Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (21 page)

Only this emotional encysting can, for instance, compartment the mind of a person who is multi-valent or who cannot see or hear his past. The analytical mind, worked upon by the reactive bank, compartments and divides with loss after loss until there is no free flow left.

Then a man dies.

Thus we could say that emotion, or what has been called emotion, is really in two sections: first, there is the endocrine system which, handled either by the analytical mind in the upper two zones or the reactive mind in the lower two zones, brings emotional responses of 81

fear, enthusiasm, apathy, etc.; second, there would be life force itself becoming compartmented by engrams and being sealed up, little by little, in the reactive bank.

It is possible that a therapy could be formulated which would spring out these various life force charges only and create thereby a full clear. Unfortunately, to date, this has not been possible.

The odd part of emotion is that it is so ordinarily based on the word content of engrams. If an engram says, “I am afraid,” then the aberree is afraid. If an engram says, “I am calm,” even if the rest of the engram gives him chattering shakes, the aberree still has to be

“calm.”

The problem of emotion as endocrine balance and life force has another complication in that the physical pain in an engram is often mistaken for a particular emotion named in the engram. For instance, the engram can say with verbal content that the individual is “sexually excited” and have as a pain content an ache in the legs and have as an actual emotional content (the valence that says “I’m sexually excited”) anger. This, to the aberree dramatizing it is a complex affair. When he is “sexually excited” -- he has an idea what that means as just language -- he is also angry and has an ache in the legs. This is actually very amusing in many cases and has led to a standard set of clinical jokes, all of which begin with, “You know, I feel like everybody else.”

Dianeticists, having discovered that people evaluate the emotions, beliefs, intelligence and somatics of the world in terms of their own engramic reactions, delight in discovering new concepts of “emotion.” “You know how people feel when they’re happy. Their ears burn.” “I feel just like anybody else when I’m happy; my feet and eyes ache.” “Of course I know how people feel when they’re happy; just pin prickles going all over them.” “I wonder how people can stand to be passionate when it makes their noses hurt so.” “Of course I know how people feel when they’re excited: they have to go to the toilet.”

Probably every person on earth has his own peculiar definition for every emotional state in terms of engram command. The command plus the somatics and perceptics make what they call an “emotional state.”

Actually the problem, then, should be defined in terms of the clear, who can function without engramic orders from the reactive mind. So defined it breaks down in terms of the endocrine system and the varying level of life force free to resurge against the suppressor.

Laughter, it should be added, is not, strictly speaking, an emotion but a relief from emotion. The early Italians had a very definite idea, as represented by their folk tales, that laughter was of therapeutic value. Melancholy was the only mental illness these tales consider and laughter was its only cure. In dianetics we have a great deal to do with laughter. In therapy patients vary, in their laughter reaction, from the slight chuckle to hilarious mirth. Any engram which really releases may be expected to begin somewhere between tears and boredom and end with laughter; the nearer the engram’s tone is to tears at the first contact, the more certainly laughter will appear as it is relieved.

There is a stage of therapy often reached by the preclear when his entire past life seems to be a subject of uncontrollable mirth. This does not mean he is clear but it means that a large proportion of the encysted charges have been tapped. A pre-clear has laughed for two days almost without ceasing. Hebephrenia is not the same thing as this laughter for the relief of the pre-clear on realizing the shadowy aspect and completely knowable character of his past fears and terrors is hearty.

Laughter plays a definite role in therapy. It is quite amusing to see a pre-clear, who has been haunted by an engram which contained great emotional charge, suddenly relieve it, for the situation, no matter how gruesome it was, when relieved, is in all its aspects a subject of great 82

mirth. The laughter fades away as he becomes disinterested in it and he can be said to be “Tone 3” about it.

Laughter is definitely the relief of painful emotion.

[The complete Tone Scale, its use in predicting the behavior of others as well as assisting in auditing, is given in the book SCIENCE OF SURVIVAL by L. Ron Hubbard, 1951, 580

pages.]

