This chapter has been assembled from three fragments of tape recordings dated 7 November 1950. We have been unable to locate all of the parts of the tape recording.

It is very simple for a person to get into an animal’s valence. I knew a girl once that was in the valence of a horse. And there was a fellow that was in the valence of a pig; facial changes had taken place on this person so that he looked like one, too. It’s very interesting how all of this happens.

In this lecture I am going to cover the file clerk and the somatic strip.

When you are dealing with cases of nonreality, you can best spot them by trying to find out whether they ever dare occupy their own valence. They are usually out-of-valence cases. They may be able to go into valence in the basic area but are so faintly in contact — nonsonic and that sort of thing — that they are pretty hard to work. It is a good idea to invest time on this person, just to pick up reality, communication and affinity and get him rolling.

If the preclear is moving on the track the file clerk and the somatic strip should work for you in this way: “The file clerk will give us the engram necessary to resolve the case. The somatic strip will go to the beginning of the engram. When I count from one to five and snap my fingers, the first phrase of the engram will flash into your mind.” The phrase flashes, he starts repeating it, the somatic turns on as he settles into the engram and you then run the engram.

This reminds me of another case. This person was in a dog’s valence and the dog hadn’t occupied very much time in his life so he only had about five or six spots on the time track where he could see anything. The rest of it was very badly occluded. A professional auditor worked this case for engrams (he was very anxious to get an engram to show up, because this person needed some convincing as far as Dianetics was concerned); but this fellow could have been taken into all the engrams in the world and would not have known what to do with them. He was out of valence, his sense of reality was very poor, his affinity level was very poor and he had not a friend in the world.

That is the way a case ought to run. If it doesn’t run that way you have a case that is stuck on the track, is out of valence, or has a tremendous amount of control circuitry. It is one of those three things. There are no other wild or strange reasons.

I took him back down the track and for about forty-five minutes did nothing but try to contact pleasure moments. I found this dog and got him out of the dog’s valence into his own valence at the age of about 4. I brought him up the track and showed him a couple more things and he was still way out of valence. Everything on that whole case from beginning to end was just way removed.

Of course, if the person is out of valence you should try to get him into his own valence, which is a fairly hard job. The easiest way to do it is to blow some grief off the case, if you can get grief when he is out of his own valence:

This person wouldn’t be able to contact an engram if you gave him one. He was highly skeptical and didn’t know anything about affinity, communication and reality. The funny thing was, he sat there for a moment then blinked and said, “Isn’t that funny? Everything looks more real to me than it’s looked for practically all my life. And you know, I feel I like you. I never felt I liked anybody before.”

Sometimes when a person first runs grief and you ask him if he is in his own valence, he doesn’t quite understand what you mean. The solution is to say “Do you see yourself?” If the answer is yes, tell him to get inside himself; and every now and then, by repeating this simple act, you will put him into his own valence and he can blow the grief. Don’t expect anybody to blow any grief unless he is in his own valence. He will merely be crying somebody else’s tears and they don’t count.

This was a strange one. And of course he started communicating like mad, just talking like a jaybird. But that was forty-five minutes of trying to run pleasure moments, and it brought his sense of reality way up.

For instance, you start to run a grief discharge. The person is outside himself, seeing himself, so you persuade him to get inside himself and the grief discharge will occasionally run off as a result.

You can continue on with this sort of thing and try to knock out some of these light charges, try to get him in his own valence — in other words, just work with him and try to get him oriented with his own life. You don’t have to jump in and start running engrams right off the bat. Running engrams is terrifically important and that is what we are trying to do. But before you run engrams you had better get the case in shape so that it will run engrams. There is no reason to keep on trying to run engrams when you can’t run engrams.

Remember, too, that as you start through a grief discharge with a person out of valence and have him recount it two or three times, the preclear will usually slide into his own valence. That is the ordinary procedure if you find somebody, during a grief moment, outside himself looking at somebody else.

If you have somebody who keeps telling you that he doesn’t know whether or not hey in an engram and he is having a hard time, it is worth your while to spend a little time bringing him up to a point where the next time you try to run an engram, he’s in an engram! Now his sense of reality is picked up. It does no good to run one in which you are not getting the somatic. You should be able to get at least 50 percent of the somatic out of it.One of the ways to find engrams on this type of case is to put him on a Guk freewheel and check him over every few days. You will find that he will start to run these little light somatics for a while as he’s freewheeling. (Of course you get him unstuck on the track first, because you can’t freewheel somebody who is stuck on the track.) After three or four or five days go by, all of a sudden he will start to get big somatics. He has sort of rolled the somatics out of his case enough so he is settling into his own valence. That all by itself will produce a better-running case.

Another way, and usually the best way, to get a person into his own valence is to get him into the basic area where he does not have any commands throwing him out of valence prior to the moments into which you are placing him. He will then get into his own valence and sonic will turn on. You shouldn’t overlook the fact that down in the basic area a person can be gotten into his own valence and can get sonic.

Now it is an odd and peculiar thing that the strength of a somatic, all by itself, will convince people of an engram. No matter what this person’s sense of reality is, if you get him into an engram that’s hot enough he won’t be skeptical anymore. He will be convinced that engrams exist, and after that he will be pretty easy to run.

