Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (40 page)

The auditor now has some slight idea of who the allies may be. And here comes the Achilles heel of the ally computation:

Any ally computation may have included the loss of the ally. And the loss of the ally may be the trigger which will start chain fission. For what we are going to try to do is blow off or discharge as many life force units as possible from the reactive engram bank and weaken it.

Every charge we get from the bank will reinforce the ability of the patient to carry on in existence and will aid his analytical mind to get into the engram bank. Hence, discharging these frozen units is a vital and important part of therapy and the condition of the case will improve in direct ratio to the number of these units so discharged.

Consider these life units as free life energy: an engram capturing them can set itself up, for all intent, as a life force. It is then an entity and only then. The demon circuits, the valence walls (which compartment the analyzer, so to speak, and bring about multi-valence), the force and power of the engram itself are all dependent, according to theory and as observed in practice, upon usurped life units.

To free these units is the primary task of therapy: to relieve pain from the engrams is the secondary task; to make the patient comfortable during therapy does not even rank, though there is no need he should be uncomfortable. The dual character of therapy, then, is actually two sections of the same thing: relieving engrams. There is this dual nature in engrams, however, that they have painful emotion (where that means usurped life force) and physical pain (where that means pain of injury, illness, etc.).

To get as early as possible as fast as possible and find basic-basic is the direction and intent of therapy in its first stages: to accomplish this (when it cannot be done immediately merely by returning and finding basic-basic which can and always should be tried) one relieves the case and robs the engram bank by releasing life units (painful emotion captured them) from the ally computations.

In brief, the entire intent and act of therapy is to find the earliest engram and erase it and then proceed to erase all other engrams as engrams so they can no longer be discovered (they refile in the standard bank but it takes a genius to find them there and a search of hours and hours: hence, to the auditor they can be said to have “erased” for they are no longer engrams and are now experience). The first, last and only job of the auditor is to find the earliest engrams available and erase them. That cannot be said too often or too strongly.

The various ways to accomplish this are the techniques and arts of therapy. Anything which brings about this erasure of engrams in place and their refiling as experience is useful and legitimate whatever it includes. An engineer intends to remove a mountain which is in the way of a river: his intent and all his effort is directed toward moving that mountain; the ways 157

and means employed by him to move that mountain, by steam shovel, hydraulic rams or dynamite are the art and techniques applied to do the job.

There are three degrees of knowledge in our task: (1) In dianetics we know the goal: we know the results which come about when that goal is attained; (2) We know the character of the obstructions between us and the goal but of the exact character of the obstruction we can never learn too much; (3) The art and technique of removing the obstruction between us and the goal are legitimate only by the test of whether or not they remove the obstruction.

The method of attack on the problem can always be improved by learning more about the character of the factors in the problem, and by learning new arts and techniques which can be applied to the problem, and by studying to improve our skill in practicing existing arts and techniques. The currently existing art and technique is not to be considered optimum merely because it does the job. The time and ease of work could be shortened by new techniques or advancing skills for old techniques.

All this is interjected so that dianetics, unlike Aristotelian logic and natural history, will be recognized as an advancing, changing science. It is interjected at this place because no auditor should just sit back with this routine and never try to improve the routine.

Very well: this is the routine: it works but it can never be made to work too quickly or too well:

(1)

Place the patient in reverie and scout into the prenatal area to see if engrams are available for lifting without further work. If they are there and can be found, take the charge out of them and erase them if possible. Do not try to erase anything as remote from basic-basic as birth unless the file clerk insists on presenting birth. In other words, get the subject into the prenatal area and look for the earliest engrams. Do not ask for specific instances, particularly for something like birth, just take whatever is presented. If you can’t get back early, take step two.

(2)

Scout the patient’s life, while he is in reverie (do this in any event sooner or later if the case slows down but only if it slows down to a point where early engrams are either not reducing or are without any emotion). Establish in this scout whomever may have been depended upon by the patient and be suspicious always that he has not told you the really important allies, but do not tell him you are suspicious.

(3)

Find out when the patient lost any ally through death or departure. Approach this moment and one way or another, by getting earlier material and this incident or getting just this incident, discharge the sorrow of loss out of the incidents. Treat any incident in which the ally departs or the patient is separated from the ally as an engram and erase it accordingly or run it until it has no “charge” of sorrow on it. If the “charge” holds, suspect an early moment of sorrow about this ally and find that and treat it as an engram.

(4)

First, last and always, the job is to get basic-basic and then ever afterwards the currently existing earliest moment of pain or sorrow, and to erase every incident as it is advanced by the file clerk or found by repeater technique.

(5)

Any incident that hangs fire always has a similar incident earlier, and the patient should be taken earlier for the prior incident when an engram will not “reduce” on recounting.

(6)

At any time the engrams start to become emotionless in tone, even though they reduce, suspect another ally computation and, early or late in the patient’s life, get it and reduce it at least until the emotional discharge is gone. Do not get everything in a case restimulated by changing from an unreduced incident to something which looks more fruitful, but reduce everything in view before you go looking for a new sorrow charge.

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(7)

It is better to reduce an emotionless early engram than it is to upset the case by hounding him for an ally computation when a cunning search fails to reveal none in sight. Erasing early emotionless engrams will eventually bring a new ally computation into sight if you occasionally look for it.

(8)

Consider that any hold-up on a case, any unwillingness to cooperate, stems from ally computation.

(9)

Treat all demon circuits as things held in place by life force units absorbed into the bank and address the problem of demon circuits by releasing charges of sorrow.