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Old women less than a hundred years ago talked wisely about “prenatal influence” and how a woman marked her child. Many such intuitive thoughts are based, actually, on observed data. It can be observed that the child born out of wedlock is often a luckless creature (in a society which frowns upon such bearings). These tenets have been held in the market place for a great many millenia. Just because they have been held is no reason they are true, but they make an excellent beginning for a chapter on prenatal experience and birth.

If dianetics had worked on obscure theories such as those of the old women or those of the mystics who believe that “childish delusions” are capable of aberrating a child, dianetics would not be a science of mind. But it was no obscure theory which brought about the discovery of the exact role prenatal experience and birth play in aberration and psycho-somatic ills.

Many schools of mental healing from the Aesculapian to the modern hypnotist were studied after the basic philosophy of dianetics had been postulated. Much data was accumulated, many experiments were made. The fundamentals about engrams had been formulated and “unconsciousness” had been discovered as being a period of actual recording when the theory began to predict new phenomena not hitherto observed.

There has been, in recent years, a practice called “narco-synthesis.” This was actually a branch of “hypno-analysis” and “deep analysis.” It did not produce clears and it did not even produce alleviation in the majority of its cases. But it was discovered to be an aberrative factor in itself. A thing which aberrates may well lead to something which removes aberrations if it is studied scientifically. Narco-synthesis was so studied. Several cases were examined on which narco-synthesis had been employed. Some of these cases had experienced relief from narcosynthesis. Others had become a great deal worse.

Working with hypno-analysis it was discovered that the technique could be varied until it would actually remove the aberrative charge contained in locks. In treating schizophrenics with narco-synthesis it was found that the locks (periods of mental anguish not including physical pain or “unconsciousness”) would sometimes spring (clear) and sometimes not.

Narco-synthesis is a complicated name for a very ancient process quite well known in Greece and India. It is drug hypnotism. And it is generally employed either by those practitioners who do not know hypnosis or on those patients who will not succumb to ordinary hypnotism. A shot of sodium pentothal is given intravenously to the patient and he is asked to count backwards. Shortly he stops counting at which the injection is also stopped. The patient is now in a state of “deep sleep.” That this is not sleep seems to have missed both narco-synthesists and hypnotists. It is actually a depressant on the awareness of an individual so that those attention units which remain behind the curtain of his reactive bank can be reached directly. These attention units are up against the standard banks. The by-pass circuits (demon circuits) which lie between these banks and “I” have themselves been by-passed. In other words, a section of the analytical mind has been exposed which is not aberrated. It is not very powerful and it is not highly intelligent, but it has the advantage of being hard up against the standard banks. This is basic personality. The intent and purpose and persistence of these few attention units have the same quality and direction as the whole analytical mind would have if it were clear. It is a very nice, co-operative group of attention units and it is very useful; for basic personality has all recalls -- sonic, audio, tactile, smell, pain, etc. It can get at anything that is in the banks -- which is everything perceived or thought in a lifetime, minute by minute. These qualities of basic personality have been very poorly described in hypnotism, and it is doubtful even if it was generally known that sonic was part of the recall system disclosed by deep hypnotism or the drug hypnotism called narco-synthesis.

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A study of basic personality in a multi-valent subject who had poor memory, no good recalls and scant imagination disclosed the information that BP (the attention units called basic personality) was more able to select out data than AP (aberrated personality as represented by the awake subject). It was further discovered that AP could ordinarily return better than BP so far as time-distance went but that when AP arrived at the earliest place it was unable to manage recall. But if AP had gone back and established a vague contact with an incident, drug hypnotism or standard hypnotism used on him when he was in present time (no longer returned would then permit BP to return. Drug hypnotism has seldom been able to force back very early into a patient’s life. But by making the strength of AP go back and then using BP for the recall, some very early incidents could be reached. This trick was invented to overcome some of the difficulties which had made drug hypnosis relatively uncertain in results.

