An examination was made of what had been attempted. It had been assumed that Man survived only for himself as an individual; it had been computed that he survived only for the group, the pack, for society; it had been postulated that he survived only for Mankind

L. Ron Hubbard - The Retard; Section 1

First, last and always, the job is to get basic-basic and then ever afterwards the currently existing earliest moment of pain or sorrow, and to erase every incident as it is advanced by the file clerk or found by repeater technique. (5) Any incident that hangs fire always has a similar incident earlier, and the patient should be taken earlier for the prior incident when an engram will not “reduce” on recounting. (6) At any time the engrams start to become emotionless in tone, even though they reduce, suspect another ally computation and, early or late in the patient’s life, get it and reduce it at least until the emotional discharge is gone. Do not get everything in a case restimulated by changing from an unreduced incident to something which looks more fruitful, but reduce everything in view before you go looking for a new sorrow charge. (7) It is better to reduce an emotionless early engram than it is to upset the case by hounding him for an ally computation when a cunning search fails to reveal none in sight. Erasing early emotionless engrams will eventually bring a new ally computation into sight if you occasionally look for it. (8) Consider that any hold-up on a case, any unwillingness to cooperate, stems from ally computation. (9) Treat all demon circuits as things held in place by life force units absorbed into the bank and address the problem of demon circuits by releasing charges of sorrow. (10) Consider that loss by death or departure of an ally is identical with a death of some part of the patient and that the reduction of a death or departure of an ally will restore that much life back to the patient. And remember that great sorrow charges are not always death or departure but merely may be a sudden reversal of stand by the ally. Always keep in mind that that person who most nearly identifies himself with the person of the patient, such as a sympathetic mother or father or grandparent or relative or friend, is considered by the reactive mind to be a part of the person himself and that anything happening to this sympathetic character can be considered to have happened to the patient. In such a case, where an ally has been found to have died of cancer, you may occasionally find the patient to have a sore or scaly place where he supposed the ally’s cancer to have been. The reactive mind thinks in identities only. The sympathetic pro-survival engram identifies the patient with another individual. The death or loss (by departure or denial) of the other individual is therefore a reactive mind conviction that the patient has suffered some portion of death.

Emotional charges may be contained in any engram: the emotion communicates, in the same tone level, from the personnel around the “unconscious” person into his reactive mind. Anger goes into an engram as anger, apathy as apathy, shame as shame. Whatever people have felt emotionally around an “unconscious” person should be found in the engram which resulted from the incident. When the emotional tone of personnel in an engram is obviously angry or apathetic from the word content and yet the patient, recounting, does not feel it, there is something somewhere which has a valence wall between the patient and the emotional tone, and that valence wall is nearly always broken down by the discovery of an engram with a sorrow charge sometime earlier or later in a patient’s life. The only legitimate reason for entering later portions of a person’s life before the prenatal area has been well exhausted is search for sorrow discharges occasioned by the death, loss or denial by an ally. And by “denial,” we mean that the ally turned into an active enemy (real or imaginary) of the patient. The counterpart of the ally, the pseudo-ally, is a person whom the reactive mind has confused with the real ally. The death, loss or denial by a pseudoally can contain a sorrow charge.

According to theory, the only thing which can lock up life units is this emotion of loss. If some method existed of doing nothing but freeing all life units, the physical pain could be neglected.

A release is brought about, one way or another, by freeing as many life units as possible from periods of loss with minimal address to actual engrams. The loss of an ally or pseudo-ally need contain no other physical pain or “unconsciousness” than the loss itself occasions. This is serious enough. It makes an engram.

Any person who is suddenly discovered to be occluded in a patient’s life can, with some reliability, be considered an ally or pseudo-ally. If, either while remembering or returning, large sections of a patient’s association with another person are missing, that person can be called an occluded person. It is a better guarantee of ally status if the occlusion surrounds the death of the person or a departure from or a denial by that person. It is possible for occlusion to take place, also, for punishment reasons; which is to say, the occluded person may also be an arch enemy: in such a case, however, any memory present will concern the death or defeat or illness of the occluded person. Occlusion of a person’s funeral in the memory of a patient would theoretically label that person an ally or pseudo-ally. Recollection of the funeral of a person but occlusion of pleasant association might tend to mean that the person was an enemy. Such rules are tentative. But it is certain that any occlusion means that a person had a vast and unrevealed significance in a patient’s life which should be explained.

It may be remarked at this point that the recovery of the patient will depend in large measure on the life units freed from his reactive bank. This is a discharge of sorrow and may be quite violent. The usual practice is to “forget” such things and the “sooner forgotten, the sooner healed.” Unfortunately this does not work: it would be a happy thing if it did. Anything forgotten is a festering sore when it has despair connected with it. The auditor will find that every time he locates that arch denyer, “forget it,” he will get the engram it suppressed; when he can’t locate the engram and yet has found a somatic, a “forget it” or “don’t think about it” or “can’t remember it” or “don’t remember it” or some other denyer will be sitting there in the context of the engram. Forgetting is such unhealthy business that when a thing has been “put out of mind,” it has been put straight into the reactive engram bank and in there it can absorb life units.

This “loopy” computation, that forgetting things makes them bearable, is incredible in view of the fact that the hypnotist, for instance, gets results with a positive suggestion when he puts one of these denyers on the end of it. That has been known now for a great many eons: it was one of the first things the author was taught when he studied Asiatic practices; from India it long ago filtered to Greece and Rome and it has come to us via Anton Mesmer: it is a fundamental principle in several mystic arts: its mechanics were known even to the Sioux medicine man. Yet people at large, hitherto unguided about it, and perhaps because they lacked any real remedy, believed that the thing to do with sorrow was to “forget it.” Even Hippocrates remarks that the whole of an operation is not finished until the patient has recounted the incident to all of his friends in turn, and while this is inadequate therapy, it has been, like the Confessional, a part of popular knowledge for lo, these many ages: yet people persist in suppressing sorrow.

