Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

  Now what happens if “society” or the husband or some exterior force told this woman, who is dramatizing this engram, that she must face reality? That’s impossible. Reality equals being herself, and herself gets hurt. What if some exterior force breaks the dramatization? That is to say, if society objects to the dramatization and refuses to let her kick and yell and shout!

  The engram is still soldered-in. The reactive mind is forcing her to be the winning valence.

  Now she can’t be. As punishment, the reactive mind, the closer she slides in to being herself, approximates the conditions of the other valence in the engram. After all, that valence didn’t die. And the pain of the blows turns on and she thinks she is a faker, that she is no good and that she always changes her mind. In other words, she is in the losing valence. Consistent breaking of dramatization will make a person ill just as certainly as there are gloomy days.

  A person accumulates, with the engrams, half a hundred valences before he is ten.

  Which were the winning valences? You will find him using them every time an engram is kicked into restimulation. Multiple personality? Two persons? Make it fifty to a hundred. In dianetics you can see valences turn on and off in people and change with a rapidity which would be awesome to a quick-change artist.

  Observe these complexities of conduct, of behavior. If one set out to resolve the problem of aberration by a system of cataloguing everything he observed and were unaware of the basic source, he would end up with as many separate insanities, neuroses, psychoses, compulsions, repressions, obsessions and disabilities as there are combinations of words in the English language. Discovery of fundamentals by classification is never good research. And the unlimited complexities possible from the engrams (and the severest, most thoroughly controlled experiments discovered these engrams to be capable of just such behavior as is listed here) is the whole catalogue of aberrated human conduct.

  There are a few other basic, fundamental things that engrams do. These will be covered under their own headings: parasite circuits, emotional impaction and psycho-somatic ills. With the few fundamentals listed here, the problem of aberration can be resolved. These fundamentals are simple, they have given rise to as much trouble as individuals and societies have experienced. The institutions for the insane, the prisons for the criminals, the armaments accumulated by nations, yes and even the dust which was a civilization of yesterday exist because these fundamentals were not understood.

  The cells evolved into an organism and in the evolution created what was once a necessary condition of mind. Man has grown up to a point where he creates now the means of overcoming that evolutionary blunder. Examination of the clear proves he no longer needs it.

  He is now in a position where he can take an artificial evolutionary step on his own. The bridge has been built across the canyon.

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  CHAPTER IV

  The “Demons”

  For a moment let us leave such scientific things as cells and consider some further aspects of the problem of understanding the human mind.

  People have been working on problems related to Man’s behavior for a good many millenia. Hindu, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and our own philosophers and researchers of the past few hundred years have been struggling against a superabundance of complexity.

  Dianetics could be evolved only by the philosophic compartmentation of the problem into its elements and the invention of several dozen yardsticks such as The Introduction of an Arbitrary, The Law of Affinity, The Dynamic, The Equation of the Optimum Solution, The Laws of the Selection of Importances, The Science of Organizing Sciences, Nullification by Comparison of Authority to Authority and so forth and so forth. All this is fine matter for a tome on philosophy, but here is dianetics, which is a science. It should be mentioned, however, that one of the first steps taken was not invented but borrowed and modified: that was the Knowable and Unknowable of Herbert Spencer.

  Absolutism is a fine road to stagnation and I do not think Spencer meant to be so entirely absolute about his Knowable and Unknowable. SURVIVE! is the demarcation point between those things which can be experienced by the senses (our old friends Hume and Locke) and those things which cannot necessarily be known through the senses but which possibly may be known but which one does not necessarily need to solve the problem.

  Amongst those things which one did not necessarily need to know (the dianetic version of the Unknowable) were the realms of mysticism and metaphysics. Many things, in the evolution of dianetics, were by-passed solely because they had not yielded solution to anyone else. Therefore mysticism got short shrift despite the fact that the author studied it, not in the little understood, secondhand sources commonly used as authority by some western mental cults, but in Asia where a mystic who can’t make his “astral self” get out and run errands for him is strictly a second rate character indeed. Well aware that there were pieces in this jig-saw puzzle which were orange with yellow spots and purple with carmine stripes, one found it necessary to pick up only those pieces which were germane. Someday a large number of pieces

  -- about structure with the rest -- will come in and there will be answers to telepathy, prescience and so on and on. Understand that there are a lot of pieces in the construction of a philosophic universe. But none of the mystic pieces were found necessary to the creation of a uniformly applicable and aberration-resolving science of mind. No opinion will be delivered at this stage of dianetics about ghosts or the Indian rope trick beyond the fact they are seen to be multicolored pieces and the only ones we want are white. We have most of the white pieces and it makes a good, solid whiteness where there was blackness before.

  Imagine, then, the consternation one must have felt when “demons” were discovered.

  Socrates had a demon, you’ll remember. It told him not what to do but whether or not he had made the right decision. Here we had been pursuing a course in the finite universe which would have pleased Hume himself for its tenacity to those things which could be sensed. And up popped “demons.”

