Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (31 page)

Then there is the case of over-perception. This is not necessarily imagination, but it can go to the length of seeing and hearing things which are not there at all, which happens to be a common insanity. We are interested in a less dramatic grade in standard operation.

A girl, for instance, who sees something or thinks she sees something but knows she doesn’t and is very startled, who jumps in fright when anyone silently comes into a room and can be so startled rather habitually, is suffering from extended sight. She is afraid she will encounter something, but instead of being blind to it she is too alive to it. This is hyper-sight.

A person who is much alarmed by noises, by sounds in general, by certain voices, who gets a headache or gets angry when the people around are “noisy” or the door slams or the dishes rattle, is a victim of extended hearing. She hears sounds far louder than they actually are. This is hyper-hearing.

The actual quality of the seeing and hearing does not need to be good. The actual organs of sight and sound can be in poor condition. The only fact of importance is the

“nervousness” about reception.

This disposes of the two perceptions in which we are interested in dianetics. As the auditor talks to people around him and gets their reactions to sights and sounds, he will find wide variety in quality of response.

Recall is the most directly important to therapy, for it is not a symptom, it is an actual tool of work. There are many ways to use recall. The clear has vivid and accurate recall for every one of the senses. Few aberrees have. The auditor is not interested in other senses than sight and sound because the others will be cared for in the usual course of therapy. But if he has a patient who has no sonic, watch out. And if he has a patient with neither sonic nor visio, beware! This is the multi-valent personality, the schizophrenic, the paranoid of psychiatry with symptoms not acute enough to be so classified in normal life. This does not mean, emphatically does not mean, that people without sight and sound recall are insane, but it does mean an above average case and it means a case which will take some time. It does not mean the case is

“incurable” for nothing can be further from the truth: but such cases sometimes take five hundred hours. It simply means that such a case isn’t any stroll through the park: there is drammer back there in that reactive mind, drammer which says, “Don’t see! Don’t hear!” Some of the engrams in this case demand reduced or no recall. The organs of sight and sound may be highly extended in their reception. This does not mean that anything need be wrong with the way this person perceives sound or light waves and records them. But it does mean that after he has recorded them, he cannot easily get them back out of the standard bank because the reactive engram bank has set up circuits (occlusion demon circuits) to keep him from finding out about his past. There are, of course, greater or lesser degrees of recall.

The test is simple. Tell the patient wide awake to go back to the time he was entering the room. Ask him what was being said. If he can “hear” it wide awake, he has sonic recall.

The auditor knows very well what was said, for if he means to use this test, he utters a certain set of words and notes the actual sounds present. Therefore, if the patient falls into the following category, the “dub-in,” the auditor will be apprised of that.

The sight recall test is equally simple. Show the patient a book with an illustration.

After a time interval, ask him to “go back” while he is wide awake and look at that book “in his mind” and see if he can see it. If he can’t, this is hypo-visio.

More tests similar to this will clearly establish whether or not our patient is recall blind and deaf or whether he falls into the next group:

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The over-active imagination which enthusiastically “dubs-in” sight and sound for the patient without knowledge is something which is definitely a hindrance to fast therapy. There are many demon circuits which snarl up thinking, but these particular “dub-in” demons mean that the operator is going to get a most awful cargo of what the auditors colloquially call

“garbage.” There is, as they further use some of the doubtlessly disgraceful terminology which, despite anything one can do, keeps rising up in this field, something at work in the brain which is a “lie factory.”

The patient asked to recount the conversation as he entered the door by “hearing it”

again may confidently start in to give forth all manner of speech which was entirely paraphrase or utterly fictitious. Asked to tell about the picture and page he is shown, he will “see” vividly a lot more than was there or something entirely different. If he is doubtful about it, that is a healthy sign.

If he is certain, beware, for it is a demon circuit “dubbing in” without his analytical knowledge and the auditor will have to listen to more incidents which never happened than he could begin to catalogue and will have to sort out and pick his way through this “garbage”

continually to get his pre-clear to a point where the data is reliable. (And it isn’t a matter of grading “garbage” by its improbability -- truth is always stranger than fiction; it is a matter of trying to reduce engrams which are not present or by-pass engrams which are present and so on in a tangled hash.)

The optimum pre-clear would be one who had average response to noises and sights, who had accurate sonic and visio and who could imagine and know that he was imagining, in color-visio and tone-sonic. This person, understand clearly, may have aberrations which make him climb every chimney in town, drink every drop in every bar every night (or try it anyway), beat his wife, drown his children and suppose himself to be a jub-jub bird. In the psychosomatic line he may have arthritis, gall-bladder trouble, dermatitis, migraine headaches and flat feet. Or he may have that much more horrible aberration -- pride in being average and

“adjusted.” He is still a relatively easy case to clear.

In the case which has sonic and visio shut-off without “dub-in” we are dealing with engrams which have shut down some of the primary working mechanisms of the mind. The auditor will have to slog through hours and hours and hours of trying to contact engrams when the patient cannot hear them or see them. A case which merely has a shut-down sonic recall still means that the auditor is going to do a lot more work than on an average case. This case is very, very far from impossible to resolve. That is not the idea here, to frighten off any attempt on such a case. But this case will only be resolved after a great deal of persistent effort. Such a person may be apparently very successful. He may be enormously intelligent. He may have few or no psycho-somatic ills. Yet he will prove to have a crammed engram bank, any part of which may come into restimulation at any time and swamp him. Usually, however, this type of case is quite worried and anxious about many things, and such worry and anxiety may put a little more time on the worksheet.

In the case of the “dub-in” who doesn’t know it, where circuits are giving him back altered recall, we have a case which may very likely prove to be very long and require artful treatment. For there is a “lie factory” somewhere in that engram bank. This case may be the soul of truthfulness in his everyday life. But when he starts tackling his engrams, they have content which makes him give out material which is not there.