L. Ron Hubbard - The Retard; Section 2

When one deals with facts rather than theories and gazes for the first time upon the mechanisms of human action several things confound him, much as the flutterings of the heart did Harvey or the actions of yeasts did Pasteur. The blood did not circulate because Harvey said it could nor yet because he said it did. It circulated and had been circulating for eons; Harvey was clever and observant enough to find it; and this was much the case with Pasteur and other explorers of the hitherto unknown or unconfirmed. In dianetics the fact that the analytical mind was inherently perfect and remained structurally capable of restoration to full operation was not the least of the data found. That man was good, as established by exacting research, was no great surprise, but that an unaberrated individual was vigorously repelled by evil and yet gained enormous strength was astonishing since aberration had been so long incorrectly supposed to be the root of strength and ambition according to authorities since the time of Plato. That a man contained a mechanism which recorded with diabolical accuracy when the man was observably and by all presumable tests “unconscious” was newsworthy and surprising. To the layman the relationship of prenatal life to mental function has not entirely been disregarded since for centuries beyond count people were concerned with “prenatal influence.” To the psychiatrist, the psychologist and psycho-analyst, prenatal memory had long been an accepted fact since “memories of the womb” were agreed to influence the adult mind. But the prenatal aspect of the mind came as an entire surprise to dianetics, an unwanted and at the time unwelcome observation. Despite existing beliefs -- which are not scientific facts -- that the foetus had memory, the psychiatrist and other workers believed as well that memory could not exist in a human being until myelin sheathing was formed around the nerves. This was as confusing to dianetics as it was to psychiatry. After much work over some years the exact influence prenatal life had on the later mind was established by dianetics with accuracy. There will be those who, uninformed, will say that dianetics “accepts and believes in” prenatal memory. Completely aside from the fact that an exact science does not “believe” but establishes and proves facts, dianetics emphatically does nor believe in “prenatal memory.” Dianetics had to invade cytology and biology and form many conclusions by research; it had to locate and establish both the reactive mind and the hidden engram banks never before known before it came upon “prenatal” problems. It had been discovered that the engram recording was probably done on the cellular level, that the engram bank was contained in the cells. It was then discovered that the cells, reproducing from one generation to the next, within the organism, apparently carried with them their own memory banks. The cells are the first echelon of structure, the basic building blocks. They built the analytical mind. They operate, as the whip, the reactive mind. Where one has human cells, one has potential engrams. Human cells begin with the zygote, proceed in development with the embryo, become the foetus and finally the infant.

Each stage of this growth is capable of reaction. Each stage in the growth of the colony of cells finds them fully cells, capable of recording engrams. In dianetics “prenatal memory” is not considered since the standard banks which will someday serve the completed analyzer in the infant, child and man are not themselves complete. There is neither “memory” or “experience” before the nerves are sheathed as far as dianetic therapy is concerned. But dianetic therapy is concerned with engrams, not memories, with recordings, not experience, and wherever there are human cells, engrams are demonstrably possible and, when physical pain was present, engrams can be demonstrated to have been created. The engram is a recording like the ripples in the groove of a phonograph record: it is a complete recording of everything which occurred during the period of pain. Dianetics can locate, with its techniques, any engram which the cells have hidden, and in therapy the patient will often discover himself to be upon the prenatal cellular time track. There he will locate engrams and he goes there only because engrams exist there. Birth is an engram and is recovered by dianetics as a recording, not as a memory. By return and the cellular extension of the time track, zygote pain storage can be and is recovered. It is not memory. It impinged upon the analytical mind and it obstructed the standard banks where memory is stored. This is a very great difference from prenatal memory. Dianetics recovers prenatal engrams and finds them responsible for much aberration and discovers that any longing for the womb is not present in any patient but that engrams sometimes dictate a return to it, as in some regressive psychoses which then attempt to remake the body into a foetus.

This matter of prenatal life is discussed here at length in this synopsis to give the reader a perspective on the subject. We are dealing here with an exact science, precision axioms and new skills of application. By them we gain a command over aberration and psycho-somatic ills and with them we take an evolutionary step in the development of Man which places him yet another stage above his distant cousins of the animal kingdom.

L. Ron Hubbard - The Retard; Section 3

Whole populaces are handled by their push-button responses. Advertising learns about push-buttons and uses them in such things as “body-odor” or constipation. And in the entertainment field and the song-writing field push-buttons are pushed in whole racks and batteries to produce aberrated responses. Pornography appeals to people who have pornographic push-buttons. Corn-and-games government appeals to people who have “care for me” push-buttons and others. It might be said that there is no necessity to appeal to reason when there are so many push-buttons around.

These same push-buttons, because they are 7’s held down by pain and emotion (false data forced into the computer by engrams -- and every society has its own special patterns of engrams), also happen to drive people insane, make them ill and generally raise havoc. The only push-button the clear has is whatever his own computer, evaluating on his experience which itself has been evaluated by the computer, tells him is survival conduct along his four dynamics. And so, being no marionette in the hands of careless or designing people, he remains well and sane.

It is not true, however, that a clear is not emotional, that his reason is cold, and that he is a self-conscious puppet to his own computations. His computer works so rapidly and on so many levels with so many of his computations going on simultaneously but out of the sight of “I” (though “I” can examine any one of them he chooses) that his inversion or acute awareness of self is minimal. Inversion is the condition of the aberree whose poor computer is wrestling with heavy imponderables and held down 7’s in his engrams such as “I must do it. I just have to do it. But no, I’d better change my mind.”

