Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

  This is highly important to an understanding of the mechanics of aberration. It is a scientific fact, susceptible of proof, and it never varies. This always happens: when an engram is received, the analyzer is shut down by the physical pain and emotion; when the engram is restimulated the analyzer shuts down as part of the commands of the engram. Actually this is a very mechanical thing. Engram is restimulated, part of the analytical power is shut down. This is as inevitable as turning on and off an electric light. Pull the cord and the light goes off. The reduction of the analyzer is not that sharp -- there are grades of light -- but it is just as mechanical.

  Put a man under ether, hurt him in the chest. He has received an engram because his analytical power was turned off first by ether and then by a chest pain. While he was there on the operating table, the reactive mind recorded the click of instruments, everything said, all sounds and smells. Let us suppose that a nurse was holding one of his feet because he was kicking. This is a complete engram.

  The engram will be keyed-in by something in the future, a similar incident. After this, in greater or lesser degree, whenever he hears clicks like instrument clicks he gets nervous. If he pays attention to what is happening in his body at that minute, he may find that his foot feels slightly as if it were being held. But he is not likely to give any attention to his foot because if 55

  he had any attention to give, the chest pain would be found present in some degree. But his analytical ability has been turned off slightly. As the foot felt it was being held, so does the analyzer have the conception of being shut down by ether and pain. The restimulator (the clicking) tended to bring the whole engram slightly into being and part of the engram command is a reduced analytical power.

  This is “push-button” in its precision. If one knew another’s main restimulators (words, voice tones, music, whatever they are -- things which are filed in the reactive mind bank as parts of engrams) one could turn another’s analytical power almost completely off, actually render him unconscious.

  We all know people who make us feel stupid. There can be two causes for that but both of them are from engrams and one of them is the fact that no matter what engram is brought into restimulation, part of the analytical power is turned off.

  Engrams can, if environment is uniform, be held in chronic restimulation. This means a chronic partial shutdown of analytical power. The recovery of intelligence by a clear and the rise of that intelligence to such fantastic heights results in part from the relief of word commands in engrams that he is stupid and in a larger part from the relief of this chronic shutdown condition.

  This is not theory. This is scientific fact. It is strictly test-tube. The engram contains the percept of a shutdown analyzer; when it is restimulated the engram puts that datum back into force in some degree.

  Engrams, then, being received in “unconsciousness” cause a partial “unconsciousness”

  to exist every time they are restimulated. The person who has an engram (any aberree) need not receive new physical pain to have a new moment of partial “unconsciousness” take place.

  Feeling “dopey” or “sleepy” or “dull” results in part from a partially shut-down analyzer. Being

  “nervous” or in a rage or frightened also carries with it partially shutoff analytical power.

  The hypnotist has “success” where he does because he is able, by talking to people about “sleep,” to put into restimulation some engram which contains the word sleep and shutdown analytical power. This is one of the reasons hypnotism “works.”

  The whole society, however, is liable to analytical shutdown in greater or lesser degree by the restimulation of engrams.

  The number of engrams a person’s reactive bank contains may not, however, establish the amount of analytical reduction to which he is subjected. A person may have engrams and they may not have been keyed-in. And if they have been keyed-in, he might not be in an environment which contains any great number of restimulators. Under these conditions his survival zone position may be high even though he is possessed of a great many engrams. And again, he might have educated himself over and above these engrams to some slight degree.

  But a person who has keyed-in engrams and does exist in the area of many restimulators is liable to an enormous amount of restimulation and analytical shut-down. This is a normal condition. If a person has a large number of engrams and they are keyed-in and he lives around many restimulators his condition can vary from normal to insane. And in a single day -- as in the case of a man who experiences moments of rage or a woman who drops into apathies -- the condition of a person may vary from normal to insane and back to normal. We take here the word “insane” to mean utter irrationality. So there is temporary or chronic insanity.

  The court of law which goes through the lugubrious process of having a man pronounced sane or insane after that man has murdered somebody is itself being irrational. Of course the man was insane when he committed the murder. What the court is asking now is whether or not the man is chronically insane. This has little bearing on the matter. If a man has 56

  gone insane enough to murder once, he will go insane enough in the future to murder again.

  Chronic, then, means either a chronic cycle or a continuous condition. The law says sanity is the “ability to tell right from wrong.” When Man is subject to a mechanism (and all men are) which lets him be rational one minute and restimulated the next, none in the society, if uncleared, can be considered able to always tell right from wrong. This is completely aside from what the law means by “right” and what it means by “wrong.”

