Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health

by L. Ron Hubbard

  Further work and research on emotion will undoubtedly bring about an even closer understanding of it. But we have a workable knowledge of emotion now. We can use what we know and produce results with it. When we know more, we shall be able to produce much better results but just now we can produce the release and the clear. If we treat emotion as bound up life force and if we follow these general precepts to release it, we shall obtain a very large gain in any pre-clear; indeed, we shall produce our largest single gains by so releasing emotion.

  In an engineering science like dianetics, we can work on a push-button basis. We know that throwing a switch will stop a motor, that closing it again will start it and that no matter how many times we open or close that switch our motor will stop or start. We are using here a force which is still as mysterious to us as electricity was to James Clerk Maxwell. Much earlier Benjamin Franklin had observed that electricity existed and had done some interesting things with it: but he had not used it much and he could not control it. A philosopher like Bergson selected out a thing he called elan vital, a life force. Man is alive, there must be a force or flow of something which keeps him alive; when Man is dead there is no force or flow. This is life force in the Benjamin Franklin stage. As he considered electricity, so did Bergson consider life force. Now we are up, in dianetics, to the James Clerk Maxwell stage, or very nearly. We know that certain equations can be made about life force and we can use those equations. And we can theorize that “life force” and what has been called a certain kind of “emotion” are either similar or the same thing. We may have the wrong theory, but so might James Clerk Maxwell.

  Indeed, Maxwell’s theories may still be wrong: at least we have electric lights. In dianetics we are pretty certain that the majority of tenets are parallels of natural law: these are the big computations. We are not certain that we have emotion properly bracketed, but then we shall not be sure until we have actually taken a dead man and pumped him up with life force again.

  Short of this extreme, we are on solid ground with emotion as life force.

  We can, for instance, take a girl, examine something of her background with, let us say, an electro-encephalograph (an instrument for measuring nervous impulses and reactions) and then proceed on the basis of the information so obtained to do one or two things. The first is inhuman and would not be done, ot course, but she could be made sick or insane merely by using this data, so obtained. (If the data is obtained in therapy, it is obtained by actual contact with engrams and an engram contacted in reverie has lost its power to aberrate: dianetic therapy thus makes such an eventuality utterly impossible.) The second and far more important fact to us is that she can be made to recover, with this same data, all the force, interest, persistence and tenacity to life and all the physical and mental well-being possible. If it could not be made to work both ways, we would not have the answer, at least in workable form.

  (Some fiction writer, by the way, if tempted to horrorize on the first fact, must please recall that the data was obtained with apparatus which would have staggered Doctor Frankenstein for intricacy and skill in use and that dianetic therapy contacts the data at source: the apparatus is necessary to keep from touching the source for the instant the source is touched by therapy its power vanishes like yesterday’s headlines: so let’s have no “Gaslight” plays about dianetics, please: they’d be technically inaccurate.)

  This is not as simple as electricity in that the switch cannot be turned off and on. So far as dianetics is concerned, it can only be turned on. We have a rheostat, then, which will not 146

  drop back but which, when pressed forward, releases more and more dynamic force into the individual and gives him more and more control over its use.

  Man is intended to be a self-determined organism. That is to say that as long as he can make evaluations of his data without artificial compulsions or repressions (held down 7’s in an adding machine) he can operate to maximum efficiency. When man becomes exteriorly-determined, which is to say compelled to do or repressed from doing without his own rational consent, he becomes a push-button animal. This push-button factor is so sharply defined that an auditor, in therapy, who discovers a key phrase in an engram (and does not release it) can use that phrase for a little while to make a patient cough or laugh or stop coughing or stop laughing at the auditor’s will. In the case of the auditor, because he got the data at source --

  contacted the engram itself, which robbed it of some power, the push-button will not last very long, certainly less than two or three hundred pushes. The whole pain-drive effort at handling human beings and most of the data accumulated in the past by various schools has been, unwittingly, this push-button material. If the engram is not touched at source it is good for endless use, its power never diminishing. Touched at source, however, the original recording has been reached and so it loses its power. The “handling of human beings” and what people have been calling, roughly, “psychology” have been actually push-button handling of a person’s aberrational phrases and sounds. Children discover them in their parents and use them with a vengeance. The clerk discovers that his boss can’t stand a full waste basket and so always has one full. The bosun on a ship finds out one of his sailors cringes every time he hears the phrase, “fancy-pants” and so uses the word to intimidate the man. This is push-button warfare amongst aberrees. Wives may find that certain words make the husband wince or make him angry or make him refrain from doing something and so they use these “push-buttons.” And husbands find their wives’ push-buttons and keep them from buying clothes or using the car. This defensive and offensive dueling amongst aberrees is occasioned by push-button reacting against push-buttons.

  Whole populaces are handled by their push-button responses. Advertising learns about push-buttons and uses them in such things as “body-odor” or constipation. And in the entertainment field and the song-writing field push-buttons are pushed in whole racks and batteries to produce aberrated responses. Pornography appeals to people who have pornographic push-buttons. Corn-and-games government appeals to people who have “care for me” push-buttons and others. It might be said that there is no necessity to appeal to reason when there are so many push-buttons around.

