Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

  Because they teach in terms of altitude* and Authority, educational institutions themselves form a social “You must believe it” aberration. It is impossible to reduce an entire university education even if it sometimes appears desirable, but by addressing the moments when the patient was hammered into believing or accepting school, from kindergarten forward, many a fact-clogged mind can again be made facile which was not so before, for the facts will be re-evaluated automatically by the

  * (By altitude is meant a difference of level of prestige -- one on a higher altitude carries conviction to one on a lower altitude merely because of altitude. The auditor may find himself unable to gain sufficient altitude with some patients to work them smoothly and he may have so much altitude with others that they believe everything he says. When he has too little altitude, he is not believed; when he has too much he is believed too well.) mind for importances, not accepted on monotone evaluation as is the case in “formal education.”

  The “Can’t believe it” is a subject so weary and dreary to the auditor that he may find himself, after a few finished cases, running adroitly away from one. The “I don’t know” and the “I can’t be sure” cases are not as bad as the “I can’t believe it.” The prize case in difficulty in dianetics is a patient who is a Junior named after either father or mother, who has not only shut-down pain, emotion, visio and sonic recall but also “dub-in” for them on a false basis, with a lie factory working full blast, who is uncooperative and who is a “Can’t believe it.”

  Monotone evaluation hinders the “Can’t believe it’s” acceptance of all facts. Any case may have a few “Can’t believe its” but some cases are so thoroughly aberrated by the phrase that they disbelieve not only reality but also their own existence.

  The mind has a “built-in doubter” which, unhindered by engrams, rapidly sorts out importances and, by their weights, resolves problems and arrives at conclusions. The rational mind applies itself to data presented, compares it to experience, evaluates its veracity and then assigns it relative importance in the scheme of things. This is done, by a clear, with a rapidity which sometimes requires the splitting of seconds. By a normal the time required is extremely variable and the conclusions are more apt to be referred to another’s opinion or compared to Authority rather than to personal experience. That is the fundamental effect of contemporary education which, through no particular fault of its own and despite every effort it has made to free itself, yet, through lack of tools, is forced to follow Scholastic methods. These, by contagion of aberration, persist against all efforts of advanced educators. The normal is taught on one hand to believe or else he’ll fail and on the other to disbelieve as a scientific necessity: belief and disbelief cannot be taught, they must be personally computed. If a mind could be likened to a general served by his own staff, it could be seen to have a G-2 which, as a combat intelligence center, collected facts, weighed them for importance and formed an estimate of a situation or the value of a conclusion. As the intelligence officer would fail if he had a signed order to disbelieve everything, so does the mind fail which has a reactive command to disbelieve. Certainly a military organization would lose to every puny enemy if it had, conversely, a command to believe everything, and a man will fail if he has a reactive mind order to believe all information in the world around him.

  214

  The believe and disbelieve engrams present different manifestations, and while one cannot be said to be either more or less aberrative than the other, it is certain that the disbelieve engram, by and large, seems to make the less sociable man.

  Disbelief occurs in various degrees, of course. There is, for instance, a social disbelief engram which promotes a class of literature which is as insincere as it is unwitty. Insincerity, shame of emotional demonstration, fear of praising may stem from other things than merely a disbelief engram, but a disbelief engram is most certainly present in the majority of such cases.

  The auditor will find, when he is trying to enter a very strong “Can’t believe it” case, that experience is disbelieved, the auditor is disbelieved, hope of results is disbelieved and that the most ridiculous and unreasonable insults and arguments may be presented. The patient may squirm in a veritable snake pit of somatics and still disbelieve that he is re-experiencing anything.

  It is a sadly chronic fact that an aberree has a certain set of cliches from out of his engram bank. He will repeat these cliches for all occasions and circumstances. Mother, having an engram bank of her own and father having his, will be found to be uttering pretty much the same sort of statement time after time. These are dramatizations. One of the parents may have had an “I don’t know” ready to precede everything he or she said, which makes a whole

  “stack” of “I don’t knows” in the engram bank: which much undermines understanding. In the same way, “You must believe!” or “You can’t believe!” may become “stacked” in the engram bank. Once one has heard a few engrams from a patient, he knows he will have many, many more similar engrams from that source. Once an auditor has listened to the personnel in the patient’s engram bank for a very short time he knows pretty much what he will have in many, many more engrams. Hence any phrase is liable to be much repeated in the engram bank, with varying somatics and accompanying perceptics. If Mother is troubled with high blood pressure, it is raised by Father -- to the intense discomfort of the child and a degree which often produces a later migraine headache -- she is apt to utter, “I can’t believe you would treat me this way.” Privately, she must have been hard to convince (one doesn’t convince much against engramic “reasoning”), for he treated her this way about every three days; and every three days she was saying, “I can’t believe you” or “I can’t believe you would do this to me,” or “I can’t believe anything you say,” or some such thing.

  The “Can’t believe” is apt to be rather hostile since “Can’t believe” is often hostile conversation. “You’ve got to believe me” is more apt to be a pleading or whining sort of an engram. “Believe what I tell you, God damn it,” is, however, fully as hostile as an auditor might expect.

