Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (27 page)

An astonishing number of pregnancies must take place which are never realized. The violence of coitus, the use of douches and jellies (used because the woman is still contracepting and does not know she is already pregnant), straining bowel movements, falls and accidents must account for a large number of miscarriages which come about sometime around the first period after conception. For the zygote and embryo forms of the child have a rather frail grip on existence and are very severely injured by things the mother would consider nothing. Once past the first missed period, the chances of miscarriage rapidly grow less and only when the child is a genetic monstrosity or when abortion attempts are made can a miscarriage be expected to take place. The monstrosities are so small a percentage that they are negligible as a possibility.

The amniotic sac can be pierced many times and repeatedly and emptied of all water after the first missed period and the child can still survive. Twenty or thirty abortion attempts are not uncommon in the aberree and in every attempt the child could have been pierced through the body or brain.

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The child before birth does not depend upon the standard senses for its perceptions.

Engrams are not memories but cellular level recordings. Therefore, the child needs no eardrums to record an engram. Cases are on hand where whatever hearing mechanism the unborn child had must have been temporarily destroyed by an abortion attempt. And the engram was still recorded. The cells rebuilt the apparatus which was to be the source of sound in the standard banks and stored their own data in the reactive bank.

Release of such engrams means a restoration of rationality to the individual far above the current norm and a stability and well-being greater than Man ever thought Man possessed.

These engrams have been confirmed by taking the data from a child, from the mother and the father, and all data checked. So we are dealing here with scientific facts which, no matter how startling, are nevertheless true.

The mother, then, should be extremely gentle on herself during pregnancy and those around her should be entirely informed of the necessity for silence after any jar or injury. And in view of the fact that it is not possible to tell when a woman has become pregnant and in view also of the high potentiality of aberration in the zygote and embryo engrams, it is obvious that society must better its ways toward women if the future health of the child is to be preserved.

The woman has to some degree become considered less valuable in this society than in other societies and times. She is expected to be in competition with men. Such a thing is nonsense. A woman has as high a plane of activity as man. He cannot compete with her any more than she can compete with him in the fields of structure and vigorous activity. Much of the social maelstrom now in existence has as its hub the failure to recognize the important role of the woman as a woman and the separation of the fields of women and men.

The changes which will come about in the next twenty years need no urging here. But with the recent discoveries in photosynthesis which should secure enough food to feed Man better and at less cost, the importance of birth control dwindles. The morality standards have already changed, no matter what moralists do to try to block the change. And woman, therefore, can be freed of many of her undesirable chains.

In the custody of Man is the current world and its activity and structure. In the charge of woman is the care of the person of the human being and his children. Almost sole custodian of tomorrow’s generation, she is entitled to much more respect than her chattel-period of the past gave her.

It is not, then, any wild Utopian thought that woman can be placed above the level hitherto occupied. And so she must be placed if the childhood of tomorrow’s generation is to reach any high standard, if homes are to be peaceful and unharassed and if society is to advance.

Preventive Dianetics, in the sphere of the home, must place emphasis on the woman in order to safeguard the child.

As any first step, a mother should be cleared, for any mother who attempts an abortion is blocked across the second dynamic and any block menaces her health as well as her happiness. An antipathy for children has been found to accompany sexual aberration.

Preventive Dianetics, then, on the level of the individual, asks for cleared parents and then precaution against the aberrating of the child, and further precaution against the keying-in of any aberration the child might have received.

To do this is very easy. Maintain silence in the presence of injury. Do what has to be done for the injure ill and do it in silence. Maintain silence in the presence of birth to save both the sanity of the mother and the child and safeguard the home to which they will go. And the maintaining of silence does not mean a volley of “Sh’s,” for those make stammerers.

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In a wider field, the maintenance of silence around any “unconscious” or injured person is second in importance only to preventing the “unconsciousness” in the first place.

Say nothing and make no sound around an “unconscious” or injured person. To speak, no matter what is said, is to threaten his sanity. Say nothing while a person is being operated upon. Say nothing when there is a street accident. Don’t talk!

Say nothing around a sick child or an injured child. Smile, appear calm, but say nothing. Actions do not speak louder than words but actions are all that can be done around the sick and injured unless one has an active desire to drive them into neurosis or insanity or, at best, to give them a future illness.

And above all, say nothing around a woman who has been struck or jarred in any way.

Help her. If she speaks, don’t answer. Just help her. You have no idea of whether she is pregnant or not.

And it is a remarkable fact, a scientific fact, that the healthiest children come from the happiest mothers. Birth, for one thing, in a cleared mother, is a very mild affair. Only birth engrams in the mother made it hard. A cleared mother needs no anaesthetic. And that is well because the anaesthetic makes a dazed child and the engram, when it reacts, makes him appear a dull child. A happy woman has very little trouble. And even a few engrams, which arrive despite all precautions, are nothing if the general tone of the mother is happy.

Woman, you have a right and a reason to demand good treatment.

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The mind is a self-protecting mechanism. Short of the use of drugs as in narcosynthesis, shock, hypnotism or surgery, no mistake can be made by an auditor* which cannot be remedied either by himself or by another auditor. Those things which are stressed, then, in this book, are ways to accomplish therapy as swiftly as possible with minimal errors; for errors take time. Auditors are going to make errors, that is inevitable. If they make the same error repeatedly, they had better get some one to guide them through therapy.

There are probably thousands of ways to get into trouble with mental healing, but all these ways can be classed in these groups: (1) use of shock or surgery on the brain; (2) use of strong drugs; (3) use of hypnosis as such; and (4) trying to cross-breed dianetics with older forms of therapy.

