And on the other hand it does not mean that some engineer or lawyer or cook with a few dianetic cases under his belt, will not be more skilled than all other practitioners of whatever background or kind. In this case, the sky is no limit.
One could not say, offhand, that an able hypnotist or an able psychologist, ready and willing to jettison and unlearn yesterday’s mistakes, is not better prepared to practice dianetics.
In the field of psycho-somatic medicine the medical doctor, with a vast fund of experience in healing, might very well be far and above other auditors in dianetic work. But it is not necessarily the case, for in research it has been proven that men and women with most unlikely professional backgrounds have suddenly become auditors superior in skill to those in fields you might suspect were more closely allied. Engineers particularly are excellent material and make excellent auditors. Again, dianetics is not being released to a profession, for no profession could encompass it. It is insufficiently complicated to warrant years of study in some university. It belongs to Man and it is doubtful if anyone could manage to gain a corner on it for it does not fall within any legislation of any kind in any place and if dianetics were legislated into a licensed profession, then it is to be feared that listening to stories and jokes and personal experience would also have to be legislated into a profession. Such laws would put all men of good will who lend a sympathetic ear to a friend’s troubles inside the barbed wire.
Dianetics is not psychiatry. It is not psycho-analysis. It is not psychology. It is not personal relations. It is not hypnotism. It is a science of mind and needs about as much licensing and regulation as the application of the science of physics. Those things which are legislated against are a matter of law because they may in some way injure individuals or society.
Legislation exists about psycho-analysis in some three states in the Union, legislation against or about psychiatry exists everywhere. If an auditor wishes to constitute himself a psychiatrist with the power of vivisecting human brains, if he wants to constitute himself a doctor and administer drugs and medicines, if he wants to practice hypnotism and pour suggestions into a patient, then he must square it with psychiatry, medicine and the local laws 110
about hypnotism, for he has entered other fields than dianetics. In dianetics hypnotism is not used, no brains are operated upon and no drugs are given unless the local medico is part of the staff. Dianetics is not in any way covered by legislation anywhere for no law can prevent one man sitting down and telling another man his troubles, and if anyone wants a monopoly on dianetics, be assured that he wants it for reasons which have to do not with dianetics but with prof it. There are not enough psychiatrists in the country to begin to staff the mental institutions.
Surely this generation, particularly with all the iatrogenic field is the treatment of the insane by definition and that has nothing to do with thee and me. In psychology, dianetics drops into line without disturbing anything concerned with staffs or research or teaching posts, for psychology is simply the study of the psyche and now that there exists a science of the psyche it can go ahead with a will.
Thus dianetics is the enemy of none and dianetics falls utterly outside all existing legislation, none of which anticipated or made any provision for a science of mind.
111
CHAPTER II
Release or Clear
The object of dianetic therapy is to bring about a release or a clear.
A release (noun) is an individual from whom major stress and anxiety have been removed by dianetic therapy.
A clear (noun) is an individual who, as a result of dianetic therapy, has neither active nor potential psycho-somatic illness or aberration.
To clear (verb) is to release all the physical pain and painful emotion from the life of an individual or, as in Political Dianetics -- a society. The result of this will bring about persistence in the four dynamics, optimum analytical ability for the individual and, with that, all recall. The experience of his entire life is available to the clear and he has all his inherent mental ability and imagination free to use it. His physical vitality and health are markedly improved and all psycho-somatic illnesses have vanished and will not return. He has greater resistance to actual disease. And he is adaptable to and able to change his environment. He is not “adjusted”; he is dynamic. His ethical and moral standards are high, his ability to seek and experience pleasure is great. His personality is heightened and he is creative and constructive. It is not yet known how much longevity is added to a life in the process of clearing, but in view of the automatic rebalancing of the endocrine system, the lowered incidence of accident and the improvement of general physical tone, it is most certainly raised.
A release is an individual from whom have been released the current or chronic mental and physical difficulties and painful emotion. The value of a release, when compared to a clear, may not at first thought be considered great, but when one understands that a release is usually in excess of the contemporary norm in mental stability, it can be seen that the condition is not without great value.
As a standard of comparison, a clear is to the contemporary norm as the contemporary norm is to a contemporary institutional case. The margin is wide and it would be difficult to exaggerate it. A clear, for instance, has complete recall of everything which has ever happened to him or anything he has ever studied. He does mental computations, such as those of chess, for example, which a normal would do in a half an hour, in ten or fifteen seconds. He does not think “vocally” but spontaneously. There are no demon circuits in his mind except those which it might amuse him to set up -- and break down again -- to care for various approaches to living. He is entirely self-determined. And his creative imagination is high. He can do a swift study of anything within his intellectual capacity, which is inherent, and the study would be the equivalent to him of a year or two of training when he was “normal.” His vigor, persistence and tenacity to life are very much higher than anyone has thought possible.
