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Lecture: Review of Progress of Dianetics and Dianetics Business (3) (1952)

As far as engrams are concerned, for a very, very short space of time it was found out that you could run engrams out of almost any case. And then we suddenly found out you had to run the earliest engram, and you had to do a lot of other things if you were going to run perceptics out of engrams.

This engram was just a moment of unconsciousness. Its existence was learned from soldiers who had been treated by psychiatrists. And these soldiers would often go into a base hospital, would be given drugs, and under drugs would be returned back to the moment of battle when they were injured. And the psychiatrist would go through it like this: he would say, “Go to the moment when you’re just charging the enemy. Now what are you thinking about? All right.

Now — yeah, the bullet hit you there. Well, we’ll just skip this next passage now, and we’ll pick it up when you wake up. Now, where are you waking up from this wound?”

What happened when he did that? That, by the way, is just fabulous that they could keep doing this with narcosynthesis and never see this point. Here he is going into battle, there he goes unconscious and here he wakes up in the base hospital. And what the psychiatrist had him run was that assuming that all of this is just a blank period and it has nothing in it.

Now, the facts of the matter are that the mind never stops recording. And I was led into this by finding out that a good percentage of the soldiers treated for battle neurosis by narcosynthesis — a good percentage of those treated — went mad in a very short space of time. They were made much worse; awful things happened to them after they had been treated by narcosynthesis. Why? Was it the drug? I tested people.

I shot them full of sodium pentothal and I ran them through locks and nothing happened, which left this only variable: the area of unconsciousness. So I began to explore areas of unconsciousness. The reason they had never been recovered before is because late areas of unconsciousness are tied down by earlier areas. Here is this battle damage: Well, let’s come way back down the track and we find a moment when he fell off his bicycle when he was a little boy. And now we find him falling off his bicycle and he remembers — he feels, he sees, he hears — everything that happened to him during this period, but actually he was unconscious. The mind never stops recording until it is dead — and of course the mind never dies.

The point here is that here was phenomena and this war the first big, major pioneer phenomena of Dianetics — that moments of unconsciousness actually are on full record; anything that happens to an individual is on record. Psychologists have tried to validate this — you see, it is easily validated in many ways — but they try to validate it wrong. They keep giving people narcosynthesis and running them into deep unconsciousness and then saying the alphabet to them, or something, backwards, and then trying to run them through this area after they wake up to recover the alphabet.1

Notes

  1. Hubbard, L. R. (1952, 25 February). Review of Progress of Dianetics and Dianetics Business. Summary Course,   (5202C25A). Wichita, Kansas. ↩

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Lecture: Self-Determinism On The Dynamics (1951)

Every few preclears, you are going to get hold of one who has monkeyed around with spiritualism, mysticism, yoga, Hinduism and all the rest of it, right down the line. And self-confidence in handling the seventh dynamic depends on not having tampered with it. That is a fact.

Look at the gorgeous louse-up that this dynamic can occasion. Let us take an individual who takes up Rosicrucianism when he is fifteen years of age. He is sent a little folder and it tells him that he should sit in a dark closet, gazing at a lighted candle for fifteen minutes every day, until he finally sees something. And believe me, he will eventually see something. If he can just get relaxed enough, one of these counter-efforts will hit him— bong! Now is he convinced! Of course, it was probably Mama’s broom handle or something of the sort, but it is much easier to assign this to a spirit world, and he says, “Gee, there’s something here—maybe.” And there is where the seventh dynamic starts falling to pieces: on that confounded maybe.

Now, let’s look at this. This boy is saying, “Do I have any affinity with something that has gone beyond, or with spiritual guidance? Do I? Well, do they have any for me? Well, I can’t nail that down, but I have a feeling like there’s something there. Do I agree with anything that this spiritual guidance is trying to do or not? Or is it there to agree with? Does it exist? Is there any reality to it? Well, I don’t know. Now, can I talk to spirits or can’t I? And if I talk to them, do they listen?” A-R-C—question mark, question mark, question mark. Is there any A, is there any R. is there any C on it?

