The tough case is now the concentration point in Dianetics. As a consequence, nearly everything I have told you has been in the direction of handling a tough case.
I am taking it for granted that you will be able to say to the preclear “Close your eyes. Anything I say to you in the future will be canceled when I utter the word canceled. The file clerk will now give us the engram necessary to resolve the case. When I count from one to five, the first phrase of the engram will flash into your mind. One-two-three-four-five (snap!)” and have the preclear give you the first phrase, go into valence, and run out the engram or reduce it.
But the file clerk (because file clerks are rather stupid in some ways — they don’t think, they merely handle files) has never quite gotten the point that you have to have early engrams. So keep asking the file clerk for the earliest engram, the earliest moment of pain or discomfort, “The file clerk will now give us the earliest moment of pain or discomfort, and the somatic strip will go to the beginning of the incident. When I count from one to five the first phrase of the incident will flash into your mind. One-two-three-four-five,” and roll out the incident with all perceptics and erase it. Then if it gets held up, go up to a secondary engram, take the charge off it, such as some grief, and then return to the bottom of the track and continue to erase the engram.
Anybody can do that, even a book auditor. There is nothing to it. All it requires is that the auditor listen to what the engram is and keep the preclear from bouncing when he hits bouncers. Actually if the preclear is exactly in valence the bouncers don’t bounce him, and if he is in valence in the prenatal area he doesn’t get any grief charge or any other kind of charge off an engram. It is extremely simple and I’m rather assuming that you know how to do this.
What we want to be able to handle is the case that is stuck on the track, out of valence, in nobody’s valence, with left/right reversals, bogged down with a grouper in full action on the case, with the bank so supercharged that all circuits are active, where everything you say to the preclear is answered by a demon circuit even when you are talking to “I”; a preclear who is completely inaccessible, who won’t do anything that you ask him to do, who won’t communicate with you, and who doesn’t like you and has no sense of reality — in other words, a normal person! Now, that is the kind of case we want to be able to crack, and if you can’t crack this case, you should not get a certificate. That’s a fact.
Nearly everybody in Dianetics now working with the Foundation is selected and graded professionally according to the measure of his skill and ability in cracking a tough case. Anybody can run an easy case. Al! you have to do is keep your head, keep the preclear going through the engram, return over it a few times, get an erasure and keep on going. In fact, the rudimentaries necessary for that could probably be learned in a few hours. The main thing that a person would have to learn in order to be able to do this would be to set up a circuit of his own so that he could think like an engram.
I ran into an auditor a short time ago who had let somebody run through a bouncer which didn’t translate readily into a bouncer; it did to the reactive mind but it didn’t to this auditor. This incident had the phrase “There’s a long dark road ahead,” and the auditor let the preclear go on through it. The only trouble was that he was running about four engrams later than that, and then he hit the phrase again up there and ran it through. He figured out that he was more or less in the same engram, so he ran it through again and now he was about six engrams above that. By the time his preclear got up to the age of fifteen the auditor decided that somewhere in the case he must have hit a bouncer! But having decided that, he still didn’t realize that thephrase “There’s a long dark road ahead” would act as a bouncer.
So, knowing the general rudiments and being able to translate spoken English into engramic English, in which a phrase like “I can’t make up my mind” is a holder, and so on, anybody ought to be able to run these pianola cases. A book auditor ought to be able to do that.
Your job is to learn how to crack tough cases, the ones that are bogged down with chronic somatics and aberrations and twitches, cases that are stuck on the track and have no affinity, reality or communication. These are the kind of cases we want you to be able to crack. Anybody can do the standard run-of-the-mill Dianetic miracle of taking somebody who is relatively wide open and knocking out the psychosis, the neurosis and the chronic somatics, and making a well person out of him. But I expect you to be able to handle the tough ones, the supercharged cases. There is no trouble with these cases. The actual gruesome truth of the matter is that sooner or later something will give, even with the toughest case on record, if you just keep slugging at it. And we just hope in such a slugging match that it isn’t the auditor that gives.
All of the material I’ve been giving you in these lectures, some of which is quite new, has been designed to assist your understanding of what makes a tough case tough. It has been codified in ways which make it easy for you to translate a case into the Accessibility Chart and the Accessibility Chart into the case. This process of translation is not very difficult. A case is always accessible somewhere on the chart.
Even if the case is only accessible to you reaching out and touching the person, you are at least in perception with him. I would hate to work a case that I had to start this way but it could be done. If you don’t think that sense of touch is communication, take a little child sometime and stroke his forehead; he smiles. That’s communication. That builds up affinity and increases his reality.
There are many cases that have to be started on that level; you can touch the person and that is about all. With some cases you would be lucky to be able to walk or run fast enough to touch them, but you should nevertheless be able to crack them. It can be done.
So automatically, in Dianetics, consider every case a terribly tough case. And then consider yourself completely competent to crack the toughest case that walks. Then just proceed to crack them. There is nothing to it; you simply crack them.
