That year of 1950 witnessed the first onslaught of Dianetics upon the public consciousness. People were rushing to get and read the book. Everyone seemed to be processing everyone else. They flocked to lectures given by Hubbard and other members of his organization. And the press was full of accounts of the new science, both pro and con. Some of the lordly potentates of psychology wrote learned, although usually tedious and pointless, articles for newspapers and magazines, attacking the new healing art, and leading the attackers was Dr. William Menninger, who with his brother Karl heads the famed clinic bearing their name. However, there is a little sidelight on the good doctor that might help to explain his aversion to Dianetics.
Official United States Government reports state that about one person out of three hundred and fifty is mentally ill. In order to promote congressional support for the National Mental Health Act of 1946, some of its
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backers claimed that the true figure was more in the neighborhood of one in seventeen. This percentage was soon lowered to one in ten, which began to seem rather grim. But then Dr. Menninger entered the lists with an announcement that the true honest-to-Freud figure was one out of one. And that, of course, included the good doctor himself.
There were others who took an even dimmer view of Dianetics, and from their point of view, they were quite thoroughly justified. Their objection appeared in a pamphlet titled Brain-Washing A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics. It defines psychopolitics as "the art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals ...and masses, and the effecting of the conquest of enemy nations through 'mental healing.'" The pertinent quotation appears at the end of Chapter Nine: "The psychopolitical operative should also spare no expense in smashing out of existence, by whatever means, any actual healing group, such as...Dianetics...in the United States..." In a foreword to this manual, Lavrenti Beria, Soviet Minister of the Interior and head of the dreaded secret police, said, "By psychopolitics create chaos. Leave a nation leaderless. Kill our enemies. And bring to Earth, through Communism, the greatest peace Man has ever known." But he, and the other Soviet leaders, knew that their brand of brainwashed peace could not be imposed on those whose engram banks had been exhausted. There was no way in which Dianetics could be employed to further their purposes, so the order was given: smash Dianetics.
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Hubbard has said that Dianetics is not political, it ignores ideology and looks toward sanity. One who is entirely sane and rational will not dispute hotly the relative merits of the Right or Left, but will use his reason to find reasonable solutions. Since he is free, he will want others to be free as well. A free world, operated for the free by the free, would not be a bad place in which to live.
Hubbard began his book with what he called "The Fundamental Axioms of Dianetics." In his axioms, he propounded a dynamic principle of existence-survive! This is basic to all living things. He subdivided this principle into his "Four Dynamics": (1) Survival of the individual for the sake of the individual. (2) Survival of the individual through procreation. (3) Survival of the individual for the group. And (4) survival of the individual for mankind. The first dynamic is easily understood; one must live, at least part of the time, for oneself. The second dynamic includes not only sex, but the rearing of the children and the preservation of the family. The third dynamic embraces all efforts to improve and preserve any group, from a team or a club to an entire nation. The fourth dynamic encompasses one's striving toward the improvement or preservation of mankind.
A man is motivated by all four dynamics, and although engrams may distort this pattern, diminishing one or the other of the dynamics, sometimes to the vanishing point, they are still present and ready to operate. No even partly sane man lives for himself alone, else why would so many men risk their lives in trying to
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save others, or give their lives to a cause they deem worthy? Yet no man can live for mankind alone. One trying to do this would not live long. Living for mankind does not provide for eating and a number of other activities essential to the preservation of life.
Having come this far, we will now enter upon the subject of Dianetic processing. In doing so, we will arrive at a much better understanding of the manner in which Dianetics works than by any further discussion along more general and theoretical lines. Let us suppose that one is going for his first session of processing. The first person he will meet will be the auditor, who is not, as one might suppose, the man who is going to collect the fee, but rather the one who is going to conduct the session. The term is well chosen; the auditor's task is a twofold one, as implied by the two meanings of the word itself. By definition, an auditor is one who listens (the original meaning of the word), and he is also one who computes, just as the man does who figures out a profit and loss statement or an income tax report.
Auditors, along with their knowledge of Dianetics and its methods of therapy, must know and subscribe to the "Auditor's Code." The Code may sound a bit like the Boy Scout Oath, but it is most practical, serving to protect the auditor from making fatal errors. In brief, the Code enjoins the auditor to be courteous, kind, trustworthy, courageous, patient, thorough, and persistent in his dealings with his patients. In addition, he should be quiet, not entering into conversation during therapy, saying nothing except the necessary directions involved in running the case. And he should give the
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patient no information as to how the case is progressing, nor should he evaluate whatever data is produced by the patient.