  An auditor who finds a case intensely and unreasonably skeptical should expect a

  “Can’t believe” stack in the engram bank. If he finds a patient incapable of holding an opinion of his own but weather-vaning to each new person or quoting an Authority (all authorities get easily identified with father in the reactive bank), he should suspect a “Must believe” in some form as well as other things. There are many manifestations of either case. The chronic aspect in therapy is that the “Can’t believe” suspects his own data so strongly that he alters it continually and the engrams which, after all, have just one, exact package of content, will not properly reduce; the “Must believe” takes up every engram he hears about as his own and that does him little good.

  Do not suppose that any case has a standard aspect, however. The language contains many words and combinations of words, and aberrees are not unusual who have the entire basic language and all its idioms securely connected up to some somatic or other. Cases ordinarily contain “Can’t believe” and “Must believe” phrases in the same bank. Only when these phrases become top-heavy does the person respond in a set pattern. When the set pattern is of either species of phrase, then the auditor confronts a patient who must have had, at best, a most unhappy life. But either case clears. They all clear, even Juniors.

  215

  PHYSICAL PAIN AND PAINFUL EMOTION COMMANDS

  Besides visio and sonic, another vital recall to therapy is the somatic, which is to say the physical pain of the incident. Running a physically painful incident without a somatic is worthless.

  If physical pain is present, it may come only after considerable “unconsciousness” has been “boiled-off.” If the incident contains pain but the somatic is not turned on, the patient will wriggle his toes and breathe heavily and nervously or he may have jumping muscles. The foot wriggling is an excellent clue to the presence of any soma
tic turned on or not turned on.

  Breathing heavily and jumping muscles and various twitches without pain denote two things: either a denyer is in the incident and the content isn’t being contacted or, if the pre-clear is recounting, the somatic may be shut-off in the incident or elsewhere, either earlier by command or late by painful emotion. The patient who wriggles a great deal or who does not wriggle at all is suffering from a pain or emotion shut-off or late painful emotion engrams or both.

  There is a whole species of commands which shut-off pain and emotion simultaneously: this is because the word “feel” is homonymic. “I can’t feel anything” is the standard, but the command varies widely and is worded in a great many ways. The auditor can pick up his own book of these from patients who, describing how they feel or rather, how they don’t feel, give them away. “It doesn’t hurt” is a class of phrases specifically shutting off pain, a class which includes, of course, such things as “There isn’t any pain,” etc. Emotion is shutoff by a class of phrases which contain the word “emotion” or which specifically (literally translated) shut off emotion.

  The auditor should keep a book of all denyers, misdirectors, holders, bouncers and groupers which he discovers, each listed under its own heading. In this way he adds to material he can use for repeater technique when he sees something is wrong with the way the patient is moving on the track. But there are four other classes of phrases which he should also study and list: shut-offs, exaggerators, derailers and lie factories. He can also add to his classes.

  He will discover enormous numbers of commands in engrams which can accomplish these various aspects. And he should be particularly interested in the pain and emotion shutoffs and the exaggerators, which is to say, those engramic commands which give the aspect of too much pain and too much emotion. There is no reason to give large numbers of them here.

  They are quite various, language being language.

  Many combinations are possible. A patient can be found to weep over the most trivial post-speech things and yet have few or no somatics. Several things can cause this. Either he had a mother or a father who wept for nine months before he was born or he has an exaggerator at work which commands that he be emotional about everything: “Too much emotion.” In combination with this he can have something which says he can feel no pain or can’t hurt or even can’t feel.

  A patient who aches and suffers and yet cannot weep would have a reverse set of commands: he has a “no emotion” command early on the track or a long chain of them and yet has commands which dictate pain to excess: “I can’t stand the pain,” “The pain is too great,” “I always feel I’m in agony,” etc. “I feel bad,” on the other hand, is a shut-off because it says there is something wrong with the mechanism with which he feels and implies disability to feel.

  Both pain and emotion can be commanded into exaggeration. But it is a peculiar thing that the body does not manufacture pain to be felt. All pain felt is genuine, even if exaggerated.

  Imaginary pain is non-existent. A person “imagines” only pain he has actually felt. He cannot imagine pain he has not felt. He may “imagine” pain at sometime later than the actual incident but if he feels pain, no matter how psychotic he is, that pain will be found to exist somewhere on his time track. Scientific tests have been carefully conducted in dianetics to establish this fact 216

  and it is a valuable one. You can test it yourself by asking patients to feel various pains,

  “imagining them” in present time. They will feel pains for you so long as you ask them to feel pains they have had. Somewhere you will find the patient unable to actually feel the pain he is trying to “imagine.” Whether he is aware of it or not, he has had pain wherever he “imagines”

  it and is simply doing a somatic strip return for you on a minor scale.

