Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (53 page)

DENYERS

“Leave me alone,” which means, literally, that he must leave the incident alone. “I can’t tell” means he can’t tell you this engram. “It’s hard to tell” means it is hard to tell. “I don’t want to know” means he has no desire to know this engram. “Forget it” is the classic of the sub-class of denyer, the forgetter mechanism. When the engram simply won’t come to view but there is a somatic or a muscle twitch, send the somatic strip to the denyer. It is often

“Forget it” or “Can’t remember” as a part of the engram. “I don’t know what’s going on” may be Mama telling Papa something but the pre-clear’s analyzer, impinged, then doesn’t know what’s going on. “It’s beyond me” means he is right there but he thinks he isn’t. “Hold on to this, it’s your life!” makes the engram “vital” to existence. “It can’t be reached,” “I can’t get in there,” “Nobody must know,” “It’s a secret,” “If anybody found out, I’d die,” “Don’t talk,”

and thousands more.

HOLDERS

The holder is the most frequent and the most used since whenever the pre-clear can’t shift on the track or come to present, he is in a holder. A holder combined with a denyer will still hold: if it can’t be found, look for the denyer first, then the holder. “I’m stuck” is the classic phrase. “That fixed it” is another. “I’m caught” doesn’t mean to the pre-clear what Mama meant when she said it. It may mean to her that she is pregnant but it tells the pre-clear he is caught on the track. “Don’t move,” “Sit there until I tell you to move,” “Stop and think”

(on this last phrase, when it is uttered on a first recounting the auditor may have to start him going again for he does just that, he stops and thinks and he would stop there and think for some time: the auditor will see this strange obedience to this literal nonsense as he works a case). And thousands more. Any way words literally understood can stop a person or keep him from moving.

BOUNCERS

The bouncer could best be demonstrated by a curve. The pre-clear goes back into prenatal and then finds himself at ten years of age or even present time. That’s a bouncer at work. He goes early on the time track: it says come back up.

When the pre-clear can’t seem to get earlier, there is a bouncer ejecting him from an engram. Get a comment from him on what’s happening. Take the comment or some phrase which would be a bouncer and use repeater technique until he settles back down on the engram. If he contacts it easily, it won’t bounce him again. “Get out” is the classic bouncer.

The patient usually goes toward present time. “Can’t go back at this point” may mean Mama has decided she will have to have the baby after all or finish the abortion but to the pre-clear it means he must move on up the time track or that he can’t get any earlier period. “Get up there.” “Run a mile” (“Beat it,” would not be a bouncer; it would mean the pre-clear should beat the engram). “I must go far, far away,” so he does. “I’m growing up,” “Blow you higher than a kite,” “Batter up.” And thousands more.

GROUPER

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The grouper is the nastiest of all types of command. It can be so variously worded and its effect is so serious on the time track that the whole track can roll up into a ball and all incidents then appear to be in the same place.

This is apparent as soon as the pre-clear

hits one. The grouper will not be discovered easily. But it will settle out as the case progresses and the case can be worked with a grouper in restimulation. “I have no time” and “Nothing makes any difference” are the classic groupers. “Everything comes in on me at once” means just that. “They’re all in there together,” “Screwed up,” “Balled up,” “It’s all right here.”

“You can remember all this in present time” (a serious auditor error if he uses this to a suggestible patient, for it will gloriously foul a case). “You associate everything.” “I am tangled up,” “Jam everything in there at once,” “There’s no time,” and thousands more.