And that is how a fellow gets himself into a beautiful state on the seventh dynamic. He just gets himself completely loused up if he keeps this up.

I speak with a great deal of experience. I know lots of people in various parts of the world, men who are very holy—who demonstrate it—and there is no accounting for the things that these individuals can do. I have seen the poltergeist phenomena. Very interesting—matter moves without being touched. Fascinating. I know people that started in telling fortunes and were excellent at it, just expert, and in about a year or so they were all off the groove on the subject of telling fortunes. I know people that have followed and studied magic, mysticism and so on as philosophies, and I know that every single one of them started out in pretty good shape and wound up in horrible shape.

I studied this off and on, I guess, for about five years in my life, because it is the most beautiful field in which to find phenomena. And can you find some choice and lovely phenomena! But if you can’t get the phenomena and bring it back to MEST and pin it down in its association with MEST, it is just a blur and you get worse and worse and worse on it. I am telling you all this, not autobiographically, but so you can appreciate some of these people when you run into them.1

Notes

  1. Hubbard, L. R. (1951-10-23). Self-Determinism on the Dynamics. The Foundation Auditors Course, (5110C23B). Wichita, Kansas. ↩

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Lecture: Conception (1950)

Once upon a time I turned a patient over to a hypnotist. I showed the hypnotist how to work Dianetics. It was a long time ago and the patient had a very large amount of material and had to be worked in amnesia trance, which is very slow work, and I was quite tired of working it. So I asked this hypnotist if he would go ahead with the case, seeing this person was a very good friend of his. I told him some of the rudiments of Dianetics and he was perfectly satisfied to take on the case and go ahead. He had no inkling that he was using anything more than maybe a little twist on hypnotherapy.

It was incredible to me how easily Dianetics could be masked when I was researching it. I have run it as psychoanalysis right in front of an analyst. I had the patient clear back in the basic area running through an engram, with the analyst sitting there and saying, “That’s quite remarkable, that’s quite remarkable. Very, very good recall, but what is he yawning about?” I said, “Probably because it’s late in the afternoon.” (Meanwhile we were getting erasures and so forth.)

This often comes up when you demonstrate Dianetics to a psychoanalyst. He will say, “It is no different than psychoanalysis,” because he doesn’t recognize the mechanism of return. He thinks the patient is in present time associating. He thinks these phrases are just random phrases that are coming up. He doesn’t have a grip on the situation. He thinks he is watching free association, and he is very quick to pronounce it as such.

But I was trying to transmit to this hypnotist exactly how we went about solving this person’s case. His case was about half solved already, he was up to a fair release, but he had to be carried a long way further to clear. It just needed volume.

The hypnotist was very interested. He knew, of course, the hypnotic technique of regression, so he put the patient into amnesia trance.

Twenty-six days went by before I saw the patient again, and when I next saw him he had a headache and he didn’t feel well at all. So I said, “Well, let’s find out what happened.” I put him in a light trance, not amnesia, and started to run him back trying to find moments when the hypnotist had been working on him, and discovered that this man had been putting in positive suggestions. He had found the patient with a headache and he figured that the thing to do to nullify the somatic was to turn it off as a headache. So he would promptly bring the patient up to present time and give him a positive suggestion that he could not now feel the headache.1

He had given him pain shut-off after pain shut-off after pain shut-off. He had been tapping everything. In the twenty-six days there had been about 15 sessions. He would do such things as the patient would state that he had a somatic in his right leg, so he would transfer it over to the left leg, then transfer it to the left arm, then transfer it to the right arm and so on. His theory was that by this time it was so far removed that it would go away, and the person’s head would not ache any longer. Of course he still had a headache, but that didn’t matter—the hypnotist was having a good time.

This poor patient was a wreck. His memory was occluded, he didn’t know what had happened to him, yesterday was invalid, and he didn’t have any somatics; so I had to take this patient back. He had been given engram after engram.

The odd aspect of his case was that the hypnotist would get an engram and say, “Come up to present time,” right out of the engram, so that engram would come out of place, then the next engram would come out of place, and the whole case was shaken into disorder by it. Additionally, the case had computations in it which assisted the malarrangement of files.