(10)

Consider that loss by death or departure of an ally is identical with a death of some part of the patient and that the reduction of a death or departure of an ally will restore that much life back to the patient. And remember that great sorrow charges are not always death or departure but merely may be a sudden reversal of stand by the ally.

Always keep in mind that that person who most nearly identifies himself with the person of the patient, such as a sympathetic mother or father or grandparent or relative or friend, is considered by the reactive mind to be a part of the person himself and that anything happening to this sympathetic character can be considered to have happened to the patient. In such a case, where an ally has been found to have died of cancer, you may occasionally find the patient to have a sore or scaly place where he supposed the ally’s cancer to have been.

The reactive mind thinks in identities only. The sympathetic pro-survival engram identifies the patient with another individual. The death or loss (by departure or denial) of the other individual is therefore a reactive mind conviction that the patient has suffered some portion of death.

Emotional charges may be contained in any engram: the emotion communicates, in the same tone level, from the personnel around the “unconscious” person into his reactive mind.

Anger goes into an engram as anger, apathy as apathy, shame as shame. Whatever people have felt emotionally around an “unconscious” person should be found in the engram which resulted from the incident. When the emotional tone of personnel in an engram is obviously angry or apathetic from the word content and yet the patient, recounting, does not feel it, there is something somewhere which has a valence wall between the patient and the emotional tone, and that valence wall is nearly always broken down by the discovery of an engram with a sorrow charge sometime earlier or later in a patient’s life.

The only legitimate reason for entering later portions of a person’s life before the prenatal area has been well exhausted is search for sorrow discharges occasioned by the death, loss or denial by an ally. And by “denial,” we mean that the ally turned into an active enemy (real or imaginary) of the patient. The counterpart of the ally, the pseudo-ally, is a person whom the reactive mind has confused with the real ally. The death, loss or denial by a pseudo-ally can contain a sorrow charge.

According to theory, the only thing which can lock up life units is this emotion of loss.

If some method existed of doing nothing but freeing all life units, the physical pain could be neglected.

A release is brought about, one way or another, by freeing as many life units as possible from periods of loss with minimal address to actual engrams.

The loss of an ally or pseudo-ally need contain no other physical pain or

“unconsciousness” than the loss itself occasions. This is serious enough. It makes an engram.

Any person who is suddenly discovered to be occluded in a patient’s life can, with some reliability, be considered an ally or pseudo-ally. If, either while remembering or returning, large sections of a patient’s association with another person are missing, that person 159

can be called an occluded person. It is a better guarantee of ally status if the occlusion surrounds the death of the person or a departure from or a denial by that person. It is possible for occlusion to take place, also, for punishment reasons; which is to say, the occluded person may also be an arch enemy: in such a case, however, any memory present will concern the death or defeat or illness of the occluded person. Occlusion of a person’s funeral in the memory of a patient would theoretically label that person an ally or pseudo-ally. Recollection of the funeral of a person but occlusion of pleasant association might tend to mean that the person was an enemy. Such rules are tentative. But it is certain that any occlusion means that a person had a vast and unrevealed significance in a patient’s life which should be explained.

It may be remarked at this point that the recovery of the patient will depend in large measure on the life units freed from his reactive bank. This is a discharge of sorrow and may be quite violent. The usual practice is to “forget” such things and the “sooner forgotten, the sooner healed.” Unfortunately this does not work: it would be a happy thing if it did. Anything forgotten is a festering sore when it has despair connected with it. The auditor will find that every time he locates that arch denyer, “forget it,” he will get the engram it suppressed; when he can’t locate the engram and yet has found a somatic, a “forget it” or “don’t think about it” or

“can’t remember it” or “don’t remember it” or some other denyer will be sitting there in the context of the engram. Forgetting is such unhealthy business that when a thing has been “put out of mind,” it has been put straight into the reactive engram bank and in there it can absorb life units.

This “loopy” computation, that forgetting things makes them bearable, is incredible in view of the fact that the hypnotist, for instance, gets results with a positive suggestion when he puts one of these denyers on the end of it. That has been known now for a great many eons: it was one of the first things the author was taught when he studied Asiatic practices; from India it long ago filtered to Greece and Rome and it has come to us via Anton Mesmer: it is a fundamental principle in several mystic arts: its mechanics were known even to the Sioux medicine man. Yet people at large, hitherto unguided about it, and perhaps because they lacked any real remedy, believed that the thing to do with sorrow was to “forget it.”

Even Hippocrates remarks that the whole of an operation is not finished until the patient has recounted the incident to all of his friends in turn, and while this is inadequate therapy, it has been, like the Confessional, a part of popular knowledge for lo, these many ages: yet people persist in suppressing sorrow.

The auditor will many times in his activity be begged by a patient “not to talk to me about so-and-so’s death.” If he is foolish enough to heed this tearful plea when the patient is in reverie, then the auditor is actively blocking a release. That is the first incident he should get!

Perhaps it would be bad, without dianetic technique, to approach such things; but with our art it is easy not only to enter the actual moment of the incident but to then recount it until the tears and wailings are but echoes in the case book. Treating that loss like an engram, recounting it until it is no longer painful emotionally, is to give back to the patient vitality he has not had since the incident took place. And if the incident does not ease on a dozen recountings, slide back down its sorrow track, just as you would with any other engram, and find earlier and earlier moments. A patient starting to discharge sorrow at the age of fifty may find himself, two hours later, down in the basic area recounting the primary moment of sorrow, at the moment when the lost ally first became an ally. If the auditor can get the whole chain on any one ally, exhausting sorrow from it from later to earlier, taking all the sorrow he can get from every incident and stripping the entire series of engrams of their charge, he may, in a few hours work, rid the case of enough emotional charge to then begin an orderly erasure.