There is one case called the false pianola case. This is a case with dub-in circuitry (which would be control circuitry and a crossover into the imagination) of the oh-my-God variety, that is very highly supercharged. This person will evidently run on the track, run incidents, go into this and go into that, and evidently has very good recalls. But don’t push these recalls too tightly, and don’t push this case too closely if you really want to go on believing this case is a pianola case. You could go on working this case for years and years without ever getting anywhere. The false pianola has got visio and sonic and so forth. The only trouble is that “I” isn’t even there.
Sometimes these people appear to be normal in their reactions in life. You can take them back down the track to last night and they apparently get terrific perceptics and this thing is apparently going to run off beautifully — only it isn’t, because sixty percent of the material they give you is strictly dub-in. They run back to last night and tell you all about this steak they ate — but they didn’t eat steak last night, they ate chili con carne. They haven’t had a steak for two years. It is apt to be that serious.
This type of case can be isolated in another sphere. A quick test on this case would be to look over the person’s ability to execute and find out how good that ability is. When you give this person a job, does he do the job? The answer in this case is probably that he has a lot of reasons why — he is very busy and so forth — but actually he very seldom delivers anything in the way of a job. So just examine his past employment record and talk to him about it; examine some reality with him. Find out what his sense of reality is, because normally it is very low even though he talks with the most enormous convictions about it.
You send him back to the time when you greeted him at the door and go over the conversation, and it appears that you had a lengthy conversation with him there. The only trouble is you didn’t let him in at the door!
Now, don’t suddenly tell this person he is a dub-in case. “Never invalidate the preclear’s data” and “Reduce every engram you come in contact with” are the two cardinal principles which will carry you to Dianetic heaven.
However, this is the dub-in case. A lot of people have such a trusting and touching faith in human nature, or perhaps are so eager to find a pianola case, that when they find one of these super dub-ins they just rub their hands together and never question it any further and try to roll the case.
True enough, if you can get this person to run out actual engrams with somatics, that’s fine. But before you have gone very far in this case you are going to find there is something very wrong with it; there is something strange about it. Somehow or other when you tell them to go into the basic area they wind up at the age of twelve. They are very convincing as to why they have to be at the age of twelve. And you tell them to go down to the middle of the bank, but there they are eating beans at the age of seven. This is control circuitry.
This person is not under the auditor’s control. He is going to fix you up in such a way that you will be totally satisfied with everything that is going on, but he will somehow or other walk out from under everything you want the case to do.
Other things will happen with this case. The main thing, though, is that the file clerk doesn’t work. The file clerk has a demon, perhaps, that it gets flash answers through, but ordinarily the file clerk is inoperative because of control circuitry, which is not necessarily of the bombastic, blasting kind. It is usually of the sympathetic kind like “My dear, poor little girl. Why don’t you control yourself, dear? That is the way to get along in life, you know. Control yourself or you will die,” rather than the engram “CONTROL YOURSELF!” in a loud and blustering tone. You will find some strange combinations as you go back over one of these super dub-in cases.
The next thing you do with one of these cases is to find out who was a very dominating sort of person; in other words, you find the dominator. You will generally be able to spot this person very early in the case. It will probably be Papa, Mama or Grandma, who will be saying “Control yourself” and all the pat phrases, but usually not in a highly bombastic way. If there are a lot of fights on the case, sonic goes off and the rest of it deteriorates badly.
This case is simply top-heavy with circuitry and will not go into the basic area and roll up in a fetal position, although apparently it is perfectly willing to, and quite usually and ordinarily has prenatal visio. However, when you try to get this case down to the bottom of the track he won’t go. There just doesn’t seem to be anything down there.
You have got to shoot the circuitry out of this case. This is one of these deceptive cases. It is like a mirage on the desert. Every time you try to put your hands on anything in this case the mirage disappears. That is a control case. When you get this case resolved, visio and sonic will turn off. You are actually five miles further from the start than you would be if the person was a plain shut-off case, because this person is shut off with frills. It is control circuitry that makes this type of visio and so on. If you work one of these cases very long, you will finally learn that this case is supersaturated with emotion. If you trigger a grief demon in this case, the case will run these touching engrams and cry and cry, but you won’t get an engram off the case or relieve it at all.
You shouldn’t worry about that, because a demon is pretty stupid; a demon doesn’t think very well. Of course there are demons that could be set up to think beautifully, but the ordinary demon that you are going to run into doesn’t think well. Start talking to a demon and you will get some very interesting answers. Most demons are somewhat discourteous, but some of them are too courteous. There is something non optimum about a demon circuit.
You will not have any trouble in differentiating between this case and the pianola case. In the pianola case the file clerk works with you, the somatic strip does what you tell it to do, you can get grief off real incidents easily and the whole case will resolve by going to the engrams necessary to resolve it. On a real pianola case you can get the secondary engrams off the case easily and it will go down into the basic area, where the person will go into his own valence and run out and erase engrams and so forth. This case just behaves the way it ought to behave.
But the dub-in case is elusive. You say, “Well, the file clerk will now give us the earliest engram necessary to resolve the case, and the somatic strip will go . . .”
And the preclear says, “Well, you know, I think I’m probably — there’s this two-year-old one.” “All right, let’s run the two-year-old one.”
Right there you have gone into your first contest with a flock of demon circuits. You are trying to audit a lot of demon circuits!
