Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (16 page)

There is another full class of demons, the occlusion demons, the demons who shut things off. These are not properly demons because they don’t talk. A bona-fide demon is one who gives thoughts voice or echoes the spoken word interiorly or who gives all sorts of complicated advice like a real, live voice exteriorly. (People who hear voices have exterior vocal demons -- circuits which have tied up their imagination circuits.) The occlusion demon doesn’t have anything to say. It is what he doesn’t permit to be said or done that makes the mental derangement.

An occlusion demon can exist for a single word. For instance, a child receives an engram by falling off her bicycle and losing consciousness; a policeman tries to assist her; she is still unconscious but moving and mutters that she can’t move (an old engram at work); the officer says, cheerfully, “Never say can’t!” Some time later she has a conscious level experience such as another fall but without injury. (We keep mentioning this second necessary step, the lock, because it is the thing old time mystics thought was causing all the trouble -- it is

“mental anguish.”) Now she has difficulty saying “can’t.” Dangerous in any event. What if she had that common engram expression, “Never say no!”?

Occlusion demons hide things from “I.” It is as easy for one to mask many words. The individual having one will then omit these words or alter them or misspell them and make mistakes with them. The demon is not the only reason words get altered but he is a specific case. An occlusion demon can be of a much higher strength and breadth. He can be created with the phrase, “Don’t talk!” or “Never talk back to your elders,” or “You can’t talk here.

Who said you could talk?” Any of these phrases might produce a stammerer.

Other things besides speech can be occluded. Any ability of the mind can be inhibited by a demon specifically designed to obstruct that ability. “You can’t see!” will occlude visual recall. “You can’t hear!” will occlude audio recall. “You can’t feel!” occludes pain and tactile recall (homonymic stuff, English).

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Any perception can be occluded in recall. And whenever it is occluded in recall, it affects actual perception and the organ of perception as well. “You can’t see!” may reduce not only recall but the actual organic ability of the eyes, as in astigmatism or myopia.

One can imagine, with the entire English language (or in other lands with other tongues, any language) susceptible to inclusion within engrams just how many abilities of the mind’s operation can be occluded. An extremely common one is “You can’t think!”

So far now “you” has been used in illustrations and examples in order to keep the similarity to hypnotic or drug tests. Actually sentences which contain “I”, are more destructive.

“I can’t feel anything,” “I can’t think,” “I can’t remember.” These and their thousands and thousands of variations, when spoken within the hearings of an “unconscious” person, are applicable to himself when he gets the engram keyed-in to circuit.

“You” has several effects. The statement, “You are no good,” to an awake person makes that person feel very angry perhaps when he has an engram to that effect.

Within him he feels, possibly, that people think he is no good. He may have a demon that tells him he is no good. And he will dramatize by telling other people that they are no good. It can be sprayed off by being dramatized. A person who has an engram to the effect that he is sexually sterile, for instance, will tell people that they are sexually sterile. (“Don’t do as I do, do as I say.”) If he has an engram that says, “You are no good, you have to eat with your knife,” he may eat with his knife but he gets excited about people eating with their knives, and he would grow very angry if somebody said he ate with his knife.

Thus, there are “compulsion demons” and “confusion demons” and so forth and so on.

The engram has a command value. There is a power of choice exercised in the reactive mind about which and what engrams will be used. But any engram, strongly enough restimulated, will come to the surface to be dramatized. And if dramatization is blocked, it will turn on the individual either temporarily or chronically.

The literalness of this reactive mind, in its interpretation of commands and the literalness of their action within the poor, harassed analytical mind is a strange thing in itself.

“It is too horrible to be borne” might be interpreted to the effect that a baby was in such bad condition that it had better not be born. There are thousands of cliches in any language which, when literally taken, mean quite the opposite from what the speaker intends.

The reactive engram bank takes them, stores them with pain and emotion and

“unconsciousness” and with moronic literalness, hands them forth to be LAW and COMMAND to the analytical mind. And when the happy little moron who runs the engram bank sees it possible to use up some analytical mind circuits with some of these confounded demons, it is done.

The analytical mind, then, can be seen to be subject to yet another form of attrition. Its circuits, ordinarily intended for smooth, rapid computation, become tied up and overloaded with demon lash-ups. The demons are parasites. They are pieces of analytical mind compartmented off and denied to larger computation.

Is it any wonder that, when these demons are deleted, I.Q. soars as it can be observed to do in a clear? Add the demon circuits to the shut-down aspect of restimulation, and truth can be seen in the observation that people run on about one-twentieth of their mental power.

Research and scientific tabulation indicate that with the “unconsciousness” aspect and the demon circuits deleted from the engram bank and the data restored into the standard bank as experience where it should be, about forty-nine fiftieths of the mind have been placed at the service of “I” which he never could use as an aberree.

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Psycho-somatic illnesses are those which have a mental origin but which are nevertheless organic. Despite the fact that there existed no precise scientific proof of this before dianetics, an opinion as to their existence has been strong since the days of Greece, and in recent times various drug preparations have been concocted and sold which were supposed to overcome these sicknesses. Some success was experienced, sufficient to warrant a great deal of work on the part of researchers. Peptic ulcers, for instance, have yielded to persuasion and environmental change. A recent drug called ACTH has had astonishing but wildly unpredictable results. Allergies have been found to yield more or less to things which depressed histamine in the body.

The problem of psycho-somatic illness is entirely embraced by dianetics, and by dianetic technique such illness has been eradicated entirely in every case.

About seventy per cent of the physician’s current roster of diseases falls into the category of psycho-somatic illness. How many more can be so classified after dianetics has been in practice for a few years is difficult to predict, but it is certain that more illnesses are psycho-somatic than have been so classified to date. That all illnesses are psycho-somatic is, of course, absurd, for there exist, after all, life forms called germs which have survival as their goals.