As regards the last clause of the Code, I remember reading a book by a young woman who had spent three years under the care of a psychiatrist. Her principal problem, according to both her and her psychiatrist, was that she believed her mother hated her. This is a big thing in psychiatry, although in Dianetics, it would be considered as no more than a lock on an engram, to be cleared out in a few sessions when the engram itself had been cleared. But the climax of the book came when the psychiatrist said to her, "You see, your mother didn't hate you after all." The young woman agreed, and another great victory was rung up for mental healing. But, on seeing the evaluation of the psychiatrist, an auditor's hair would stand on end. Under no condition would an auditor ever say such a thing to his patient, since the clearing of that engram comes when the patient realizes for herself that her mother did not hate her. Any information or evaluation given to the patient would only serve to confuse and delay the case.
There may be times when the patient does not like his auditor because of his refusal to give out this sort of information. The patient may also feel unhappy when the auditor shows no sign of sympathizing with him or of entering into whatever emotional reaction he may be having. But the auditor is not there to give comfort; his job is like that of the surgeon who goes about removing a diseased organ without weeping over the necessity of using a knife on a human being. Not that Dianetic
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processing is as painful as surgery; no anesthetic is needed or used.
Our next step is to trade in that expression "patient" for another new term: preclear. All those who have not reached the end of Dianetic auditing are so labeled. The word clear represents that condition at which one arrives when all of the matter in his engram banks has been cleared out and refiled in the memory banks where it can no longer be the cause of trouble.
The usual practice is for the preclear to lie on a couch while the auditor sits in a chair beside him. Having assumed a comfortable position, the preclear is directed to enter into reverie. The auditor will say something like, "When I count from one to five (or seven, or ten, or whatever number he chooses) your eyes will close." B: He may have to repeat his count one or more times. When the preclear closes his eyes, he is in reverie. That is all there is to it. It is not hypnotism; the preclear is fully conscious. At any time, he can open his eyes and . terminate the session. He is not subject to suggestion. The auditor does not try to "make" him do anything, and he could not, even if he wanted to. Some people, especially those who have previously been hypnotized, tend to drift into a hypnotic state. There is not very much an auditor can do about this but try to run out the cause as soon as possible. Hypnotism is never used in Dianetic therapy because it may tend to thoroughly confuse a case and is aberrative in itself. Undergoing hypnosis is but adding another engram to the bank.
To prevent an accidental suggestion from having any effect on the preclear, a canceler is installed immedi-
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ately after he has gone into reverie. The auditor says something like this: "When I say the word canceled, everything that I have said to you during this session will be canceled and will have no effect upon you." At the end of the session, before the preclear opens his eyes, the auditor will say, "Canceled." That is sufficient to cancel out any effect of anything he has said that might be aberrative.
Now that the preclear is in reverie and the canceler has been duly installed, the auditor tells him to return along the time track to a recent pleasant experience. This time track, and returning along it, are two more terms that require explanation. Returning is not the same as remembering, although there might seem to be a close resemblance. When you try to remember something, some specific thing, word, or name, you may have trouble doing so, and if you succeed, the memory of that particular thing will probably be surrounded by bits and pieces of other memories which may obscure the features of the datum you want. When one returns to an event, or to some desired piece of information previously known, he goes right back to it in time, provided that he is not aberrant in that region. He, himself, goes back; he does not send some imagined part of his mind back to find it for him. This may be difficult at first for the preclear, and it would be even more difficult if he were asked to go at once into a painful incident. Pain and painful emotion have ways of fending off all attempts at recontacting them, as we have already seen. So, he is sent back to a recent pleasant experience to get him acclimated to the idea of moving on the time track.
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The preclear may send only a part of himself back in the beginning, and that will be ordinary memory. But as he continues, more of himself will go back, and that will be returning. When he arrives at the point of being able to go back fully, that will be reliving. This is the optimal condition under which the preclear can go engram hunting, and therapy will be much speeded up when he has achieved it. The auditor can pretty well determine the degree of return from the manner in which the preclear speaks. If he uses verbs in the past tense: "I saw this," or "I felt that," or "I went there," he is only remembering. But when these change to the present tense: "I see this," etc., one may be sure he has returned.
The time track is another term used in Dianetics. It is an imaginary track along which one travels while returning into the past. The time track is all of the time and every event through which a person has passed from his very first instant of existence until the present moment. Wherever one finds himself along the time track, he will be in the present of that moment as far as he is concerned. If he should return along the time track to a point when he was five years old, that will be the present for him - he will be five years old.