You start to work with this case and go into this mass of material, and the person “obviously” has visio and sonic, and obviously can get off grief, but by the time you have run off the fifth airplane accident before the age of seven you begin to realize that something is wrong. And when the twenty-third benefactor that this person had in his childhood is killed by the twenty-third streetcar, you are certain something is wrong there. He is running a whole dreamed-up incident.
For instance, the preclear tells you about this dear old lady by the name of Suchdike and how she died. It was all very pathetic. So you run this incident as a grief charge and you get tears. Then all of a sudden the preclear runs into another incident and cries. And then he runs into Mrs. Snortlebort who died in a very pathetic way (usually trying to reach him or rescue him from the flames or something); she died heroically, and you get tears off that one. Then there was Mrs. Smythe who lived down the street, who died rescuing the preclear from something or other, and you get tears off that one. By this time you realize that there are a lot of funny-sounding deaths on this case. Actually you have got a demon circuit which has taken over control of the tear glands. The imagination will run through and this person will play it out.
This is a lot like a little child. Children are very facile in the way they handle their minds. They really know they are kidding themselves. But the child will say, “Oh, poor me, poor me” (he can actually restimulate an engram this way), “nobody likes me, I am unwanted in the world,” and he will all of a sudden decide it would be a good thing to be very mournful, and put on a terrific dramatization.
I have come upon a little child who was crying and asked him why. It turned out that it was because of something or other the child had just imagined. He had dreamed something up and had decided that this whole play was going to go forward, but then it came to this very sad ending and the child cried. So I talked to him for a moment and he forgot all about that. It was just a daydream.
In such a way the dub-in case will occasionally weep. But don’t let this case throw you. It is easy to resolve, except for the fact that this bank has plenty of quantity in it and the bank is supercharged.
The seriousness of the situation is measured by how far this person drifts away from reality. The dub-in case who is fairly close to reality is not very difficult; you can break this case down, get the circuitry out and get it going. But then there are cases with more highly charged circuitry, and above that come cases that are much more highly charged. And then there are cases that are so highly charged that they run actual engrams. They are so supercharged that you cannot help but get an actual engram out of them. You just touch the case and it explodes.
This can be measured on a graduated scale which has maximum charge at one end of it and minimum charge at the other. I am not talking about the amount of circuitry on the case. This refers only to the amount of charge.
The person has had all sorts of catastrophes in his life. In the ordinary course of human events you can enter a case and start running it rather easily, getting actual charge off the case and running engrams and so forth. It doesn’t matter, from maximum charge down to minimum charge, how much charge there is on the case unless there are circuits in the case. A case will run pianola from maximum charge right on down to minimum charge unless there is circuitry, but a case that has got maximum charge is one that you have to run with some skill. Don’t let him bounce out of painful emotion engrams; knock out these secondary engrams. You bleed the charge off and run the case. That’s all there is to it.
Charge, then, is in relationship only to the amount of charge you will get off the case. There is also a graph depicting circuitry.
These two graphs are not a parity; they are two different graphs, unrelated at this point. The measure of the toughness of a case is where it sits on this graph of maximum circuitry to minimum circuitry.
If we have these two scales combined, where there is maximum circuitry and maximum charge the result is one of these auditor nightmares, because the charge is all on the case and the circuits won’t let it come off, and the person is not in contact. This is another way of expressing “I” being deteriorated by charge.
Where does the charge come from? The charge does not come from the exterior world. The charge is not a transplanted emotion from somebody else. It is not transplanted from Mama via the umbilical cord. The charge is a very simple thing to locate. This analogy is not necessarily true, but consider that “I” plus reactive charge equals a constant. In other words, let’s say that this “I” is 1,000, and that there are 200 units of reactive charge on this case, so that “I” (the individual himself, the awareness-of-awareness unit monitor) and the reactive charge on the case total 1,200; the constant for this case would be 1,200 units. For another case we could say that “I” was 2,000 and the reactive charge during the case’s life was 500, so 2,500 would be the constant for that case. In this way, every case could be considered to have a constant. One individual has a constant of 1,200. Another individual has a constant of 2,500 and somebody else has a constant of 300. That is the life units of the individual summed up.
Now, say the case starts to pick up secondary engrams — the big shocks caused by breaks in affinity, communication and reality, big grief or terror engrams, or something strong like a sudden, sharp communication cut-off on some very vital subject. All these engrams were already in the reactive level but not restimulated particularly. For instance, the case at this moment is only restimulated 200 units’ worth, but all of a sudden a big new secondary engram comes in; it immediately goes into action and the ratio becomes 800 units of “I” to 400 units of charge (still using 1,200 as a constant on this particular individual). Now the case gets a lock on this secondary engram and the ratio becomes 799 to 401 on the reactive charge. Now he picks up about five more secondary engrams, one right after the other, and he then has 500 units for “I” and 700 units of reactive charge. This person is now insane. But he is not completely gone as far as insanity is concerned; he will still show sane moments on occasion because he is not completely overpowered.
This dwindling spiral happens very rapidly. At first it is very hard to start stealing units away from “I,” but as “I” starts losing units it is easier and easier and easier for the reactive bank to pick up the units, and it becomes harder and harder to get them back to “I” again.
