Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (35 page)

AUDITOR: Are you in present time?

PRE-CLEAR: Sure.

AUDITOR: How do you feel?

PRE-CLEAR: Oh, I’ve got a slight headache.

AUDITOR: Close your eyes. Now say: “Stay here.”

PRE-CLEAR: All right. Stay here. Stay here. Stay here. (Several times) AUDITOR: Are you moving?

PRE-CLEAR: No.

AUDITOR: Say “I’m caught. I’m caught.”

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PRE-CLEAR: I’m caught. (Several times)

AUDITOR: Are you moving on the track?

PRE-CLEAR: Nope.

AUDITOR: Say, “I’m trapped.”

PRE-CLEAR: I’m trapped. I -- Ouch, my head!

AUDITOR: Keep going over it.

PRE-CLEAR: I’m trapped. I’m trapped. I’m trapped, Ouch! That’s worse! (His somatic is getting stronger as he approaches the engram holding him on the other side of the

“unconsciousness” veil)

AUDITOR: Keep going over it.

PRE-CLEAR: I’m trapped -- “Oh, God, I’m trapped. I’ll never get out of this place. I’ll never get out. I’m trapped!”

AUDITOR: Contact it closely. Make sure there is nothing more in it. (A trick to keep the preclear from replaying what he himself has just said and keep running the engram) PRE-CLEAR: My head hurts! Let me come up to present time!

AUDITOR: Go through it again. (If the pre-clear comes up with this much charge, he’ll be unhappy and the incident may be hard to enter next time) PRE-CLEAR: “Oh, God, I’m trapped. I’m afraid I’m trapped (new word showed up). I’ll never get out of this place as long as I live. I’m trapped. I’ll never get out. I’m trapped.”

(aside) She’s crying. “Oh, why did I ever have to marry such a man!”

AUDITOR: How’s your head?

PRE-CLEAR: Hurts less. Say, that’s a dirty trick. She’s pounding herself on the stomach.

That’s mean! Why, confound her!

AUDITOR: Re-experience it. again. Let’s make sure there isn’t more in it. (Same mechanism to keep the pre-clear from replaying what he said before rather than what he now gets from the engram. If he replays rather than re-experiences, the engram won’t lift) PRE-CLEAR: (Does so, getting some new words and several sounds including the thud of the blows on her abdomen and an auto horn (bulb type) in the street outside) Don’t tell me I have to run this thing again.

AUDITOR: Recount it, please.

PRE-CLEAR: Well, so this dame tries to bust my head in and get rid of me. And so I jumped out and beat hell out of her.

AUDITOR: Please re-experience the engram.

PRE-CLEAR: (Starts to do so, suddenly finds out that like a piece of string with a loop in it, this engram has straightened out and contains more data where the loops were). “I’ve got to think of something to tell Harry. He’ll jump all over me.” ( This was the source of his joking --

“jumped out, etc.”)

AUDITOR: Please go over it again. There may be more in it.

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PRE-CLEAR: (Does so, old parts of it reduce, two new sounds appear, her footsteps and running water. Then he is happy laughs at it. This engram is released because it may not have entirely vanished. Such an engram is in this shape only when it is contacted prior to basic-basic.)

This is both repeater technique and an engram talked into recession. This engram may appear again with a very faint additional charge after basic-basic is contacted, but it has lost all power to aberrate or give out a psycho-somatic headache or other illness. Yet this engram, not contacted by therapy, was quite enough to make this patient, when a boy, scream with terror every time he found he could not get out of some closed space (claustrophobia).

The repeater technique is the one particular phase of dianetics which requires cleverness from the auditor. Given persistency and patience, any auditor can succeed in the other phases of the science with minimal intelligence. In the repeater technique he must learn how to think --

for therapy purposes -- like an engram. And he will have to observe how the subject is conducting himself along the time track. And he will have to observe the type of reaction the subject has and draw from this the conclusion as to what sort of command is troubling the subject when the subject himself either does not cooperate or does not know.

