If you were able to look into someone's mind and you were to discover a computation which stated: "In order for me to survive, I must have a severe stomach ache," you might be forgiven for wondering if you had somehow fallen into that same shaft down which Alice had made her entrance into Wonderland. The whole idea seems so mad that our minds are instantly closed to the possibility that anyone short of a Mongoloid idiot could operate in such a fashion. And yet, in one way or another, it is quite safe to say that you are very close to someone who does, on occasion, compute in just such a manner. And so am I, dear reader, so am I, for the certifiably insane mind referred to belongs to someone so close to us that no one is closer. In brief, it is our very selves.
This uncomfortable fact and others, some of which are equally uncomfortable, were discovered by a young civil engineer and Doctor of Philosophy through re-
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searches begun back in the middle 1920's. As an engineer, he took an engineer's approach to the question of existence, which was his principal interest. Now, many of us have wondered about existence: what is it? why are we here? where did we come from? where are we going? Usually, we ponder the problem for a time, debate it with others, often in discussions and "bull sessions" which make up in heat for what they lack in illumination. And having thoroughly exhausted the subject and each other, we return to more rewarding fields of inquiry: what movie we should see tonight, when the Yankees will win another pennant, or the method for making a better salad dressing; all of which are intensely practical questions, yielding, upon the discovery of suitable answers, most worthwhile gratification.
But Dr. L. Ron Hubbard, while not lacking in interest regarding cosmic matters, was not satisfied by limiting himself to their consideration alone. He reasoned that there is an answer to every question, provided only that the question be intelligently put. There is, for instance, no purpose in asking with the medieval theologians, "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" since we lack one essential datum unobtainable on our present level of technology: what is the size of an angel?
Employing the principles of engineering, Hubbard set out to determine which questions were answerable, and which, for his purposes, could be disregarded. An engineer does not need to know waxy a piece of steel of a certain weight and thickness will bear a certain maxi-
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mum load. All he needs to know is that it will do so, and with this fact he can lay the plans for building a bridge or a skyscraper. So Hubbard eliminated all questions on the subject of Why, limiting himself to those of What. He made further eliminations, throwing out all questions that were not absolutely essential to his quest, and he found that When, Where and Who were also both unanswerable and unnecessary. But asking "What?" could yield answers. This is not asking, "What is life all about?" or "What is the ultimate purpose of life?" for these are only other ways of asking, "Why are we living?" His questions centered around "What does life do?" This is something that can be observed, and the answers can be computed.
Hubbard began to search for what he called "the lowest common denominator of existence," the one factor common to all living things, and he finally hit upon one that certainly was present in everything that lives: survival. Whether it is animal or vegetable, it struggles to survive, and not only struggles, but expends its last ounce of vitality attempting to survive.
He had already concluded that the human brain was a magnificent computer, as well as a wonder of miniaturization. One professor in the field of electronics has said that for an electronic brain to be equal to that of the human, it would require the space of four warehouses, each five stories high and occupying a full city block; that the electric power to operate it would be sufficient to light all of the City of New York; and that to prevent it from overheating, it would be necessary to have available the full water supply of Niagara Falls. Such an
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instrument, if it could be constructed at all, would cost many billions of dollars, entail a huge amount of labor over a long period of years, and be a universal marvel. And yet, each of us carries one of these wonders around, perched more or less securely atop his neck. And no one seems the slightest bit overawed by such an amazing phenomenon.
What would be the characteristics of a perfect computer? It would have to be able to reach accurate answers to all questions in the tiniest fractions of a second, producing all the necessary data from its memory banks upon which to make its computations. It would program itself, arrive at conclusions, remember not only these conclusions but also the steps by which it had arrived at them, and be ready to include new data so that it could arrive at new conclusions. It would be capable of imagination, and still be able to discriminate between imagination and actual experience. And most important of all, it would be able to repair and maintain itself, protecting itself to its full capacity against any injury. This is a precise description of an optimum brain.
From this, Hubbard reasoned that the human being was basically good. Certainly, no one with such a brain could ever be guilty of aberrant thoughts and actions, whether criminal, cruel, or irrational in any way. And yet, there are very few saints among us; almost everyone we know, present company excepted, can be most irrational at times. What, then, had occurred to change people from a state of pristine purity into contestants in a world-wide rat race, one, incidentally, that the rats seem to be winning?