And now vie come to another, and most important, little device - like the time track and so many others, a construct. This is the file clerk. He works in all the banks, the standard memory, or analytical, banks as well as those of the reactive and somatic minds. Now, one must hasten to admit that no brain surgeon is ever going to discover a little man, complete with green eyeshade
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and paper cuffs, running about inside a brain. But in accepting his presence, one will enjoy a great advantage. It will be the file clerk's responsibility to dig out whatever data are required. This relieves the preclear of the feeling that he has to cudgel his brain in an attempt to remember something. The file clerk will get it for him, whenever the auditor makes a request. And when the clerk is sent for a file containing a particular datum, he brings back a very complete file indeed, including date, time, weather, what was seen, heard, felt, tasted and smelled, what the preclear was thinking at the moment-in short, everything. If there were some need for knowing about a particular baseball game that the preclear had attended, the file clerk would come up with seat numbers, the batting order of each team, the names of the umpires, what the score was and how each run was scored, batting averages, pitching records, who made the last putout, and all the rest of it, from which the pertinent data could be extracted. However, the file clerk may not always be able to deliver the file at once, even though he instantly takes it out of the file cabinet. He may have to pick his way along a badly obstructed path - a reactive circuit - or he may take a road that turns out to be entirely occluded for the time being and have to go back and select a new route. But, sooner or later, he will make the journey and deliver the file.
As a rule, the auditor will achieve the best results by speaking directly to the file clerk. Rather than saying to the preclear, "Please ask the file clerk to give me the data on..." he will get further by saying, "The file clerk will please give me the data on..." With the
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preclear seemingly excluded from the communication between the file clerk and the auditor, he will feel less responsibility for producing results and is less likely to further occlude his probably limited recall with worry over whether he will be able to locate the material, or get the file clerk to locate it for him.
These are three important devices essential to successful Dianetic auditing: the time track, returning, and the file clerk; and the best success usually results when the auditor and the file clerk act as though they were ignoring the preclear. This may sound as though we have suddenly contradicted what was said earlier about there not being a real little person attending to the banks, but during auditing, the file clerk can become pretty real to both auditor and preclear. The file clerk does have a certain reality as a construct; there is certainly some part of the brain that can produce data out of the various banks, and, whatever it is, it can do so without seeming to involve the preclear's mind in the process. Frequently, the preclear will not be able to return to an incident, particularly in the early stages of auditing. Then the auditor merely asks the file clerk to return to it and he will do so without the preclear's being aware of it.
To return to our auditing session: having sent the preclear back to a recent pleasant experience and taken him through it so that he has begun to feel somewhat more comfortable under processing ("It isn't as bad as I thought it would be"), the auditor takes advantage of this increased confidence to go further. Making sure that the preclear has really returned to the incident from
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his use of tenses, past or present, the auditor sends him back to an earlier pleasant experience, saying something like, "Please return along the time track to the earliest pleasant experience available at present."
The preclear will probably come up with something that occurred when he was four or five years old, a birthday party or a Christmas Day when he received some gifts that made him happy. If he is not too aberrant, he will go through this quite well, giving a good deal of detail and showing every sign of having returned to the incident. If he is not running well, the auditor proceeds to try to move him forward and backward along the time track, working only with pleasant experiences, since if he cannot enter easily into these, he will most certainly not enter into those involving pain and painful emotions. If he seems to be running satisfactorily, the next step will not be so pleasant.
This is the moment for which all the rest was but preparation. This is, as the hippies say, "where it's at." The auditor says, in a pleasant and fairly matter-of-fact tone of voice, "You will return along the time track to the earliest available moment of pain and anaten," or words to that effect. He waits for some response from the preclear or at least some sign indicating that he has arrived at such a moment, and then he will ask: "What do you hear?" If, as is quite likely at this early stage in the game, the preclear does not hear anything, the auditor will say, "When I count to five and snap my fingers, you will give me the first phrase that pops into your head. One, two, three, four, five (snap)." It is quite common in the beginning for the preclear to be lacking
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in sonic recall, and in some cases, the condition will persist until most of the engrams have been resolved.
The preclear may utter a phrase or even just a word. This will not be sonic recall, but material handed up by the file clerk. If nothing further seems to be forthcoming, the auditor asks for the second word or the next phrase. He continues in this way until all of the verbal content has been given. After the first few words have been produced, he may have the preclear repeat all of them. This will often start the ball rolling and the preclear will come up with the remaining words without further prodding. When the preclear tells him that there is no more, he then says, "Please return to the beginning of the incident and roll it again."
