Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (15 page)

In the case of the woman being knocked out and kicked, there were two valences present: herself and her husband. If another person had been present the engram would have contained three valences, providing he took any part: herself, her husband and the third person.

In an engram, let us say, of a bus accident where ten people speak or act, there would be, in the “unconscious” person an engram containing eleven valences, the “unconscious” person and the ten who spoke or acted.

Now in the case of the woman beaten by her husband, the engram contains just two valences. Who won? Here is the law of “tooth and claw,” the aspect of survival in engrams.

Who won? The husband. Therefore it is the husband who will be dramatized. She didn’t win.

She got hurt. Aha! When these restimulators are present, the thing to do is to be the winner, the husband, to talk like him, to say what he did, to do what he did. He survived. “Be like him!”

say the cells.

Hence, when the woman is restimulated into this engram by some action, let us say, on the part of her child, she dramatizes the winning valence. She knocks the child down and kicks him, tells him he is a faker, that he is no good, that he is always changing his mind.

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What would happen if she dramatized herself? She would have to fall down, knocking over a chair, pass out and believe she was a faker, no good and was always changing her mind and she would have to feel the pain of all blows!

“Be yourself” is advice which falls on deaf reactive mind ears. Here is the scheme.

Every time the organism gets punished by life, the analytical mind, according to the reactive mind, has erred. The reactive mind then cuts the analytical mind out of circuit in ratio to the amount of restimulation present (danger) and makes the body react as if it were the person who won in the earlier but similar situation where the organism was hurt.

Now what happens if “society” or the husband or some exterior force told this woman, who is dramatizing this engram, that she must face reality? That’s impossible. Reality equals being herself, and herself gets hurt. What if some exterior force breaks the dramatization? That is to say, if society objects to the dramatization and refuses to let her kick and yell and shout!

The engram is still soldered-in. The reactive mind is forcing her to be the winning valence.

Now she can’t be. As punishment, the reactive mind, the closer she slides in to being herself, approximates the conditions of the other valence in the engram. After all, that valence didn’t die. And the pain of the blows turns on and she thinks she is a faker, that she is no good and that she always changes her mind. In other words, she is in the losing valence. Consistent breaking of dramatization will make a person ill just as certainly as there are gloomy days.

A person accumulates, with the engrams, half a hundred valences before he is ten.

Which were the winning valences? You will find him using them every time an engram is kicked into restimulation. Multiple personality? Two persons? Make it fifty to a hundred. In dianetics you can see valences turn on and off in people and change with a rapidity which would be awesome to a quick-change artist.

Observe these complexities of conduct, of behavior. If one set out to resolve the problem of aberration by a system of cataloguing everything he observed and were unaware of the basic source, he would end up with as many separate insanities, neuroses, psychoses, compulsions, repressions, obsessions and disabilities as there are combinations of words in the English language. Discovery of fundamentals by classification is never good research. And the unlimited complexities possible from the engrams (and the severest, most thoroughly controlled experiments discovered these engrams to be capable of just such behavior as is listed here) is the whole catalogue of aberrated human conduct.

There are a few other basic, fundamental things that engrams do. These will be covered under their own headings: parasite circuits, emotional impaction and psycho-somatic ills. With the few fundamentals listed here, the problem of aberration can be resolved. These fundamentals are simple, they have given rise to as much trouble as individuals and societies have experienced. The institutions for the insane, the prisons for the criminals, the armaments accumulated by nations, yes and even the dust which was a civilization of yesterday exist because these fundamentals were not understood.

The cells evolved into an organism and in the evolution created what was once a necessary condition of mind. Man has grown up to a point where he creates now the means of overcoming that evolutionary blunder. Examination of the clear proves he no longer needs it.

He is now in a position where he can take an artificial evolutionary step on his own. The bridge has been built across the canyon.

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For a moment let us leave such scientific things as cells and consider some further aspects of the problem of understanding the human mind.

People have been working on problems related to Man’s behavior for a good many millenia. Hindu, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and our own philosophers and researchers of the past few hundred years have been struggling against a superabundance of complexity.

Dianetics could be evolved only by the philosophic compartmentation of the problem into its elements and the invention of several dozen yardsticks such as The Introduction of an Arbitrary, The Law of Affinity, The Dynamic, The Equation of the Optimum Solution, The Laws of the Selection of Importances, The Science of Organizing Sciences, Nullification by Comparison of Authority to Authority and so forth and so forth. All this is fine matter for a tome on philosophy, but here is dianetics, which is a science. It should be mentioned, however, that one of the first steps taken was not invented but borrowed and modified: that was the Knowable and Unknowable of Herbert Spencer.

Absolutism is a fine road to stagnation and I do not think Spencer meant to be so entirely absolute about his Knowable and Unknowable. SURVIVE! is the demarcation point between those things which can be experienced by the senses (our old friends Hume and Locke) and those things which cannot necessarily be known through the senses but which possibly may be known but which one does not necessarily need to solve the problem.

Amongst those things which one did not necessarily need to know (the dianetic version of the Unknowable) were the realms of mysticism and metaphysics. Many things, in the evolution of dianetics, were by-passed solely because they had not yielded solution to anyone else. Therefore mysticism got short shrift despite the fact that the author studied it, not in the little understood, secondhand sources commonly used as authority by some western mental cults, but in Asia where a mystic who can’t make his “astral self” get out and run errands for him is strictly a second rate character indeed. Well aware that there were pieces in this jig-saw puzzle which were orange with yellow spots and purple with carmine stripes, one found it necessary to pick up only those pieces which were germane. Someday a large number of pieces

-- about structure with the rest -- will come in and there will be answers to telepathy, prescience and so on and on. Understand that there are a lot of pieces in the construction of a philosophic universe. But none of the mystic pieces were found necessary to the creation of a uniformly applicable and aberration-resolving science of mind. No opinion will be delivered at this stage of dianetics about ghosts or the Indian rope trick beyond the fact they are seen to be multicolored pieces and the only ones we want are white. We have most of the white pieces and it makes a good, solid whiteness where there was blackness before.

