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.