The mind will not permit itself to be seriously overloaded so long as it can retain partial awareness of itself; it can only be overloaded when its awareness is reduced to a point where it cannot evaluate anything: it can then be thoroughly upset. Dianetic reverie leaves a patient fully aware of everything which is taking place and with full recall of everything which has happened. Types of therapy which do not do this are possible and useful but they must be approached with the full knowledge that they are not foolproof. Dianetics, then, uses the reverie for the majority of its work and using the reverie an auditor cannot possibly get himself into any trouble from which he cannot extricate himself and the patient. He is working with an almost foolproof mechanism as long as the mind retains some awareness: a radio or a clock or an electric motor are far more susceptible to injury in the hands of a workman than the human mind. The mind was built to be as tough as possible. It will be found that it is difficult to get it into situations which make it uncomfortable and impossible, with the reverie, to embroil it enough to cause neurosis or insanity.

In the U.S. infantry manual there is a line about decision: “Any plan, no matter how poorly conceived, if boldly executed is better than inaction.”

In dianetics, any case, no matter how serious, no matter how unskilled the auditor, is better opened than left closed. It is better to start therapy if it is to be interrupted after two hours of work than not to start therapy at all. It is better to contact an engram than to leave an engram uncontacted even if the result is physical discomfort for the patient -- for that engram will not thereafter possess as much power and the discomfort will gradually abate.

This is scientific fact. The mechanism dianetics uses is an ability of the brain which Man as a whole did not know he had. It is a process of thought which everyone possesses inherently and which was evidently meant to be used in the overall process of thinking but which, by some strange oversight, Man has never before discovered. Once a person has learned that he possesses just this one new faculty, he is better able to think than he was before, and he can learn this faculty in ten minutes.

Further, when one approaches an engram with this faculty (which, when intensified, is the reverie) some of that engram’s sub-level connections are broken and the aberrative factors no longer have as much force either in the physical or mental spheres. Further, the knowledge that there is a solution to mental ills is a stabilizing factor.

Approaching an engram with the reverie is very far from the same as restimulating the engram exteriorly as is done in life. The engram is a powerful and vicious character only so long as it is untapped. In place and active it can be restimulated to cause innumerable mental and physical ills. But approaching it with reverie is approaching it on a new circuit, one that disarms it. The power of the engram is partly the fear of the unknown -- knowing brings stability by itself.

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Do not think that you will not make patients uncomfortable. That is not true. The auditor’s work, when it taps engrams which cannot be lifted, may cause the patient to have headaches, various aches and pains and even mild physical illness, even when the work is carefully done. But life has been doing this to the patient on a much grander scale for years and no matter how badly the case is mauled around, no matter how many aberrations spring into view to plague the patient for a day or two, none are as serious as those which can be occasioned by the environment acting upon the untapped engram.

The auditor can do everything backwards, upside down and utterly wrong and the patient will still be better, provided only that he does not try to use drugs before he has worked a few cases, that he does not use hypnotism as hypnotism and he does not try to cross dianetics with some older therapy. He can use drugs in dianetics if he knows his dianetics and if he has medical concurrence. He can use all the techniques of hypnotism so long as he is thoroughly experienced with dianetics.

And once he has used dianetics, he will not fall back to mystic efforts to heal minds. In short, the point which is offered here is that so long as the auditor takes a relatively simple case at first to see how the mechanisms of the mind work and uses only the reverie he cannot get into trouble. There will be those, certainly, who believe they are so vastly experienced in tom-tom beating or gourd rattling that they won’t give dianetics a chance to work as dianetics but will sail in and begin to plague the patient about “penis-envy” or make him repent his sins, but the patient who starts to get this will be smart to simply change positions from the couch to the auditor’s chair and clear up some of the aberrations of the auditor before work proceeds.

Anybody who has read this book once through and procured a patient with sonic recall for a trial effort will know more about the mind, in those actions, than he has ever known before, and he will be more skilled and able to treat the mind than anyone attempting to do so, regardless of reputation, a very short while ago. This does not mean that men who have had experience with mental patients will not, knowing dianetics (knowing dianetics) have an edge on those who do not realize some of the foibles of which Man in an aberrated state is capable.

And on the other hand it does not mean that some engineer or lawyer or cook with a few dianetic cases under his belt, will not be more skilled than all other practitioners of whatever background or kind. In this case, the sky is no limit.

One could not say, offhand, that an able hypnotist or an able psychologist, ready and willing to jettison and unlearn yesterday’s mistakes, is not better prepared to practice dianetics.

In the field of psycho-somatic medicine the medical doctor, with a vast fund of experience in healing, might very well be far and above other auditors in dianetic work. But it is not necessarily the case, for in research it has been proven that men and women with most unlikely professional backgrounds have suddenly become auditors superior in skill to those in fields you might suspect were more closely allied. Engineers particularly are excellent material and make excellent auditors. Again, dianetics is not being released to a profession, for no profession could encompass it. It is insufficiently complicated to warrant years of study in some university. It belongs to Man and it is doubtful if anyone could manage to gain a corner on it for it does not fall within any legislation of any kind in any place and if dianetics were legislated into a licensed profession, then it is to be feared that listening to stories and jokes and personal experience would also have to be legislated into a profession. Such laws would put all men of good will who lend a sympathetic ear to a friend’s troubles inside the barbed wire.

Dianetics is not psychiatry. It is not psycho-analysis. It is not psychology. It is not personal relations. It is not hypnotism. It is a science of mind and needs about as much licensing and regulation as the application of the science of physics. Those things which are legislated against are a matter of law because they may in some way injure individuals or society.