So you could get a case, finally, where “I” had been brought way down and then received another jolt in life which sent “I” down to 0 units and the reactive charge up to 1,200 units. Now that person would really be insane. He would never be in contact with any kind of reality; he would have no reality, no communication and no affinity. This person would be in a bad state — probably a catatonic schizophrenic in the last stages. According to old standards, the person might be said to be hopelessly insane at this point.
Your job is to get some of these units back up to “I,” and you do that by knocking out the first few units of charge that you can, getting one or two units at a time. You finally run some kind of a secondary engram, a grief discharge or something. You get this off the case, because you can see, obviously, that there is something there. The charge is so great on the reactive bank that the case bleeds quickly. You can hardly even start to put this person on the track before the charge explodes. This is the screamer. A screamer is not necessarily getting rid of charge, however; he might be merely dramatizing.
Actually, the cases you work are unlikely to be in that bad a state. This is the extreme. But here we have measured this in terms of maximum charge and minimum charge.
However, the difficulty of the case does not depend upon maximum and minimum charge. The difficulty of the case depends upon control circuitry and other types of circuitry — which are also control — but, pointedly, the main offender is the type that says “You’ve got to control yourself,” “You’ve got to keep yourself down,” “You’ve got to keep yourself in hand,” “You’ve got to get a grip on yourself.” The other types of circuitry just stretch out from there.
This does not change the maximum-minimum-charge picture but it certainly does make it difficult to release that charge, because these circuits absorb a lot of the 1,200 units; there are other individuals and all sorts of things in there. If “I” goes down to 0, you definitely have an insane person. The method of proceeding on such a case is to try to pick up some of that circuitry.
A circuit could be considered as a structure with only one vulnerable point, being almost impregnable on all other points. The Achilles’ heel of every circuit is the phrase which created it. Any attack on this circuit that does not include the phrase which created it has a tendency to charge it up.
The maximum charge case is not hard to crack unless there are circuits on it. This presents a strange picture. If you were to go into an institution and work people there, you would be completely fascinated to find that you would get a remission in every few persons as you sent them back down the track, blew grief charges, gave them a little dressing-up and then brought them up to present time. All you would have to do is say, “Well, let’s go back to the engram necessary to resolve your case.” The person may be gibbeting to a point where he doesn’t know where the engram is, so you say, “Well, let’s go to the incident, the moment of pain in your life, necessary to resolve your case.” He won’t be able to stay out of it and he will explode into tears and sorrow and all the rest of it. You can then run a few more incidents off the case, get some line charge off the track and bring the person up to present time.
In fact, you will find cases which are wide open with actual perceptics, real pianola cases, in an institution. They are not rare either — perhaps twenty or twenty-five percent. So the maximum-minimum-charge picture is what you are looking at in these people.
The difficulty of working the case is brought about by circuits. You won’t find any schizophrenics who don’t have circuits. They are loaded with circuits. Neither will you find a paranoiac who doesn’t have circuits.
The manic-depressive is a very rough case. I have had to redefine the term manic-depressive so it would make a little more sense. A manic-depressive is somebody who is caught on the track in a manic engram which has a depressive aspect. For instance, a person is caught and fixed solidly somewhere on the track in an engram that says “I’m strong, I am wonderful, I am so happy, I am so cheerful, but sometimes I get so depressed.” That would be a ridiculous simplification of it but it is that kind of an engram. It has a manic in it. It punches up his analyzer to the limit to do exactly what the engram says the analyzer is to do. It is a directed, concentrated, fixed state.
Manic-depressives sometimes make good salesmen, but they make much better salesmen after you get rid of the engram. I almost broke a salesman’s heart once. He found out that all this beautiful sales talk that he had been giving to people all his life was Papa trying to sell Mama on the idea of getting rid of him! The person was very convinced he was a great salesman. I was interested enough in this case to call up his boss, and I found out that the person’s sales record was so poor that he was on the verge of getting fired. Yet he was certain that he was a great salesman — it said so right in the engram. We got rid of the engram when he wasn’t so convinced, and he went back and for a short time he had his old job, and then he went on to something else because this was not his purpose. He had been fixed in an engram which didn’t particularly agree with his basic purpose.
So that is a manic-depressive.
A manic-depressive caught on the track can get supercharged if the engram in which he is caught gets charged up. And if there are some circuits on this engram in which he is held and they are charged up very high? that makes it very tough. Trying to get a manic-depressive moving on the track and out of it theoretically should be very easy, but as far as I have been able to learn in Dianetics so far, the manic-depressive forms our roughest case.
We know what the circuits and central computation are on the paranoiac, so he is an easy case. But that is only because we know the combination which opens the door; it is an “against me” engram which is laid in very heavily. Lots of people have “against me” engrams who are not paranoiacs, but when the “against me” engram is there and when it gets charged up, and when it is laid in very heavily, that person becomes a paranoiac.
So there are two things at work here. Engrams contain a lot of circuits potentially, but the circuits are not set up. When this case is given a lot of charge the circuits repress the charge so we can’t get it back.
For instance, the circuits “You’ve got to protect yourself,” “I’ve got to protect you from yourself,” and so forth, shield off “I” all the way around, and when that bank starts to get charged up the person gets to be in pretty bad shape after a while. As long as the circuits aren’t charged up, though, nothing much happens with them.