MISDIRECTOR

This is an insidious character, the misdirector. When it appears in an engram, the patient goes in wrong directions, to wrong places, etc. “You’re doing it all backwards.” “All up now” is a grouper and a misdirector. “Always throwing it up to me” puts the pre-clear up the track some distance and from there he tries to pick up engrams. “You can’t go down” is partly bouncer, partly misdirector. “We can’t get to the bottom of this” keeps him off from basic-basic. “You can start over again” keeps him from finishing the recounting, whereupon he goes back to the beginning of the engram instead of running it. “Can’t go through that again” keeps him from recounting. “I can’t tell you how it began” keeps him starting his engrams in the middle and they will not then reduce. There are many such phrases. “Let’s settle down” and all “settlings” make him drift backwards down the track. “I am coming down with a cold” puts the aberree in a common cold engram. This can be counted upon to make every cold much worse. “Come back here” is really a call back but it directs him away from where he should be. A patient who reaches present time with difficulty and then begins to go back has a “Come back here” or a “Settle down.” “Down and out” misdirects him not only away from present time but to the bottom of the track and off it. This is a misdirector and a derailer all at once. “Can’t get past me” is a misdirector on the order of a reverser. “You don’t know down from up” is the classic phrase. “I’m all turned around.”

A special case is the derailer which “throws him off the track” and makes him lose touch with his time track. This is a very serious phrase since it can make a schizophrenic and something of this sort is always to be found in schizophrenia. Some of its phrases throw him into other valences which have no proper track, some merely remove time, some throw him bodily out of time. “I don’t have any time” is a derailer as well as a grouper. “I’m beside myself” means that he is now two people, one beside the other. “I’ll have to pretend I am somebody else” is a key phrase to identity confusion. “You’re behind the times” and many more.

There is another special case of the misdirector. The auditor says to go to “present time”

and the file clerk throws out a phrase with “present” in it. It does not matter if the present in the phrase was a Christmas present, if it is in the prenatal area, the pre-clear goes there, ignoring what the auditor meant. “That’s all at present,” is a vicious phrase, putting everything in present time. “It’s a lovely present.”

And others. “Now” is sometimes confused with present time but not often. The auditor should not say “Come to now,” because if he did he would find more “nows” than he could comfortably handle. “Present” is a rarer engramic word and is therefore used. “Now” appears too frequently.

Several severely aberrated persons who had little memory of the past have been found to be entirely off their time tracks, regressed into the prenatal area and stuck when the case was entered. As far as their wits were concerned, they had only a few months of past from where they were back to conception. And yet these people had managed somehow to function as normals.

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Emotional charges usually hold the person off his track and, indeed, are the only things which give these engram commands any power according to current findings.

DIFFERENCES

There are two axioms about mind function with which the auditor should be familiar.

I.

THE MIND PERCEIVES, POSES AND RESOLVES PROBLEMS RELATING TO

SURVIVAL.

II.

THE ANALYTICAL MIND COMPUTES IN DIFFERENCES. THE REACTIVE

MIND COMPUTES IN IDENTITIES.

The first axiom is of interest to the auditor in his work because with it he can clearly establish whether or not he is confronting a rational reaction. The seven-year-old girl who shudders because a man kisses her is not computing; she is reacting to an engram since at seven she should see nothing wrong in a kiss, not even a passionate one. There must have been an earlier experience, possibly prenatal, which made men or kissing very bad. All departures from optimum rationality are useful in locating engrams, all unreasonable fears and so forth are grist to the auditor’s mill. The auditor, with the above law, should study as well, the Equation of the Optimum Solution. Any departure from optimum is suspect. While he cares little about aberrations, at times a case will stall or seem to have no engrams. He then can observe the conduct of his patient and his patient’s reactions to life in order to gain data.

The second law is dianetics’ contribution to logic. In the philosophic text this is more fully entered. Aristotle’s pendulum and his two-valued logic were abandoned not because of any dislike of Aristotle but because broader yardsticks were needed. One of these yardsticks was the spectrum principle whereby gradations from zero to infinity and infinity to infinity were used and Absolutes were considered utterly unobtainable for scientific purposes.