Many cases get snarled up because the auditor is willing to run material which is too late, and after that he runs the person out of valence and then has the devil’s own time getting the preclear into his own valence in the basic area.

But somewhere along the line this person’s case might deteriorate. He might have an environmental upset or something of the sort, and his sense of reality would get very thin and poor. If you couldn’t get him into another engram that was good and hot, you could just start pecking away at this case by making him remember and running him through locks, and finally get him patched up. It is an odd thing that right at the beginning of Dianetics, in its researches, when I knew absolutely nothing about prenatals or birth or that these bear traps were waiting for me, I was producing results with people just along the line of running out locks.

If you are not getting flash answers off someone, it is because a circuit or two circuits or two hundred circuits or two thousand circuits interpose between the file clerk and “I.” The flash will come up and start through to “I” but will then hit three or four shunts and some resistances and go around and be reevolved, hit the dub-in circuits, go into a small slot and come out the other end saying something not even remotely similar.When you start knocking out these circuits you will notice that the file clerk will start picking up in his efficacy. There isn’t any reason to believe otherwise. When the file clerk is giving you strange data it is not the file clerk. And when he is giving you no data, there is interposition. There is no reason to think anything else is happening than just circuits.

I knew that engrams existed, but I was continually confronted with locks and would spend the beginning of most cases handling locks. This became routine. So even after I knew about prenatals and basic-basic, I would still work locks in the opening rounds of the case. I would have the person return to this and that, even them up on the perceptics and get them adjusted on the case. I turned on sonic in these people!

There can be many kinds of circuits, such as occlusion circuits and so on, but the circuit which really gives trouble is the control circuit: “I’ve got to do it myself” or “Nobody can do it but myself,” “You’ve got to control yourself,” “I have lost all control,” “You’ve got to have control,” and so forth.

Sometimes I would spend 10 to 15 hours doing nothing but going back and finding the time that Mama slapped him, and the time at Halloween when the two bad boys jumped out and said “Boo! “ or the time he fell off his tricycle. I would get the person used to auditing, and only then send him all the way back down the track to an engram, move him into his own valence, run the engram out and start the case on an erasure.

If the file clerk and the somatic strip are working together efficiently, you can run this case right on out. But you have to get them into shape so that they work, because about 25 percent of the time they apparently don’t. This is not a fair measure, however, because the file clerk and the somatic strip very often work for me but not for other people. I noticed that as a peculiarity. It’s more a matter of confidence; somebody else won’t be quite as confident. The reason they apparently don’t work may not only be circuits, it could also be basic personality.

One could spend 25 hours at the beginning of every case doing this and he would save a hundred hours in the process of clearing. It evidently collects a lot of attention units out of the bank, and the case doesn’t stick on the time track as easily and it isn’t likely to bog down.

When it comes to a broken-down basic personality, you have a problem on your hands. Basic personality will sometimes quit. Somebody starts into the case and picks up a prenatal and says, “Well, we’re not interested in that. Let’s go someplace else. Let’s pick up a grief discharge,” and runs that halfway out. “Now, are you in your own valence?”

There was a technique earlier in Dianetics which you might find useful. If you run out a person’s birth and it refuses to lie flat, parts of it keep going into recession and coming back again, bring the birth up to present time, run it in present time and it will knock out completely.

The preclear says, “Yes,” so he tries to go on running this grief discharge. Eventually the auditor says, “Are you sure you are in your own valence?” (The preclear is crying.) “Are you sure this isn’t sitting on an earlier grief discharge? Was this really your grandmother?” About that time basic personality, if he had a machine gun, would sit up and fire. I have seen basic personality get pretty vengeful.

For instance, someone comes to you with a fine case of asthma, and you find out that you can get him to the beginning of birth. You start to run birth through and discover it is going to be a tough one; so you spend about five hours running birth until it is pretty flat, particularly those portions of it that pertain to asthma. Then you bring birth up to present time with the command “Birth will now come up to present time,” and you run it in present time. You will find out that the engram will change position on the track if you do that. This is something you can use if you get a case that is restimulated in that fashion.

So, people are sometimes asked to compute on their cases because of the anxiety of the auditor. The auditor wants very much for the preclear to get over some chronic somatic or some aberration, so he will hit a phrase which to him explains it perfectly and the preclear doesn’t see it. The auditor tells him to compute on it and anxiously says, “Now, think that over. Isn’t that the cause of your rheumatoid bursitis?”

In many cases you can run birth out; you discover that you can find one prenatal and that the one prenatal will erase, after which birth will reduce. Then three or four childhood locks can be flattened out, and you can bring the person up to present time, run all these things out again, and the preclear’s chronic lumbosis will disappear. You can then call this person a fairly good release.

The preclear says, “No.”

There are quite a few things in Dianetics which have been picked up, researched and passed over. It is one of the crosses which people at the Foundation have to bear. I didn’t have time to write everything down. Dianetics was sweeping along at such a rate, people were coming at me in such streams, that I would simply make notes and try to file them. Any stenographer or secretary that I had was so busy typing up stories with which I was supporting the research, and anything I wrote in terms of words was so jealously guarded by me for stories to carry along the research, that I wasn’t putting down any research.