The computational difference between the clear and the aberree is very wide. But there is a much grander difference: life force. The dynamics have, evidently, so much potential force. This force manifests itself as tenacity to life, persistence in endeavor, vigor of thought and act and ability to experience pleasure. The dynamics in a man’s cells may be no stronger than those in a cat’s cells. But the dynamics in the whole man are easily greater than those in any other animal. Assign this as one will, the man is basically more alive in that he has a more volatile response. By more alive is meant that his sentient-emotional urge to live is greater than those found in other life forms. If this were not true, he would not now command the other kingdoms. Regardless of what a shark or a beaver does when threatened with final extinction, the shark and the beaver get short shrift when they encounter the dynamics of Man: the shark gets worn as leather or eaten as vitamins and the beaver decks a lady’s back.

The fundamental aspect of this is seen in a single reaction. Animals are content to survive in their environments and seek to adjust themselves to those environments. That very dangerous animal -- or god -- Man has a slightly different idea. Ancient schools were fond of telling the poor demented aberree that he must face reality. This was optimum conduct: facing reality. Only it isn’t Man’s optimum conduct. Just as these schools made the fundamental error of supposing that the aberree was unwilling to face his environment when he was actually, because of engrams, unable to face it, they supposed that the mere facing of reality would lead to sanity. Perhaps it does, but it does not lead to a victory of Man over the elements and other forms. Man has something more: some people call it creative imagination, some call it this or some call it that: but whatever it is called, it adds up to the interesting fact that Man is not content merely to “face reality” as most other life forms are. Man makes reality face him. Propaganda about “the necessity of facing reality,” like propaganda to the effect that a man could be driven mad by a “childhood delusion” (whatever that is) does not face the reality that where the beaver down his ages of evolution built mud dams and keeps on building mud dams.

Man graduates in half a century from a stone and wood dam to make a mill wheel pond to structures like Grand Coulee Dam, and changes the whole and entire aspect of a respectable portion of Nature’s real estate from a desert to productive soil, from a flow of water to lightning bolts. It may not be as poetic as Rousseau desired, it may not be as pretty as some “nature lover” would desire, but it’s a new reality. Two thousand years ago the Chinese built a wall which would have been visible from the Moon had anybody been up there to look; three thousand years ago he had North Africa green and fertile; ten thousand years ago he was engaged upon some other project; but always he has been shaping things up pretty well to suit Man.

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L. Ron Hubbard - The Retard; Section 4

There is therefore a necessity for pleasure, for working, as happiness can be defined, toward known goals over not unknowable obstacles. And the necessity for pleasure is such that a great deal of pain can be borne to attain it. Pleasure is the positive commodity. It is enjoyment of work, contemplation of deeds well done; it is a good book or a good friend; it is taking all the skin off one’s knees climbing the Matterhorn; it is hearing the kid first say daddy; it is a brawl on the Bund at Shanghai or the whistle of amour from a doorway; it’s adventure and hope and enthusiasm and “someday I’ll learn to paint”; it’s eating a good meal or kissing a pretty girl or playing a stiff game of bluff on the stock exchange. It’s what Man does that he enjoys doing; it’s what Man does that he enjoys contemplating; it’s what Man does that he enjoys remembering; and it may be just the talk of things he knows he’ll never do. Man will endure a lot of pain to obtain a little pleasure. Out in the laboratory of the world, it takes very little time to confirm that.

And how does necessity fit this picture? There is a necessity for pleasure, a necessity as live and quivering and vital as the human heart itself. He who said that a man who had two loaves of bread should sell one to buy white hyacinth, spoke sooth. The creative, the constructive, the beautiful, the harmonious, the adventurous, yes, and even escape from the maw of oblivion, these things are pleasure and these things are necessity. There was a man once who had walked a thousand miles just to see an orange tree and another who was a mass of scars and poor-set bones who was eager just to get a chance to “fan another bronc.” It is very well to dwell in some Olympian height and write a book of penalties and very well to read to find what writers said that other writers said, but it is not very practical. The pain-drive theory does not work. If some of these basics of dianetics were only poetry about the idyllic state of Man, they might be justified in that, but it happens that out in the laboratory of the world, they work. Man, in affinity with Man, survives, and that survival is pleasure. In the original equations of dianetics, when the research was young, it was believed that survival could be envisioned in personal terms alone and still answer all conditions. A theory is only as good as it works. And it works as well as it explains observed data and predicts flew material which will be found, in fact, to exist. Survival in personal terms was computed until the whole activity of Man could be theoretically explained in terms of self alone. The logic looked fairly valid. But then it was applied to the world. Something was wrong: it did not solve problems. In fact, the theory of survival in personal terms alone was so unworkable that it left a majority of behavior phenomena unexplained. But it could be computed and it still looked good. Then it was that a nearly intuitive idea occurred. Man’s understanding developed in ratio to his recognition of his brotherhood with the Universe. That was high flown but it yielded results.

Was Man himself a brotherhood of Man? He had evolved and become strong as a gregarious being, an animal that hunted in packs. It seemed possible that all his activities could be computed in terms of the survival of the group. That computation was made. It looked good. Man survived, it was postulated, solely in terms of the survival of his group. It looked good but it left a majority of observed phenomena unexplained. It was attempted, then, to explain Man’s behavior in terms of Mankind alone; which is to say, it was assumed that Mankind survived for Mankind in a highly altruistic way. This was straight down the sylvan path of Jean Jacques Rousseau. It could be computed that Man lived alone for the survival of all Mankind. But when addressed to the laboratory -- the world -- it did not work.

