Research and scientific tabulation indicate that with the “unconsciousness” aspect and the demon circuits deleted from the engram bank and the data restored into the standard bank as experience where it should be, about forty-nine fiftieths of the mind have been placed at the service of “I” which he never could use as an aberree.
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CHAPTER V
Psycho-somatic Illness
Psycho-somatic illnesses are those which have a mental origin but which are nevertheless organic. Despite the fact that there existed no precise scientific proof of this before dianetics, an opinion as to their existence has been strong since the days of Greece, and in recent times various drug preparations have been concocted and sold which were supposed to overcome these sicknesses. Some success was experienced, sufficient to warrant a great deal of work on the part of researchers. Peptic ulcers, for instance, have yielded to persuasion and environmental change. A recent drug called ACTH has had astonishing but wildly unpredictable results. Allergies have been found to yield more or less to things which depressed histamine in the body.
The problem of psycho-somatic illness is entirely embraced by dianetics, and by dianetic technique such illness has been eradicated entirely in every case.
About seventy per cent of the physician’s current roster of diseases falls into the category of psycho-somatic illness. How many more can be so classified after dianetics has been in practice for a few years is difficult to predict, but it is certain that more illnesses are psycho-somatic than have been so classified to date. That all illnesses are psycho-somatic is, of course, absurd, for there exist, after all, life forms called germs which have survival as their goals.
The work of Louis Pasteur formulated the germ theory of disease. With dianetics is gained the non-germ theory of disease. These two, with bio-chemistry, complement each other to form the whole field of pathology so far as can be determined at this time, providing of course that the virus is included under the germ theory.
Dianetics adds an additional leaf to the germ theory in that it includes predisposition.
There are three stages of pathology: predisposition, by which is meant the factors which prepared the body for sickness, precipitation, by which is meant the factors which cause the sickness to manifest itself, and perpetuation, by which is meant the factors which cause the sickness to continue.
There are two kinds of illness: the first could be called autogenetic, which means that it originated within the organism and was self-generated, and exogenetic, which means that the origin of the illness was exterior. Actually, although this is good medicine, it is not quite as precise as dianetics could desire. Mental illness itself is actually exterior in origin. But medically, we consider that the body can generate its own sicknesses (autogenetic) or that the sickness can come from an exterior source such as bacteria (exogenetic). The Pasteur germ theory would be the theory of exogenetic -- exteriorly generated -- illness. Psycho-somatic illness would be autogenetic, generated by the body itself.
Treatment for accidental injury, surgery for various things such as malformation inherent in the body on a genetic basis, and orthopedics, which actually can be classed under both, remain properly outside the field of dianetics, although it can be remarked in passing that almost all accidents are to be traced to dramatization of engrams and that clears rarely have accidents.
Psycho, of course, refers to mind and somatic refers to body; the term psycho-somatic means the mind making the body ill or illnesses which have been created physically within the body by derangement of the mind.
Naturally such diseases, when one has resolved the
problem of human aberration, become uniformly susceptible to cure.
Arthritis, dermatitis, allergies, asthma, some coronary difficulties, eye trouble, bursitis, ulcers, sinusitis, etc. form a very small section of the psycho-somatic catalogue. Bizarre aches 65
and pains in various portions of the body are generally psycho-somatic. Migraine headaches are psycho-somatic and, with the others, are uniformly cured by dianetic therapy. (And the word cured is used in its fullest sense.)
Just how many physical errors are psycho-somatic depends upon how many conditions the body can generate out of the factors in the engrams. For example, the common cold has been found to be psycho-somatic. Clears do not get colds. Just what, if any, part the virus plays in the common cold is not known, but it is known that when engrams about colds are lifted, no further colds appear -- which is a laboratory fact not so far contradicted by 270 cases.
The common cold comes about, usually, from an engram which suggests it and which is confirmed by actual mucus present in another engram. A number of germ diseases are predisposed and perpetuated by engrams. Tuberculosis is one.
The engram itself, as has been covered, follows a cycle of action. The body is predisposed to the conduct and conditions contained in the engram when that engram is first received. Then a conscious-level experience keys-in the engram and other experience or the content of the engram itself may make it chronic. This is predisposition, precipitation and perpetuation in the mental plane.
Engrams and inherited disabilities and accidents and germs are the four ways an organism can be reduced physically from the optimum. Many conditions which have been called “inherited disabilities” are actually engramic Engrams predispose people to accidents.
Enengrams predispose and perpetuate bacterial infections. Therefore the catalogue of ills affected by dianetics is very long. This is not a book listing effects but a book stating causes, and so the reader is asked to call upon his own knowledge or consult a medical text to understand just how many thousands and thousands of conditions result from engrams to disturb or derange the body.
At the present time dianetic research is scheduled to include cancer and diabetes. There are a number of reasons to suppose that these may be engramic in cause, particularly malignant cancer. This is remarked so that attention may be given to the possibility; no tests of any kind have been made on cancer or diabetic patients, and the thought is purely theory and is not to be taken as any kind of an avowal about a cancer cure. Those diseases which were catalogued above, however, have been thoroughly tested and have uniformly yielded to dianetic therapy.