And the auditor says, “Are you sure now? Just go over the phrase carefully again, ‘I ache in every joint,”’ because he is so convinced. But this is probably not the phrase. It isn’t a matter of computation. It simply isn’t the phrase that causes the rheumatoid bursitis.

A university professor walked in one day and wanted to validate Dianetics. He presented me with a big list and said, “I want you to go over these and tell me about them, and then I will go ahead with my work.”

The phrase that causes any one of these chronic somatics has charge on it. You can run out all manner of explanatory phrases in a case. There would probably be, in any case that has some particular condition, hundreds of phrases which could explain that condition.

I looked over this list, and it said: “History of Dianetics: first researches; early tenets. First cases: complete description. Changes in the evolution of a technique.” It would have taken me about three months to have outlined what he wanted, and about two years to have written it. Meanwhile at the Foundation there were people to be trained, and things were going along at a terrific rate. So we adopted at that time a policy to the effect that “Hubbard will carry it around in his head and maybe in his old age he will tell us all about it. In the meantime, we will just backtrack as best we can and get this thing squared around.” I don’t have the time to sit down and talk to somebody for three months, just to make an outline of this stuff!

The answer is to keep running Standard Procedure for a release. Sooner or later you will run into the phrase which counts, and that one when hit, or the incident when hit, will suddenly find your preclear in excellent condition. An auditor is wasting time telling a preclear to compute on the case.

So there are a lot of things that have been discovered and passed over as not being optimumly workable due to bugs in them, things that didn’t lead directly on a straight, clear road to a positive solution. We get some of these in the mail quite regularly as brand-new discoveries. That is something that can’t be helped, when you consider the body of the research and the enormous spread of this field.

Another idea that ran wild was the idea that one had to get a case restimulated to find engrams! In other words, one had to find engrams and restimulate them so that one could find engrams. But you have got your hands on engrams, so why do you want to restimulate these engrams in order to find engrams? It is totally non sequitur and would practically ruin a case. The first thing that would happen on this practice would be that basic personality would quit.

I am covering this for a particular reason. A student of Dianetics is going to find, many times, that he thinks he has a very valid departure from Standard Procedure which he wants to use. If he is an expert on Standard Procedure and if Standard Procedure works for him invariably, then he has written his own ticket to go and think something else up and use it. But if he is shaky with Standard Procedure and doesn’t know it cold, he must not run anything else in on it. The chances are it has already been run in on it and thrown away. It doesn’t take too long to learn Standard Procedure and to practice up to where these tools are very sure and secure in a person’s hands — perhaps a few months — and then he can cut himself loose and do what he wants to do. He will probably come back to Standard Procedure. Most students do.

The preclear lies down in full confidence of the auditor. The auditor says, “Let’s go into the prenatal area. All right, now do you contact that incident? Have you got a somatic?” Supposing just as the preclear starts to run the somatic the auditor says, “Now let’s go up postnatal and see if we can find some grief,” and the preclear goes up, then just as he starts to find some grief the auditor says, “Let’s go to birth. All right, you feel those contractions now? You feel them real good? Now, let’s go to conception” — this procedure would snarl up the case horribly.

But we have here in Standard Procedure something which keeps people out of trouble and gets the engrams, something which has been tested over and over again. It can be communicated to people easily. It has its various workable factors and, as far as we know today, has no bugs.

You do not restimulate engrams in order to find engrams. You have got to knock out everything you contact; otherwise basic personality is going to get sore, and he is going to quit.

What happens on the relay of the information to new auditors, if they keep to Standard Procedure, is that they are going to get good, solid, positive results, and they will become more and more skilled in practice until they hit the limit and carry along with it. There are no uncrackable cases as far as we’ve learned. It is a mistake for an auditor to run just one case. In the first place, he learns Dianetics as it applies to this case. His tools get rusty, and his imagination stultifies on him. The best way to conduct a private practice is to start picking up people and opening their cases. Team them up and send them home to work on each other, and check-run them regularly. There aren’t enough professional auditors around for one to tie himself down to Mrs. Gotbucks. He should collect teams, open the cases of two people and get them rolling along, maybe carry them through to a point where their cases are well open or even released, and then let them audit each other. He should correct their auditing and let them pay for a case opening every once in a while to get them rolling again. He should let them call him on the phone and find out what is going on with their cases, and so on.

I had one preclear moving smoothly up and down the track one time (he had been stuck most of his life); we were hitting engrams and reducing them, his visio and sonic were turning on, and this case was running beautifully. The file clerk and the somatic strip were working in there one right after the other. I left it alone for about three weeks, at the end of which I picked it up again and started to run it, and there was no file clerk or somatic strip — nothing! I might as well have been standing there talking to the wall.

Occasionally he will get back one of the cases that was running so well for him and find out that the person he assigned to this case was doing nothing but pattycake, and a case which was beautifully opened is now bogged down and has to be opened up again. Then he has to spend a little time training, and so forth, in order to get people to work smoothly.