Finally, it was recalled that some had thought that Man’s entire activity and all his behavior could be explained by assuming that he lived for sex alone. This was not an original assumption. But some original computations were made upon it and it is true that, by a few quick twists of the equation, his survival activity can be made to resolve on only the sexual basis. But when this was applied to observed data, again it failed to explain every phenomenon.

An examination was made of what had been attempted. It had been assumed that Man survived only for himself as an individual; it had been computed that he survived only for the group, the pack, for society; it had been postulated that he survived only for Mankind; and finally, it had been theorized that he lived only for sex. None worked alone. A new computation was made on the survival dynamic. Exactly for what was man surviving? All four of these factors, self, sex, group and Mankind were entered into a new equation. And now it was found, a theory was in hand which worked. It explained all observed phenomena and it predicted new phenomena which were discovered to exist. It was a scientific equation, therefore!

From the survival dynamic, in this fashion, were evolved the four dynamics. By survival dynamic was meant the basic command, SURVIVE! which underlay all activity. By dynamic was meant one of the four purpose divisions of the entire dynamic principle. The four dynamics were not new forces; they were sub-divisions of the primary force. DYNAMIC ONE is the urge toward ultimate survival on the part of the individual and for himself. It includes his immediate symbiotes*, the extension of culture for his own benefit, and name immortality.

There is a consequent lowering of the survival dynamic. Averaging out, the future possibility of strain because of the act, added to the state of being at the moment the debauchery was experienced, again depresses the survival dynamic. Because of this, various kinds of debauchery have been in indifferent odor with Man throughout his history. This is the equation of “immoral pleasures.”

