Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

  BIRTH. Instrument. 29 hours labor.

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  In that mother was a sub-vocal talker this made a sizable quantity of material to be erased for the remainder of the patient’s life was in addition to this. This was a 500-hour case, non-sonic, imaginary recalls which had to be cancelled out by discovering lie factories before the above data could be obtained.

  There are other chains possible but this case was picked because it contains the usual ones found.Mother’s lover is not very unusual, unfortunately, for he puts secrecy into a case to such an extent that when the case seems very, very secret, then a lover or two will seem indictated. But don’t suggest them to a pre-clear. He may use them for an avoid.

  DIANETIC DON’TS

  Don’t give any patient a positive suggestion as therapy in itself or to assist therapy.

  Don’t fail to give a canceller at every session’s beginning and use it at every session’s end.

  Don’t ever tell a patient he can “remember this in present time” because the somatic will come to present time and that is very uncomfortable.

  Don’t ever, ever, ever, ever tell a patient that he can remember everything that ever happened to him in present time because that groups everything in present time if the patient has slid into a deep trance. And that makes it necessary to unsnarl a whole case. Want to waste two hundred hours?

  Don’t ever retaliate in any way when a patient in reverie gets angry at you. Follow the auditor’s code. If you get angry with him you may throw him into an apathy which will take you many hours to undo.

  Don’t evaluate data or tell a patient what is wrong with him.

  Don’t crow. If the pre-clear is your wife, or husband, or child, don’t rub it in that the favorite argument phrase was out of an engram. Of course it was!

  Don’t question the validity of data. Keep your reservations to yourself. Audit the information for your own guidance. If the patient doesn’t know what you think, the engrams will never get a chance to evade.

  Don’t ever snap a patient to present time just because he begs for it. If he is in the middle of an engram, the only way out of it is through it. The power of the engram is slight when the patient is returned to it. It turns on hard when the patient comes to present time. The patient will have a nervous shock if he is snapped to present.

  Don’t ever get frightened, no matter what kind of squirming or squalling a patient may do. It isn’t serious, any of it, although it is sometimes dramatic.

  Don’t ever promise to clear a case: promise only to release it. You may have to go away or work on something more urgent. And a broken promise to a pre-clear will be taken very hard.

  Don’t interfere with the private life of a pre-clear or give him guidance. Tell him to make up his own mind about what he should do.

  Don’t break the auditor’s code. It is there to protect you, not just the pre-clear. Therapy can’t hurt him if you do but half a job on it and do half of that wrong; breaking the code can make you very uncomfortable because it will make you a target of the pre-clear and cost you considerable extra work.

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  Don’t leave engrams half-reduced when you are given them by the file clerk.

  Don’t get inventive about dianetics until you have worked at least one case out. And don’t get too inventive until you have worked a case which has sonic, a case which has shutoff sonic, and a case which has imaginary sonic. Clear these and you will know. And you will have met enough engrams to get some ideas that can be of great benefit to dianetics. If you don’t get ideas after that and after you yourself are in therapy and cleared, there’s something wrong. Dianetics is an expanding science; but don’t expand it until you know which way it travels.

  Don’t mix gasoline and alcohol, or dianetics and other therapy except purely medical, dispensed by a professional medical doctor.

  Don’t get a case snarled up and then take it to a psychiatrist who knows no dianetics.

  Only dianetics can unsnarl dianetics and yesterday’s methods won’t help your patient one slightest bit when all he needs is another run through the one you snapped him out of too fast.

  Take a cinch on your nerve and send him back through the incident again. In dianetics today’s obvious nervous breakdown is tomorrow’s most cheerful being.

  Don’t quit, don’t balk. Just keep running engrams.

  And one day you’ll have a release. And another day you’ll have a clear.

  TYPES OF SOMATICS

  There are two kinds of somatics, those which properly belong to the patient and those which belong to his mother or some other person. The first actually happened, so did the second. But the patient should not have his mother’s somatics. If he does, if he is found complaining of headaches whenever his mother has a headache, there is an engram, very early, which says he must have whatever she has: “The baby is part of me,” “I want him to suffer as I suffer,” etc. Or the phrase may be some entirely misunderstood thing literally taken. However, all this “comes out in the wash” and should be no great concern of the auditor’s.

  “UNCONSCIOUSNESS”

  While “unconsciousness” has been covered elsewhere in various ways, in therapy it has two special manifestations. The yawn and the “boil-off.”

  The engram of physical pain contains deep “unconsciousness” and if it is going to lift, particularly in the basic area, it comes off in yawns. After a first or second recounting, the patient starts to yawn. These yawns are turning on his analyzer.

  In a very extreme engram -- a prenatal electric shock which mother received -- five hours of “unconsciousness” “boil-off” have taken place during therapy. The shock lasted for less than a minute but so close did it bring the individual to death that when the incident was first contacted in therapy, he swam and floundered and had strange dreams, muttered and mumbled for five hours. That is a record. Forty-five minutes of this “boil-off” is rare. Five or ten minutes of it are not uncommon.