This case was in much worse shape than it had been when I first laid my hands on it. I really scratched my head over this one until I found out that someone had been “working” this case for three weeks. He had taken the preclear down the track a little way and contacted something, then had brought him back up to present time so that he could go earlier to contact something else, and then had brought him up to present time again and sent him back earlier. Of course, what was happening was that he was restimulating an engram with a “Come up to present time” command on it, and present time had come into collision with this causing basic personality to quit. This person was evidently still somewhat willing to work but could not get anything. The file clerk was saying, “I have enough trouble in life without handing these things out, because I can’t get them back into the file again after these dumb fools don’t run them out!”

Standard Procedure will open cases smoothly and keep them rolling. One has to overcome lack of experience and build up his faith in his tools and his ability to work cases.

Actually it is a computational problem. You will recognize these cases. They go to sleep on you, they dramatize, and they evidently just travel up and down the track without finding anything. Those three things happen on these cases.

One of the things that an auditor builds up is a fund of phrases and experiences, so that when he looks at a case and has seen this situation before, he simply fills in what is missing, the preclear hits it, and off they go.

So, reduce everything you contact using good Standard Procedure. If you do so and work well with your preclear basic personality gets more and more confident, and the more confident he gets, the tougher the engram he will hand up, and the case will resolve much more swiftly.

Before one has built all that up, there are going to be cases an auditor runs into over which he will just tear his hair out, and even cases on which he will just quit. Don’t feel that you have got to hit 100 percent average in cases. Hit 50 percent and you will be doing well. Then, go back and handle the real toughies after you have had a lot of experience.

This is why a certified auditor gets a case running so much faster than anybody else. In the first place, as a certified auditor, he has some prestige. Basic personality pricks up his ears and says, “Well, it’s not going to be Aunt Suzie running me now; this fellow knows his business,” so he will give some aid. Don’t betray that assistance. Do it exactly according to Standard Procedure and basic personality will agree with you. This is not even a basic personality that has been educated in Dianetics; this is a basic personality straight off the street who knows nothing about Dianetics, knows nothing about a file clerk or a somatic strip, and knows no terminology. Just for a test, don’t use terminology. Bring this person in, lay him down on the couch and merely say something like “A moment of pain will occur to you. Now the first words that were spoken in the moment of the pain will sort of come into your mind and I want you to repeat those a few times,” and you will be running engrams right away.

Don’t permit yourself to bog down on a very, very tough case. All cases are somewhat complicated, but they are not all tough. And if you take unto yourself a diet of nothing but tough cases, your morale and your confidence in your tools is going to go down. Your ability to audit will then go down. So you want to pick up a variety of cases; don’t work just one. And as you work longer and longer and get better and better, then you will find out that your opinion of what is a tough case will change, until a person really has to be inaccessible, stuck on the time track after a hundred electric shocks and so on, to be what you would consider a real tough case. This is in the realm of experience.

If this person doesn’t get that, you would start shooting for circuitry, not by saying so, but merely by saying “Who in your family used to say ‘Control yourself’?” He will think for a moment, then say, “My father.”

There is one thing an auditor has to develop which is very necessary to him. It is something that everyone should know about, called “dialogue sense.” (Writers have this naturally.) You are dealing with engrams, but the personnel of engrams are human beings, and human beings talk. Until a person has been around a long time listening to people talk, with this purpose in mind, he doesn’t really register what people say. He doesn’t make the specialized observation which would then permit him to write the dialogue of these people. Unless an auditor makes a specialized investigation he will not have an instinct as to what is going to be said next, and an auditor who doesn’t have dialogue sense is a lost auditor. But every human being who talks has some little grain of this sense, and it is something that is very easily developed.

“Just how did he say it?”

If Mama says “I just don’t have anything to wear,” and you have any idea of Papa at all, you could probably dub in “Oh, no. You’re not going to go into that again!” You spot that Papa has been talking to Mama just before this, but all of a sudden there is no more conversation. If you know the personnel in the engram at all, you know that conversations don’t end on that note. And “You’re not going to go into that again” is enough to kick the preclear out of the engram.

“‘Well, you’ve got to take it calm and easy. You’ve got to hold yourself down. You’ve got to get a grip on yourself.’ Yes, that’s what he always used to say.”

As an auditor you get very well acquainted with the person’s parents. You get up to a point where you know just exactly what they are going to say next, and if they don’t say it you become very sharp and take a look over this engram to find out what is happening.

“All right, let’s contact the dramatization,” and he will contact it. You don’t even have to tell him he is traveling on a track or that he has a time track or anything else. And soon you will be running engrams all the way up and down the track.

The most rudimentary part of dialogue sense calls for the auditor to know how people talk when they talk to themselves and how they talk when they are talking to somebody else, so that he can spot whether or not somebody else is there. One of the main tricks that will be played on an auditor continually is for somebody to be in another valence and do nothing but run off Mama’s or Papa’s conversation, assuring the auditor that this is just monologuing. Well, it certainly isn’t monologing. Papa is right there and he is talking. In fact, his phrases are probably the superaberrative phrases on the case, but they are not being run; they are merely being restimulated.

It is also fascinating that you don’t have to tell a person that prenatals exist. You simply tell them to go to the earliest moment of pain or discomfort and soon they will be wound up in the prenatal area without having heard any of this.

