Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (17 page)

Let us now address the heart. By deep hypnosis or drugs we take a patient into amnesia trance, a state of being wherein the “I” is not in control but the operator is the “I” (and that’s all there is, really, to the function of hypnosis: the transfer of analytical power through the law of affinity from subject to operator, a thing which had a racial development and survival value in animals which ran in packs).

A caution should be observed that a patient who has a very sound heart and no heart-trouble history be chosen for this experiment, which, even above any other hypnotic experiment, can make a patient very ill if he has a heart history. And none of these hypnotic tests should be performed until one has finished this book and knows how to get rid of the suggestions; for hypnosis, as practiced, is strictly live fuse stuff and the hypnotist who is unacquainted with dianetics has no more idea how to get rid of a suggestion he has made than he has of how to peel an atom. He has thought he had the answer, but dianetics has treated many, many former hypnotic subjects who were thoroughly, as the engineers interested in dianetics say, “loused-up.” This is no criticism of hypnosis or hypnotists, who are often very able people, but it is a comment that there is more to be known about it.

The heart, by positive suggestion alone, can be speeded up, slowed down or otherwise excited. Here are words spoken into the deep strata of the mind which cause physical action.

Further, blood flow can be inhibited in some area of the body by suggestion alone. (This experiment, it is warned, particularly overloads the heart.) Blood can be denied to a hand, for instance, so that if you were to cut a vein in that hand it would bleed slightly if at all. A fine swami trick; which most amazed the author in India, was the inhibition of blood flow by the awake individual in himself. On command a cut would bleed or not bleed. It looked fantastic and made very good press agentry that here was a swami who had so associated himself with Nirvana that he was in control of all material matters. Awe faded when the author learned that, via hypnosis, he could make his own body do the same thing and no Nirvana involved. The mechanism fades out rapidly and in a few days would have to be renewed: the body has its own optimum operation, and although such a function can be “analytically” handled, it is not an upper echelon analytical job to keep the blood going in the hand. The point here is that blood flow can be interrupted by verbal suggestion. Words connect up with the physical being.

How this can come about can be shown by an analogic explanation such as a schematic diagram, but we are not so much interested in structure as in function at this stage of the science of mind -- because by knowing function alone we can cure aberrations and psychosomatic ills every time, predict new ills and conditions, and generally “work miracles,” as such actions were once called before Man knew anything about the mind.

Excreta are among the easiest things to regulate by suggestion. Constipation can be caused or cured by positive suggestion with remarkable speed and facility. The urine can also be so controlled. And so can the endocrine system.

It is harder to make tests on some of the more poorly understood functions of the endocrines. Glandular research has not progressed very far at this time. But, by removing engrams and watching the endocrine system rebalance, it has been made obvious that the endocrine system is a part of the control mechanism with which the mind handles the body.

The glands are easily influenced. These fluids and secretions -- testosterone, estrogen, adrenalin, thyroid, parathyroid, pituitrin, etc. -- are the substances the mind uses as one means 67

of controlling the body. They form relay circuits, so to speak. Each one has its own action within the body.

This experiment tends to prove the fallacy of an ancient assumption that the mind was controlled by the glands. An aberree is given a shot of 25 mg. of testosterone in oil twice a week. There may be some improvement in his physical status for a short time -- his voice may deepen and he may grow more hair on his chest. Now, without suggestion, we simply delete the engrams from his reactive bank so that they can re-form as experience in the standard bank.

Before we have completed this task

his body begins to use more of the testosterone. The dose can be markedly reduced and still give more benefit than formerly. Finally the dose can be eliminated. This experiment has also been performed on people who had not been able to receive benefit from glandular substances such as testosterone and estrogen. And upon people who were made ill by the administration of these hormones. The deletion of the engrams from the reactive bank uniformly brought about a condition where they could receive benefit from the hormones but where such artificial administration was not necessary save in cases of extreme age. What this means to gerontology, the study of longevity in life, cannot at this time be estimated, but it can be predicted with confidence that the deletion of engrams from the reactive bank has a marked effect upon the extension of life. A hundred years or so from now this data will be available, but no clears have lived that long as yet.