The way to take apart a tough case is to get the case moving on the track using the various methods we have gone over, and then go into a contest of first picking up the circuit which is keeping the charge from coming off and then getting the charge off. When you cannot get any more charge off, you get another circuit up that is keeping the charge from coming off, and you just alternate, circuits to charge, charge to circuits, circuits to charge, charge to circuits, until you bleed this case down to a point where it runs pianola.
The reason tough cases are called tough cases is simply because people are not following that procedure. The cases, as such, are actually not extremely tough.
I was very interested in one of these super dub-in cases — the auditor’s nightmare. This case appeared to be very obliging, evidently moved very well and easily on the track and so forth, and had apparently gotten a lot of charge off, but it was actually in bad condition. I found out that this case was strictly dub-in and was just sodden with circuits. So I told this person’s auditor, “Knock out the circuits so that you can get some of the charge off this case so it will simmer down and run.”
Later I saw the preclear and asked him how he was doing.
“Well, I don’t know. I’ve had about 150 hours of processing and I’m not sure whether it’s done me any good or not.”
“What’s happening?”
“Well, we run out engrams all right, but you know, I just can’t tell whether they’re there or not. I run them, but what’s the use of running them, because it doesn’t do very much good anyhow” — strictly in apathy.
I immediately got hold of this person’s auditor and said, “What are you doing to this person?”
“Oh, we go down to the basic area and we run out engrams and so forth. Of course, if I push him too hard, he gets awfully mad.”
“What do you mean, if you ‘push him too hard’?”
“Well, if I tell him to go into the basic part of the track, why, he gets mad.” “What happens? How do you go into a session?”
“Well, certain things get into restimulation and he tells me about them, so I help him take them out of restimulation.”
Needless to say, this “auditor” had never gotten a certificate. So I said, “What have you done about control circuits in this case? Remember I told you about control circuits earlier. This case is sodden with control circuits. What have you done about them?”
“Oh, is it? Well, I didn’t know.”
So I asked the preclear, “Has anybody tried to find out if anybody in your family ever said ‘Control yourself’ or ever tried to push other people around?”
And the preclear said, “Nobody has ever asked me that question.” .
I couldn’t resist it. I took this case by the nape of the neck and I said, “You can remember what your father used to tell your mother when she became excited.”
“Oh no,” he said, “it was my mother telling my father.”
“What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Well, you’ll have to control yourself, dear, you know about your heart. It will stop if you don’t.”’
“Let’s remember a specific moment when this was being said.” “All right.”
He got one, he remembered it, he laughed, and we ran it down to the bottom of the track and it was basic-basic. This was a supposedly tough case! This gives you some idea of the anatomy of the tough case. The anatomy of the tough case is a dumb auditor!
You have the Accessibility Chart and that’s pretty easy. You try to trigger the affinity, communication and reality break locks and try to run the secondary engrams out of the case. Use Straightwire on the case, get lots of data on it and open up occluded areas. Find out when sight and sound and other perceptics got shut off on the individual, and run out some of the incidents that have happened in his life. If you cannot get any grief off, take a little bit of fear off, or even run a boredom engram — anything you can get on the case; you try to dress it up. What you are trying to do is get the units that have been absorbed into the reactive bank back up to “I.” Every time you knock out one of these locks you get a unit back, and every time you knock out one of these super engrams you may get as many as two or three hundred units back.
If you cannot get these things back, you are not rehabilitating “I,” which is primarily what you are supposed to be doing. If you find yourself unable to blow any charge off this case and you know there is charge there (any dub-in is just skidding along on a mirage of charge which is suppressed by circuitry), you have got to get rid of the circuitry on the case.
These circuits are not always as simple as “Control yourself.” They may be “Dear, you must safeguard that dear little thing inside of you. You must take adequate care of it. You mustn’t let anything at all disturb that dear little thing inside of you.” I ran this out of a preclear once. This person would not go into processing. He was in a thoroughly bad way. So I guaranteed not to take anything out of him and then broke the circuit. I didn’t take anything out of him; I put some attention units back to him. That’s circuitry. Some of the weirdest possible combinations can come up and stop the case.
Usually the surface manifestation of circuitry is just straight “Control yourself,” “You’ve got to get a grip on yourself,” “Hold it down, hold it down,” “Keep calm,” “Be calm,” “Don’t cry, honey. Grandma is right here taking care of you. Now control yourself, honey, don’t cry. It will all be all right. I’m sure you are not going to die. I’m almost sure, that is,” “Oh dear, what shall I do if you ever leave me? You’ve got to take better care of yourself, you’ve just got to. You’ve just got to get a grip on yourself.” That is circuitry. All circuitry controls or nullifies, and actually anything that seeks to control also seeks to nullify the individual. It is an open-and-shut case. And the control circuit, by coming over the “I” of the case, of course nullifies “I” and that drives “I” back into the reactive bank, turns the units upside down and creates havoc.
There isn’t anything else wrong with the case except the following three things:
That is all that is wrong with cases and why they won’t run. The reason why a case is crazy is basically engrams. You want to get these engrams up. And those three points are the only reasons why you can’t get the engrams up.