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Born of this quest for answers to the questions of existence was the science of Dianetics (from the Greek: dianoia - thought) along with a research project that would attempt to solve the age-old problem of the reason for Adam's fall. Every religion had dealt with this problem, and in the cases of a few exceptional individuals had achieved some success. But the road was too difficult, the climb too steep for poor old average homo sapiens, which is the reason the few exceptional cases remain exceptional. The various schools of psychology had produced a few cures, about as many as the equally effective schools of African witch doctors, and probably for the very same reason: both of them employ to some extent the techniques of hypnotism.
Unfortunately, hypnotism is a highly unreliable method of therapy. Some people cannot be hypnotized, and of those who can, the "cure" is frequently, if not always, worse than the aberration it displaces. Hubbard experimented with hypnosis and narcosynthesis, the use of drugs to put a person into a hypnotic state, and found that those who had been previously treated by these methods had somehow become aberrant in new patterns. This provided a clue: there must be some kinship between hypnosis and insanity; but how to go about finding it?
Another clue developed from Hubbard's attempts at thinking along new lines unlimited by previous authoritarian pronouncements of Great Truths. He had found that what everybody "knew" might not necessarily be true. At one time, man had believed in demons. Today, everyone knows there are no demons, because the Great
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Thinkers tell us that there are none. So Hubbard decided to look for demons. And demons he found. Of course, these were not what ancient man had accepted as real, but they inhabited the minds of all those he examined under hypnosis. There were demons who gave commands, demons who blocked off access to certain areas of the mind, demons who did not seem to care whether school kept or not, and demons who flew into a rage at the drop of a fact. These he called "demon circuits," again following the analogy of the optimum computer, circuits in the brain, installed as one might install aberrational circuits in a computer.
Soon after arriving at this conclusion, Hubbard placed a man who was highly nervous, color-blind, and unable to recall the actual sounds and sights of past events, under hypnosis. In this state a new man emerged, one who was quite calm, could remember things he had seen in color, had full sonic recall, could imagine events in color and sound, was able to think clearly, could distinguish between things he had experienced and things he had imagined, and wanted to be helped so that he would be able to take over the support of his family, lifting this burden from his wife's shoulders. But, upon awakening, he became his old aberrant self again.
Another patient, a confirmed criminal, was found to be a very decent citizen, once the demon circuits had been bypassed. This served to prove Hubbard's original thesis: that man was basically good. The brain, unless physically damaged, was basically good. But everyone, although basically good, was more or less aberrant, una-
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ble to realize his full potential. Granting the truth of this, it must be the aberrations that are to blame for whatever antisocial behavior he may display. But whence came the aberrations?
Apparently, these aberrations came from outside. Certainly an optimum computer, or an optimum brain, would not, in fact could not, become aberrant of its own accord. Something had to have happened in the exterior world which had so impressed the brain that the event had become an interior memory, but a memory that seemingly could not readily be recalled.
This led to further exploration. Something was sealing off the experience that ought to be remembered, but what? Again he examined all that he had learned about the memory banks in the human computer, but nothing seemed to fit this postulate of a sealed-off memory. It was there, of that he felt sure, but nothing known about memory could account for it. Hubbard decided that his work was itself being blocked by something that he had accepted as true, probably one of those great "truths" that everybody "knows."
When anybody begins thinking in this vein, he becomes a great danger to the established patterns of thought, and he is very likely to discover keys that will unlock some of those old iron-bound doors that so often effectively bar the way to real truth. The door blocking Hubbard's path was a very old "truth," "known" to everybody, probably since man first began to walk erect. This was the concept of mind and body, which is just about as true as that other universal principle known by everybody, that the earth is flat.
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There was only one thing wrong with the concept of mind and body: nobody has ever demonstrated the proposition that they exist as independent entities, and once you take a good hard second look at it, the proposition can be seen to be standing on some rather shaky ground. If you were to prick your finger with a pin, the message of pain would be carried to the brain by the nervous system and be duly recorded. It would also be carried along other nerves to the solar plexus, which would issue an order to flinch from the pain. Now, one might say that this is an example of the coordination of the physical and mental parts of the being, the mind recording what had happened to the body, but nothing was said here about the mind. The whole process was one of the stimulation of the nerves in the finger, the passing on of the message to the brain and solar plexus, and the command issued to the appropriate muscles by the nerve centers in the solar plexus to flinch from the source of the pain. And if, after all effects of this incident had seemingly passed from the memory, one could be returned to the moment of the pinprick, he would feel it again, not in the brain where it had been recorded, but in his finger. Thus, memory is not the exclusive property of the brain, but of the body as a whole, which includes the brain.