It should not be read here that survival is always a matter of keeping an eye on the future. Contemplation of pleasure, pure enjoyment, contemplation of past pleasures, all combine into harmonies which, while they operate automatically as a rise toward the survival potential, by their action within the organism physically, do not demand the future as an active portion of the mental computation in such contemplation. A pleasure which reacts to injure the body physically, as in the case of debauchery, discovers at work a ratio between the physical effect (which is depressed toward pain) and the mental effect of experienced pleasure. There is a consequent lowering of the survival dynamic. Averaging out, the future possibility of strain because of the act, added to the state of being at the moment the debauchery was experienced, again depresses the survival dynamic. Because of this, various kinds of debauchery have been in indifferent odor with Man throughout his history. This is the equation of “immoral pleasures.” And any action which has brought about survival suppression or which can bring it about, when pursued as a pleasure, has been denounced at some time or another in Man’s history. Immorality is originally hung as a label upon some act or class of actions because they depress the level of the survival dynamic. Future enforcement of moral stigma may depend largely upon prejudice and aberration and there is, consequently, a continuous quarrel over what is moral and what is immoral. Because certain things practiced as pleasures are actually pains -- and how easy it will be to trace out why when you’ve finished this volume -- and because of the moral equation as above, pleasure itself, in any aberrated society can become decried. A certain kind of thinking, of which more later, permits poor differentiation between one object and another. Confusing a dishonest politician with all politicians would be an example of this. In ancient times the Roman was fond of his pleasures and some of the things he called pleasure were a trifle strenuous on other species such as Christians. When the Christian overthrew the pagan state, the ancient order of Rome was in a villain’s role. Anything, therefore, which was Roman was villainous. This went to such remarkable lengths that the Roman love of bathing made bathing so immoral that Europe went unwashed for some fifteen hundred years. The Roman had become a pain source so general that everything Roman was evil and it stayed evil long after Roman paganism perished. Immorality, in such a fashion, tends to become an involved subject. In this case it became so involved that pleasure itself was stigmatized. When half the survival potential is struck from the list of lawful things, there is a considerable reduction in survival indeed. Considering this graph on a racial scale, the reduction of survival potential by one-half would forecast that direful things lay in wait for the race. Actually, because Man is after all Man, no set of laws, however enforced, can completely wipe away the attraction of pleasure. But in this case enough was removed and banned to occasion precisely what happened: the Dark Ages and the recession of society. Society brightened only in those periods such as the Renaissance, in which pleasure became less unlawful. When a race or an individual drops into the second zone, as marked on the chart, and the general tone ranges from the first zone barely into the third, a condition of insanity ensues. Insanity is irrationality. It is also a state in which non-survival has been so closely approached continually that the race or the organism engages in all manner of wild solutions. In further interpretation of this descriptic graph there is the matter of the survival suppressor. This, it will be seen, is a thrust downward out of potential immortality at the race or organism represented as the survival dynamic. The survival suppressor is the combined and variable threats to the survival of the race or organism. These threats come from other species, from time, from other energies. These are also engaged in the contest of survival to potential immortality in terms of their own species or identities. Thus there is a conflict involved. Every other form of life or energy could be plotted in a descriptic as the survival dynamic. If we were to use a duck’s survival dynamic in a descriptic graph, we would see the duck seeking a high survival level and Man would be a part of the duck’s suppressor. The balance and nature of things do not permit the infinity of the goal of immortality to be reached. In fluctuating balance and in almost unlimited complexity, life and energies ebb and flood, out of the nebulous, into forms and, through decay, into the nebulous once more.* Many equations could be drawn concerning this, but it is outside the sphere of our present interest. In terms of the zones of the descriptic it is of relative concern what the extent of the force of the suppressor is against the survival dynamic. The dynamic is inherent in individuals, groups and races, evolved to resist the suppressor through the eons. In the case of Man, he carries with him another level of offensive and defensive techniques, his cultures. His primary technology of survival is mental activity governing physical action in the sentient echelon. But every life form has its own technology, formed to resolve the problems of food, protection and procreation. The degree of workability of the technology any life form develops (armor or brains, fleetness of foot or deceptive form) is a direct index of the survival potential, the relative immortality, of that form. There have been vast upsets in the past; Man, when he developed into the world’s most dangerous animal (he can and does kill or enslave any life form, doesn’t he?) overloaded the suppressor on many other life forms and they dwindled in number or vanished. A great climatic change, such as the one which packed so many mammoths in Siberian ice, may overload the suppressor on a life form. A long drought in the American southwest in not too ancient times wiped out the better part of an Indian civilization. A cataclysm such as an explosion of the core of the Earth, if that were possible, or the atom bomb or the sudden cessation of burning on the Sun would wipe out all life forms on Earth. And a life form can even overload the suppressor on itself. A dinosaur destroys all his food and so destroys the dinosaur. A bubonic plague bacillus attacks its hosts with such thorough appetite that the whole generation of pasteurella pestis vanishes. Such things are not intended by the suicide to be suicide; the life form has run up against an equation which has an unknown variable, and the unknown variable unfortunately contained enough value to overload the suppressor. This is the “didn’t know the gun was loaded” equation. And if the bubonic plague bacillus overloads its own suppressor in an area and then ceases to trouble its food and shelter, the animals, then the animals consider themselves benefited. Reckless and clever and well-nigh indestructible, Man has led a course which is a far cry from “tooth and claw” in every sphere. And so have the redwood tree and the shark. Just as a life form, Man, like every life form, is “symbiotic.” Life is a group effort. Lichens and plankton and algae may do very well on sunlight and minerals alone, but they are the building blocks. Above such existence, as the forms grow more complex, a tremendous interdependence exists. It is very well for a forester to believe that certain trees willfully kill all other varieties of trees around them and then conclude a specious “attitude” of trees. Let him look again. What made the soil? What provides the means of keeping the oxygen balance? What makes it possible for rain to fall in other areas? These willful and murderous trees. And squirrels plant trees. And Man plants trees. And trees shelter trees of another kind. And animals fertilize trees. And trees shelter animals. And trees hold the soil so less well rooted plants can grow. Look anywhere and everywhere and we see life as an assist for life. The multitude of the complexities of life as affinities for life is not