  This is an example of the roller-coaster sanity curve of the aberree. All aberrees possess engrams (the normal number is probably in the hundreds per individual). Analytically people have a wide latitude of choice and they can deal even with philosophic rights and wrongs. But in aberrated persons the engram bank is always susceptible of restimulation. The “sanest”

  aberree of Tuesday may be a murderer on Wednesday if the exactly right situation occurs to trip the exact engram. A clear is not entirely predictable in any given situation -- he has such a wide power of choice. But an aberrated person transcends all predictability for the following reasons: (1) what engrams an aberree has in his reactive engram bank none know including himself; (2) what situation will contain what restimulators is a matter of chance; and (3) what his power of choice will be with the factors in the engrams on a reactive level cannot be established.

  The variety of conduct which one can evolve out of these basic mechanics is so wide that it is no wonder that Man was considered to be a rather hopeless case by some philosophies.

  The cells, if the engram bank is retained on a cellular level, might be theoretically supposed to have made sure that the analyzer did not get too adventurous in this life and death matter of living. They therefore could be considered to have copied down all data contained in every moment of physical pain and emotion resulting in or contained in “unconsciousness.”

  Then when any data similar to this appeared in the environment they could be wary and, with a large number of restimulators in sight, they could be considered to shut down the analyzer and proceed on reaction. This has a crude safety factor. Obviously, if the organism survived through one period of “unconsciousness,” it could be theorized by the cells that the placing of the data and action in effect under circumstances which threatened to be similar would result once more in survival. What’s good enough for grandpa is good enough for me. What was good enough in the bus accident is good enough in a bus.

  This moronic “thinking” is typical of the reactive mind. It is just the sort of thinking it does. It is the ultimate in conservatism. It misses the point and important data at every turn, it overloads the body with pain, it is a whirlpool of confusion. If there were just one engram per situation, maybe it would get by. But there may be ten engrams with similar data in them (an engram lock chain) and yet the data may be so contradictory that when a new emergency arises wh
ich contains the restimulators of the chain, no proper past conduct can be put forth to meet it.

  Obviously the x factor is language. The cells, if this is a problem in cells (for recall, this part is theory based on data in an effort to explain what happens and a theory can be altered without altering the scientific usefulness of the facts), probably do not understand languages very well. If they did they wouldn’t evolve such “solutions.”

  Take two engrams about baseball bats. In the first, the individual is hit on the head and knocked out and somebody yells, “Run! Run! Run!” In the second the individual is knocked out by the bat in the same environment and somebody yells, “Stay there! You’re safe!” Now what does he do when he hears a baseball bat or smells one or sees one or hears these words?

  Run or stay there! He has a similar pain for each action. What actually happens? He gets a headache. This is that thing called conflict. This is anxiety. And anxiety can become very acute indeed on a purely mechanical level when one has ninety engrams pulling him south and eighty-nine pulling him north. Does he go north or south? Or does he have a “nervous breakdown?”

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  The level of brilliance of the reactive mind is about the same as a phonograph. The needle gets put on the record and the record plays. The reactive mind merely puts on the needle. When it tries to select several records out and play them all at once, things happen.

  By intentional construction or accident in design or by-pass in evolution -- where the old, useless organ is still built -- the cells managed to hide this engram bank fairly well. Man is conscious in his analytical mind. When he is “unconscious,” his analytical mind is unable to monitor the incoming data and the data is not to be found in the thing we call, by analogue, the standard banks. Therefore whatever came in passed by consciousness. And having passed by, consciousness cannot (without dianetic process) recall it, since there is no channel for recall.

  The engram enters when consciousness is absent. It thereafter operates directly into the organism. Only by dianetic therapy can the analyzer come into possession of this data (and the removal of it does not depend upon the analyzer contacting it at all, despite an old belief that the

  “realization” of something cures it: “realize” an engram and one is in quick trouble, without dianetic technique). The engram is received by the cellular body. The reactive mind could be the very lowest level of analytical power, of course, but this does not alter the scientific fact that the engram acts as if it were a soldered-in connection to the life function regulator and the organic co-ordination and the basic level of the analytical mind itself. By “soldered-in” is meant

  “permanent connection.” This keying-in is the hook-up of the engram as part of the operating machinery of the body. An analytical thought process is not permanently hooked in but can be thrown in and out of circuit at the will of the analyzer. This is not true of the engram, thus the term, “soldered-in.”

  The analytical mind lays down a training pattern; on a stimulus-response basis this training pattern will work smoothly and well whenever it will do the organism the most good.

  An engram is a training pattern, all complete in a package, “permanently” hooked into the circuits (without dianetic therapy) and it goes into operation like a training pattern without any consent whatever from the analyzer.

  Influenced itself by the engram in the several ways of reduced analytical power and positive suggestion in the engram, the analytical mind is unable to discover any truly valid reason for the conduct of the organism. It therefore makes up a reason, for its job is to make sure the organism is always right. Just as the young man with the detachable coat gave forth a number of silly explanations as to why he was detaching his coat so does the analytical mind, observing the body engaged in irrational actions, including speech, for which there seems to be no accounting, justify the actions. The engram can dictate all the various processes incident to living; it can dictate beliefs, opinions, thought processes or lack of them and actions of all kinds, and can establish conditions remarkable for their complexity as well as their stupidity.