Just now, to our purpose, it is easy to demonstrate the effect of positive suggestion upon the endocrine system and the lack of effect of artificial hormones upon aberrees.

This sort of an engram has a terribly reductive effect upon testosterone manufacture:

“Sex is horrible; it is nasty; I hate it.”

The autonomic nervous system, which has been supposed to run without much connection to the mind can be shown to be influenced in its parts by the mind. There is a dwindling spiral effect (note the lines on the survival potential chart) whereby the engram starts malfunction in the life function regulator; this produces malfunction in the mind, which in turn has further effect on the life function regulator; this again reduces physical activity, and the mind, being part of the organ and, so far as we can tell, organic itself, is further reduced in tone. Mental tone makes body tone go down. Body tone, then being down, makes mental tone go down. This is a matter of inverse geometric progression. A man starts to get sick and, having engrams, he gets sicker. Clears are not subject to this dwindling spiral. Indeed, so entirely superficial is this horrible stuff called psycho-somatic illness that it is the first thing which surrenders and can be alleviated without clearing.

Now the reason why various drug preparations which seek to change psycho-somatic illness meet with such uncertain success lies in the fact that the mind, containing these engrams which are “survival” (like a fellow needs a hole in his head), handles the life function regulator to actively produce illnesses. Something comes to take them away (they’re “survival,” you see, and these confounded cells moronically insist upon it) and the mind has to rapidly reverse the activity and put an illness back in place again. Try to influence the reactive mind by reason or needles and it is not any easier to convince than a drug-crazed man bent on murdering everybody in a bar. He’s “surviving,” too.

A concoction like ACTH has a slightly different effect. It is too exclusive to have any research done with it, but on reports about it, it seems to affect engrams in the time sense. That is to say, as will be covered under therapy, the individual’s reactive location in time is shifted by it. ACTH and perhaps many others in its category move the individual from one chronic engram into another. This is about as reliable as changing dictators in Europe. The next one may be twice as bad. It may even be a manic and that’s horrible despite its apparent “euphoria.”

Electric shock treatment, the beatings of Bedlam and other things of their ilk, including surgical treatment of things psycho-somatic in origin, have another effect but one not dissimilar 68

to drugs like ACTH in that they give another shock which transfers the engram pattern to another part of the body (and switches around the aberrations; when these things work it is because the new aberration is less violent than the old one). Shocks, blows, surgery and maybe even things like cobra venom change the effect of the engram bank on the body, not necessarily for the worse, not necessarily for the better; they just change them. Like shooting dice: sometimes one gets a seven.

Then there is the deletion of tissue treatment of psycho-somatic ills. This simply removes the area which is busy dramatizing in the physical line. This can be the removal of a toe or the removal of a brain. These things are quite commonly used, as this is being written.

The removal of the toe is addressed to one part of the engram content, the somatic, and the removal of parts of the brain (as in the trans-orbital leukotomy and the pre-frontal lobotomy or anything else more recent) is addressed mistakenly to “the removal of” the psycho-aberration.

There is a surrender system at work in this as well: the surgeon or the patient has an aberration about “getting rid of it,” and so bits of the body are cut up or removed.

Some patients surrender anatomy on advice or at their own insistence like old timers shed blood in a phlebotomy. There is a straight parallel between bleeding the patient to make him well and cutting away parts of him to make him well. Both are based on a surrender (get rid of) engram and neither are effective in any way. Barber basin medicine, it is hoped, will eventually die out as did its patients.

These are the five classes of psycho-somatic ills: (1) those ills resulting from mentally caused derangement in physical fluid flow, which class subdivides into (a) inhibition of fluid flow and (b) magnification of fluid flow; (2) those ills resulting from mentally caused derangement of physical growth, which class subdivides into (a) inhibition of growth and (b) magnification of growth; (3) those ills resulting from predisposition to disease resulting from a chronic psycho-somatic pain in an area; (4) those ills resulting from perpetuation of a disease on account of chronic pain in an area; and (5) these ills caused by the verbal command content of the engrams.