This is not to say that the repeater technique is hard: it is not. But the ability of the auditor to use it is the principal reason why a case takes longer with one auditor than another. It is a definite ability. It is playing the game mentioned earlier with cleverness. Where is the preclear stuck and with what command? Why has the pre-clear suddenly stopped cooperating?

Where is the emotional charge which is holding up the case? With the repeater technique the auditor can resolve all these problems and a clever auditor resolves them much faster than an unclever one.

How does one think like an engram? Ronald Ross, discovering that insects carried germs, considered it necessary to think like a mosquito. Here is a similar menace, the engram.

One has to learn to think, for therapy purposes, like an engram.

The auditor could not and does not have to be able to look into a patient’s eyes and guess why the patient won’t eat anything but cauliflower on Wednesdays. That is an aberration and the auditor does not have to guess at either aberrations or psycho-somatic illness sources; they all come out in time and he will learn much about them as he goes. But the auditor must be able to keep his patient straightened out on the track, moving earlier into the basic area, moving upwards from there for a reduction. The current answer to this is the repeater technique.

Understand that a whole new art of practice, or many arts of practice, could be evolved for dianetics: one would be unhappy with his fellow man if such evolution and betterment did not take place. Just now the best that has come forward -- and the criterion of best is that it works uniformly in all cases -- is the repeater technique. The auditor must be able to use it if he expects anything like results from a case at this time. When the auditor -- or some auditor -- has run a few cases and knows the nature of this beast, the engram, he may -- and better had --

come forward with improved techniques of his own. The real drawback which repeater technique has is that it requires the auditor to be clever.

Being clever does not mean talking a lot. In dianetics, when one is auditing, that is being very unclever. Indeed auditors, when they begin to work cases, almost invariably so love the sound of their own voices and the feel of their skill that the poor pre-clear hardly gets a chance to get a word in reactive-wise -- and it is the pre-clear who is to be cleared, who has the only accurate information, who can make the only evaluations.

Being clever in the sense of the repeater technique is being able to pick out, from the subject’s conversation or action, just what the engrams contain which will prevent his reaching them, progressing through them and so forth. The repeater technique is addressed only to action, not to aberration.

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Here is a case, for instance, which was so “sealed-in” that thirty hours of almost continual repeater technique were necessary to break the walls between the analytical mind and the engrams. It is important to know that an engram would not be an engram if the pre-clear could contact it easily. Any engram which can be easily contacted and has no emotional charge is about as aberrative as a glass of soda water.

A young girl, with sonic recall, but with extended hearing and such a complete imbalance of the endocrine system that she had become an old woman at twenty-two, was worked for seventy-five hours before she contacted anything in the basic area. This is almost incredible but it happened. In a patient with sonic shut-off and off his time track, seventy-five hours of work would just about get the wheels greased. But this girl, having sonic recall, should have been well on the road to being clear and she had yet to touch basic-basic.

By repeater technique and repeater alone the case was finally resolved. It contained practically no holders or bouncers. It simply appeared that the whole prenatal area was a blank.

Now it happens that an engram, being not a memory with reason in it, is just a set of waves or some other type of recording which impinges itself on the analytical mind and the somatic mind and runs the voice and muscles and other parts of the body. The analytical mind, to justify what it finds going forward, and cut down by the engram in dramatization, may be interjecting data to make this action seem reasonable -- to justity it. But this does not make an engram sentient. When an engram is first approached in therapy it appears to be absent entirely.

It may be that three sessions will be required to “develop” this engram. As many are worked, this does not mean three blank sessions, but it means that the “I,” in returning, must pass over an engram a few times for the engram to “develop.” This is important to know. Just as you ask the mind for a datum one week and don’t find it (in an aberree) and ask it again the next week and find it, so with engrams. A cardinal principle in therapy is that if you keep asking for it, you will eventually get the engram. Returning over and over the prenatal area will, of itself alone, eventually develop the engrams in it so that the analytical mind can attack them and reduce them. This is slow freight. The repeater technique -- although the engram is still in need of development by several sessions -- speeds the process immensely.

In the case of this young girl it probably would have taken another fifty or sixty hours of work to contact the engrams unless a technique like repeater had been used.

