Lecture: The Mind: Its Structure In Relation To Thetan And MEST (July 26, 1957)

I remember when Dianetics first came out, I received a tremendous number of letters. I haven’t received too many letters quoting on this same phenomena since. But for. some reason or other, people were obsessed for a couple of years with throwing their wives into measles engrams and then taking them to doctors who would then say, “Your wife, I would say, had the measles except there is no respiratory congestion.” Had all the spots, had the fever, had everything else and it’d be a case of measles that lasted about three days. A fellow would hear about the time track, he’d decide well, the proper place for a wife of course is in a measles engram if they exist. And he’d shoot the girl down into a measles engram, the spots would turn on, fever would go up and it never occurred to the silly bloke to run the rest of the engram through like it said in the book. He’d lug her off to an MD who would diagnose it as measles without any germs or respiratory difficulties.

Well, what had he done, in essence? He’d taken the pictures made by the girl when she was a little girl having measles and he’d taken these pictures and he’d simply splashed them up against the modern body. That’s all that happened. And when this juxtaposition of space between present time and the old picture was made, the body – call it structure – reacted to the content of the picture, just as easy as that. ¹

Notes