The mechanism by which the mind is able to cause a physical disability or predispose the body to an illness and perpetuate sickness is, in its basic cause, a very simple thing. The complexity arrives when one begins to combine all the factors possible; then a staggering list of potential illnesses can be written.
A series of simple tests can be made on drugged or hypnotic patients which will prove clinically in other laboratories this basic mechanism. A series of these tests were run in the formulation of dianetics with uniform success.
Let us take first something -- which is only mildly psycho-somatic and scarcely an illness at all. A patient is hypnotized. He is given the positive suggestion that he will be able to hear much more acutely. This is “extended hearing.” Controlling out other means of his gaining data (including safeguards against telepathy between operator and subject) the hearing can be found to be amplifiable many times over. In fact, there exist all around aberrees who have “extended hearing.” By suggestion the power of the hearing can be tuned down or up so that a person is nearly deaf or can hear pins fall at a great distance. When the suggestion is removed, the subject’s hearing returns to its previous normal state.
Similarly, experiments can be performed on the eyes, using light sensitivity. The patient’s sight is tuned up or down so that his eyes are much more or much less sensitive to light than is normal for him. This is done entirely on the word suggestion basis such as “The light will appear very, very bright to you,” or “The light will appear so dim it will be hard for you to see.” With the former suggestion the patient can be made to see almost as well as a cat, 66
although other people around might think it impossible to see objects the patient can unerringly point out. In the latter suggestion the p
atient can be placed under light almost blinding and yet can read through a glare with apparent comfort.
The tactile sense can likewise be tuned up or down by verbal suggestion until touch becomes painfully acute or so dull it scarcely registers.
So with the various senses. Here we have simply the spoken word going into the mind and causing physical function to change.
Let us now address the heart. By deep hypnosis or drugs we take a patient into amnesia trance, a state of being wherein the “I” is not in control but the operator is the “I” (and that’s all there is, really, to the function of hypnosis: the transfer of analytical power through the law of affinity from subject to operator, a thing which had a racial development and survival value in animals which ran in packs).
A caution should be observed that a patient who has a very sound heart and no heart-trouble history be chosen for this experiment, which, even above any other hypnotic experiment, can make a patient very ill if he has a heart history. And none of these hypnotic tests should be performed until one has finished this book and knows how to get rid of the suggestions; for hypnosis, as practiced, is strictly live fuse stuff and the hypnotist who is unacquainted with dianetics has no more idea how to get rid of a suggestion he has made than he has of how to peel an atom. He has thought he had the answer, but dianetics has treated many, many former hypnotic subjects who were thoroughly, as the engineers interested in dianetics say, “loused-up.” This is no criticism of hypnosis or hypnotists, who are often very able people, but it is a comment that there is more to be known about it.
The heart, by positive suggestion alone, can be speeded up, slowed down or otherwise excited. Here are words spoken into the deep strata of the mind which cause physical action.
Further, blood flow can be inhibited in some area of the body by suggestion alone. (This experiment, it is warned, particularly overloads the heart.) Blood can be denied to a hand, for instance, so that if you were to cut a vein in that hand it would bleed slightly if at all. A fine swami trick; which most amazed the author in India, was the inhibition of blood flow by the awake individual in himself. On command a cut would bleed or not bleed. It looked fantastic and made very good press agentry that here was a swami who had so associated himself with Nirvana that he was in control of all material matters. Awe faded when the author learned that, via hypnosis, he could make his own body do the same thing and no Nirvana involved. The mechanism fades out rapidly and in a few days would have to be renewed: the body has its own optimum operation, and although such a function can be “analytically” handled, it is not an upper echelon analytical job to keep the blood going in the hand. The point here is that blood flow can be interrupted by verbal suggestion. Words connect up with the physical being.
How this can come about can be shown by an analogic explanation such as a schematic diagram, but we are not so much interested in structure as in function at this stage of the science of mind -- because by knowing function alone we can cure aberrations and psychosomatic ills every time, predict new ills and conditions, and generally “work miracles,” as such actions were once called before Man knew anything about the mind.
Excreta are among the easiest things to regulate by suggestion. Constipation can be caused or cured by positive suggestion with remarkable speed and facility. The urine can also be so controlled. And so can the endocrine system.
It is harder to make tests on some of the more poorly understood functions of the endocrines. Glandular research has not progressed very far at this time. But, by removing engrams and watching the endocrine system rebalance, it has been made obvious that the endocrine system is a part of the control mechanism with which the mind handles the body.
The glands are easily influenced. These fluids and secretions -- testosterone, estrogen, adrenalin, thyroid, parathyroid, pituitrin, etc. -- are the substances the mind uses as one means 67
of controlling the body. They form relay circuits, so to speak. Each one has its own action within the body.