On this second recounting of the incident, the auditor checks to make sure that the preclear is not merely replaying what was said the first time he went through it. If he is only remembering what he said, he is not running the engram, and its content will not be reduced or erased. The test for this is quite simple: the auditor asks him to give any additional data that he can feel, hear, or see. If he does not find any, something is wrong, since when an engram is contacted closely all of the percepts will turn on. The auditor will then ask some specific questions: who is talking? is anyone else present; how old are you? what other sounds can you hear? and the like. As the preclear furnishes the answers to these questions, he will begin to return more of himself to the incident and be less inclined to replay. Somewhere along in here, the preclear should feel the pain of the original incident, for, as we have seen, there
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is no engram without accompanying pain or painful emotion. The pain he feels is but a minor fraction of the original, but it must be there and he must run through it, or the engram cannot be reduced. Once all of the engram has been recounted, a few repetitions - not replays - will serve to reduce or erase it.
Whenever an engram is contacted, it must be reduced before moving on in search of something else. The only engram that can be erased is one that is basic to a chain, that is, the original incident upon which the key-in and all the others related to it are based. Before the basic engram is contacted and erased, all others on the chain can only be reduced, but after it has been erased - that is, after its content is refiled in the standard memory banks - the rest of the chain will erase very easily. After the erasure of the basic engram, the auditor will ask the preclear to return up the time track and contact the next engram on the chain. Moving toward present time, he will find all of these and run them out in short order.
An auditing session must not be brought to a close until any engram that has been reached is reduced or erased. To stop in the middle of processing an engram would be to leave the preclear in a restimulated state, which can be most disturbing and probably result in several days of discomfort or worse. However, even this is better than never to have reached the engram at all, since it will be more readily available for contacting at a later date and can be quite easily reduced.
When the time comes for bringing the session to an end, and this will come as the agreed-upon period for
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the session has elapsed and when there is no engram in restimulation, the auditor will say something like, "Move forward along the time track toward present time, contacting a recent pleasant experience." The purpose of this is to build up the preclear's tone, his mental attitude, permitting him to face the world in a happy frame of mind. He is run through this experience, and then the auditor says, "Come forward to present time. Are you in present time?" If there is any doubt in the auditor's mind on this score, he might ask the preclear what day it is, or what year, or some such question. When present time has been established, and while the preclear's eyes are still closed, he will say, "Canceled. When I count from five to one and snap my fingers, you will be in present time and will open your eyes. Five, four, three, two, one (snap)."
There may be times when one is unavoidably interrupted in the midst of a session, although every precaution should be taken to ensure that this will not occur. In the early days of Dianetics, I attended a party at which a woman was present who had lost some rings. Not only did these rings have some monetary value, but they bore memories of her husband who had given them to her and who had also committed suicide because of ill health. The hostess suggested that it might be possible for her to recall where she had last seen them under a little auditing, and asked if I would be willing to work with her. Like a child with a new toy, I agreed with more eagerness than good judgment. In the first place, there is no such thing as "a little auditing," and in the second place, a bedroom down the hall from a living
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room in which a party is going on is something less than an ideal location for a session. And even beyond these considerations, I should have been warned of what we might get into because of the association of the missing rings with the beloved deceased husband.
We had no more than begun the session, and she had started to move pretty well on the time track toward the moment when she had last seen the rings, when the husband made his entrance. Suddenly, I found she had returned to the moment when she had received a telephone call at the place where she worked from the police department, telling her of the suicide. I had enough good sense to take her through the incident, and had begun to rerun it, when she clapped her hands over her eyes, as if to blot out a horrifying sight, and almost screamed, "Oh, the blood." I naturally took it for granted that she had seen his body before it was removed, lying with his head blown off in a pool of blood, and I was about to pursue this new development when the door swung open, and a girl, a friend of the family who had been staying in this room, entered, asking if it would be all right if she got her gear for bowling. That ended the session immediately. The preclear and I could do nothing but rejoin the party so that the girl could use her room.
The preclear had no desire for another experience like that one, and we had no further sessions. She was in a bad state of restimulation for a few days, but recovered, and from all accounts did feel a little better about the incident of the suicide after her recovery. What I did not learn until later was that she had never
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seen her husband's body, which had been removed by the time she had arrived home. All signs of blood had been removed as well. What she had seen during the session was a mental image of the way she had decided things looked before she appeared on the scene. The whole incident could have been reduced without trouble if only there had been no interruption. Incidentally, she found her rings a few days later, about the time her restimulation had gone into recession once more, and strangely enough they were right in the drawer where she later recalled having placed them.
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