In Class 1 (a) fall such ordinary things as constipation and such extraordinary things as arthritis. Arthritis is a complex mechanism with a simple cause and a relatively simple cure.

Remember that there are two things present in an engram: physical pain and verbal command.

In arthritis both must be present (as in the bulk of psycho-somatic ills). There must have been an accident to the joint or area affected, and there must have been a command during the “unconsciousness” which attended the injury which would make the engram susceptible to chronic restimulation. (Such commands as “It is always like this” or “It just goes right on hurting” or “I’m stuck” will produce similar results). Given this engram and given this engram keyed-in, there is a chronic pain in the area of the injury. It may be minor, but it is a pain just the same. (It can be a pain but not be felt if the engram contains a command which is anaesthetic such as “He’ll never feel this,” which produces a similar condition but makes one

“unconscious” of the pain there.) This pain in the body probably tells the cells and the blood that this area is dangerous. It is therefore avoided.

The command permits the mind to influence, let us say, the parathyroid, which contains the secret of the calcium content in the blood stream. A mineral deposit then begins to be laid down in the area. The mineral deposit is not necessarily the cause of the pain, but it is an organic restimulator so that the more mineral, the more pain, the more the engram keys-in.

This is the dwindling spiral. And this is arthritis in action. Understand that the parathyroid and the blood avoidance are theoretical cause; the scientific fact is that when an engram is picked up and deleted about an area containing arthritis, that arthritis vanishes and does not return and this is X-ray plate evidence; it happens every time and does not happen because of any suggestion or medicine; it happens because an engram is picked up and refiled.

As the engram goes away, so goes the pain, so vanishes the arthritis. This forms a whole class of ills, of which arthritis is only one.

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The mechanisms involved vary slightly. All can be headed under “physical derangement caused by reduced body fluid flow.”

Class 1 (b) of psycho-somatic ills, magnification of fluid flow, contains such things as high blood pressure, diarrhea, sinusitis, priapism (overactivity of the male sex glands), or any other physical condition resulting from a superabundance of fluid.

Class 2 (a) can cause such things as a withered arm, a foreshortened nose, underdeveloped genital organs or any other underdevelopment of a gland having to do with size (which cross-classes this with 1 [a]), hairlessness (which also like the rest can be part of the gene pattern and therefore inherent), and in short reduction in size of any part of the body.

Class 2 (b) causes such things as oversized hands, a lengthened nose, oversized ears, enlarged organs and other common physical malformations. (Cancer might possibly come under this heading as overhealing.)

Class 3 would include tuberculosis (some cases), liver trouble, kidney trouble, rashes, common colds, etc. (cross-classing with others, as do all of these in one way or another).

Class 4 would include those diseases which, arising without psycho-somatic influence, yet fix upon by accident a previously injured area and by restimulation, keep an engram keyed-in in that area so that a condition becomes chronic. Tuberculosis could be included here.

Conjunctivitis, all running sores and any condition which refuses to heal, etc.

This fourth class would also include all bizarre pains and sicknesses which cannot be found to have actual pathology.

Class 5 includes an enormously wide catalogue of conditions, any one of which may cross-index to other classes or which arise solely out of engrams which dictate the presence or necessity of an illness. “You always have colds,” “I have sore feet,” etc. announce a psychosomatic illness and the mechanisms of the body can furnish one.

Any disease whatever can be precipitated by engrams. The disease may be of germ origin; the individual possesses an engram to the effect that he may become sick and on this generalization, becomes sick with whatever is to hand. Further and even more general, the engram reduces the physical resistance of the body to disease, and when an engram goes into restimulation (perhaps because of a domestic quarrel, an accident or some such thing), the ability of the individual to resist sickness is automatically decreased.