dramatic. But they are the steady, practical, important reason life can continue to exist at all. A redwood tree may be first out for redwood trees and although it does an excellent job of seeming to exist as redwood alone, a closer glance will show it has dependencies and is depended upon. The father had said that he would lock the mother in a closet until she decided to abort the child. (This case was much complicated because the mother had been afraid to tell the father and had pretended not to be pregnant for three months, giving the husband the belief that the child, seven months along, was actually only four months along. Therefore, there was much secrecy in the case, much confusion and conflicting data.) This meant that R had a severe holder in the prenatal area: he was held by the engram which included a penetration of his stomach. This was the key engram, which is to say other engrams, by the mechanism of similar somatic and content, had gathered around it to suppress it. This was the tangle of incidents which C was confronting unknowingly: it had become more tangled by her anger. R would now cooperate but his time track had wound into a ball around the holder engram, the key. Two exodontistries for the removal of wisdom teeth with nitrous oxide anesthesia were also suppressing the prenatals. C worked for some time trying to get at the late extraction engrams, which contained an enormous amount of conversation between the dentist and his assistants and R’s mother, who, unfortunately for his sanity, had accompanied him to the dentist’s office. R was made intensely uncomfortable by the continual restimulation of engrams which yet could not be reached. He was no more uncomfortable than he had often been in the past and his discomfort would have been absent had C understood and followed the auditor’s code. The case made no progress for several weeks. C’s therapy was progressing. It was intensely restimulative to R to work upon her and increase his discomfort, but the more he worked on her the better auditing she did and the more intelligent she was (her I.Q. went up about fifty points after five weeks of therapy). C desired to know how she could break the impasses in his case and was informed that she was now practicing tacit consent, for she had many times been needlessly thoughtless of R long before therapy was undertaken and she now realized what she had done to him and yet could not bring herself to face the fact that she was a responsible party to so much of his unhappiness -- she had quite ordinarily used angry language to him which she well knew would “push-button” him into doing something or into retreating from a quarrel, which language had been restimulative to him long before therapy. C thereupon entered into painful emotion engrams late in R’s life and, by working early physically painful engrams which said R could “feel nothing” alternately with late engrams when he was feeling intensely on an emotional plane but could not exhibit it, began to release the emotion in the case. R then showed steady improvement. Late painful emotion was released and early prenatals would show to be reduced, at which more late emotion would be visible for reduction. It was suddenly disclosed in the case that the reason R was so easily upset by C lay in the person of a nurse who had attended R during his tonsillectomy when he was five years of age. C had some similarity of mannerism to this nurse. This was a sympathy engram, and when it was released the time track began to straighten out and the abortion engrams could be more easily contacted. It so happened that R had been well off his time track most of his life, his memory occluded, his recall in poor condition. This was found to lie in the hidden key engram, the abortion attempt wherein his father had vowed to kill him if he came out and had added that the child could not see, feel or hear anything anyway, engramic material which was demonstrated by R’s inability to move on his time track. The moment the key was found -- two hundred and eighty hours of therapy had elapsed -- R came back on the time track, could move on it, and the erasure of his engrams proceeded in an orderly fashion. C had been cleared about two months before R reached the final engram. C’s allergies, however, disappeared long before her case was cleared completely and R’s ulcer and some other psycho-somatic difficulties also vanished well before his case was finally cleared. G was cleared in ten months of sporadic sessions. His case had the initial diagnosis of non-sonic, non-visio, pain and emotional shut-off, permanent light trance, permanent “regression” at the age of three years. This is to say that the instant he went into reverie he was startled and frightened to find himself in a dental chair, three years old, and having a tooth pulled, an engram in which he had been situated, unknowingly, about half of his ensuing life. It had been the partial cause of his chronic tooth decay and his inability to sleep as negation against the anesthetic. The situation was obvious since he immediately began to wrestle about and lisp, which condition was instantly remedied by running the engram so that he could come to present time, which he did. He had had considerable difficulty in life, was a high dynamic but manifested apathy. It was discovered after seventy-five hours, at which time release took place, that his wife was sometimes his pseudo-grandmother and also, by ambivalence, was his pseudo-mother. As his sympathy computation demanded that he be ill so that his grandmother would stay with him and as his contra-survival engrams demanded that his mother was only nice to him when he was ill, the reactive computation added up to the fact that he must be ill continually, which demand had been obeyed by his body for twenty-three years. All this was recovered and remedied, of course, only by reducing engrams. The erasure began to take place at the end of about two hundred hours of therapy and was proceeding when the case suddenly stopped all progress. For fifty or more hours of therapy, few engrams could be located, those which were located could not be reduced, no painful emotion could be reached and whatever engrams were reached and reduced were located and treated only because the auditor in this case used highly skilled forcing techniques which are almost never necessary and should not be employed save in psychotic cases. Such endeavor had not been necessary at the beginning of the case. Something was obviously wrong. On close questioning it was discovered that G’s wife was violently opposed to dianetics, that she never lost any chance of leveling the most scathing attacks against it to G and par ticularly when he was in the company of friends. She derided him as being psychotic. She sought a lawyer to give her a divorce (announcing it after he had entered therapy but actually having had continual consultation on it with a lawyer for two years past) and generally agitated and disturbed G to such an extent that he was continually receiving painful emotional engrams even though he did not display any emotion against her. They had a child, nine years of age, a boy. G was very fond of the boy. The child had had an unusual number of childhood illnesses and suffered from eye trouble and chronic sinusitis; he was backward in school. The wife was somewhat sharp with the child. Anything he did made her nervous. The auditor in the case, on learning the facts about her attitude toward her husband in general and dianetics in particular, held a conference with her about her husband. She was found to be unopposed to therapy for herself. Shortly after the conference, G and this woman had a brief quarrel in which G made the remark that she must be aberrated. She took intense affront at this and said that he must be the one who was crazy since he was interested in dianetics. He countered with the fact that of the two he must be the least aberrated since he was taking steps to do something about it. Further, he pointed out that she must be aberrated or she would not be as quarrelsome with the child as she was, a fact which definitely indictated that she must have a block on her second dynamic, sex.