  A thorough examination of a number of subjects (14) revealed that every one apparently had a “demon” of some sort. They were randomly selected subjects in various conditions in society. Therefore the “demon” aspect was most alarming. However, unlike some of the cults (or schools as they call themselves), the temptation to sail off into romantic inexplicable and confounding labels was resisted. A bridge had to be built across a canyon and demons are darned bad girders.

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  Out in the Pacific islands -- Borneo, the Philippines -- I had seen quite a bit of demonology at work. Demonology is fascinating stuff. A demon gets into a person and makes him sick. Or it gets in and talks in lieu of him. Or he goes crazy because he has a demon in him and runs around with the demon shouting. This is demonology in a narrow sense. The shaman, the medicine man, these people deal pretty heavily in demonology (it pays well). But, while not skeptical particularly, it had always seemed to me that demons could be explained a little more easily than in terms of ectoplasm or some such unsensible material.

  To find “demons” living in one’s civilized fellow countrymen was disturbing. But there they were. At least there were the manifestations which the shaman and medicine man had said were caused by demons. It was found that these “demons” could be catalogued. There were

  “commanding demons,” “critical demons,” ordinary “tell-you-what-to-say demons” and

  “demons” which stood around and yelled or “demons” which simply occluded things and kept them out of sight. These are not all the classes, but they cover the general field of

  “demonology.”

  A few experiments with drugged subjects showed that it was possible to set these

  “demons” up at will. It was even possible to set up the whole analytical mind as a “demon.” So there was something wrong with demonology. Without proper ritual, simply by word of mouth, one could make new demons appear in people. So there are no real demons in dianetics (that�
�s underscored in case some mystic runs around telling people that a new science of mind believes in demons).

  A dianetic demon is a parasitic circuit. It has an action in the mind which approximates another entity than self. And it is derived entirely from words contained in engrams.

  How this demon gets there is not very hard to understand, once you’ve inspected one, close up, papa, while baby is unconscious, yells at Mama that she’s got to listen to him and nobody else, by God. The baby gets an engram. It is keyed-in sometime between babyhood and death. And then there’s the demon circuit at work.

  An electronics engineer can set up demons in a radio circuit to his heart’s content. In human terms it is as if one ran a line from the standard banks toward the analyzer but before it got there he put in a speaker and a microphone and then continued the line to the plane of consciousness. Between the speaker and the microphone would be a section of the analyzer which was an ordinary, working section but compartmented off from the remainder of the analyzer. “I” on a conscious plane wants data. It should come straight from the standard bank, compute on a sub-level and arrive just as data. Not spoken data. Just data.

  With the portion of the analyzer compartmented off and the speaker-microphone installation and the engram containing the above words “got to listen to me, by God” in chronic restimulation, another thing happens. The “I” in the upper level attention units wants data. He starts to scan the standard banks with a sub-level. The data comes to him spoken. Like a voice inside his head.

  A clear does not have any “mental voices!” He does not think vocally. He thinks without articulation of his thoughts and his thoughts are not in voice terms. This will come as a surprise to many people. The “listen to me” demon is common in the society, which is to say this engram circulates widely. “Stay right there and listen to me” fixes the engram in present time (and fixes the individual in the time of the engram to some extent). After it is keyed-in and from there on, the individual thinks “out loud,” which is to say, he puts his thoughts into language. This is very slow. The mind thinks out solutions (in a clear) at such speed that the word stream of consciousness would be left at the post.

  Proving this was very easy. In clearing every case without exception one or another of these demons was discovered. Some cases had three or four. Some had ten. Some had one. It is a safe assumption that almost every aberree contains a demon circuit.

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  The type of engram which makes a critical demon is, “You are always criticizing me.”

  There are dozens of such statements contained in engrams, any one of which will make a critical demon, just as any combination of words resulting in a demand to listen and obey orders will make a commanding demon.

  All these demons are parasitic. That is to say, they take a part of the analyzer and compartment it off. A demon can think only as well as the person’s mind can think. There is no extra power. No benefit. All loss.

  It is possible to set up the whole computer (analyzer) as a demon circuit and leave “I”

  on a tiny and forlorn shelf. This, on the surface, is a pretty good stunt. It makes it possible for the whole analytical mind to work out computations undisturbed and relay the answer to the

  “I.” But in practice it is very bad, for “I” is the will, the determining force of the organism, the awareness. And very soon “I” becomes so dependent upon this circuit that the circuit begins to absorb him. Any such circuit, to last, would have to have pain and be chronic. It would have to be, in short, an engram. Therefore, it would have to be reductive of the intellect and would victimize the owner by eventually making him ill one way or another.

