessible to Straightwire. There’s where you enter the case.

So the Accessibility Chart is actually a chart of case entrance.