A case can be bogged by running it way out of valence — for example, running only Mama’s conversation. The auditor must keep his ears open. Mama says, “I just don’t know whatb the matter with you.... Well, don’t say that again.... All men are alike.” This runs off as an engram, yet about 50 percent of it is missing! Papa had something to say between each one of those sentences. But, being out of valence, the preclear is not recording it and may not even be aware of the fact that Papa is there, because the preclear is not thinking very well when he runs through these engrams. So, it is up to the auditor to alert the preclear to the fact that somebody else might be present. He can even get a file clerk flash on the fact.

When you are dealing with Standard Procedure you are dealing with a parallel to mind operations. And if one violates the way that the mind runs by gross and constant errors, basic personality will quit and refuse to cooperate with the auditor.

The severely neurotic and the psychotic have very, very sharp and solid valence walls. They get over into one of these valences and nothing else comes into this valence at all. Then the auditor must be aware of the fact that somebody else is probably talking.

You will pick up cases where this has happened, and you are going to be in the same situation that I am in constantly. Nobody ever willingly brings me an easy case. Once in a while on a demonstration out in the countryside I’ll look through the audience and pick up a case that I know will run. And it is with peculiar satisfaction that I see a running case.

Go down to an institution and listen to a dramatizing psychotic dramatize an engram. You will find out that it has got gaps in it; it is non sequitur. That is why it sounds so strange to people. The other person’s conversation is missing in the engram because the psychotic is dramatizing just one valence. It is the other valence, probably, which is holding him suppressed on the track. So it would not do anybody any good just to let this psychotic continue to go through this engram that he is dramatizing, without shifting his valence.

However, if a case is suddenly thrown in my lap, I know very well that this case is stuck, basic personality has quit, an engram is in solid restimulation that nobody else has been able to touch, and that 10 or 15 people have attempted to handle this case and made all their mistakes on it, too. Then finally it comes to me and I am supposed to undo this thing in half an hour, which is really tough. I have become very quick at spotting bad auditing. I am probably the world’s greatest expert on bad auditing; I have had to run so much of it out of people.

You can change the whole dramatization of a psychotic sometimes just by saying “Now what would your papa say?” And the person goes into a completely different dramatization of the same engram. Make him run off what Papa said a few times and you can occasionally release some tension. All you are trying to do with this fellow is get him up to present time.

Occasionally it is with great satisfaction that somebody hands me a preclear who has a tough case on whom fairly good auditing has been done, but that is an exception. Usually people will take a very tough case and complicate it with bad auditing, and then I will get hold of this case. And I always do the same thing: I go to the first time the preclear was audited. It is rare that I find the auditor and the bad auditing later than the first time. But if I found good auditing there the first time, I would keep coming forward trying to find out if there had been another auditor on the case, and then I would run out the first time he or she audited this case. By running the first session, I go immediately into the first error and drop into the first engram that was left unreduced and handle that. Basic personality will buy this; I have never had him do otherwise. He says all of a sudden, “Well, that’s okay; I’ll work this far. I’ve been over this ground anyhow and we might as well go into that engram. We have been there already.” You go through it and reduce two or three of these engrams and soon basic personality has pricked up his ears and said, “Hey, let’s roll!” and the case starts moving.

It requires dialogue sense. One is listening to people talk. Don’t ever treat an engram any other way. They have human beings in them that are talking, and you should know what human beings say. Just for practice, open your ears as you walk around the town and listen to people talking. Find out what they are saying to each other. You will be amazed to find out that you have probably never listened before. They say the strangest things!

Step Two, A: 4, l says that if the file clerk and the somatic strip indicate a stuck case, try all prescribed methods to free it on the track and failing that go to Step Three. Freeing somebody on the track isn’t easy, but it can be done.

Of course, this is old data to a writer. Somebody showed me the fact that writers and engineers seem to have somewhat of a priority on being good auditors, but writers seem to be able to do it extremely well. What it finally boiled down to was dialogue sense. That is actually all a writer has got — a little more imagination on dialogue that can be fitted into a case. But you can develop that.

Something further on trying all prescribed methods is the fact that a lot of people are partially stuck. So lets take up the analogy of attention units, which consists of postulating that a person has 1,000 units and that a certain number of these units are tied up in the reactive bank and a certain number of them are free to think with and to remember. These units are of various kinds; some are monitor units and some are free units. But using this analogy we find that where a person sends back 2 units to a datum, he is remembering that datum. If he sends back 50, 60 or 70 of the 100 which he still has free after 900 have been tied up in the reactive bank, he is returning; and if he sends back all of his 100, he is reliving.

Look over this question of reality, communication and affinity. Check up how well the preclear is running. Try Straightwire on the auditing session which you have had with your preclear and see what happens. Watch the effect of picking up this sense of reality by running a little bit of something, even an incident of boredom or an incident of fear, if you can’t get grief off a preclear After looking these things over, reassay each case that you are working.

However, remember that we have postulated that about 900 units in this one case are tied up in the reactive bank. I have seen people with engrams in an enormous state of restimulation all up and down the track who could still move freely on the track. They had enough units to spare in spite of all this to go on running some semblance of pianola.

Practically every preclear that you will work on is actually stuck on the track.