  Of all the engram demon circuits found and removed, those which contained a seemingly all-powerful exterior entity which would solve all problems and answer every want were the most dangerous. As the engram keyed-in further and further and was constantly restimulated, it eventually made a spineless puppet out of “I”; because other engrams existed, the sum of the reduction tended toward insanity of a serious sort. If you want a sample, just imagine what you would have to say to a hypnotized person to make him think that he was in the hands of a powerful being who gave him orders and then imagine this as the phrase spoken when an individual had been knocked unconscious one way or another.

  There is another full class of demons, the occlusion demons, the demons who shut things off. These are not properly demons because they don’t talk. A bona-fide demon is one who gives thoughts voice or echoes the spoken word interiorly or who gives all sorts of complicated advice like a real, live voice exteriorly. (People who hear voices have exterior vocal demons -- circuits which have tied up their imagination circuits.) The occlusion demon doesn’t have anything to say. It is what he doesn’t permit to be said or done that makes the mental derangement.

  An occlusion demon can exist for a single word. For instance, a child receives an engram by falling off her bicycle and losing consciousness; a policeman tries to assist her; she is still unconscious but moving and mutters that she can’t move (an old engram at work); the officer says, cheerfully, “Never say can’t!” Some time later she has a conscious level experience such as another fall but without injury. (We keep mentioning this second necessary step, the lock, because it is the thing old time mystics thought was causing all the trouble -- it is

  “mental anguish.”) Now she has difficulty saying “can’t.” Dangerous in any event. What if she had that common engram expression, “Never say no!”?

  Occlusion demons hide things from “I.” It is as easy for one to mask many words. The individual having one will then omit these words or alter them or misspell them and make mistakes with them. The demon is not the only reason words get altered but he is a specific case. An occlusion demon can be of a much higher strength and breadth. He can be created with the phrase, “Don’t talk!” or “Never talk back to your elders,” or “You can’t talk here.

  Who said you could talk?” Any of these phrases might produce a stammerer.

  Other things besides speech can be occluded. Any ability of the mind can be inhibited by a demon specifically designed to obstruct that ability. “You can’t see!” will occlude visual recall. “You can’t hear!” will occlude audio recall. “You can’t feel!” occludes pain and tactile recall (homonymic stuff, English).

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  Any perception can be occluded in recall. And whenever it is occluded in recall, it affects actual perception and the organ of perception as well. “You can’t see!” may reduce not only recall but the actual organic ability of the eyes, as in astigmatism or myopia.

  One can imagine, with the entire English language (or in other lands with other tongues, any language) susceptible to inclusion within engrams just how many abilities of the mind’s operation can be occluded. An extremely common one is “You can’t think!”

  So far now “you” has been used in illustrations and examples in order to keep the similarity to hypnotic or drug tests. Actually sentences which contain “I”, are more destructive.

  “I can’t feel anything,” “I can’t think,” “I can’t remember.” These and their thousands and thousands of variations, when spoken within the hearings of an “unconscious” person, are applicable to himself when he gets the engram keyed-in to circuit.

  “You” has several effects. The statement, “You are no good,” to an awake person makes that person feel very angry perhaps when he has an engram to that effect.

  Within him he feels, possibly, that people think he is no good. He may have a demon that tells him he is no good. And he will dramatize by telling other people that they are no good. It can be sprayed off by being dramatized. A person who has an engram to the effect that he is sexually sterile, for instance, will tell people that they are sexually sterile. (“Don’t do as I do, do as I say.”) If he has an engram that says, “You are no good, you have to eat with your knife,” he may eat with his knife but he gets excited about people eating with their knives, and he would gro
w very angry if somebody said he ate with his knife.

  Thus, there are “compulsion demons” and “confusion demons” and so forth and so on.

  The engram has a command value. There is a power of choice exercised in the reactive mind about which and what engrams will be used. But any engram, strongly enough restimulated, will come to the surface to be dramatized. And if dramatization is blocked, it will turn on the individual either temporarily or chronically.

  The literalness of this reactive mind, in its interpretation of commands and the literalness of their action within the poor, harassed analytical mind is a strange thing in itself.

  “It is too horrible to be borne” might be interpreted to the effect that a baby was in such bad condition that it had better not be born. There are thousands of cliches in any language which, when literally taken, mean quite the opposite from what the speaker intends.

  The reactive engram bank takes them, stores them with pain and emotion and

  “unconsciousness” and with moronic literalness, hands them forth to be LAW and COMMAND to the analytical mind. And when the happy little moron who runs the engram bank sees it possible to use up some analytical mind circuits with some of these confounded demons, it is done.

  The analytical mind, then, can be seen to be subject to yet another form of attrition. Its circuits, ordinarily intended for smooth, rapid computation, become tied up and overloaded with demon lash-ups. The demons are parasites. They are pieces of analytical mind compartmented off and denied to larger computation.

  Is it any wonder that, when these demons are deleted, I.Q. soars as it can be observed to do in a clear? Add the demon circuits to the shut-down aspect of restimulation, and truth can be seen in the observation that people run on about one-twentieth of their mental power.