This experiment tends to prove the fallacy of an ancient assumption that the mind was controlled by the glands. An aberree is given a shot of 25 mg. of testosterone in oil twice a week. There may be some improvement in his physical status for a short time -- his voice may deepen and he may grow more hair on his chest. Now, without suggestion, we simply delete the engrams from his reactive bank so that they can re-form as experience in the standard bank.
Before we have completed this task
his body begins to use more of the testosterone. The dose can be markedly reduced and still give more benefit than formerly. Finally the dose can be eliminated. This experiment has also been performed on people who had not been able to receive benefit from glandular substances such as testosterone and estrogen. And upon people who were made ill by the administration of these hormones. The deletion of the engrams from the reactive bank uniformly brought about a condition where they could receive benefit from the hormones but where such artificial administration was not necessary save in cases of extreme age. What this means to gerontology, the study of longevity in life, cannot at this time be estimated, but it can be predicted with confidence that the deletion of engrams from the reactive bank has a marked effect upon the extension of life. A hundred years or so from now this data will be available, but no clears have lived that long as yet.
Just now, to our purpose, it is easy to demonstrate the effect of positive suggestion upon the endocrine system and the lack of effect of artificial hormones upon aberrees.
This sort of an engram has a terribly reductive effect upon testosterone manufacture:
“Sex is horrible; it is nasty; I hate it.”
The autonomic nervous system, which has been supposed to run without much connection to the mind can be shown to be influenced in its parts by the mind. There is a dwindling spiral effect (note the lines on the survival potential chart) whereby the engram starts malfunction in the life function regulator; this produces malfunction in the mind, which in turn has further effect on the life function regulator; this again reduces physical activity, and the mind, being part of the organ and, so far as we can tell, organic itself, is further reduced in tone. Mental tone makes body tone go down. Body tone, then being down, makes mental tone go down. This is a matter of inverse geometric progression. A man starts to get sick and, having engrams, he gets sicker. Clears are not subject to this dwindling spiral. Indeed, so entirely superficial is this horrible stuff called psycho-somatic illness that it is the first thing which surrenders and can be alleviated without clearing.
Now the reason why various drug preparations which seek to change psycho-somatic illness meet with such uncertain success lies in the fact that the mind, containing these engrams which are “survival” (like a fellow needs a hole in his head), handles the life function regulator to actively produce illnesses. Something comes to take them away (they’re “survival,” you see, and these confounded cells moronically insist upon it) and the mind has to rapidly reverse the activity and put an illness back in place again. Try to influence the reactive mind by reason or needles and it is not any easier to convince than a drug-crazed man bent on murdering everybody in a bar. He’s “surviving,” too.
A concoction like ACTH has a slightly different effect. It is too exclusive to have any research done with it, but on reports about it, it seems to affect engrams in the time sense. That is to say, as will be covered under therapy, the individual’s reactive location in time is shifted by it. ACTH and perhaps many others in its category move the individual from one chronic engram into another. This is about as reliable as changing dictators in Europe. The next one may be twice as bad. It may even be a manic and that’s horrible despite its apparent “euphoria.”
Electric shock treatment, the beatings of Bedlam and other things of their ilk, including surgical treatment of things psycho-somatic in origin, have another effect but one not dissimilar 68
to drugs like ACTH in that they give another shock which transfers the engram patter
n to another part of the body (and switches around the aberrations; when these things work it is because the new aberration is less violent than the old one). Shocks, blows, surgery and maybe even things like cobra venom change the effect of the engram bank on the body, not necessarily for the worse, not necessarily for the better; they just change them. Like shooting dice: sometimes one gets a seven.
Then there is the deletion of tissue treatment of psycho-somatic ills. This simply removes the area which is busy dramatizing in the physical line. This can be the removal of a toe or the removal of a brain. These things are quite commonly used, as this is being written.
The removal of the toe is addressed to one part of the engram content, the somatic, and the removal of parts of the brain (as in the trans-orbital leukotomy and the pre-frontal lobotomy or anything else more recent) is addressed mistakenly to “the removal of” the psycho-aberration.
There is a surrender system at work in this as well: the surgeon or the patient has an aberration about “getting rid of it,” and so bits of the body are cut up or removed.
Some patients surrender anatomy on advice or at their own insistence like old timers shed blood in a phlebotomy. There is a straight parallel between bleeding the patient to make him well and cutting away parts of him to make him well. Both are based on a surrender (get rid of) engram and neither are effective in any way. Barber basin medicine, it is hoped, will eventually die out as did its patients.
These are the five classes of psycho-somatic ills: (1) those ills resulting from mentally caused derangement in physical fluid flow, which class subdivides into (a) inhibition of fluid flow and (b) magnification of fluid flow; (2) those ills resulting from mentally caused derangement of physical growth, which class subdivides into (a) inhibition of growth and (b) magnification of growth; (3) those ills resulting from predisposition to disease resulting from a chronic psycho-somatic pain in an area; (4) those ills resulting from perpetuation of a disease on account of chronic pain in an area; and (5) these ills caused by the verbal command content of the engrams.
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health Page 13