The aberrative quality of the “feeble-minded” species of remark is of course, high. The worry that the child may be born blind or deaf or otherwise incapacitated is common. The former class of engramic remarks can bring about actual feeble-mindedness; the latter concern over blindness and so on bring about, at best, impaired visio and sonic recall

A standard class of prenatal engrams has as its content the worry of the parents that the child will be feeble-minded if not now aborted in earnest. This adds an emotional overload to such engrams and it adds, as importantly, an aberrative condition in the now grown patient that he is “not right,” “all wrong,” “feeble-minded,” and so forth. The difficulty of aborting the child is nearly always underestimated: the means used are often novel or bizarre: the worry because the child has not come out of the womb after the abortion attempt is acute, and the concern that he is now damaged beyond repair all combine to make severely aberrative engrams and, because of their content, engrams which are difficult to reach. The aberrative quality of the “feeble-minded” species of remark is of course, high. The worry that the child may be born blind or deaf or otherwise incapacitated is common. The former class of engramic remarks can bring about actual feeble-mindedness; the latter concern over blindness and so on bring about, at best, impaired visio and sonic recall. The shut-off of the recalls is occasioned as well by an engramic belief in the society at large that the unborn child is blind, unfeeling and not alive. This belief is introduced into AA (attempted abortion) engrams by people’s self-justification remarks while attempting an abortion: “Well, he can’t see, feel or hear anyway.” Or, “It doesn’t know what’s going on. It’s blind, deaf and dumb. It’s a sort of growth. It isn’t human.” The greater part of all sonic and visio recall shut-off has as its source the remarks made at such times or by painful emotion and other engramic data. Hundreds of hours of therapy may pass before these recalls turn on. The bulk of all shut-offs will turn on in the course of therapy. There are thousands of engramic remarks and emotional situations which will deny the pre-clear his recall and that recall can be expected ordinarily to restore. A very low dynamic patient (for people have various native strengths of the dynamic) may have recalls shut-off rather easily. A high dynamic patient would require much more aberration before the recalls are closed down. These recalls can be turned on simply by running out the physically painful and painful emotion engrams. It must not pass unremarked, however, that the abortion attempts actually can, if rarely, derange the brain and nervous mechanisms beyond the foetal ability to repair. The result of this is actual, physiological disability. Children and adults now classified as feeble-minded may then be separated into two groups: the actual, physiological class and the aberrated class. Further, recall shut-offs must be classified into two classes as well, regardless of the dynamic and intelligence of the individual: those occasioned by brain damage received during an attempted abortion and those which are solely aberrational and derived from engramic commands and emotion. The ability of the foetus to repair damage is phenomenal. Brain damage can ordinarily be repaired perfectly regardless of how many foreign substances were introduced into it. Just because the brain was touched in an attempted abortion is no reason to suppose that the recall shut-off has this as a source, for this is the rarer of the two causes. It is understood that this is being read by many with recall shut-offs and it is understood that it may well produce a considerable upset. But remember this, sonic and visio recall are not vital to a nearly full release. This comment about organic damage does not mean that a release cannot be effected which will leave the person more competent and happier, for this can always be done regardless of the recalls. And remember this, recalls almost always turn on even if it takes five hundred hours or more. This condition is only remarked because it will be found in some few cases. The “tests” and “experiments” with human brain vivisection in institutions are not, unfortunately, valid. For all the pain and trouble and destruction caused by these “experiments,” they were done without a proper knowledge of aberration and mental derangement. None of such data is of any value beyond showing that the brain can be cut in various ways without entirely killing the man. For the patients used responded both to engramic disorder and the physical disorder caused by the psychiatrist, and there is no way to differentiate between these after the operation except by dianetics. Conclusions drawn from this data are then invalid conclusions, for the response of the patient after the operation might have stemmed from a number of sources: engramic, the engram of the operation itself, attempted abortion damage early in life, brain disability on account of the operation and so forth. Hence, draw no conclusions that impairment of conceptual thinking, for instance, results only when a part of the brain is removed, that recall is shut off only when the brain is vivisected and so on. From a scientific standpoint no such “findings” were conclusive of anything except that the brain can be damaged late in life without entirely killing a man and that surgery of any kind often brings about a mental change in the patient. True, it may have been discovered that this or that portion of the switchboard called the brain, when removed, removed also some ability to perform. It will be of interest to those associated with emergency hospital work particularly that the healing and recovery of any patient can be enormously benefited and the term of illness shortened by removing the engram occasioned at the moment of injury. The accident case sometimes dies, in a few days, from shock, or does not recover and will not heal swiftly. In any injury -- a burn, cut, a bruise of whatever kind -- a trauma lingers in the injured area. The moment of the injury created an engram. This engram inhibits the release of the trauma. The fact that the injured part still hurts is an organic restimulator which depresses the ability of the patient to recover. Using reverie or merely working the patient with his eyes closed, and working the patient as soon after the injury as possible, the doctor, nurse or relative can return the injured person to the moment when the injury was received and usually recover and exhaust the incident as a usual engram. Once the engram of the injury is reduced, the general mental tone of the patient improves. Further, the injured area is no longer inhibited from healing. Some experimental work on this demonstrated that some burns would heal and disappear in a few hours when the engram which accompanied their reception was removed. On more serious injuries tests showed definite and unmistakable acceleration of the rate of healing. In operations, when anesthetics have been used, dianetics is useful in two ways: (1) as a preventive measure and (2) as a recovery measure. In the first, no conversation of any kind should be held around or with the “unconscious” or semi-conscious patient. In the second, the trauma of the operation itself should be recovered and relieved immediately afterwards. R and his wife C cleared each other in eight months with dianetics, working four hours a night four nights a week, each of them auditing the other for two hours of the four. This mutual arrangement had been complicated by the fact that whereas R was very eager to be cleared, his wife was quite apathetic about the work: he had managed only after much persuasion to get the cases started. He was a high dynamic case with much emotion encysted; she was an apathy case who entirely neglected her troubles (black panther mechanism). He was troubled with a chronic ulcer and anxieties about his job; she was troubled with a general allergic condition and a chronic carelessness in domestic affairs. They were not to any great degree mutually restimulative, but they had problems about tacit consent, avoiding the subjects which had most upset them while together, such as a miscarriage she had had and the loss of their home by fire many years before, as well as other shocks. Further they were faced by R’s intensity on the one hand and his introversion, which caused him to slight her therapy, and C’s apathy on the other hand, which at once aided R’s effort to take more time as the pre-clear than she and which made her less interested in being a good auditor. Aside from the fact that psychometry would show a clear phenomenally intelligent, would show his aptitude and versatility wide, there is another quality, the human quality of a freed man. You take a release through psychometry and show him to be above normal, too. But a clear is a clear and when you see it you will know it with no further mistake. That a clear is no longer interested in his extinct engrams does not mean he is not interested in the troubles of others. That a person is not interested in his own engrams does not necessarily argue a clear but may well be another mechanism, the apathy of neglect. To have engrams and neglect them is a common aberration with the reactive mind on a tone scale of apathy. To have no engrams and neglect them is another thing. Every apathy case, neglecting his engrams as an answer to his woe, insisting he is happy, insisting, as he racks himself to pieces, that there is nothing wrong with him, will, in work, particularly after basic-basic is lifted, become interested in his engrams and more interested in life. It is easy to tell the apathy case from the clear for the two are at opposite ends of the spectrum of life: the clear has soared up toward victory and triumph, the apathy case knows victory and triumph are not for him and explains they are not worth it. What the life span of a clear is cannot be answered now; ask in a hundred years. How can you tell a clear? How close does the man measure to optimum for Man? Can he adjust to his environment smoothly? And far more important, can he adjust that environment to him? Sixty days and again six months after a clear has apparently been effected, the auditor should again make a search for any neglected material. He should question the possible clear carefully as to the events of the past interval. In such a way he can learn of any worries, concerns or illnesses which may have taken place and attempt to trace these to engrams. If he cannot then find engrams, the clear is definitely and without question, cleared. And he will stay that way. If a case merely stalls, however, and while aberration seems to be present, engrams cannot be found, the cause probably lies with thoroughly masked despair charges -- painful emotional engrams. These are not necessarily postnatal, they can be within the prenatal period and involve circumstances which are very secret -- or so the engrams announce. Also, some cases have stalled and proven “impenetrable” because of a current or immediately past circumstance the patient has not revealed. There are two reasons which can delay a case: (a) the person may be so aberratedly ashamed of his past or so certain of retribution if he reveals it that he does nothing but avoid; and (b) the person may be in fear because of some existing circumstance or threat. The auditor is not interested in what the patient does. Or in what the patient has done. Dianetics treats of what has been done to the person exclusively in therapy. What has been done by a patient is of no concern. The auditor who would make it any concern is practicing something other than dianetics. However, a patient, because of his engrams, may become obsessed with the idea that he must hide something in his life from the auditor. general classes above cover the general conditions. These active reasons, as under (a), may be such a thing as a prison sentence, a murder hitherto unknown (although many people think they have done murder who have not even threatened it to anyone), abnormal sexual practices, or some such circumstance. The auditor should promise not to reveal any confidential matter, purely as a matter of routine and explain the principle of “done to. not done by.” And no auditor would taunt or revile a patient for having been victimized by his engrams. As under (b) there may exist some person, even the wife or husband, who has cowed the patient into secrecy. One case is at hand where no advance was made although there were many incidents contacted: the incidents would not reduce or erase no matter where they were. It was discovered that this case, a woman, had been beaten savagely and often by her husband and that she had been threatened with death if she told the auditor a word of these acts; and yet these acts contained the whole despair charges of the case and had to be released. Seeing this, finally suspecting, the auditor was able to gain her confidence and locate the despair charges. Even if he had not gained her confidence, by constant restimulation of late life areas he would have provoked her tears. In another case, that of a small child, “dub-in” recall was so obvious and lie factories were so busy that the auditor at last realized that he was attempting to penetrate not just the secrecy on an engram but the secrecy imposed upon a child by some one at hand. The mother, in this case, out of the idea that she would be apprehended, had furiously threatened the child to say nothing about his treatment at home. There was more than this behind the case, there were eighty-one attempted abortions, an incredible number. Anything is the business of an auditor if it has become an engram. If society has jailed a man, if all is not well in the home, these are things done to a person. What the person did to “deserve” this treatment is of no concern. Now and again an auditor will encounter a strange sort of hold-up in a case. He will be unable to get anything to clear or make sense in the prenatal area and sometimes in childhood as well as the prenatal area. He may be encountering a “foreign language case.” Occasionally the child did not know he was born to other parents (who may have spoken a foreign tongue) than those he has known as his parents. This is a special sort of mix-up of its own which is rather easily resolved simply by running engrams. It is always possible for the patient to forget that his parents spoke some other tongue in the home. Another tongue than the one the patient is using or other than that of the country in which the patient resides is, in one way, an asset: it gives a prenatal area which is very difficult to restimulate although it may still be acting upon the patient’s mind. But it is no asset to the auditor, who must now deal with a patient who does not know the language, who may not have sonic recall and yet has an engram bank full of data which once had meaning and really is his basic language. The best remedy for such a case is to get an auditor who knows both the language used in the prenatal area and the present tongue. Another remedy is to take a dictionary to the case and figure out the bouncers et al. from the dictionary. Another way is to regress the patient often enough into the infant period that he begins to pick up the language again (making the file drawer of it come forth) and then ask the patient for phrases which, in the foreign tongue, would mean this or that. Gradually he may recover the language and so exhaust the bank. This is an extremely difficult case only when there was no childhood use of the other tongue. Given childhood use of that tongue, the auditor simply keeps returning the patient to childhood when he knew the tongue and then returning him into the prenatal area: the patient can translate what is happening. The cliches of other tongues than that the auditor speaks are often quite productive of other literal meanings than comparable cliches in the auditor’s tongue. This difference of cliche is a very responsible agent in the social aberrations of one nation as they differ from those of another. “I have hot,” says the Spaniard. “I am hot,” says the Englishman. Engramically, they mean different things, even if they mean the same to the analyzer. Every time the auditor has a case with dub-in recall or which is highly charged with emotion, the case may return into the prenatal area and start describing scenery. This is the awe and wonder of some beholders. There is the patient in the womb and yet he can “see” outside. The patient tells about father and mother and where they are sitting and what the bedroom looks like, and yet there he is in the womb. Some pretty theories can be advanced for this: one of them is that the tortured foetus develops extra-sensory perception in order to see what is coming next. ESP is an excellent theory and some observation may confirm it but not in the foetus. One must recall that the foetus, even if it has highly developed and clever cells, is yet not a truly rational organism. The presence of the engram does not necessarily mean that the foetus could think. The engram became most severely aberrative when the child finally learned speech. The engram is not a memory but a recording of pain and percepts. Returning a grown man or a child into the prenatal area returns there an experienced mind which, connecting with these engrams, forms conclusions. To listen to some pre-clears one would think they read Keats and drank lemonade every afternoon at four throughout the prenatal period. To return reason and analytical power back into a period when neither reason nor analytical power existed, of course, impinges upon the returned individual many ideas. All he is supposed to run are the engrams and their contents. He may additionally, by dream mechanisms and current computation, try to fashion in a whole technicolor picture of the scenery. This prenatal ESP does not in fact exist. It has been proven, after considerable test, that whenever the returned pre-clear thinks he sees something, the scenery itself is mentioned in the engrams and gives him an imaginary picture of it. There is no prenatal ESP, in other words. There are only descriptions and actions which suggest scenery and these suggestions, operating now upon the imagination, bring about the supposed visio. This is most chronic with patients who have high powered lie factories. When the auditor sees this he begins to form a notion of the case he is engaged upon, he knows “dub-in sonic” may be used and he should find and discharge all painful emotion he can reach for it is this painful emotion which so disposes a case to avoid. He can find, then, the lie factory itself, not the lie factory of the lie factory which produces lie factories, but the actual engram which causes all this delusion. However, never bring a pre-clear up short on this material. Don’t tell him it is imaginary, you’ll drive the lie factory into higher effort. For there are sympathy computations here, despairful losses, great prenatal pain and childhood neglect. And it would take little to shatter what self-confidence this patient has managed to assemble. Therefore walk softly, look for despair charges, allies, sympathy engrams and get the lie factory. Then the case will settle down and progress to clear. It has been found important, in entering a case to locate and relieve all engrams caused by electric shock of whatever kind. These seem to produce a grouping of engrams, whether they are received prenatally (as some have been), accidentally, or at the hands of psychiatrists.