  An engram can dictate anything it contains and engrams can contain all the combinations of words in the entire language. And the analytical mind is forced, in the light of irrational behavior or conviction, to justify the acts and conditions of the organism, as well as its own strange blunders. This is justified thought.

  There are three kinds of thought, then, of which the organism is capable: (a) analytical thought, which is rational as modified by education and viewpoint, (b) justified thought, analytical thought attempting to explain reactions, and (c) reactive thought, which is wholly in terms of everything in an engram equals everything in an engram equals all the restimulators in the environment and all things associated with those restimulators.

  We have all seen somebody make a blunder and then give forth an explanation of just why that blunder had been made. This is justified thought. The blunder was made, unless out of education or viewpoint, by an engram. The analytical mind then had to justify the blunder to make sure that the body was right and that its computations were right.

  Now there are two other conditions which can be caused by engrams. One is dramatization and the other is valence.

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  You have seen some child come forth with a tirade, a tantrum. You have seen some man go through a whole rage action. You have seen people go through a whole irrational set of actions. These are dramatizations. They come about when an engram is thoroughly restimulated, so thoroughly that its soldered-in aspect takes over the organism. It may come into circuit slightly or wholly, which is to say that there are degrees of dramatization. When it is in full parade, the engram is running off verbatim and the individual is like an actor, puppet-like, playing his dictated part. A person can be given new engrams which will make these old ones take secondary importance. (Society’s punishment complex is aimed squarely at giving anti-engram education.)

  Dramatization is survival conduct -- in the silly, reactive mind way of thinking -- based on the premise that the organism, in a “similar” situation lived through it because these actions were present.

  The woman who was knocked down and kicked would dramatize her engram, possibly, by doing and saying exactly the same things done and said to her. Her victim may be her child or another woman. It could or would be the person who gave her the engram if she were strong enough to overcome him. Just because she has this engram does not mean she will use it. She may have a hundred other engrams she can use. But when she dramatizes one, it is as if the engram, soldered-in, were taking over a puppet. As much analytical power as she has left may be devoted to altering the pattern. Therefore she can make a similar or an identical dramatization.

  This aspect of dramatization is strictly “tooth and claw” survival. This is the sort of thing which made observers think that “tooth and claw” was a primary rule.

  In went the engram, by-passing rationality and the standard memory banks. Now it is in the organism but the organism does not know it in the level of consciousness. It is keyed-in by a conscious level experience. Then it can be dramatized. And far from becoming milder the more it is used, the more an engram is dramatized the more solid is its hold in the circuits.

  Muscles, nerves, all must comply.

  “Tooth and claw” survival. The cells were making sure. And here we come to valence.

  Valens means “powerful” in Latin. It is a good term because it is the second half of ambivalent (power in two directions) and exists in any good dictionary. It is a good term because it describes (although the dictionary did not mean it to) the intent of the organism when dramatizing an engram. Multi-valence would mean “many powerfuls.” It would embrace the phenomena of split personality, the strange differences of personality in people in one and then another situation. Valence in dianetics means the personality of one of the dramatic personnel in an engram.

  In the case of the woman being knocked out and kicked, there were t
wo valences present: herself and her husband. If another person had been present the engram would have contained three valences, providing he took any part: herself, her husband and the third person.

  In an engram, let us say, of a bus accident where ten people speak or act, there would be, in the “unconscious” person an engram containing eleven valences, the “unconscious” person and the ten who spoke or acted.

  Now in the case of the woman beaten by her husband, the engram contains just two valences. Who won? Here is the law of “tooth and claw,” the aspect of survival in engrams.

  Who won? The husband. Therefore it is the husband who will be dramatized. She didn’t win.

  She got hurt. Aha! When these restimulators are present, the thing to do is to be the winner, the husband, to talk like him, to say what he did, to do what he did. He survived. “Be like him!”

  say the cells.

  Hence, when the woman is restimulated into this engram by some action, let us say, on the part of her child, she dramatizes the winning valence. She knocks the child down and kicks him, tells him he is a faker, that he is no good, that he is always changing his mind.

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  What would happen if she dramatized herself? She would have to fall down, knocking over a chair, pass out and believe she was a faker, no good and was always changing her mind and she would have to feel the pain of all blows!

  “Be yourself” is advice which falls on deaf reactive mind ears. Here is the scheme.

  Every time the organism gets punished by life, the analytical mind, according to the reactive mind, has erred. The reactive mind then cuts the analytical mind out of circuit in ratio to the amount of restimulation present (danger) and makes the body react as if it were the person who won in the earlier but similar situation where the organism was hurt.