Your goal is to get this case into a real pianola state and let it roll. You may have to do all sorts of things to a case to get it into a pianola state, but they all revolve around these three actions:
In order to accomplish this you heighten the preclear’s affinity, communication and reality points, and so on, as covered earlier.
Most “tough cases” are really not tough at all.
It demands, perhaps, a little imagination from the auditor to look at a case and tell what is wrong with it, but it is no great strain on one’s wits. It is mostly an accumulated fund of observation. You know very well that somebody who is getting his flash answers in the form of a Los Angeles traffic light, with a signal that indicates yes and then changes to no, perhaps with a bell clang, is nothing mysterious or unique; it is strictly a supercharged circuitry case. Start running out the engram necessary to resolve this case and it will probably run at a loud enough volume to be heard two or three city blocks away with the windows closed. A really rough case with lots of charge and lots of circuits is known as a screamer, and the engram would probably run something like this:
“You’ve got to control yourself, dear. You’ll have to control yourself. You’ll have to get a grip on yourself.”
“I can’t control myself, I can’t control myself. I’m just going mad. I’m lost. I don’t know what I’m doing. Leave me alone; go away and leave me alone.”
“Oh, dear, now please be calm, be calm. Keep it down, keep it down. Be quiet, dear. Now control yourself. I’m right here with you and everything’s going to go along all right.”
Basically, if you had gotten this case before it had a lot of secondary engrams on it, it would have run out at a normal volume. But the secondary engrams have come in and charged that engram up so that when it is run it is a rival for air-raid sirens. The charge has gone up that high on the case.
So circuitry represses charge. And the reason he screams is because the charge gets in there and it can’t get out again. It is all dammed up by this circuitry. So you get this played back and forth, and the thing gets all wound up and you can’t get the charge out of it. But every circuit has an Achilles’ heel, which is the phrase that created it. The way you find that phrase is by finding one of Papa’s or Mama’s dramatizations. If you cannot find their dramatizations, look over the preclear himself and get him to go into a little play by saying “Well now, what would you tell somebody if they were having a hard time of it and they were all emotional or upset?” He may give you the whole content of the engram just talking to you.
Sometimes you can go back down the line a little bit and ask him to give you the last time he calmed somebody down. He will go back down the line and give you his comments. That is the content of the circuit. You have got its Achilles’ heel right there. So you take this circuit and the central words of it and tell him to go to the first time it occurs on the case. And because you know that this circuit is liable to fight away from you — because it, after all, is a demon circuit which is doing its own auditing on the preclear — you just run that circuit down the case and you start knocking it out in the various parts of the engram where you have to get rid of it.
You will find some of these cases are very sloppy. They will skid all over the place because the circuitry is too solid on the case. But shoot the circuitry out of the case, and then when you have gotten all of these suppressors off, you come on up to the secondary engrams and start to knock those out.
When you try to work a real psychotic on this it is a very tough job, because he hasn’t got enough “I” to concentrate. So in this case you don’t look for the circuits right away except in Straightwire. Don’t give him anything but Straightwire. Build back that “I.” Do anything you can to get “I” up there and get some attention units to it and so on. Then you can go back down and run the circuits. But if you start into this case, and you find the case all of a sudden hasn’t enough power to push through an engram, it wanders and can’t be concentrated on the subject, screams, goes into one valence and out of it again, can’t be controlled, tries to go all over the track and so forth, it means that you have started to run a basic engram or a real physical pain engram on this case before you have broken enough affinity, communication and reality locks. So you want to size these people up very well.
When you first start to run a case and you have any reason to believe it may be a very hard, thoroughly charged case, don’t just say “Oh, well, go into the basic area and let’s run something.” That is why it says “Run painful emotion” on the Standard Procedure Chart. That is what you run.
If you cannot get anything off the case even by running painful emotion, and you realize that you are running a dub-in case who is exteriorized and in extremely bad shape, you had better start running some pleasure moments and breaking some light locks on the subject of affinity, communication and reality. Give the case a lot of Straightwire and get some of the units out of the reactive bank up to “I,” moving in gradually on this case until you can break, maybe, some of the fear secondary engrams. And then see if you can’t break out a little bit of that time when the teacher slapped him and so forth. Just work with this case little by little. It isn’t necessary to make a big splash all at once with a case.
There isn’t much “I” there, and basic personality is pretty weary. Bad auditing can take some more units away from “I” and create some more locks. What you are trying to do is restore attention units to “I.” The locks and the key-ins from the secondary engrams stole the attention units. In a tough case, you had better work with those things that have these units if you want to get them back.
The first sign of a psychotic is that the person will begin to disassociate. Don’t run engrams on this person. Would you throw a two-year-old child into a bank full of attempted abortions? Work with the things which stole the attention units from “I,” the locks and secondary engrams. By running them, you return the captured attention units to “I.” Use Straightwire, run off a few light locks in reverie, get some fear off and a little emotion. You want to knock off circuitry by Straightwire. Don’t try to go into the basic area. Run secondary engrams out of the case, and after that run more control circuits. You may even be able to blow one grief engram of considerable magnitude and move the preclear from a psychotic to a neurotic in just a short time.