To prove his theory, Hubbard pinched several people - with their permission - and then got them to return to, rather than merely remember, the moment when they were pinched. In each case, they re-experienced the pain. He concluded from this that those memories containing pain are the strongest of all, but he also
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realized that the most severe pains, such as those inflicted during surgery, were not remembered at all. Or were they? Employing the crude beginnings of what later came to be the Dianetic technique, he had himself returned to a dental operation performed under nitrous oxide, "laughing gas," and although "unconscious" under the anesthetic, he was able to recall the entire operation, including the pain. From this and similar experiments, he was able to establish the fact that there is no such thing as true unconsciousness.
There is one thing of which we may be quite sure: the highly advertised "unconscious" mind is never unconscious. In fact, the "unconscious" mind is more conscious than the conscious mind; it never sleeps and it cannot be put to sleep, even by anesthetics or blows to the head. So, it would have been most confusing to continue calling it "unconscious." One could not say, "When I say the 'unconscious mind,' I don't mean it is actually unconscious, what I really mean is..." Somewhere along about there, one's audience would begin quietly drifting away. New terminology had to be invented, terminology that was more descriptive of the idea one wanted to convey.
Returning to the idea of the similarity of the brain to an optimum computer, Hubbard reasoned from the fact that man, in a few short years, had been able to construct a computer that not only always gave the correct answers, but would stop and summon a mechanic to correct its faulty circuits if an incorrect answer were about to be produced. It is even possible with our present knowledge to build a computer that could locate its
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own faulty circuit and correct the fault. If man could build such a machine in the comparatively few years since the beginning of the scientific age, what about man's own computer, his brain, which had been undergoing the process of perfection for some two billion years, Surely, in all that time, it must have achieved a high degree of perfection, subject only to physical damage and the installation of additional circuits tending to impede its function.
Since the function of such a mechanism is to analyze, Hubbard decided to call the human computer the analytical mind or the analyzer.
It is this analyzer that spells the difference between man and animal. A dog does not possess an analyzer equal to that of a man, and it was this fact that enabled Pavlov to train his dogs. By now, his classic experiment is well known. Briefly, he would ring a bell and then give a dog his food. After this was done for a while, Pavlov could ring the bell, and even though no food was produced the dog would salivate just as though it had been brought. The dog had learned to identify the bell with food; in fact, to the dog, the bell and the food had become identical.
A man does not make identifications in this manner unless he has become severely aberrant, in which case he is pronounced irrational. And the more irrational a man is, the more he will act like an animal. In fact, a pretty good measure of irrationality is the degree to which a man will identify more or less dissimilar objects or ideas. To say that no one can sit on the word "chair" is to make such an obvious statement that few would
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care to dispute it. A word, then, cannot be identified with the object it represents. We all know this, and it may seem frivolous to take the time to mention it.
But we are apt to identify the word with the object in less obvious ways. Even in these more permissive times, there are many who shy away from a discussion of sex, and some who shudder slightly at the word "sex" itself. Dr. Wendell Johnson, in his book People in Quandaries, written in 1946, one of the best expositions of General Semantics, wrote: "It is no accident that the problems encountered in 'mental' hospitals are so largely concerned with sex.... It is with regard to the words that symbolize experience in these areas that we have maintained our most consistent taboos. If we were to teach the multiplication table the way we teach matters of 'sex,' the world would be filled with an interminable dispute as to what six times five might be. Scarcely anyone would be willing to venture an opinion on the matter in mixed company." Perhaps today, some twenty-two years after this was written, sex is discussed more freely in social gatherings, but not by all elements in our society, and many people still identify the word "sex" with the sexual act itself, as though to speak the word in public were tantamount to the performance of the act in public.
There is also a tendency to see all members of a group of which one is not a member as identical. Thus, it is widely held in some parts of the country that people with black skins are shiftless and love watermelon, ignoring the real-life fact that while Mr. Smith may like watermelon, he is a very hard-working member of so-
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ciety; that Mr. Jones has nothing against work just as long as he is not involved in it, but hates watermelon; that both Mr. Brown and Mr. Williams are bank presidents and seldom think of watermelon at all.
When a man who has a distinct distaste for the great outdoors says, "Once you have seen one tree, you have seen them all," he is operating on a level very close to that of a dog whose purposes are as well served by one tree as another. To him, all trees are equally valuable and he tends to identify them, considering them to be exactly alike. In a dog, this tendency is forgivable, but in a man, it is irrational.