  These same push-buttons, because they are 7’s held down by pain and emotion (false data forced into the computer by engrams -- and every society has its own special patterns of engrams), also happen to drive people insane, make them ill and generally raise havoc. The only push-button the clear has is whatever his own computer, evaluating on his experience which itself has been evaluated by the computer, tells him is survival conduct along his four dynamics. And so, being no marionette in the hands of careless or designing people, he remains well and sane.

  It is not true, however, that a clear is not emotional, that his reason is cold, and that he is a self-conscious puppet to his own computations. His computer works so rapidly and on so many levels with so many of his computations going on simultaneously but out of the sight of

  “I” (though “I” can examine any one of them he chooses) that his inversion or acute awareness of self is minimal. Inversion is the condition of the aberree whose poor computer is wrestling with heavy imponderables and held down 7’s in his engrams such as “I must do it. I just have to do it. But no, I’d better change my mind.”

  The computational difference between the clear and the aberree is very wide. But there is a much grander difference: life force. The dynamics have, evidently, so much potential force. This force manifests itself as tenacity to life, persistence in endeavor, vigor of thought and act and ability to experience pleasure. The dynamics in a man’s cells may be no stronger than those in a cat’s cells. But the dynamics in the whole man are easily greater than those in any other animal. Assign this as one will, the man is basically more alive in that he has a more 147

  volatile response. By more alive is meant that his sentient-emotional urge to live is greater than those found in other life forms. If this were not true, he would no
t now command the other kingdoms. Regardless of what a shark or a beaver does when threatened with final extinction, the shark and the beaver get short shrift when they encounter the dynamics of Man: the shark gets worn as leather or eaten as vitamins and the beaver decks a lady’s back.

  The fundamental aspect of this is seen in a single reaction. Animals are content to survive in their environments and seek to adjust themselves to those environments. That very dangerous animal -- or god -- Man has a slightly different idea. Ancient schools were fond of telling the poor demented aberree that he must face reality. This was optimum conduct: facing reality. Only it isn’t Man’s optimum conduct. Just as these schools made the fundamental error of supposing that the aberree was unwilling to face his environment when he was actually, because of engrams, unable to face it, they supposed that the mere facing of reality would lead to sanity. Perhaps it does, but it does not lead to a victory of Man over the elements and other forms. Man has something more: some people call it creative imagination, some call it this or some call it that: but whatever it is called, it adds up to the interesting fact that Man is not content merely to “face reality” as most other life forms are. Man makes reality face him.

  Propaganda about “the necessity of facing reality,” like propaganda to the effect that a man could be driven mad by a “childhood delusion” (whatever that is) does not face the reality that where the beaver down his ages of evolution built mud dams and keeps on building mud dams Man graduates in half a century from a stone and wood dam to make a mill wheel pond to structures like Grand Coulee Dam, and changes the whole and entire aspect of a respectable portion of Nature’s real estate from a desert to productive soil, from a flow of water to lightning bolts. It may not be as poetic as Rousseau desired, it may not be as pretty as some

  “nature lover” would desire, but it’s a new reality. Two thousand years ago the Chinese built a wall which would have been visible from the Moon had anybody been up there to look; three thousand years ago he had North Africa green and fertile; ten thousand years ago he was engaged upon some other project; but always he has been shaping things up pretty well to suit Man.

  There’s an extra quality at work or perhaps just more of it, so much more of it that it looks like a new thing entirely.

  Now all this is not any great digression from therapy; it is stated here as an aspect of life force. Where the individual finds himself “possessed of less and less life force,” he is losing some of the free units somewhere.

  And the free units of this life force, in a society or an individual, are the extra surge that is needed to tame North Africa, divide an atom, or reach the stars.

  The mechanical theory here -- and recall it is but theory and dianetics can stand without it -- is that there are so many units of force per individual. These units may be held in common by a group and may build to higher and higher numbers as “enthusiasm” increases; but for our purposes, we can consider that Man, as an individual or a society -- both are organisms -- has a ready number to hand for use in any given hour or day. He may manufacture these life units as required and he may simply have a given supply: that is beside the point.

  What is to the point is that he can be considered, at any hour or day, as just so much alive. Consider this as his dynamic potential as we can see on our descriptic earlier.

  What happens, then, to this dynamic potential in the aberree? He has a large quantity of engrams in his bank. We know that these engrams can sleep for his entire life without being

  “keyed-in,” and we know that any or all of them can be keyed-in and thereafter wait for restimulators in the environment to set them into action. We know that his necessity level can suddenly rise and surmount all these keyed-in engrams, and we know that a high survival activity can bring him such a chance of pleasure that the engrams can stay unrestimulated, though keyed-in. And we can suppose that these engrams, from one period of life to another, 148

  can actually key-out again and stay out because of some vast change of environment or survival chances.

  The usual case, however, is that a few engrams stay keyed-in continually and are restimulated rather chronically by the environment of the individual, and that if he changes environment the old may key out but eventually new ones will key-in.

  Most aberrees are in a state of chronic restimulation which, on the average, starts the spiral dwindling down rather rapidly.