Then another factor was discovered. All those patients who had been treated by narcosynthesis had become worse every time the people doing the work had crossed over but left (because “everybody knew” an “unconscious” person didn’t record) a period of

“unconsciousness.” When one of these “unconscious” periods was so probed -- by the drug hypnosis called narco-synthesis -- the patient usually became worse, not better. Doing a little more probing than had been done by the usual practitioners, dianetic research entered some of the late life “unconscious” periods and, with much labor, laid them bare.

Now all drug hypnosis, whether it is called narco-synthesis or a visit from the god Aesculapius, is still hypnosis. Whatever is said to a hypnotized subject remains as a positive suggestion, and these positive suggestions are simply engrams with a somewhat lighter effect and a shorter duration. When a drug is present the hypnotism is complicated by the fact that hypnotic drugs are, after all, poisons; the body is then possessed of a permanent (at least until dianetics was discovered) somatic to go along with the suggestion. Drug hypnotism invariably creates an engram. Whatever a practitioner says to a drugged subject becomes engramic in some degree. In the course of dianetic research it first was supposed, playing back the careless chatter of practitioners out of the minds of patients they had placed under drug hypnosis, that this carelessness in saying so many aberrative things was responsible for some of the failure.

But this was found to be true in a very limited sense. Then it was discovered that when the

“unconscious” periods were reached by drug hypnosis they refused to lift even when the patient recounted them scores of times. This was blamed on the drug character of the hypnosis.

Straight hypnotism was then used to reach these late “unconscious” periods and these periods still failed to lift. Therefore it was adjudged safe to continue drug use on those patients who refused hypnosis. And the AP-BP alternate trick began to be employed.

It was discovered by drug hypnosis where it was necessary and straight hypnosis where that was possible that the “schizophrenic” (the multi-valent aberree) could be made to reach very early periods in every case. And it was further found that an early period of

“unconsciousness” would often lift. Experimentation brought about a scientific axiom: The earlier the period of “unconsciousness” the more likely it is to lift. That is a fundamental axiom of dianetic therapy.

Manic-depressives who had sonic recall were worked upon, most of them by straight hypnosis, and it was discovered that they also followed this rule. But it was most dramatic in the multi-valent aberree: for when the engram did not lift it impinged against his analytical mind when he was awakened and created a variation in his psychoses and brought with it psychosomatic illnesses as well.

This brought about an understanding of why the multi-valent aberree, under narcosynthesis, was made worse whenever some practitioner had glided over (but not entered, of course) a late-life period of “unconsciousness.” Now came the problem of applying the axiom.

It was postulated that the primary engram must in some way suppress later engrams. In view of other data and postulates, this was an entirely reasonable assumption. The earlier a person went in the life of a multi-valent aberree the less likelihood there was of restimulating him 85

artificially. Often an engram at around two or three years of age would lift entirely and give him a great deal of relief.

The problem of this research was very far from the same problem of those who, not knowing about the reactive mind and “unconsciousness,” tried merely to find computing factors on a rational level or incidents of everyday life as aberrative factors in a patient.

When an engram is touched, it is very resistive, particularly above the age of two years.

Further, the whole reactive bank was buried deeply under foggy layers of “unconsciousness”

and was further safeguarded by a mechanism of the analytical mind which tended to prohibit it from touching pain or painful emotion. The reactive bank was protecting itself all the way through the research but it was obviously the answer. The problem was how to achieve its relief, if it could be relieved.

Having made several multi-valent personalities intensely uncomfortable, a new necessity level was reached whereby something had to be done about the problem. But there was this shining hope, the above axiom. A bridge between insanity and sanity had to be built and there, in the axiom, one had at least a glimmer of a plan. The earlier one had experienced this fog and pain, the lighter these engrams seemed to be.