The objection that it is dangerous to create too many clears in a society is a thoughtless one. The clear is rational. The acts which damage a society are irrational. That a handful of clears could probably handle any number of “normals” is within reason, but that the clear would handle them to their detriment is unreasonable. The more clears a society possessed the more chance that society would have to prosper. That a clear is unambitious is not proven out by scientific observation, for the curve of dwindling ambition follows the curve of reducing rationality; and those who have been cleared have proven the matter by reactivating all their skills toward goals they had once desired but had begun to consider unattainable when
“norms.”* That a clear is in some degree separated from the “norm” is attributable to the gulf between their respective mental abilities, for he has achieved solutions and conclusions before the “norm” has begun to form an idea of what to conclude; this does not make a clear intolerable to the “norm,” for the clear has none of that superiority attitude which is actually a product of engrams. This is a quick glance at the state of being clear, but the state cannot be described; it has to be experienced to be appreciated.
112
A release is a somewhat variable quantity. Anyone well advanced on the road to clear is a release. There is no comparison between a clear and anything Man has before believed obtainable and there is no comparison between clearing and any therapy hitherto practiced. In the case of the release only is there a basis of comparison between dianetics and past therapies such as “psycho-analysis” and any other. A release can be effected in a few weeks. The resulting condition will be at least equivalent to that following two years of “psycho-analysis”
with the difference that the release has a guarantee of permanent results and no guarantee of success has ever been made by “psycho-analysis.” A release does not relapse into any pattern which has been relieved.
These are the two goals of the dianetic auditor: clear and release. It is not known a
t this writing how long is the average time to raise the institutionally insane into the neurotic level: it has been done in two hours, it has been done in ten and in some cases it has required two hundred.*
The dianetic auditor should determine beforehand in any case whether he wishes to attempt a release or a clear. He can achieve either with anyone not organically insane (missing or seared portions of the brain bringing about insanity, mainly genetic or iatrogenic and relatively rare except in institutions). But he should make an estimate of the amount of time he can invest in any one person and regulate his intention accordingly and announce it to his patient. The two goals are slightly different. In a release one does not attempt entrance into phases of the case which will or may bring about a necessity of long work and gives his attention to the location and release of emotional charge. In clearing the auditor gives his attention to the location of the basic-basic engram, the discharge of emotion and the entire engram bank.
There is a third goal which could be considered a sub-head of a release.
This is an assist: it is done after injury, or illness following the injury, or illness just sustained, in order to promote more rapid recovery: to assist the body in its rehabilitation after injury or illness. This is specialized therapy which will probably be practiced commonly enough but is of primary benefit to the medical doctor who, with it, can save lives and speed healing by releasing the engram of that particular illness or injury, thus removing the various engram conceptions which the furtherance of the injury restimulates. Any dianetic auditor can practice this. The assist has about the same level of usefulness as a faith healing miracle which would work every time.
Estimations of the amount of time the case will require are difficult to attain with any accuracy greater than 50% and it should be understood by the patient that the time in therapy is variable. It depends in a measure upon the skill of the auditor, the number of unsuspected engrams never hitherto reactivated, and the amount of restimulation to which the patient is subject during therapy. Therefore the auditor should not be optimistic in estimating time but should make his patient understand that greater or lesser time may be consumed in the therapy.
Any person who is intelligent and possessed of average persistency and who is willing to read this book thoroughly should be able to become a dianetic auditor. When he has cleared two or three cases he will have learned far more and understood far more than is contained in this book, for there is nothing which develops an understanding of a machine like handling it in action. This is the instruction book, the machine in question is ready to hand wherever there are men. Contrary to superstition about the mind, it is almost impossible to permanently injure the mechanism. It can be done with an electric shock or a scalpel or an ice-pick, but it is almost impossible to do it with dianetic therapy.
113
CHAPTER III
The Auditor’s Role
The purpose of therapy and its sole target is the removal of the content of the reactive engram bank. In a release, the majority of emotional stress is deleted from this bank. In a clear, the entire content is removed.
The application of a science is an art. That is true of any science. The efficacy of its application depends upon the understanding, skill and ability of whomever applies it. The chemist has a science of chemistry and yet the profession of being a chemist is an art. The engineer may have behind him the precision of all the physical sciences and yet the practice of engineering is an art.
Certain rules of procedure can be laid down after the basic axioms of a science are understood. Beyond those rules of procedure is the understanding, skill and ability necessary to application.
Dianetics is extremely simple. This does not mean that cases cannot be extremely complicated. To cover one case for each kind of case in this book would necessitate two billion cases and that would only encompass the current population. For each man is a great deal different from every other man. His inherent personality is different. His composite of experience is different. And his dynamics are of different strengths. The only constant is the mechanism of the reactive engram bank and that alone does not vary. The content of that bank is different from man to man both in quantity and intensity but the mechanism of operation of the bank and therefore the basic mechanisms of dianetics are constant from man to man, and were in every age and will be in every future age until Man evolves into another organism.