  The auditor will take a patient into an area. No somatic turns on. But the patient begins to drowse into a strange kind of sleep. He rouses from this from time to time, mutters something, usually idiotic, rouses again with a dream and generally makes no progress to all appearances. But progress is being made. A period when he was almost dead is coming up to the surface. Soon a somatic will turn on and the patient will run an engram a few times on command, will yawn a little and then brighten up. Such a quantity of “unconsciousness” was, of course, sufficient to keep his analyzer about nine-tenths shut off when he was awake for, if 190

  it was near basic, it was part of every other engram. Such an engram, with such deep

  “unconsciousness,” when released, produces a marked improvement in a case, as much as a painful emotion engram at times.

  It is up to the auditor to sit it through no matter how long it takes. It may make an uncleared auditor very sleepy to watch all this but it should be done. He will rarely strike one that lasts an hour but every case has such a period lasting from ten minutes to a half hour.

  He should stir the patient up once in a while and try to make him go through the engram. There is a very special way to stir a patient into life: don’t touch his body for it may be highly restimulative and make him very upset. Touch only the bottoms of his feet with your hand or your own feet and touch them just enough to jog him into attention for a moment. That keeps the “boil-off” in progress and does not permit the patient to sag into ordinary sleep.

  The “boil-off” can be confused, by an inexperienced auditor, with an engram command to sleep. However, if the auditor will observe the patient closely, he will find that in the “boil-off” the patient gives every appearance of being drugged while in a sleep command, he simply goes to sleep and does it very smoothly. The “boil-off” is a trifle restless, full of mutterings and flounderings and dreams. The sleep is smooth.

  An engramic command to go to sleep, acting on the returned pre-clear, is broken by sending the somatic strip to the moment wh
en the sleep command is given. If the pre-clear contacts it and goes over it, he will quickly awaken on the track and continue with therapy.

  The “boil-off” may be full of yawns, mutterings or grunts. Sleep is usually quiet and gentle.

  Just why this is called a “boil-off” and just why auditors are fond of the term is obscure. It was originally and sedately named “comatic reduction” but such erudition has been outvoted by the fact that it has never been used.

  If you are fond of listening to dreams, you will find them in plenty in the “boil-off.” As images on the desert are distorted by the glass snakes of heat waves, so are the engramic commands distorted to the analyzer through the veil of “unconsciousness.”

  LOCKS

  It is one of the blessings of nature that the lock is something which needs minor attention. A lock is an incident which, with or without charge, is in conscious recall and which seems to be the reason the aberree is aberrated. Perhaps this was another way the bank protected itself. A lock is a moment of mental discomfort containing no physical pain and no great loss. A scolding, a social disgrace: such things are locks. Any case has thousands and thousands of locks. The auditor will discover them in plenty if he cares to waste time looking for them. The treatment of these locks was the main goal of an old art known as “hypno-analysis.” Most of them can be reduced.

  The key-in of an engram takes place at some future date from the time the engram was actually received. The key-in moment contains analytical reduction from weariness or slight illness. A situation similar to the engram, which contained “unconsciousness,” came about and keyed-in the engram. This is a primary lock. Breaking it, if it can be found, produces the effect of keying out the engram. But it can be considered a waste of time even if it has some therapeutic value and was used, without understanding, by some past schools.

  If an auditor wants to know how the case was reacting to life, he can find some of these thousands and thousands of locks and look them over. But that is probably all the interest he has in them, for locks discharge. They discharge automatically the moment the engram holding them is erased. A whole life rebalances itself when the engrams are gone and the locks need no 191

  treatment. Neither does the pre-clear now cleared need education as to how to think: like the blowing of locks, this is an automatic process.

  These locks lie down amongst the engrams sometimes. The pre-clear may be deep in the prenatal area and suddenly think about a time when he was twenty or, as is common in therapy, think about an engram he heard from somebody else. This is a good clue. Pay no further heed to the lock: find the engram to which it attached itself, for there is an engram immediately with it. In dreams these locks in distorted form, come swimming up out of the bank, complicating the dream.

  THE JUNIOR CASE

  Do not take on a Junior for your first case if you can avoid it. If father was named George and the patient is called George, beware of trouble. The engram bank takes George to mean George and that is identity thought de luxe.

  Mother says, “I hate George!” “That means Junior,” says the engram though mother meant father. “George is thoughtless.” “George must not know.” “Oh, George, I wish you had some sex appeal, but you haven’t.” And so go the engrams. A Junior case is seldom easy.

  It is customary to shudder, in dianetics, at the thought of taking on a Junior case. An auditor can be expected to slave his hardest when he has a case with non-sonic, which is off the time track, and which is named after father or mother. Such cases resolve, of course, but if parents knew what they did to children by giving them any name which might appear in the engram bank, such as that of parents or grandparents or friends, it is certain the custom would vanish instanter.

