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.