There is the occasional case which has to have birth run out of it. Birth is just another engram. If the file clerk gives you birth or if the person is stuck in birth, you have got to handle birth. That’s all there is to that. There was one case where the preclear was put in reverie, and before anybody really did anything with the case it was found out that the person was already in birth. When that happens you have to handle it.
One of the major bars to getting off secondary engrams is valences. The preclear has a low sense of reality when he isn’t in valence. He isn’t himself. You are not going to get any attention units reduced in an out-of-valence case until you do something about valence.
The valence proposition is a very specialized action. Usually these things go down into the prenatal bank. Valence shifters are a definite type of command, and they go down in a kind of spectrum.
First, there is the valence shifter which shifts a person into one other persons valence. Then there is one that shifts the person into all the valences of his family, or two or more persons. Then there’s the valence shifter that shifts a person into everybody else, the general valence, and the one that shifts a person into nobody’s valence — out of valence, out of the blue; a synthetic valence. A synthetic valence may be the valence character of a story — for example, an air-sprite. This could be caused by Mama reading a fairy tale to an older brother sitting on Mama’s lap.
Another kind is one which shifts a person into animals or insects. This is a specialized shifter; “make a monkey out of me” shifts one into the valence of a monkey. In France they have one that makes a person into a cabbage — mon petit chop which means “my little cabbage” when taken literally. There’s another type that shifts one into inanimate objects, like the psychotic who was a bed post; the phrase was “as deaf as a post.”
Circuitry puts the person off the time track. There are also circuitry phrases like “You are off your trolley” and “You are way off the track” that definitely move a person out of valence and off the track.
See if you can’t coax the preclear into himself. If he is in the basic area in the coffin positions he’s out of valence. He should be curled up like a ball until he is released, at which time the engram has no power to command his motor responses. Telling the person to go into his own valence in the basic area very often does not produce results. You could say, “Let’s see if you can feel some tactile there,” or “Let’s feel some moisture,” or “Let’s try to get some sonic on some strange sounds.” The fellow will be inside of himself if he can do this.
A person running engrams will sometimes suddenly go out of valence. At such a moment the somatic changes, and you can even expect that sonic will turn off. A green auditor will believe the preclear has bounced. He should work more carefully with the file clerk. Ask the file clerk “What happened? Give me a yes or no: Bouncer? Holder? Valence shifter?”
“Yes.”
“When I count from one to five a valence shifter will flash into your mind.” Run it a couple of times and the fellow will go back into his own valence.
Valence shifter and circuit phrases are not the only ones you are looking for on the case; there are also action phrases, perhaps the most dangerous of which is the grouper. “It all happens at once” and “It’s closing in on me” are examples of groupers. If the person has the same somatic all the way through, then the case could be sitting on a grouper. If he had a sore head in the grouper engram, when he runs through measles or the time he got kicked in the shins, he’ll have a sore head. “Everything happens at once,” “It’s all coming in here,” “They are closing in on me,” “Everything is against me,” “There is no time,” “I have no time for you,” “I have no time for anything,” are all grouper phrases. (That last one leaves all the time out of the track, and leaves everything else grouped.)
Other action phrases to watch for are bouncers, which throw the preclear back up to present time; holders, which keep him from going any place; call-backs, which call him back to the engram; and misdirectors, which send him in the opposite direction. A misdirector that occurs quite commonly in birth is “I’ve got to turn him around and bring him out the other way.” Another perfect misdirector and confuser is “I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.”
There is one way to run an engram. Start out as early as you can get, always remembering there may be earlier material. You have the preclear start through the engram. You listen to the phrase as he recounts it and note whether its an action phrase and then translate it into engram language to find out what action it’s going to take. If it’s an action phrase have him repeat it several times right there and take the kick out of it. If he is heavy with control circuitry he may not want to do it. All the action phrases in the engram are active once you run over them, so you deintensify every action phrase as you hear it. That’s the way you reduce an engram. For instance, a person says, “I don’t like you any more.” Let him run past that one. “Get out” comes next, and you go over that again and again and again.
If the auditor has let somebody bounce, the way to unsnarl the case is to run out the auditing. You send him back to the time he was audited and he will wind up in the engram. You get the bouncer off so he can get back into the engram.
The things we are most interested in, however, are the valence shifters and circuitry. There is a distinct difference between a valence shifter and a circuit.
Man learns mainly by mimicry. Learning and mimicry are practically synonymous. Mimicry also includes the ability to shift into other people’s valences selectively. This should be done very easily without disturbing a person’s personality. But an engram demands that it be fixed or barred. It has done an irrational selection. The second an engram starts to use this mechanism of mimicry, you get some interesting manifestations. For instance, a little girl in a dog’s valence will scratch on the door to be let in instead of ringing the bell. Twenty years later you might see her cocking her head on one side when she says “Please give it to me.” She isn’t imitating the dog; she is the dog. A valence builds up the whole picture of a personality.