To test his theories in regard to the perfect human computer, impeded only by demon circuits, Hubbard procured some willing patients, stutterers, prostitutes, people with mathematical blocks, people with poor recall, and people lacking in imagination. Under hypnosis - he was still using this method, having developed no other - the stutterers stopped stuttering, the prostitutes became virtuous, those with mathematical blocks had little trouble solving fairly complex problems in arithmetic, those with poor memories began producing total recall in color and sound, those with poor imaginations could imagine in color and sound and distinguish between imagination and experience. Somehow, for the duration of the hypnotic state, the demon circuits had been bypassed and the patients were free of their aberrations. It began to appear that the demon circuits were themselves the aberrations; when they could be bypassed, the person was not aberrant, but when they remained in place he was irrational.
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How did these demon circuits get themselves installed in an otherwise perfect computer? No perfect computer would install such circuits in itself; therefore, they must come from the external world. And since it would reject such circuits if it could, Hubbard assumed that they were of such a nature, or had been installed under such conditions, that they could not be rejected. And since they could not be rejected, the computer would have to continue computing under their influence, leading to error.
Suppose we were to use a computer for doing some . simple problems in addition, and we were to short-circuit the "two" key so that to every answer it computed it would add two. Now we ask for an answer to the problem of three plus four, and we get nine, that is, three plus four plus two. As long as the short-circuit remains in effect, we will get wrong answers. But even under these conditions, we could build a bypass circuit around the short and receive correct answers. Could this be done with the human computer;
It could be - and it was. Under hypnosis, a demon circuit was installed in a patient that acted as an entirely separate analyzer, bypassing that of the patient. This also served to bypass all the other demon circuits, and under its influence everything desired could be extracted from the patient's memory bank and actions normally impossible to the patient could be performed. This provided clear evidence that the bank is always correct, no matter what the aberrations would seem to indicate. The memories are not only present in their entirety, but appear to exist as though in filing cabinets,
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cross-filed according to date and all surrounding circumstances, including emotional content and sense data, what had been seen, heard, felt, smelled and tasted, as well as what was going on in the analyzer at the time.
Everything was present that was requisite to an optimum computer, but something was going on between the memory banks and the analyzer, something on the order of our short-circuited "two." This was the villain of the piece, but what was it?
In his many experiments, Hubbard employed every possible method for extracting the data he needed, including that of automatic writing. In one case, he worked with a man who at one time had been hospitalized with a broken leg. However, although this information was given through automatic writing, the man could not recall any of it consciously. Finally, under hypnosis, he was forced back into the incident, giving the full details of it and feeling the pain all over again. And that was all the clue required. There was the answer - pain. Pain was the villain that short-circuited the "two."
One of the principal functions of the mind is the maintenance of the total organism, what Hubbard had laid down as "the lowest common denominator of existence," the factor common to all living things - survival. Pain was anti-survival; pain had to be avoided. Certainly, we try in every way to avoid pain, mental or physical, in our day-to-day existence. And, although we cannot always be successful in this worthy endeavor, we can manage to ward off the pains in our past. To paraphrase the Sermon on the Mount: "Sufficient unto the
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day is the pain thereof." There is enough pain for today; we don't need the pains of our yesterdays. Avoiding yesterday's pain assists us in surviving, or so it seems.
We acquire our knowledge of the outside world through our senses, but when the things we perceive are irrational, the analyzer judges them as such and rejects them. It will do this as long as it is in control and capable of doing so. But that is just the point; the analyzer can protect the organism only as long as it maintains its control. Could it be that in a moment of pain this control is somehow removed? Using hypnosis, Hubbard tried taking his subjects through painful incidents and received a good deal of painful response, revivified pain of the past, and one fact began to appear: in these painful instances, there was a period of "unconsciousness," a period when the analyzer had shut down its operations to a greater or lesser extent, and everything perceived by the senses during this period was accepted in toto by some part of the mind, accepted without any sign of critical discrimination. Every sound, odor, touch, taste, and sight, whether pertinent or not, was recorded. In running people through these experiences, Hubbard found that these percepts (things perceived) were almost identical to, and had the power of, post-hypnotic suggestions.
One of the best examples of post-hypnotic suggestion I have ever witnessed occurred at a party given in honor of a well-known psychiatrist, who consented to give a demonstration of it. Having placed his subject in a trance, he then suggested that when the subject awoke, he would not be able to see any electric light. Upon
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regaining normal consciousness, the subject began feeling his way about the brightly lighted room, wondering who had turned the lights off. He first reasoned that a fuse had probably blown out, but when he stepped to the window and looked out over the city, also brightly lighted - this took place in New York - and still could not see any light, he decided that there had been a city-wide power failure. Not only was he unable to see the light, but he also advanced plausible explanations for its absence.