We could postulate one of two things. We could say that there are monitor units or units which actually compose the central “I” of the mind, the “me” — a special type of unit which goes to make up “I” — and that when those units get tied up on the track this person is really stuck; or we could simply say that the bulk of the units are stuck on the track. Either way it turns out the same.

The person who is really stuck on the track is unmistakable. Anybody who is occluded has the majority of his attention units stuck on the track.

The reason you are processing people is because they are stuck on the track. So, when we take up this problem, we are actually talking about a spectrum again. We are talking about a person who is 5 percent stuck or 10 percent stuck or 80 percent stuck or 90 percent stuck or 100 percent stuck.

When we have a person who is 100 percent stuck on the track, we have somebody that would practically have to be blasted loose with a pneumatic drill. Such a person would be talking with the accent he had and would know no more than he knew when he was that old. That is the psychotic. He is 100 percent stuck on the track. He gets 100 percent stuck in a prenatal, for example, and rolls up into a fetal position, has to be fed through a tube, can’t perform any bodily functions and has no control over his physical being at all. That is one type of psychosis. Or he is 100 percent stuck at the age of 2 with attendant difficulties. That’s another type of psychosis. Or he is 100 percent stuck at the age of 14. That’s another type of psychosis. It so happens that they are all just 100 percent stuck on the track reliving the moment.

The people you are mainly going to handle are those who are considered sane enough to be normal. But they have so many units stuck in one place that they can’t move above or below a certain place; they aren’t free-running on the track. Those are the people you are going to worry about. Although the number of units which they actually have stuck there are perhaps only 30 percent, they still haven’t enough units to move up and down on the track.

That is an analogy. We haven’t any substantiating facts for it. This is just the way cases behave, and if you think of it in that fashion you will be better able to see how to resolve it.

What you are trying to do is spring loose attention units from this point. There are commands there — call-backs, holders. denyers and so forth — which demand that the person stay right where he is, and these commands are forcefully enough restimulated so that the bulk of his attention units are right there.

Ask this person, “How old are you?” and he says, “Twelve — I mean I’m 29.”

It is also interesting how much you will learn about facial expressions and so forth. You say, “How old are you?” And sometimes there will be a slight change in the person’s facial expression as he says “Twenty-nine.”

You say, “What was the first flash that you got?” And he will say, “I didn’t get any flash.”

“Didn’t any number occur to you at first?” “Yes, 12.” You want to watch that.

There is another facial expression that might be of assistance to you. When a person is stuck on the track where you have been running an engram and you start him back up the track by saying “Come up to present time,” if he opens his eyes immediately, he is stuck right on the track at that point, because he opened his eyes there; this was present time as far as he was concerned.

The way he should come up to present time is as follows: You say, “Come up to present time,” and there should be a pause before he opens his eyes. Then you say, “How old are you?” and he should give you his proper age. In other words, there is a time lag and the time lag is expressed by the eyelids. These are things you learn in the course of observation.

Sometimes you run somebody whose eyelids habitually fly open, who tells you he is not stuck when you know very well that he is. You don’t argue with him. You just try to go through the whole procedure of getting him unstuck.

Now, during processing you are continually sticking somebody on the track; because any time you locate an engram and you start repeating the first phrases of it, you are bringing all the attention units available into that engram. But you are sticking the person on purpose and you are running an engram with those attention units. During the course of running an engram you pour attention units into it in order to get attention units out of it. This is a problem of income and outgo, and your outgo in this case must never be less than the income.

A reduction gives you, let’s say, 100 percent income. You have got all the attention units available in the case running this engram except those that are still anchored in and orienting on present time. As you run through it you are investing in this engram all the attention units you can possibly grab. The reason you do this is to get every attention unit out of this engram that was ever bound up in it. You want to get all the attention units back. You want this to be an efficient operation.

The reason you are running this engram is because it either potentially or actually ties up attention units. An engram’s danger is in the fact that it can seize attention units and restimulate. When an engram is restimulated, attention units have to go down the track to where the engram is and they get tied up there. And they will stay there until the engram is run or until, by some accident, something else calls for more emergency, at which point they will sometimes pull out of it.

ACTH has the wonderful facility of blowing attention units out of engram A into engram B. but unfortunately it doesn’t blow the attention units out of engram A into present time. For instance, a person is getting along just fine except that he has some bad arthritis in his left hip; he is not worried about such things as his wife leaving him. Then they shoot him with ACTH and suddenly he has diabetes and becomes extremely jealous. In other words, the man’s behavior pattern and his physiological troubles shift. This has been very puzzling to people in the field. ACTH is about as dangerous as playing with a small panther, because one doesn’t know which engram the person will go into. Very often one was better off to have left it alone in the first place.

Cortisone also has the effect of moving a preclear who is in one engram to some other random engram in his bank and tying up the bulk of his attention units in it without doing any more about it.

The point I am making is that you, as an auditor, tie up engrams on the track, but then you untie them. Therefore, you might say that processing is the process of sticking people on the track and unsticking them again, so you had better be extremely good at it. And you had better pay considerable attention to how you blast people loose, because the process of blasting them loose and the process of processing are exactly the same thing.