The fellow who has shifted into Grandpa’s valence had someone tell him “You are just like your grandfather.” This has fixed him in Grandpa’s valence. The engram includes “You will drink yourself to death.” Grandpa had lumbago, and he had the habits of wearing a hat in the house and eating with his knife. So the person will pick up the whole engram, and he will get lumbago, drink heavily, wear his hat in the house and eat with his knife. Just by being Grandpa, he will do all the things Grandpa does.
A person has a hard time with the general valence shifter “You are just like everybody else.” It reduces him to a state of mediocrity. The analyzer is absolutely sure that this command is survival itself.
Most people suffering from chronic somatics are suffering from valence shifter somatics. However, a person does not demonstrate pain unless he himself had some pain to substitute for what the valence had. If Grandpa had a broken arm, the person picks up a somatic from when he fell off a bicycle and dubs it in so that he has the same somatic as Grandpa. The second you get this person out of this valence, these chronic somatics turn off.
A person can be exteriorized on a selective shifter, such as “You are just like your father.” You have him in an incident where he is playing checkers with Papa. Only he will be Papa playing checkers with himself; he will play checkers with the boy. You can’t get him to play checkers with his father until you find and deintensify the valence shifter “You are just like your father.”
Sometimes a person is held in an engram in which he got a valence shifter. He will move up and down the time track as Papa, or as his family if the valence shifter was “You are just like the rest of your family.”
You can spot easily whose valence he is in. What were the illnesses of the people that surrounded him? Who is dead?
There was one case of a man with dermatitis on his hands. Mama died of skin cancer when he was five years old. He was shifted into Mama’s valence, and Mama’s death charged up the valence. The auditor tried to go back and find an engram in which his hands were injured. He ran out a time when he hurt his hands and the dermatitis went away for a day or two. Then all of a sudden it came back again. Another incident was run out, this time when his hands got injured at a bonfire. Again the dermatitis diminished for a few days and then came back. The reactive mind was being put to a lot of trouble to approximate somebody who had some hand trouble.
Sometimes you can take a person down to the bottom of the track, who has been shifted into Mama’s valence, and get him earlier than the valence shifter so that he will be in his own valence.
The best way to resolve valence shifters is to take the charge off the loss of the ally. Mama died and this valence has been confirmed by the death; with the charge on Mama’s death the valence has been charged and locked in. Blow Mama’s death. If you can’t do this, knock out some circuitry, in or out of valence, and then get back and knock out the death. Then he is in his own valence and you can take him back down the track.
There can be all kinds of valence shifters in the case which are not necessarily active. It is necessary to get all the grief and fear off secondary engrams to get a person into his own valence. It’s not a problem of picking up the valence shifters, but one of getting the charge off the case.
Running a case out of valence will cause strange things to happen. For instance, you are running an engram in the basic area, and the preclear gets a somatic in his left eye. (There is no left eye in the basic area, only a few cells.) He is out of valence. Then if the auditor starts to run it, and fails to note he has wrong somatics, that engram will come back later.
If a person is in the valence of Mama, and Papa says “Get out of here and leave,” he will bounce. The auditor running this out of valence may get some yawns off. A few weeks later the auditor wanders back there and the engram will still be there. The auditor will say, “Every time I erase this engram, it doesn’t stay erased.” Actually he deintensified it a little by running it out of valence, but he could have restimulated it.
When you are running an engram to get the basic on the chain to take charge off circuitry, you are not getting a person completely in his own valence, but you are taking some tension off the case. Remember, you are running this kind of engram to get circuitry in order to get the charge off the case. You have to get some of the circuitry off so you can get some of the secondary engrams.
There is another valence shifter that says “He can never be himself.” This is a sort of valence bouncer; it just bounces the person out of his own valence. There can be a valence shifter that says “Why can’t you be like little Rudy down the street? You are a toughie.” This keeps him from being good like Rudy.
An interesting one was the case where a child was in Mama’s valence. There was a time when Mama was rejected by the grocer. The grocer said, “You can’t have any more credit.” The child was with Mama when this was being said, and the child was Mama so the child got this embarrassment. You can just run the person all up and down the time track and pick up all the serious things that have happened to this valence. The job is slower this way than it is if you can run Mama’s death, but charge comes off the valence little by little. For instance, you have spotted that your preclear is in Father’s valence, so you say, “Let’s go back to the time your father lost his business,” and you get some charge off the case. Papa’s tears may not be suppressed even though the preclear’s are.
The hardest person to reach is the one who is in a synthetic valence. When he starts to run a scene, he is plastered on the ceiling or something.
There is the fellow who doesn’t like himself. He has been shifted into a valence where there is negation against the valence. For example, he doesn’t like his father. He was told “You are just like your father. What am I going to do with you?” He doesn’t like Papa so he doesn’t like himself. This is a break on the first dynamic.
I have run into people that had as many as forty valences.
Then there are circuits. The circuit is a command in an engram which has gained charge through secondary engrams, and has taken away a part of the analyzer and is using it for its own purposes. A demon circuit or control circuit is only as serious on a case as it has been charged up by secondary engrams or locks on fear, grief, and so on.
The only way these secondary engrams can occur is through the existence of a physical pain engram which has keyed in. If you get any secondary engram you can get the physical pain engram it is sitting on. The danger to the case of the circuits or valences is when they have been charged up by secondary engrams and locks.