Hubbard's subjects were acting in similar ways, just as though they had received post-hypnotic suggestions, and they were being short-circuited by these suggestions. It began to dawn on him that man, as a product of evolution, had retained all the aspects of each of his evolutionary stages, and one of the aspects was a mechanism that warned of danger.
He imagined how a small fish would react to stimuli that are warning signals. It finds itself in yellowish water, swimming over a green bottom, eating shrimp. Suddenly, a bigger fish makes a pass at our little fellow, who darts away, but not before a tooth of the big fish makes a small cut in its side. Some time later, our little fish is again swimming in yellowish water, but the bottom is black. It begins to get tense. As it swims along, the bottom gradually turns to green. Now it gets a feeling of danger and becomes most cautious. Then it begins to eat shrimp, but not for long. Its alarm bells begin to ring and it gets away from there fast; that big fish isn't going to get another chance. Of course, this
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time the big fish is nowhere about, and the danger is no greater than it usually is for any small fish.
Other animals act in much the same fashion, since, although they have analyzers of a sort, they are dominated by their own pushbutton responses to stimuli. But man does not have pushbutton responses unless he has become aberrant, and he responds to his pushbuttons only to the extent of his aberration. Unfortunately, all mankind is aberrant to some degree.
It all comes down to this: the analyzer is the protector of the total organism, but it is not the proper instrument for the instant response sometimes necessary in an emergency. When instantaneous action is required, there is no time for analysis, so that when you prick your finger with a pin, you pull your finger back before the analyzer has time to make any computation. Apparently, the analyzer shuts down and something else takes over, something that does not analyze, but reacts. And what is more, it seems to think in identities, just as our little fish did: yellowish water equals green bottom equals taste of shrimp equals pain in the side.
This is not analysis; when one analyzes, he looks for comparisons and contrasts, not identities. No architect worthy of the name ever equated a church with a steel mill. Rather, he would notice the differences in structure, interior furnishings, and apparent functions. Anyone capable of analysis knows that no two things are exactly alike, so he does not think in terms of identities.
But something is thinking in those terms, and it takes charge in moments of pain and "unconsciousness." We
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do not know precisely what it is nor where it is located, but then, we do not need to know. All we have to know is the manner in which it operates. That it does exist is obvious. Hubbard was able to determine from his experiments not only that it exists, but that it thinks in identities. It is the something that takes over when the time comes for a speedy reaction, so he called it the reactive mind.
The concept of the reactive mind is what is known in the scientific world as a "construct," a thing constructed. An example of this might be a clock, the insides of which had never been seen. If we can imagine such a clock, and further, imagine that a highly capable engineer was given the task of telling us what its works were like without being able to look inside it, we could safely predict the way in which he would go about accomplishing his task. He would observe it very carefully, noticing every outward detail. He would watch the manner in which the hands move, and he would listen to its ticking. Finally, he would draw up blueprints for a workable clock, probably quite similar in mechanism to the real one. There are many constructs in modern science, such as the concept of atomic structure, a structure which no man has seen. The genes were such constructs before the advent of the electron microscope which first made them visible, at which point it was found that they were very much as the scientists had expected them to be.
The reactive mind takes over when the analyzer has been shorted out by pain. All hospitals, and many industries, have an auxiliary lighting system that goes into
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operation when the main system goes off due to a power failure. In much the same way, the reactive mind takes over when the analyzer shuts down, but, unlike the analyzer, it has no critical powers. It accepts whatever is presented to it, and as a guardian of the total organism, it sends out signals whenever in its erroneous judgment a similar danger is encountered. The little fish was caused to be progressively uneasy as the objects of its environment began to resemble more closely those of the first incident. It began to feel the restimulated pain of the original tooth mark, and if it had not swum away, the pain would have continued growing in severity.
Our little fish swam away from his dinner in order to survive. How's that again? How can it further survival if one does not eat? Because the unanalytical reactive mind of the little fish deduced danger from surroundings similar to those of a former period of danger and commanded it to get out of there. The only real factor of danger, the big fish, was not present, but all the other factors were, and that was enough for the reactive mind. The action of swimming away was actually anti-survival, but the reactive mind did not compute it as such.