Imagine, then, the consternation one must have felt when “demons” were discovered.

Socrates had a demon, you’ll remember. It told him not what to do but whether or not he had made the right decision. Here we had been pursuing a course in the finite universe which would have pleased Hume himself for its tenacity to those things which could be sensed. And up popped “demons.”

A thorough examination of a number of subjects (14) revealed that every one apparently had a “demon” of some sort. They were randomly selected subjects in various conditions in society. Therefore the “demon” aspect was most alarming. However, unlike some of the cults (or schools as they call themselves), the temptation to sail off into romantic inexplicable and confounding labels was resisted. A bridge had to be built across a canyon and demons are darned bad girders.

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Out in the Pacific islands -- Borneo, the Philippines -- I had seen quite a bit of demonology at work. Demonology is fascinating stuff. A demon gets into a person and makes him sick. Or it gets in and talks in lieu of him. Or he goes crazy because he has a demon in him and runs around with the demon shouting. This is demonology in a narrow sense. The shaman, the medicine man, these people deal pretty heavily in demonology (it pays well). But, while not skeptical particularly, it had always seemed to me that demons could be explained a little more easily than in terms of ectoplasm or some such unsensible material.

To find “demons” living in one’s civilized fellow countrymen was disturbing. But there they were. At least there were the manifestations which the shaman and medicine man had said were caused by demons. It was found that these “demons” could be catalogued. There were

“commanding demons,” “critical demons,” ordinary “tell-you-what-to-say demons” and

“demons” which stood around and yelled or “demons” which simply occluded things and kept them out of sight. These are not all the classes, but they cover the general field of

“demonology.”

A few experiments with drugged subjects showed that it was possible to set these

“demons” up at will. It was even possible to set up the whole analytical mind as a “demon.” So there was something wrong with demonology. Without proper ritual, simply by word of mouth, one could make new demons appear in people. So there are no real demons in dianetics (that’s underscored in case some mystic runs around telling people that a new science of mind believes in demons).

A dianetic demon is a parasitic circuit. It has an action in the mind which approximates another entity than self. And it is derived entirely from words contained in engrams.

How this demon gets there is not very hard to understand, once you’ve inspected one, close up, papa, while baby is unconscious, yells at Mama that she’s got to listen to him and nobody else, by God. The baby gets an engram. It is keyed-in sometime between babyhood and death. And then there’s the demon circuit at work.

An electronics engineer can set up demons in a radio circuit to his heart’s content. In human terms it is as if one ran a line from the standard banks toward the analyzer but before it got there he put in a speaker and a microphone and then continued the line to the plane of consciousness. Between the speaker and the microphone would be a section of the analyzer which was an ordinary, working section but compartmented off from the remainder of the analyzer. “I” on a conscious plane wants data. It should come straight from the standard bank, compute on a sub-level and arrive just as data. Not spoken data. Just data.

With the portion of the analyzer compartmented off and the speaker-microphone installation and the engram containing the above words “got to listen to me, by God” in chronic restimulation, another thing happens. The “I” in the upper level attention units wants data. He starts to scan the standard banks with a sub-level. The data comes to him spoken. Like a voice inside his head.

A clear does not have any “mental voices!” He does not think vocally. He thinks without articulation of his thoughts and his thoughts are not in voice terms. This will come as a surprise to many people. The “listen to me” demon is common in the society, which is to say this engram circulates widely. “Stay right there and listen to me” fixes the engram in present time (and fixes the individual in the time of the engram to some extent). After it is keyed-in and from there on, the individual thinks “out loud,” which is to say, he puts his thoughts into language. This is very slow. The mind thinks out solutions (in a clear) at such speed that the word stream of consciousness would be left at the post.

Proving this was very easy. In clearing every case without exception one or another of these demons was discovered. Some cases had three or four. Some had ten. Some had one. It is a safe assumption that almost every aberree contains a demon circuit.

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The type of engram which makes a critical demon is, “You are always criticizing me.”

There are dozens of such statements contained in engrams, any one of which will make a critical demon, just as any combination of words resulting in a demand to listen and obey orders will make a commanding demon.

All these demons are parasitic. That is to say, they take a part of the analyzer and compartment it off. A demon can think only as well as the person’s mind can think. There is no extra power. No benefit. All loss.

It is possible to set up the whole computer (analyzer) as a demon circuit and leave “I”

on a tiny and forlorn shelf. This, on the surface, is a pretty good stunt. It makes it possible for the whole analytical mind to work out computations undisturbed and relay the answer to the

“I.” But in practice it is very bad, for “I” is the will, the determining force of the organism, the awareness. And very soon “I” becomes so dependent upon this circuit that the circuit begins to absorb him. Any such circuit, to last, would have to have pain and be chronic. It would have to be, in short, an engram. Therefore, it would have to be reductive of the intellect and would victimize the owner by eventually making him ill one way or another.

Of all the engram demon circuits found and removed, those which contained a seemingly all-powerful exterior entity which would solve all problems and answer every want were the most dangerous. As the engram keyed-in further and further and was constantly restimulated, it eventually made a spineless puppet out of “I”; because other engrams existed, the sum of the reduction tended toward insanity of a serious sort. If you want a sample, just imagine what you would have to say to a hypnotized person to make him think that he was in the hands of a powerful being who gave him orders and then imagine this as the phrase spoken when an individual had been knocked unconscious one way or another.