Every time you run an engram, you are moving down into an area and running out something that would normally tie the person up on the track. If you failed to run out or reduce the engram and merely brought him up to present time again, you would have tied him up on the track, and in order to start the case again you would have to unstick him. Usually it is much simpler when you are doing it in processing because there are a specific number of solid holders in an engram, and once the engram is being run the preclear knows where he is, so you are not doing it in the dark.

What makes being stuck on the track seem so very dangerous is when you don’t know where the person is stuck. You didn’t track him into this place; he doesn’t know where he got into this thing, and you have added to that the factor of hunting for a needle in a haystack. This person has several thousand engrams and he is stuck in one of them. Actually, for all practical purposes, he is stuck in hundreds of them, but there is one principal engram in which he is stuck, and you have got to find that engram and unstick him in order to get the case rolling.

Bad auditing can also stick somebody in an engram. The usual way it happens is for the auditor to get into the engram, hit a bouncer, not know that he has hit a bouncer and let the preclear bounce out of it. Now it is not known to the “I” of the preclear or to the auditor that an engram has been restimulated and that the preclear has bounced out of it.

A bouncer is a species of holder. The action of a bouncer is a very mysterious thing. It is as if a bouncer puts an attention unit or a set of attention units down the track with a walkie-talkie. They are very definitely connected with “I.” Once the bouncer has bounced, the preclear is obviously not in the engram because the somatic will turn off to a large degree; but he is certainly not out of it. He is still very much in contact with it and the engram is alive and restimulated.

If we carried this through on a postulate that there is a certain type of attention unit which makes up “I,” we would say that this type of attention unit releases, but that standard utility attention units (the kind that just sit around for memory and so forth) had been left stuck when you hit a bouncer.

So don’t ever make the mistake of believing that because a person has bounced out of an engram he is out of the engram. “I” units may be out of the engram but there is enough there to cause plenty of trouble; and if you let him bounce out of one engram, then out of another engram and another and another, by the time you go a certain distance you will have five, six, eight, ten engrams restimulated but not thoroughly reduced, and you will find the case suddenly stalled.

The best way to start a stalled case is to go back to the first session of auditing and start running it and try to find out what was done wrong. Usually you will find one of two things: The person has bounced out of the engram or he has hit an “engram ender” (a false statement, such as a phrase which says “I’m finished” or “I’m all through this”) and he will tell you so — ”That’s the end of it.” He won’t necessarily use the words in the engram. He will say, “That’s the end of the engram,” and the unalert auditor who does not pay any attention to bodily functions or aspects of the preclear, such as twitches and so on, but says, “All right, let’s just go to another engram,” has left that engram in restimulation.

So, the art of processing is knowing firstly how to get somebody stuck in an engram, and secondly how to unstick them. It is a continuous, repeating process, one after the other. And when you start a case, you could start it on either part of the cycle. Open one case and you will find out it is already stuck on the track; open another and you will find out it is moving on the track.

It should not mean any great amount of difficulty or sorrow to you to find somebody stuck on the track. You are sticking and unsticking people on the track all the time, and you should not get upset because somebody is stuck. That is the usual, rather than the unusual. But in processing you must know how to stick and unstick people on the track.

The way you stick somebody on the track is to tell the file clerk to give you the engram necessary to resolve the case, have the somatic strip go to the beginning of the engram, then count from one to five, snap your fingers and tell the preclear to repeat the first phrase four or five times. If he did that and there happened to be a holder in there anyplace, and if you were to just get up and walk off from the case at that point, you would have somebody stuck on the track.

Let us say that auditor A fixes a preclear up so he is stuck on the track and then walks away. Auditor B walks in. Now let us suppose that the preclear has an amnesia on what has gone on before and doesn’t tell auditor B anything about auditor A. It is now auditor B’s problem to find out what engram it was that stuck the preclear and to unstick him.

Of course, that engram can be somewhere up or down the bank, the fifteenth or twentieth on a chain, or the fourth or fifth from the basic on that chain. Basic is simply the first engram of a similar type — the earliest.

It doesn’t matter which engram it is; the point is that it is always on a chain. Engrams which are not on chains don’t exist. If it is well up the chain and many similar engrams exist before this point, it will be a tough one because it is not going to reduce; it is going to beat into recession. In other words, if you ran it 200 times it would temporarily disappear but three days later it would reappear. No matter how many times you ran it, once you let it go it would reappear three days after that. This is recession and something you shouldn’t overlook as one of the main things that could happen.

The only possible thing wrong with an engram is that it is too far up the chain on which it belongs. You want to get earlier and get the basic on the chain or something near the basic on the chain and get a reduction. The moment that you do that, the one that was beating into recession will deintensify automatically without any further attention.

So there is recession, reduction and erasure. You are after reductions and erasures. A reduction will occur rather rapidly; 10 or 12 recountings should get a reduction. If it starts up to 15, 20, 30, 40 or 50 recountings (if anybody was ever fool enough to recount an engram that many times), it is going into recession and it will just get tougher and tougher. The solution is very simple: There are earlier engrams.

A peculiar thing about a chain is that if it has a holder on it the holder will not be effective if you go back down earlier on the chain.