The founder of General Semantics, Count Alfred Korzybski, told in his book Science and Sanity of the anti-survival that can be demonstrated in plants. In one experiment, a radish was suspended in a narrow-mouthed jar so that only its roots were covered by water. After being allowed to remain in this state for some time, the jar was laid on its side so that the roots were now standing out clear of the water. Soon, the roots turned downward until they were again covered by the
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water. After another period, the jar was set upright, and the roots, again uncovered, sought the water. Then the jar was laid on its opposite side, and again, the uncovered roots sought the water. This cycle was repeated at regular intervals a number of times. Then the jar was left standing, but the roots, having set up a habit pattern, continued with the motion that would have immersed them if the jar had been tilted onto its side, but because the jar was not being moved, they actually raised up out of the water and maintained their motion, slowly swinging from side to side. Each raising of the roots out of water was a move toward non-survival, yet the motions had been generated by the need to survive.
So now, the parts of the once-scrambled jigsaw puzzle had fallen into place. In moments of pain and "unconsciousness," the reactive mind takes control. All percepts of the incident are recorded, and when something occurs later to restimulate the reactive mind, it takes control and causes one to react in aberrant ways. The incident, complete with pain and all percepts, Hubbard called the engram. The word itself was not new with Hubbard, although he gave it additional meaning. The New Collegiate Dictionary, published in 1947, has this definition: "Engram, noun: A memory picture latent in consciousness; specifically, the trace or impression assumed in a certain theory of mnemonics [the science of memory improvement] to be left in cells subject to a constantly repeated stimulus." To the idea of a "memory picture," Hubbard added a recording of all the percepts, and he took it out of the realm of memory, since the engram is not remembered but is sealed off from the memory.
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The engram remains as a simple recording and has little effect on the person's life until an incident occurs that has a similar content, including a moment of pain and "unconsciousness." This is the key-in, an engram that restimulates the original one. A lock is an incident occurring in full consciousness that may seem to be the cause of the patient's aberration, but is not, the real cause being the hidden engram. There are also later similar engrams, and these and the locks attach themselves to the first, or basic, engram to form a chain.
In addition to the analytical and reactive minds, there is a third, called the somatic mind. The somatic mind has no mental process of its own, but is at the command of either of the first two, which are its superiors. It takes whatever commands are given to it, particularly those from the reactive mind, and through its rule over the muscles, nerves, glands and interior organs, produces effects which are commonly called psychosomatic illnesses, and which may include everything from the common cold through cancer.
Before going any further, it is about time to discard an old and meaningless term. We have been using the word "unconscious" and have set it off in quotation marks to show that it does not really mean unconsciousness. Hubbard devised a word made up from the first syllables of "analytical attenuation": anaten. This more realistically describes the condition of the mind when the analyzer, under pain or painful emotion, shuts down. The analyzer becomes more or less attenuated: more under an anesthetic or when knocked out; less under milder forms of pain or shock.
An engram is compounded of: anaten and the pain or
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shock causing anaten; every percept during the time of the anaten - sounds (including whatever words are spoken), sights, odors, tastes, and contacts; emotions; age; time and date. These percepts are recorded in the order of their original occurrence.
Let us take an example: A little boy falls off his tricycle, hits the back of his head on the sidewalk and is knocked out. While he is anaten, a fire engine goes by a block or two away, sounding its siren. He Plying in front of a house inside of which cabbage is being cooked. A voice says, "I'd better call his mother." Another voice says, "No, not now. Stay here. I'll get her." The first voice says, "Don't leave me; he may be dying." There is the sound of footsteps running away, then more footsteps approaching. Then Mother's voice: "Oh, my poor baby. He's hit his head. Oh, what will I do? It's still soft. He's always getting hurt. My baby, Mother will take care of you."
Now, all of that is quite natural conversation and none of it seems designed to harm the child's future life in any way. But let us see what happens. For a time - this may be anywhere from a day to several years - there is no noticeable effect. Then one day, while his mother is cooking cabbage, among other things, for dinner, and when he is quite tired from a hard day of playing, he goes into the kitchen and bumps his head on an open cupboard door. His mother, rushing to soothe him, says, "My poor baby [he is now twelve], you're always getting hurt. Mother will take care of you."
The engram, which has been dormant up to this point, has now become keyed in; that is, it has been
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restimulated for the first time. Not every incident of the original has been repeated, but enough of them have been to cause the reactive mind to spring into action as the analyzer has become momentarily anaten. The reactive mind, unable to analyze the situation, begins to think in identities: tiredness (slight anaten) plus light bump on the head (more anaten) equal all the percepts of the present incident which equal all the percepts of the original incident: cooking cabbage equals fire-engine siren equals footsteps equal all the spoken words equal Mother. All of the percepts, and the words in particular, act as a post-hypnotic suggestion.