In the second axiom the mind can be conceived to recognize differences very broadly and accurately, in its nearest approach to complete rationality and then, as it falls away from rationality, to perceive less and less difference until at last it achieves a near approach to utter inability to compute any difference in time, space or thought and so can be considered completely insane. When this follows one thought only, such as a sweeping statement that

“All cats are the same,” it is either careless or insane since all cats are not the same, even two cats who look, act and sound alike. One could say, “Cats are pretty much the same,” and still be dealing with rather irrational thought. Or one could recognize that there was a species felix domesticus but that within it cats were decidely different not only from breed to breed but cat to cat. That would be rationality, not because one used Latin but because he could tell the difference amongst cats. The fear of cats has as its source an engram which usually does not include more than one cat and that is a very specific cat of a specific breed with a certain (or perhaps uncertain) personality. The pre-clear who is afraid of all cats is actually afraid of one cat and a cat which is most likely dead these many years at that. Thus as we swing from complete rationality down to irrationality there is a narrowing of differences until they nearly vanish and become similarities and identities.

Aristotle’s syllogism in which two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other simply does not begin to work in logic. Logic is not arithmetic, which is an artificial thing Man invented and which works. To handle a problem in logic the mind flutters through an enormous mass of data and computes with dozens and even hundreds of variables. It does not and never did think on the basis that two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other except when employing mathematics it had conceived the better to resolve abstract problems. It is an abstract truth that two and two equal four. Two what and two what equal four? There is no scale made, no yardstick or caliper or microscope manufactured, which would justify the actuality, for instance, that two apples plus two apples equal four apples. Two apples and two apples are four apples now if they are the same apples. They would not equal four other apples 210

by any growth or manufacturing process ever imagined. Man is content to take approximations and call them, loosely, exactitudes. There is no Absolute anything save in abstract terms set up by the mind to work out exterior problems and achieve approximations. This may seem to be a stretched conception, but it is not. The mathematician is very well aware that he is working with digit and analogue approximations set up into systems which were not necessarily here before Man came and will not necessarily be here after he is gone. Logic, even the simple logic of wondering about the wisdom of going shopping at ten, is handling numerous variables, indefinites and approximations. Mathematics can be invented by the carload lot. There is no actual Absolute, there is only a near approach. Our grammarians alone, much behind the times, insist, probably in memory of the metaphysician, on Absolute Reality and Truth.

This is here set down partly because it may be of interest to some but mainly because the auditor must realize that he has an accurate measuring stick for sanity. Sanity is the ability to tell differences. The better one can tell differences, no matter how minute, and know the width of those differences, the more rational he is. The less one can tell differences and the closer one comes to thinking in identities (A = A) the less sane he is.

A man says, “I don’t like dogs!” Spot it, auditor, he has an engram about one or two dogs. A girl says, “All men are alike!” Spot it, auditor, here’s a real aberree. “Mountains are so terrible!” “Jewelers never go any place!” “I hate women!” Spot them. Those are engrams right out in broad daylight.

Those engrams which inhibit the analytical mind in differentiating are those engrams which most seriously inhibit thinking.

“You can’t tell the difference,” is a common engram. “There is no difference,”

“Nothing will ever make any difference to me again,” “People are all bad,” “Everybody hates me.” This is insanity bait, as the auditors say, and puts a man “spin-bin bound.”

There is another class of identity thought and that is the group which destroys time-differentiation. “You don’t know when it happened!” is a classic phrase. “I don’t know how late it is,” and others have a peculiar effect on the mind for the mind is running on a precision chronometer of its own and the engrams can thoroughly misread the dial. On a conscious level one goes along fairly well on analytical time. The engrams slide around back and forth according to when they are keyed-in or restimulated. An engram may underlie today’s action which belonged forty years ago on the time track and should be back there. It is not remarks about time difference so much that aberrate, it is the untimed character of engrams. Time is the Great Charlatan, it heals nothing, it only changes the environmental aspects and a man’s associates. The engram of ten years ago, with all its painful emotion, may be encysted and

“forgotten” but it is right there, ready to force action if restimulated today.

The reactive mind runs on a dime-store wrist watch, the analytical mind runs on a battery of counter-checking chronometers of which a liner could be proud. The cells think that wrist watch is a pretty fair gimmick -- and it was, it was, back there in the days when Man’s ancestor was washed in by the waves and managed to cling to the sand.