Sharply and clearly, then, without further reservation or condition, this is dianetic diagnosis: The aberration is the engram content; the psycho-somatic illness is the former injury.

The perceptions of sight and sound, under-optimum recall, over-optimum imagination regulate the length of the case.

If the auditor wants to be fancy, he can list the general tone scale position of the individual mentally and physically. The woman who is dull and apathetic is, of course, around Tone 0.5, in the Zone Zero part of the dynamic scale earlier in the book. If the man is angry or 125

hostile, the auditor can mark him down as a 1.5 or somewhere generally in the Zone One range of the survival scale. These markings would apply to the probable average tone of the aggregate engrams in the reactive mind. This is interesting because it means that a Zone Zero person is far more likely to be ill and is a slightly harder case than a Zone One person: And, as therapy raises tone to Zone Four, the 1.5 is closer to the goal.

It is difficult to estimate time in therapy. As mentioned before, it has several variables such as auditor skill, restimulative elements in the patient’s environment and sheer volume of engrams.

The auditor is advised, in his first case, to seek out some member of the family or a friend who is as close as possible to the optimum pre-clear, which is to say, a person with visio and sonic recall and average perceptions. In clearing this one case he will learn at first hand much of what can be expected in the engram banks of any mind; and he will see clearly how engrams behave. If the auditor himself falls into one of the harder brackets and if he means to work with somebody in one of these brackets, that poses no great difficulty, either case can be released in a hundredth the time of any former mental healing technique and they can be cleared, if any skill at all is used, in five hundred hours of work per case. But if two cases are particularly difficult, before they work on each other each would be wise to find and clear a nearly optimum pre-clear. That way each will be a competent operator when the rougher cases are approached.

Thus, diagnosis. The other perceptions, recalls and imaginations are interesting but not vital in measuring case time. I.Q., unless it falls down into the feeble-minded level, is no great factor. And even then the I.Q. of any patient goes up like a skyrocket with clearing and rises all the while during the work.

There are organic insanities. Iatrogenic psychoses (caused by doctors) are equivocal in dianetics, for a part of the machinery may have been wrecked. Nevertheless, with many organic psychoses a case can be improved by dianetics even if an optimum cannot be reached.

And so all an auditor can do is try. Insanities caused by missing parts of the nervous system have not been extensively investigated by auditors at this time: the reviving of corpses is not the end of dianetics: the bringing about an optimum mind in the normal or merely neurotic person has had the main emphasis. Dianetics can be otherwise used, is being and will be. But with so many potentially valuable people who can be made highly valuable to themselves and society, emphasis has been placed on inorganic aberrations and organic psycho-somatic illnesses.

Cases which have been subjected to pre-frontal lobotomy (which saws a section out of the analytical mind), the topectomy (which removes pieces of brain somewhat as an apple corer cores apples), the trans-orbital leukotomy which, while the patient is being electrically shocked, thrusts an ordinary dime store ice-pick into each eye and reaches up to rip the analyzer apart), and electric shock “therapy” which sears the brain with 110 volts, as well as insulin shock and other treatments, are considered by dianetics to be equivocal. There are ordinary organic insanities such as paresis, but most of these, even so, can be benefited by dianetics.

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There is a method of “thinking” which Man did not know he had.

If you would like an illustration of this, ask a small child if she would like to go sleigh riding in memory. She will try to remember the last time she rode her sleigh. She will frown and pucker her brows perhaps. Now tell her to go back to the last time she was sleigh riding.

Coaxed she will suddenly come forth with a complete experience and, unless she is badly aberrated, will be able to tell you about the snow getting down her collar and so forth. She is right back there sleigh riding, swimming or whatever you choose.

Man, when and if he thought about this at all, must have mistaken it for imagination.

But it is not imagination. Anyone, unless he is very severely aberrated indeed, can be “sent back” wide awake to an experience of the past. In initial tests one should use experiences not long gone and experiences which are pleasant.

This is not memory in the way one “remembers something.” It is returning.

Remembering is a far more complicated process than returning. Just why people go around seeking to remember some specific or complex datum when they can return is something of a mystery when one considers lost articles, things read, conversations had and so forth.

Remembering, of course, has a very definite role and is an automatic process which provides

“I” with conclusions and data in a never-ending stream. But when one wishes a very precise, specific bit of information or when one seeks a past pleasure to contemplate it, returning is more to the point.

The hypnotist, with much mumbo-jumbo and hand passes et al., has something which he calls “regression.” This is a very complicated business which requires being hypnotized.

True enough, regression has research value since, by hypnosis, it by-passes occlusions which are not otherwise easy to get around. And regression served dianetics well when the author was checking his data on memory banks. But it evidently had occurred to none that regression is an artificial use of a natural process.

Undoubtedly some people use returning for some of their mental work, and these people probably think that “everybody else” does likewise, which is far from true. But even those people who return naturally seldom understand that this is a distinct process, much different from remembering.

People also relive without being hypnotized or drugged; this is a rarer thing. If a person sits in contemplation ot some past glory for a while he will begin to relive instead of simply return.

In dianetics we have had much to do with “spectrums.” The spectrum of gradations is a much better mechanism for philosophy than Aristotle’s pendulum which swung from one extreme to the other. We have the spectrum of the dynamics. We call them four dynamics, through which the command: SURVIVE! is expressed, and the four are actually a great number of gradations from the cells of “I” through “I,” through family and children, through club and city and state, through nation and race and hemisphere and finally all Mankind. That is a spectrum: gradations of something which are really the same thing but which have wider and wider scope or range.