  RESTIMULATING THE ENGRAM

  “Ask often enough and you will receive,” is always true when working the engram bank. Simply by returning into an area enough times engrams will appear. If it is not there today, it will be there tomorrow. But if it is not there tomorrow, it will be there the day after and so forth. Emotional discharges are most certainly located by asking for them time after time, returning the patient over the part of the track where the charge is expected to lie. What repeater technique will fail to do can be done by returning the patient, session after session, to a portion of his life. Sooner or later it will come into view.

  OCCLUDED LIFE PERIODS AND PEOPLE

  Whole areas of the time track will be found occluded. These contain suppressors by way of engram command, ally computations and painful emotion. Persons can vanish utterly from sight for these reasons. They come to view after a few engrams have been lifted in basic or the area has been developed as above.

  ANIMOSITY TOWARD PARENTS

  It always happens, when one clears a child or adult, that the pre-clear goes through stages of improvement which bring him up the tone scale and cause him, of course, to pass through the second zone, anger. A pre-clear may become furious with his parents and other offenders in the engram bank. Such a situation is to be expected. It is a natural by-product of therapy and it cannot be avoided.

  As the case progresses the tone scale, of course, rises and places the pre-clear in a state of boredom toward the villains who have wronged him. At last he reaches Tone 4, which is the 192

  tone of the clear. At this time he is very cheerful and willing to be friends with people whether they have wronged him or not: of course he has the data about what to expect of them, but he nurses no animosity.

  If a parent feels that the child, knowing all, would turn against him, then the parent is mistaken. The child has already, as an aberree, turned very thoroughly against the parent whether his analyzer knows all or not and the most uncertain and unlovely conduct may result from further hiding of the evidence.

  It is a matter of continual observation that the good release and the clear feel no animosity whatever toward their parents or others who had caused their aberrations and indeed stop negating, defending and fighting so irrationally. The clear will fight, certainly, for a good cause and he will be the most dangerous opponent possible, but he does not fight for irrational reasons like an animal and his understanding of people is very much enlarged and his affection can at last be deep. If a parent wishes love and cooperation from a child, no matter what he has done to that child, permit therapy and achieve that love and cooperation with the child self-determined and no longer secretly in apathy or rage. After all, the clear has learned the source of his parents’ aberrations as well as his own; he recognizes that they had engram banks before he did.

  PROPITIATION

  In the process of work a stage will be passed, in the upper range of apathy, of propitiation. This conciliation is an effort to feed or sacrifice to an all destructive force. It is a state wherein the patient, in deep fear of another, offers expensive presents and soft words, turns the other cheek, offers himself as a doormat and generally makes a fool out of himself.

  Many, many marriages, for instance, are marriages not of love but of that shabby substitute, propitiation. People have a habit of marrying people who have similar reactive minds. This is unfortunate for such marriages are destructive to both partners. She has a certain set of aberrations: they match his. She is pseudo-mother, he is pseudo-father. She had to marry him because father tried to murder her before she was born. He had to marry her because mother beat him when he was a child. Incredible as it may seem, these marriages are very common: one or the other partner becomes mentally ill, or both may deteriorate. He is unhappy, his enthusiasms crushed; she is miserable. Either with another partner might be a happy person yet, out of fear, they cannot break apart. They must propitiate each other.

  The auditor who finds a marriage in this condition and attempts to treat one of the partners, had better treat both simultaneously. Or such partners had better treat each other and soon. Tolerance and understanding are almost always fostered by mutual help.

  Propitiation is mentioned here because it has a diagnostic value. People who start
bringing the auditor expensive gifts are propitiating him, and it probably means that they have a computation which tells them, engramically, that they will die or go crazy if they become sane.

  The auditor may enjoy the gifts, but he had better start looking for a sympathy engram not yet suspected or tapped.

  LOVE

  Probably no single subject in the concerns of Man has received as much attention as Love.

  It is not untrue that where one finds the greatest controversy, there he will also find the least comprehension. And where the facts are least precise there one can also find the greatest arguments. And so it is with Love.

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  Without doubt Love has ruined more lives than war and made more happiness than all the dreams of Paradise.

  Entangled with a thousand songs a year and submerged beneath a solid tonnage of poor literature, Love should have a proper chance to be defined.

  It has been discovered that there are three kinds of Love between woman and man: the first is covered under the law of affinity and is the affection with which Mankind holds Mankind; the second is sexual selection and is a true magnetism between partners; the third is compulsive “Love” dictated by nothing more reasonable than aberration.

  Perhaps in the hero and heroine legends there have been cases of the second kind, and surely as one looks about him in this society he can discover numbers of happy partnerships based on a natural and strongly affectionate admiration. The third kind we find in plenty: tabloid literature is devoted to it and its travails; it crams the courts with urgent pleas for divorce, with criminal acts and civil suits; it sends children weeping into the corner away from quarrels and it launches from its broken homes broken young women and men.

  Dianetics classifies this third kind of love as “reactive mind partnership.” Here is a meeting of minds -- but the minds are on the lowest computational level possessed by man.

  Driven together by compulsion, men and women mate who will find in that mating nothing but sorrow and reduction of their hopes.