Lecture: Dianetics: First Lecture of Saturday Course (5) (1950)

Several years ago when research was very intense, I learned this the hard way on a young man who maintained that he could run his own engrams. He kept insisting on it. He wanted all his engrams up in present time where he could run them himself.

So finally I swamied him into a deep trance and said, “You can remember everything you’ve ever felt, heard or seen in present time. You can remember all these things in present time.” That’s it, just you can remember—permission. There was enough material in the bank to pick up the whole bank and sweep it up just as one might take leaves and brush them into a pile.

That fellow was in misery, he was in agony. It took me about a week’s work to straighten his case out to the point where he could breathe, because naturally that positive suggestion went down the track, and latched on to whatever was there. The reason he wanted me to do this was an engramic reason which approximated in its wording what he wanted to be told. I was very obliging. I told him. Up it came to present time. Headaches, knitting needles through him, both legs broken, he was in very bad shape. He didn’t run any of it in present time either.

Although that was very valuable from an experimental standpoint, I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t known about what was going to happen to him and about how I could untangle it.

However, I didn’t think it would be that hard to untangle. But to find the light locks that I gave him with hypnosis, and try to pull it off and discover at the same time that the incident which should have been underneath it was now lying parallel with it was very, very rough.

However, let me assure you that in all the researches of Dianetics there hasn’t been a single human being who has been permanently disabled in any way. There have been a lot of people who have been very, very uncomfortable for a couple of weeks or a couple of months, but you are benefiting from what they went through. I have always patted them on the back too and told them they gave a great boost to science.

Positive suggestion in hypnosis works very interestingly, but this is not a lecture on hypnosis. If you are interested in hypnosis I advise you to read up on it. There are books by such people as Bernheim and Charcot on the subject. There are quite a lot of them available in public libraries. It is valuable to know but not essential.

For instance, if one put in a hypnotic suggestion on the time track which says, “You can write,” and the next day put another positive suggestion on the time track saying, “You can’t write,” the person will go on writing. The first one in the bank has priority. This is also true in running individual engrams. The first one has priority. If the first engram in the bank says, in a Junior case, “George was a skunk,” George will go on smelling very badly for a long time, even though the next engram says, “George is a beautiful wolf.” The priority is number one.

Therefore, engramic commands are not reversible by hypnosis, hypnotism to the contrary. There are hypnotists who have studied Dianetics who no longer practice hypnotism, and they are very happy to have a theory which explains a lot of what hypnotism is doing. ¹

Notes