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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so we have to start along this lowest echelon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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