  This aspect of pain is quite interesting in that many patients have, at one time or another in their lives, pretended to the family or the world that they had a pain. The patient thought, when he asserted this “make-believe” pain, that he was lying. In therapy the auditor can use these “imaginings” for they lead straight to sympathy engrams and actual injury. Further, these

  “imaginary” pains are generally displayed to the person or pseudo-person who was the sympathy ally present in the engramic moment. Thus, if a small boy always pretended to his grandmother, and thought he was pretending, that he had a bad hip, it will be discovered eventually that sometime in his early life he hurt that same hip and received sympathy during the engramic moment which is now eclipsed from the analyzer. Patients often feel quite guilty over these pretenses. Sometimes soldiers in the recent war have come home pretending they had been wounded and, when in therapy, are afraid the auditor will find out or give them away to their people. This soldier might not have been wounded in the war, but an engram will be found which contains sympathy for the injury of which he complains. He is asking for sympathy with a colorful story and believes he is telling a lie. Without informing him of this dianetic discovery, the auditor can often flush into view a sympathy engram which might otherwise have to be arduously hunted down.

  “Cry baby” is a phrase against which the pre-clear will negate in an engram, thus inhibiting tears. It is quite ordinary to find the pre-clear confusing himself with older brothers and sisters who are in his prenatal life: their jeers, mother’s orders and so forth then all register. If the pre-clear knows of any older children, the auditor should look for them in the engrams of prenatal life, for children are quite active and often bounce up and down on mother’s lap or collide with her. Any childish phrases of derision are then not always post-birth.

  It has been said during dianetic research that if one could release all the painful emotion of a lifetime, he would have ninety-percent of the clearing done. However, the painful emotion is only a surface manifestation of the physical pain engrams and would not be painful if the physical pain did not co-exist or exist priorly.

  When emotion and pain shut-offs exist in a case, the patient is normally tense of muscle and nervous, given to twitching or merely tension. When pain and emotion are exaggerated by commands, one has a highly dramatizing case on his hands.

  THE ALLY VERSUS THE ANTAGONIST

  It is necessary for the auditor to know the reactive mind’s evaluation of importances.

  Moronic or not, the reactive mind distinguishes violently between friend and foe, about the only piece of differentiation it does.

  There is a prime test for an ally. And recall that the ally is a part of sympathy engrams, the things which are most likely to produce psycho-somatic illnesses, immaturities and confusion on a grand scale. As long as it can rebel and negate, the reactive mind takes care of the enemies so far as it is able. It can, of course, be twisted by circumstance into the valence of the enemy and so cry havoc and abreact in general if this was a winning valence. But it will not ordinarily use the data of the enemy contained in a contra-survival engram save to negate against it. When the general tone nears Zone One, of course the reactive mind starts picking up and obeying antagonistic commands. Thus, if father is the villain of the piece, an antagonist, father’s commands are not the reactively obeyed commands but the commands the aberree will usually negate against or avoid.

  217

  This is not the case, however, with the ally. The ally, the person from whom sympathy came when the patient was ill or injured, is heeded and obeyed since his “purpose” is apparently aligned with the purpose of the individual to survive. If one thing about a person is right then, according to our moronic little friend, the reactive mind, everything about that person is right, everything that person says and does is right and particularly is right whatever that person said in the engram.

  The chronic psycho-somatic illness is ordinarily from a sympathy engram. This is quite important, for the sympathy engram will be the last or hardest to reach, being aligned with survival purpose.

  A “Must believe” from an ally means that the person must believe. A “Mu
st believe”

  from an antagonist ordinarily brings about a circumstance that the person must not believe.

  Here, in the ally and the antagonist, we have the age-old tale of the hero and the villain, the heroine and the villainess, Mazda and Ahriman, the cowboy in the white hat and the cowboy in the black. The Hindu trinity is found, as source, in father, mother and unborn baby.

  But the war of “good and evil” is found as reactive data in the engram bank in the form of the ally and the antagonist.

  The very best logic of which the reactive mind is capable is two-valued, white and black, and two-valued logic finds its response only in the reactive bank. And the reactive mind works out all problems in absolutes, bringing about logical monstrosities, for there is the absolute of good, the absolute of evil and the absolute of identity thought. Any rational computation demonstrates an absolute to be impossible from a standpoint of truth or workability: but the reactive mind never quibbles, it just reacts. It knows a champion when it sees one (it thinks) and it knows a villain (it supposes). The ally, the champion, is everybody who has any characteristic of the ally and the antagonist, the villain, is everyone who has any characteristics of the antagonist. Further, anything associated with the ally is a champion and everything associated with the antagonist is villainous. If the ally is an aunt, then aunts are good. If the antagonist is a sign painter, then sign painters are all evil. Further, the dollies Auntie crocheted mean that dollies are good and that all lacework is good and that anything on which lacework sits is good and that anything which looks like lacework is good and so on in the ad absurdum which only the reactive mind can manage without a qualm. And the signs the painter painted were evil and where they sit is evil and paint is evil and smell of paint is evil and brushes are evil so hair brushes are evil so the dresser on which hairbrushes sit is evil and so on.