Remembering that the reactive mind cannot analyze, let us look at what some of these words can mean when taken completely or partially out of context. "Stay here" now means that the little boy (and later, the man) must stay in the conditions of this engram. This is a particularly vicious little demon known as a holder, comprising such phrases as: "stay here," "stay there," "keep still," "be quiet," "don't move," and "stop." "Not now" is another demon, one that is called a bouncer in the irreverent lexicon of the Dianetic auditors. It has the faculty of "bouncing" the patient out of the time of the engram just as it is about to be run through. "Not now" means "some other time," and the patient goes to some other time. There are many phrases that can act as bouncers, directing one to a future or past time according to their content.
"Don't leave me" may create a fear of being abandoned. "He may be dying" can instill a fear of death. "My poor baby" tends toward preventing the patient
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from maturing. "His head...is still soft" and "He's always getting hurt" are commands which can result in conditions indicated by them. And this brings us to a charming little phrase, "Mother will take care of you," which can lead to all sorts of complications.
"Mother will take care of you" can cause the patient to become dependent upon Mother for the rest of his (or more likely, her) life. When Mother dies, he is a lost soul, and he suffers far more than the normal amount of grief. Beyond this, Mother is now an ally. Well, one might say, every good mother is her child's ally, and that is just as it should be. But we are dealing here with the reactive mind, which does not reason about such matters as normal conduct and the process of maturing. He will very likely marry a girl who reminds him of Mother, but not necessarily in any obvious way.
How often does it happen that a boy meets a girl that he does not like very much in the beginning? Then he notices some little thing, the sound of her voice, a speech mannerism, a particular gesture, a facial expression, and suddenly she is the only girl for him. She is the only one who will take care of him; he will be safe with her. They may have very little in common; they may be quite wrong for each other, but they get married, often with the most unfortunate results. And, of course, all that has been said here can apply equally well to a girl who finds an ally in some otherwise entirely unsuitable boy. The ally need not be Mother or Father; it can be a nurse, a servant, a teacher, or any of a number of people who might appear in an engramic incident.
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Once the engram has been keyed in, it is quite easily restimulated, especially when one is anaten to some degree, as may well be the case after a hard day at the office or around the house. The boy who fell off his tricycle may get a headache every time he hears a fire-engine siren. The smell of cabbage cooking may cause him to feel the need of his mother's care. The boy grows up to be a man. He may become a great industrial tycoon, but he will always have a headache when he hears a siren, and he will never know why, nor will his doctor ever be able to prescribe a reliable preventative.
The engram bank is like a separate memory bank, all the items in it neatly filed and marked with red tabs, ready to take over the bodily defenses whenever the analyzer relinquishes part of its control. Hubbard rightly claims the discovery of the engram bank as one of the important "original discoveries of Dianetics," and he explains why it was never previously known. The only methods available prior to Dianetics for penetrating deeply into the mind were hypnosis and narcosynthesis, but when one approached an engram by either of these means, its anaten content was restimulated and emerged as sleep, so that no communication was possible.
That the engram remained undiscovered prior to Dianetics is, as Hubbard has observed, a great pity, because most of man's ills, his wars, his crimes, his irrational behavior, and his psychosomatic illnesses come directly out of the engram bank. And the irony of this fact is that the engram bank is the only part of the mind that can be entirely exhausted. Our regular memory
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banks can hand up any datum that we need, take it back and refile it for future use, and there is no way short of physical damage to the brain that this datum can be lost. But once an engram has been reached by Dianetic processing, which will be described in the next chapter, and once the engram has been thoroughly "run," it is removed from the engram bank and is refiled as a memory where it can do no further harm once an engram has been transformed into a simple memory, it loses its power to affect anyone. Remember the details of the accident to the little boy. If that engram were to be run out, he would be free of his headaches and all the other bad effects. The words spoken by his mother and the others are now merely words; some of them do not even apply to him, and those that do must pass through his analyzer, which can evaluate them for what they are. And what they are has little to do with his life in the present. If he has any lesson to gain from the incident, it is that one should be careful when riding a tricycle, and that is a problem with which a grown man is seldom faced.