For approximately 30 hours I did nothing with this patient but run random phrases. They were in no particular moment, they were simply all over the track. There was a phrase here, there and someplace else. This one might have a little somatic on it and that one might have a little somatic on it, and this one was in place and that one wasn’t in place, and so on. You could go up and down and around and around on this case in an effort to rehabilitate it, picking up random phrases on the track. There was also a lot of boil-off—the unconsciousness on it was pretty deep.

The case presented a very odd aspect for Dianetics. I recognized that sooner or later I would discover this in a bank. If it could happen to this patient then it could happen that we would run across this proposition in Dianetic therapy.

The case used in this demonstration is about the fifth patient I have run into that boils and gets off random phrases. It is probably going to go on for quite a while. I would hate to say how many hours. Maybe it will go along 30, 40, 50, 60 hours before all of a sudden all the material that has been knocked loose in the case by restimulation (the restimulation in this case is done by life) is available. One simply has to potshoot it.

The above case started strongly on repeater, then faded out and came back in very strongly on it once more; and sometimes there was a little smile on it, but the voice tone was varying, going down and coming up again, which occurs on knocking out a phrase. That phrase may or may not be associated with an engram. Somebody has really worked this case over on the line.

There is definitely an approximation of hypnotherapy. There must have been down below this level someplace the “you’ve got to believe me” computation, or “you’ve got to mind me.” If I were going to continue to work this case I would just keep on shooting the bank full of holes, not worrying about restimulation. Notice that I didn’t bother much to tell him to return, because the bank is full of such commands. Whatever he was told could possibly be a good approximation of a lot of hypnotic material.2

Notes

  1. Hubbard is correcting a hypnotist’s Dianetic errors on a patient by placing the patient in a light trance. Hubbard and Scientology vigorously deny that Dianetics has any relation to hypnosis, an obvious fabrication. ↩
  2. Hubbard, L. R. (1950-06-28). Conception. Monday-Wednesday-Friday Course. Elizabeth, NJ. ↩

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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

  1. Hubbard, L. R. (1950, 10 June). Dianetics: First Lecture Of Saturday Course. Professional Course,   (5006C10). Lecture conducted from Elizabeth, New Jersey. ↩

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Book: Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science (4) (1950)

Study of animals has long been popular with experimental psychologists, but they must not be misevaluated. Pavlov’s work was interesting: it proved dogs will be dogs. Now by light of these new observations and deductions it proved more than Pavlov knew. It proved men weren’t dogs. Must be an answer here somewhere. Let’s see. I’ve trained a lot of dogs. I’ve also trained a lot of kids. Once I had a theory that if you trained a kid as patiently as you trained a dog, then you would have an obedient kid. Didn’t work. Hmmm. That’s right. It didn’t work. The more calmly and patiently one tried to make that kid into a well-trained dog– ”Come here” and he’d run away–hmmm. Must be some difference between kids and dogs. Well, what do dogs have that kids don’t have. Mentally, probably nothing. But what do kids have that dogs don’t have. A good analytical mind!1

Notes

  1. Hubbard. (1950). Dianetics: The Evolution of a Science (2007 ed., pp. 36-37). Los Angeles: Bridge Publications, Inc. ↩

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Article: Dianetics: The Original Thesis (1948)

Dianetics: The Original Thesis was written by Ron in 1947, fifteen years after he began his studies of the mind. […]

Originally titled Scientology: A New Science, the book was retitled Abnormal Dianetics when it was offered to the medical and psychiatric profession in early 1948. The work was not utilized by these professions; it was, however, accepted broadly by the public at large. […]

The first hardcover edition, titled Dianetics: The Original Thesis was published in Wichita, Kansas in December 1951.

In 1983, the book was newly released with an updated title: The Dynamics of Life.1

Notes

  1. Hubbard, L. R. (1991). Dianetics: The Original Thesis by L. Ron Hubbard The Technical Bulletins of Dianetics and Scientology (1991 ed., Vol. I, p. 3). Los Angeles: Bridge Publications, Inc. ↩