Repeater technique resolved it when the auditor noted that she kept saying, “I’m sure there’s a good reason why I feel bad up in my childhood. After all, my brother raped me when I was five. I’m sure it’s up in my childhood, much later. My mother was terribly jealous of me. I’m sure it’s later.”

This young lady, as might be imagined, had studied some school of mental healing in college which thought sex or eating vitamins caused aberrations of the mind and she had often held forth on the fact that while she was not averse to what she called “analysis” she did think it dull to expect a foetus to hear anything. She would go into the area before birth and declare she was quite comfortable. But birth was not in sight. That is important. The basic engram or engrams in the basic area -- around the embryo period -- cannot vanish and will not vanish short of therapy, and when birth cannot even be contacted by so much as one somatic, it is certain that something lies before it. If birth were the first engram, everybody could be cleared in five hours. Birth can even be in sight and there may still remain half a hundred severe prenatal experiences. In her case, nothing was in sight. Her educational pattern had slowed the case: she was always trying to sit in present time and “remember” with a memory so full of occlusions that she couldn’t have recalled her mother’s right name. (She had acquired this from being in the hands of mental practitioners for ten years who had asked her to do nothing but

“remember.”) As has been said, she was quite comfortable before birth, sensed the amniotic fluid and was certain that life in the womb was a joyous life for all. The incongruity that she could experience the sensations of this amniotic fluid and floating comfort and warmth and a continued belief that there was no prenatal memory escaped her utterly. The auditor made no 141

slightest effort to convince her. Knowing his business, he merely kept sending her back and forth, trying this mechanism or that.

She finally wanted to know if there had to be prenatal experience and was told that what was there was there, that if there was no prenatal memory then she wouldn’t recall any but that if there was, she might. This is a good, equivocal attitude for an auditor. Dianetics, after all, as one auditor put it, “just shows the yard goods” and makes no sales effort at all.

The auditor had been using repeater technique on varieties of phrases. She was moving on the track so there must be a denyer present. And he had utterly run out of ideas when he realized, suddenly, that she was very handy with that phrase, “much later.”

AUDITOR: Say “Much later” and return into the prenatal area.

GIRL: “Much later. Much later,” etc. (very bored and uncooperative).

AUDITOR: Continue please. (Never say “Go ahead” for that means to do just that. Say

“Continue” when you want them to keep on progressing along an engram or repeating and

“Return over it” when re-running an engram already run once.) GIRL: “Much later. Much...” I have a somatic in my face! It feels like I am being pushed.

(This was good news for the auditor knew she had a mid-prenatal pain shut-off which prevented later somatics from appearing.)

AUDITOR: Contact it more closely and continue to repeat.

GIRL: “Much later. Much later.” It’s getting stronger. (Naturally. On repeater technique, the somatic gets stronger until the phrase appears, exactly right. On a non-sonic case it impinges itself indirectly on “I”; in a sonic, the sound comes through as sound.) AUDITOR: Continue.

GIRL: “Much...” I hear a voice! There. That’s it. Why, that’s my father’s voice!

AUDITOR: Listen to the words and repeat them, please.

GIRL: He’s talking to my mother. Say, this face pressure is uncomfortable. It keeps going up and down on me. It hurts!

AUDITOR: Repeat his words please.

GIRL: He’s saying: “Oh honey, I won’t come in you now. It’s better to wait until much later to have one.” And there’s my mother’s voice. Say, this pressure is hurting me. No, it’s eased up considerably. Funny, the minute I contacted his voice, it got less.

AUDITOR: What is your mother saying, please, if you hear her?

GIRL: She’s saying: “I don’t want you in there at all then!” She’s mad! Say, the somatic stopped. (Coitus had ended at this point.)

AUDITOR: Please return to the start of this and recount.

GIRL: (Regains the beginning, somatic returns) I wonder what they’re doing? (then a pause) I hear a squishing sound! (then a pause and embarrassment) Oh!

AUDITOR: Recount the engram please.

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GIRL: There’s a sort of a faint rhythm at first and then it gets faster. I can hear breathing.