For example, Papa has the habit of hitting Mama over the head with a baseball bat and saying “Forget it.” Now, if you find Papa saying and doing this once, the probability is that it happened many times, so this type of action made a chain. But there was a first time that this happened as far as your preclear is concerned. Maybe it was the five-hundredth time that Papa did this, but the preclear wasn’t there before that point. When you find the earliest time that it occurred for the preclear and hit that incident or type of incident, it will knock into an erasure, usually, or a reduction. (If it’s up there around four or five months postconception, it will go into a reduction. If it’s down around a month or two weeks and it is the first incident of that type, it will knock out as an erasure.)

You have to learn to think in terms of chains and not consider that these are isolated incidents. There will be a few isolated incidents in a case. Birth is a chain of one in men, and in most women it’s a chain of several because her delivering herself of children will act up on her own birth; so the maternal delivery chain has as its inevitable basic the woman’s own birth.

Now, we have come down to the point of starting in the basic area and proceeding to present time on an erasure. The subject of how one goes ahead with an erasure is something that has been to some slight degree overlooked.

There is a certain dullness on the part of a file clerk. The file clerk would, of course, get more money and better working hours if he weren’t stupid on this one point. He is very fine and does a good job, but never seems to have gotten the point that the place to start is early. so the auditor must bring the case up to a point where he can then start giving the file clerk a few tips and tell the file clerk to go early; and when the auditor keeps insisting that he go early each time, the case will get a consecutive erasure. But unless you tell the file clerk that you want a consecutive erasure and that you want to get early, the file clerk will keep on handing you material on the late track or middle track, and he can hand you a lot of engrams which will merely reduce and not erase. One erasure is worth forty reductions!

What you want to do is to get to the bottom of the case — the earliest moment of pain or discomfort — and then get the next earliest moment of pain or discomfort and the next one, and as you walk up that bank, erase. You will find out that by the time you are up around two or three months, if you have got tension off the upper bank and some grief off the case, you will start getting erasures in a single pass and the second pass through you will get the yawn, but the word content will go that fast. That is a lot different than running one of these engrams over and over and over.

Early in the case it may take six, eight or ten passes to get an erasure, but every time you get one, there is that much more available in terms of mental force and the material goes out that much faster, until when you really get rolling on an erasure, around 30 engrams can be erased in two hours. I have even erased 55 long ones in two hours!

Engrams don’t come back if they are erased or deeply reduced. They do come back if they have gone into recession, and they occasionally come back if the auditor insists on running a case 100 percent out of valence. What would have occurred there is that the auditor would have run one or two valences out of the engram leaving the person’s own engram still there. The other valences in an engram are not important; they will come off in the normal course of human affairs. You want to get into the basic area and get the preclear into his own valence and start the erasure as soon as you can.

I was somewhat astonished to find that there are cases around who have been in processing for a long time but who are still being run rather late on the track and have not carried forward a systematic erasure. This is strictly an omission of Standard Procedure by not sticking with an erasure once it has been started.

The following can happen with an erasure: You can start in the basic area and erase for a while and then all of a sudden discover that you cannot erase anymore; you’ll find out a grief engram has come into view which can be blown at that time. So you go up the case and blow the grief engram and then return into the basic area and continue the erasure. What happens evidently is that when the erasure is interrupted in that fashion, people who blow the grief engram then start relying on the file clerk and start picking up material all over the track and reducing it. The person will get better, but he will not progress toward clear with any great rapidity.

I had a hard time trying to judge why other people could not do what I was doing, and the reason for it was that the file clerk didn’t know how early one had to get or how often one had to get early.

If you start up on a case and the preclear starts reducing things, there is some grief ready on that case or the auditor has simply overlooked four or five engrams in a row. Keep fighting down into the basic area and you will get erasures.

It is not necessary for you to demand of the file clerk that you go to conception immediately. What you want is the earliest moment of pain or discomfort, and you should be very insistent with the file clerk. If he hands you up conception, that’s just fine; but don’t start demanding conception, because there is a case here and there where conception is misplaced in the bank and you have to get later material before you can get the earlier material. It gets badly filed down in that corner of the bank. I have seen it happen where people have willy-nilly entered conception, they just demanded it and were very insistent on it, and then conception would not reduce.

I have never had any of this trouble myself for the good reason that I always ask for the earliest moment of pain or discomfort which can now be reached. If the preclear runs something at 2 years of age, I run it and reduce it and then say, “Now let’s go to a real early moment of pain or discomfort,” and get something around six months prenatal, with a very surprised file clerk. And then I say, “Well now, let’s go early,” and perhaps get two months postconception, and by this time the file clerk is really scratching his head saying, “What have I gotten into here? I didn’t know this material was lying around.”

You as the auditor, of course, are always smarter than the file clerk as far as an understanding is concerned. He has the edge on you in that he can look right straight at the bank and pick up what is handy there. But he will keep handing you late material until you demand and insist on getting early material.

I even went so far with a file clerk as to tell him I wouldn’t accept an engram unless it would erase, and for about ten hours the file clerk gave me nothing but engrams that would erase!

Don’t lose sight of your objective, which is to get the grief off the case first and then to get into the basic area and erase all the engrams in the case. And when the engrams stop erasing you have got some more grief coming up, so you might as well square that up and get back into the basic area again.