The work of Louis Pasteur formulated the germ theory of disease. With dianetics is gained the non-germ theory of disease. These two, with bio-chemistry, complement each other to form the whole field of pathology so far as can be determined at this time, providing of course that the virus is included under the germ theory.

Dianetics adds an additional leaf to the germ theory in that it includes predisposition.

There are three stages of pathology: predisposition, by which is meant the factors which prepared the body for sickness, precipitation, by which is meant the factors which cause the sickness to manifest itself, and perpetuation, by which is meant the factors which cause the sickness to continue.

There are two kinds of illness: the first could be called autogenetic, which means that it originated within the organism and was self-generated, and exogenetic, which means that the origin of the illness was exterior. Actually, although this is good medicine, it is not quite as precise as dianetics could desire. Mental illness itself is actually exterior in origin. But medically, we consider that the body can generate its own sicknesses (autogenetic) or that the sickness can come from an exterior source such as bacteria (exogenetic). The Pasteur germ theory would be the theory of exogenetic -- exteriorly generated -- illness. Psycho-somatic illness would be autogenetic, generated by the body itself.

Treatment for accidental injury, surgery for various things such as malformation inherent in the body on a genetic basis, and orthopedics, which actually can be classed under both, remain properly outside the field of dianetics, although it can be remarked in passing that almost all accidents are to be traced to dramatization of engrams and that clears rarely have accidents.

Psycho, of course, refers to mind and somatic refers to body; the term psycho-somatic means the mind making the body ill or illnesses which have been created physically within the body by derangement of the mind.

Naturally such diseases, when one has resolved the

problem of human aberration, become uniformly susceptible to cure.

Arthritis, dermatitis, allergies, asthma, some coronary difficulties, eye trouble, bursitis, ulcers, sinusitis, etc. form a very small section of the psycho-somatic catalogue. Bizarre aches 65

and pains in various portions of the body are generally psycho-somatic. Migraine headaches are psycho-somatic and, with the others, are uniformly cured by dianetic therapy. (And the word cured is used in its fullest sense.)

Just how many physical errors are psycho-somatic depends upon how many conditions the body can generate out of the factors in the engrams. For example, the common cold has been found to be psycho-somatic. Clears do not get colds. Just what, if any, part the virus plays in the common cold is not known, but it is known that when engrams about colds are lifted, no further colds appear -- which is a laboratory fact not so far contradicted by 270 cases.

The common cold comes about, usually, from an engram which suggests it and which is confirmed by actual mucus present in another engram. A number of germ diseases are predisposed and perpetuated by engrams. Tuberculosis is one.

The engram itself, as has been covered, follows a cycle of action. The body is predisposed to the conduct and conditions contained in the engram when that engram is first received. Then a conscious-level experience keys-in the engram and other experience or the content of the engram itself may make it chronic. This is predisposition, precipitation and perpetuation in the mental plane.

Engrams and inherited disabilities and accidents and germs are the four ways an organism can be reduced physically from the optimum. Many conditions which have been called “inherited disabilities” are actually engramic Engrams predispose people to accidents.

Enengrams predispose and perpetuate bacterial infections. Therefore the catalogue of ills affected by dianetics is very long. This is not a book listing effects but a book stating causes, and so the reader is asked to call upon his own knowledge or consult a medical text to understand just how many thousands and thousands of conditions result from engrams to disturb or derange the body.

At the present time dianetic research is scheduled to include cancer and diabetes. There are a number of reasons to suppose that these may be engramic in cause, particularly malignant cancer. This is remarked so that attention may be given to the possibility; no tests of any kind have been made on cancer or diabetic patients, and the thought is purely theory and is not to be taken as any kind of an avowal about a cancer cure. Those diseases which were catalogued above, however, have been thoroughly tested and have uniformly yielded to dianetic therapy.

The mechanism by which the mind is able to cause a physical disability or predispose the body to an illness and perpetuate sickness is, in its basic cause, a very simple thing. The complexity arrives when one begins to combine all the factors possible; then a staggering list of potential illnesses can be written.

A series of simple tests can be made on drugged or hypnotic patients which will prove clinically in other laboratories this basic mechanism. A series of these tests were run in the formulation of dianetics with uniform success.

Let us take first something -- which is only mildly psycho-somatic and scarcely an illness at all. A patient is hypnotized. He is given the positive suggestion that he will be able to hear much more acutely. This is “extended hearing.” Controlling out other means of his gaining data (including safeguards against telepathy between operator and subject) the hearing can be found to be amplifiable many times over. In fact, there exist all around aberrees who have “extended hearing.” By suggestion the power of the hearing can be tuned down or up so that a person is nearly deaf or can hear pins fall at a great distance. When the suggestion is removed, the subject’s hearing returns to its previous normal state.

Similarly, experiments can be performed on the eyes, using light sensitivity. The patient’s sight is tuned up or down so that his eyes are much more or much less sensitive to light than is normal for him. This is done entirely on the word suggestion basis such as “The light will appear very, very bright to you,” or “The light will appear so dim it will be hard for you to see.” With the former suggestion the patient can be made to see almost as well as a cat, 66

although other people around might think it impossible to see objects the patient can unerringly point out. In the latter suggestion the patient can be placed under light almost blinding and yet can read through a glare with apparent comfort.

The tactile sense can likewise be tuned up or down by verbal suggestion until touch becomes painfully acute or so dull it scarcely registers.

So with the various senses. Here we have simply the spoken word going into the mind and causing physical function to change.