Besides the aberrative effect of engrams, they act to limit our abilities in another important way. In order to examine this effect, we resort to a device somewhat on the nature of a construct. It is as though one were born with a certain definite number of "attention units," imaginary units of mind which may be employed in giving one's attention to dealing with the world and solving one's problems. Of course, the mind is not divided up into units, but as we said, this is a construct, a convenient way of thinking on this subject. Now, each
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engram ties up a certain number of these attention units, and so, as every new engram is installed, the person will have less and less of his mental capacity with which he may work. If there is a sufficient number of engrams, there may be very few of these units left, and the patient may respond to even the most elementary questions with great difficulty. Those who know him, his parents, teachers, and playmates, may write him off as being "plain dumb." But he isn't plain dumb at all. If his engram bank could be cleared out, he would be as quick mentally as the next fellow; in fact, he would be quicker, provided only that the next fellow retained his own engrams.
Another important discovery of Hubbard's was that the engram bank, if drawn on a map of the construct of one's mind, would have a place between the memory banks and the analyzer, interfering only with the circuits between them. It does not block off the circuits which carry the percepts to the memory bank. Thus, if one is psychologically deaf, his organs of hearing undamaged, once the engram bank has been cleared out he will be able to recall sounds that were filed during his time of "deafness." He might "hear" a Beethoven symphony that had been played in his presence while he was totally unaware of it.
Memories from the standard banks do not crowd in upon the analyzer, filling the mind with a hodge-podge of unrelated, and at the moment unwanted, data. The analyzer draws upon the bank for material it needs, otherwise the bank speaks only when it is spoken to. But the reactive banks do send up material that is not
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wanted, forcing it upon our consideration at times when we have other and more important work to do. Suddenly, in the midst of some delicate task, or when we are reading something that demands our full concentration, an unwanted image will pop into our minds - the time we spilled a cup of coffee on Aunt Matilda's new wall-to-wall carpet, or when we wanted to pay a compliment to the neighbors on the arrival of their new baby, only to have it come out all wrong. The reactive mind is full of anti-survival elements, even though it acts at times as if it alone was keeping the frail bark of life afloat.
When Pavlov was working with his dogs, he dealt with their reactive minds, conditioning them to respond to certain signal commands. A man can be conditioned through his reactive mind, which is exactly what brainwashing does. But no man who has had a major portion of his reactive banks reduced could be brainwashed. This probably explains why some of the American prisoners of war in Korea succumbed more readily to brainwashing techniques than others. A man cannot be conditioned through his analytical mind, since it analyzes incoming data and takes whatever action he chooses concerning them.
When we want to learn certain ways of responding or operating, such as memorizing a poem or a piece of music, we work through the analyzer and the standard memory banks. On the other hand, habits are in the province of the reactive mind, and habits can be broken by clearing out the engram bank. A habit, which is a conditioned response, is always anti-survival, no matter
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what has been said about forming "good" habits. These so-called "good habits" are not habits at all, but patterns adopted by the person of his own free will. Good patterns are self-imposed, while habits are imposed by some external force.
It must be understood that engrams are not memories and they do not lie exclusively, if at all, within the brain. They are recorded on the cells of the body, much as a speech or a piece of music may be recorded on tape. The tape does not "remember" the words of a speech, nor do the cells remember the percepts of an engram. This explains why the words spoken in the presence of a baby before he has learned to speak can be played back at a later date and have an effect on his life once he has learned the meanings that go with the words. And, with a sort of moronic precision, the words are accepted literally, since (to repeat) the reactive mind does not analyze. Thus, the word "dough" can mean dough, from which bread is made; dough, a slang word for money; do, the first note of the musical scale; or doe, a girl-type deer. So the words in an engram might have been spoken by a choir master, asking his lead soprano to sing a certain note, "I want do," and the command, restimulated some years later, could result in an overwhelming desire to become possessed of a large amount of money, perhaps by any means necessary.
These, then, are some of the more important of L. Ron Hubbard's discoveries and postulates. He published them in his first book, Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health, which appeared in 1950 and has been going strong ever since. In it, he also described
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in detail the Dianetic method of therapy, to be explained in the next chapter. While these methods have, in large part, been replaced by those of Scientology, the outgrowth of Dianetics, it is still important to be familiar with them in order to have a sufficient basis for understanding Scientology. In that same year of 1950, Hubbard began to give public lectures and opened centers in Los Angeles and Elizabeth, New Jersey, only to find himself nearly overwhelmed by the public response. He was even more surprised to find his book at the top of the best-seller list. But there it was, and there he was, and Dianetics was off to a fine start.
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