  As this pertains to life force, the mechanical action of an engram on being keyed-in, is to capture so many of these units of life force. Sudden and sweeping restimulation of the engram permits it to capture a great many more units of life force. In the average case, every restimulation captures a greater residue of life force and holds it. When enthusiasm or impetus aligns the purpose of the individual toward a true survival goal (as opposed to a pseudo-goal in the engrams) he recaptures some of these units. But the spiral is dwindling: he cannot capture back, except in very unusual circumstances, as many as he has lost into the engram bank.

  Thus it can be said, for purposes of this theory of life force action, that more and more life force units out of an individual’s supply are captured and held in the engram bank. Here they are perverted in use to counterfeit themselves as dynamic (as in the manic and the high euphoria case) and force action upon the somatic and analytical mind. In this engram bank, the life force units are not available as free feeling or for free action but are used against the individual from within.

  An observation here tends to demonstrate this action: the more restimulated an aberree is, the less free feeling he may possess. If caught in a manic (highly complimentary pro-survival engram), his life force is channeling straight through the engram and his behavior, no matter how enthusiastic or euphoric, is actually very aberrated: if he has this much life force to be so channeled, then he can be shown to have even more life force, sentiently directed, when clear. (This has been done.)

  We have demonstrated the parasitic quality of the “demon circuits” which use pieces of the analytical mind and its processes. This parasitic quality is common to engrams in other ways. If a man has, arbitrarily, a thousand units of life force, he has an ability to channel them, when clear, into highly zestful existence: in a manic state, with a pro-survival engram in full restimulation, the life force is directed through an aberrated command and gives him, let us say, five hundred units of pseudo-dynamic thrust.

  In other words, the power is out of the same battery: such an engram has at best less power than the whole organism, cleared, would have. (This aspect of the manic or super-personality neurotic has misled some of the old schools of mental healing into the thoroughly aberrated and poorly observed belief that insanities alone were responsible for Man’s ability to survive, a concept which can be disproven in the laboratory simply by clearing one of these manics or any other aberree.)

  The engram uses the same current but perverts it just as it uses the same analytical mind but usurps it. Not only does the engram have no life of its own, but it is wasteful as are so many parasites, of the life force of the host. It is thoroughly inefficient. If a comparable device were fitted into an electronic circuit it would merely lead off and make “unalterable” some of the functions of the equipment which should be left variable and would, in addition, consume, simply by lengthened leads and bad condensers and tubes, power supply vital to the machine.

  In the human mind, the engram assumes its most forceful “assist” aspect in the manic, channeling and commanding the organism into some activity of wild violence and monomanic concentration.

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  The “super-salesman,” the violently buoyant “glad-hander,” the fanatical and apparently unkillable religious zealot are classifiable as manics. The abundance of “power” in these people, even when it is as grim as Torquemada’s or as destructive as Genghis Khan’s, is an object of admiration in many quarters. The manic, as will be later covered, is a “pro-survival,”

  “assist” command in an engram which yet fixes the in
dividual on some certain course. But an engram is capable only of as much “power” as is present in the host, just as it is capable of tying up only as much analyzer as is present.

  Let us take a forceful manic who is displaying and functioning on 500 arbitrary units of life force. Let us assume that the entire being is possessed of 1000 arbitrary units of life force.

  Suppose we have here an Alexander. The dynamics of the average person are unassisted by manics in most cases but are dispersed as a stream of electrons might be dispersed by a block before them.

  Here are scattered activity, scattered thoughts, uncomputable problems, lack of alignment. In such a person, with 1000 units present, 950 of those units could be so captured in the engram banks and yet so thoroughly counteractive that the person displays a functioning capacity of only 50 units. In the case of Alexander, it could be assumed, the manic must have been an alignment in a general direction of his own basic purposes. His basic purpose is a strong regulator: the manic happens to align with it: a person of great ability and personal prowess becomes possessed of 500 units via a manic engram, believes he is a god and goes out and conquers the known world. He was educated to believe he was a god, his manic engram said he was a god and had a holder in it.

  Alexander conquered the world and died at 33. He could hold in his manic only so long as it could be obeyed: when it could no longer be obeyed, it changed his valence, became no more a manic and drove him, with pain, into dispersed activities. The engram, received from his mother, Olympia, can almost be read even at this late date. It must have said he would be a joyous god who would conquer all the world and must keep on conquering, that he must always strive to rise higher and higher. It was probably a ritual chant of some sort from his mother, who was a high priestess of Lesbos and who must have received some injury just before the ritual. She hated her husband, Phillip. A son who would conquer all was the answer. Alexander may well have had fifty or a hundred such “assist” engrams, the violent praying of a woman aberrated enough to murder. Thus he could be assumed to have conquered until he could no longer stretch a line of supply for conquering, at which time he, of course, would no longer be able to obey the engram and its force of pain would turn on him. The engrams dictated attack to conquer, and they enforced the command with pain: once conquering could not longer be accomplished, the pain attacked Alexander. He realized one day he was dying: within the week he was dead: and at the height of his power. Such, on a very large scale, is a manic phrase in an engram at work.