The target is the engram. It is also the target of the patient’s analytical mind and the patient’s dynamics as he tries to live his life: it is the target of the auditor’s analytical mind and the auditor’s dynamics. So bracketed and salvoed it gives up its store of engrams.
This should be extremely plain to any auditor: the amount he relaxes from the position of auditor and forgets the target, he garners trouble which will consume his time. The moment he makes the error of thinking that the person, the analytical mind or the dynamics of the patient are resisting, trying to stop therapy, or giving up, the auditor has made the fundamental and primary error in the practice of dianetics. Almost anything that goes wrong can be traced back to this error. It cannot be too emphatically stated that the analytical mind and the dynamics of the patient never, never, never resist the auditor. The auditor is not there to be resisted. He has no concern with resistance from anything except the patient’s (and sometimes his own) engrams.
The auditor is not there as the patient’s driver or adviser. He is not there to be intimidated by the patient’s engrams or be frightened by their aspects. He is there to audit and only to audit. If he feels that he is called upon to be lordly to the patient, then the auditor had better change chair for couch because he has a case of authoritarianism coming into view. The word auditor is used, not “operator” or “therapist,” because it is a cooperative effort between the auditor and the patient, and the law of affinity is at work.
The patient cannot see his own aberrations. That is one of the reasons why the auditor is there. The patient needs to be bolstered to face the unknowns of his life. That is another reason the auditor is there. The patient would not dare address the world which has gotten inside him and turn his back upon the world that is outside him unless he has a sentry. That is another reason the auditor is there.
114
The auditor’s job is to safeguard the person of the patient during therapy, to compute the reasons why the patient’s mind cannot reach into the engram bank, to strengthen the patient’s nerve and to get those engrams.
There is a three-way case of affinity at work this moment. I am in affinity with the auditor: I am telling him all that has been discovered and is in practice in dianetics and I want him to succeed. The auditor is in affinity with the patient: he wants the patient to attack engrams. The patient is in affinity with the auditor because, with minimal work, that patient is going to get better and with persistence lent him by the auditor, plus his own, will become a release or a clear. There are even more affinities at work, a vast network of them. This is a cooperative endeavor.
The engram bank is the target, not the patient. If the patient swears and moans and weeps and pleads, those are engrams talking. After a while the engrams that make him swear and moan and weep and plead will be discharged and refiled. The patient, in whatever state, knows full well that the action taken is necessary. If the auditor is short of rationality that he mistakes this swearing or moaning as something directed at him personally, that auditor had better change places with the patient and undergo therapy.
The only thing which resists is the engram! When it is being restimulated it impinges against the patient’s analyzer, tends to reduce analytical power, and the patient exhibits a modified dramatization. Any auditor with two brain cells to click together will never be in any slightest danger of his person at the hands of the pre-release or pre-clear. If the auditor wants to use hypnotism and try to run late physically painful engrams such as operations when early ones are available, he may find himself targeted. But then he has done something ver
y wrong.
If the auditor suddenly gets supermoral and lectures the patient, he may get involved, but again he has done something very wrong. If the auditor snarls and snaps at the patient, he may get targeted, but once more a fundamental error has been made.
The target is the engram bank. It is the auditor’s job to attack the pre-clear’s engram bank. It is the pre-clear’s job to attack that bank. To attack the pre-clear is to permit his engram bank to attack the pre-clear.
We know that there are five methods of handling an engram. Four of them are wrong.
To succumb to an engram is apathy, to neglect one is carelessness, but to avoid or flee from one is cowardice. Attack and only attack resolves the problem. It is the duty of the auditor to make very sure that the pre-clear keeps attacking engrams, not the auditor or the exterior world.
If the auditor attacks the pre-clear, that’s bad gunnery and very poor logic.
The engram bank is best attacked primarily by discharging its emotional charge anywhere it can be contacted. After that it is best attacked by finding out what the pre-clear, in reverie, thinks would happen to him if he got well, got better, found out, etc. And then it is most and always most important, in any way possible, to contact the primary moment of pain or unconsciousness in the patient’s life. This is basic-basic. Once an auditor has basic-basic, the case will swiftly resolve. If the preclear’s reactive mind is suppressing basic-basic, then the auditor should discharge more reactive emotion, discover the computation now in force, and try again. He will eventually get basic-basic. That’s important. And that is all that is important in a pre-clear.
In the pre-release (patient working toward release only) the task is to discharge emotion and as many early engrams as will present themselves easily. The reduction of locks may be included in pre-release; but only when they lead to basic-basic should locks be touched in a preclear.
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health Page 22