L. Ron Hubbard - The Retard; Section 1
First, last and always, the job is to get basic-basic and then ever afterwards the currently existing earliest moment of pain or sorrow, and to erase every incident as it is advanced by the file clerk or found by repeater technique. (5) Any incident that hangs fire always has a similar incident earlier, and the patient should be taken earlier for the prior incident when an engram will not “reduce” on recounting. (6) At any time the engrams start to become emotionless in tone, even though they reduce, suspect another ally computation and, early or late in the patient’s life, get it and reduce it at least until the emotional discharge is gone. Do not get everything in a case restimulated by changing from an unreduced incident to something which looks more fruitful, but reduce everything in view before you go looking for a new sorrow charge. (7) It is better to reduce an emotionless early engram than it is to upset the case by hounding him for an ally computation when a cunning search fails to reveal none in sight. Erasing early emotionless engrams will eventually bring a new ally computation into sight if you occasionally look for it. (8) Consider that any hold-up on a case, any unwillingness to cooperate, stems from ally computation. (9) Treat all demon circuits as things held in place by life force units absorbed into the bank and address the problem of demon circuits by releasing charges of sorrow. (10) Consider that loss by death or departure of an ally is identical with a death of some part of the patient and that the reduction of a death or departure of an ally will restore that much life back to the patient. And remember that great sorrow charges are not always death or departure but merely may be a sudden reversal of stand by the ally. Always keep in mind that that person who most nearly identifies himself with the person of the patient, such as a sympathetic mother or father or grandparent or relative or friend, is considered by the reactive mind to be a part of the person himself and that anything happening to this sympathetic character can be considered to have happened to the patient. In such a case, where an ally has been found to have died of cancer, you may occasionally find the patient to have a sore or scaly place where he supposed the ally’s cancer to have been. The reactive mind thinks in identities only. The sympathetic pro-survival engram identifies the patient with another individual. The death or loss (by departure or denial) of the other individual is therefore a reactive mind conviction that the patient has suffered some portion of death.
Emotional charges may be contained in any engram: the emotion communicates, in the same tone level, from the personnel around the “unconscious” person into his reactive mind. Anger goes into an engram as anger, apathy as apathy, shame as shame. Whatever people have felt emotionally around an “unconscious” person should be found in the engram which resulted from the incident. When the emotional tone of personnel in an engram is obviously angry or apathetic from the word content and yet the patient, recounting, does not feel it, there is something somewhere which has a valence wall between the patient and the emotional tone, and that valence wall is nearly always broken down by the discovery of an engram with a sorrow charge sometime earlier or later in a patient’s life. The only legitimate reason for entering later portions of a person’s life before the prenatal area has been well exhausted is search for sorrow discharges occasioned by the death, loss or denial by an ally. And by “denial,” we mean that the ally turned into an active enemy (real or imaginary) of the patient. The counterpart of the ally, the pseudo-ally, is a person whom the reactive mind has confused with the real ally. The death, loss or denial by a pseudoally can contain a sorrow charge.
According to theory, the only thing which can lock up life units is this emotion of loss. If some method existed of doing nothing but freeing all life units, the physical pain could be neglected.
A release is brought about, one way or another, by freeing as many life units as possible from periods of loss with minimal address to actual engrams. The loss of an ally or pseudo-ally need contain no other physical pain or “unconsciousness” than the loss itself occasions. This is serious enough. It makes an engram.
Any person who is suddenly discovered to be occluded in a patient’s life can, with some reliability, be considered an ally or pseudo-ally. If, either while remembering or returning, large sections of a patient’s association with another person are missing, that person can be called an occluded person. It is a better guarantee of ally status if the occlusion surrounds the death of the person or a departure from or a denial by that person. It is possible for occlusion to take place, also, for punishment reasons; which is to say, the occluded person may also be an arch enemy: in such a case, however, any memory present will concern the death or defeat or illness of the occluded person. Occlusion of a person’s funeral in the memory of a patient would theoretically label that person an ally or pseudo-ally. Recollection of the funeral of a person but occlusion of pleasant association might tend to mean that the person was an enemy. Such rules are tentative. But it is certain that any occlusion means that a person had a vast and unrevealed significance in a patient’s life which should be explained.It may be remarked at this point that the recovery of the patient will depend in large measure on the life units freed from his reactive bank. This is a discharge of sorrow and may be quite violent. The usual practice is to “forget” such things and the “sooner forgotten, the sooner healed.” Unfortunately this does not work: it would be a happy thing if it did. Anything forgotten is a festering sore when it has despair connected with it. The auditor will find that every time he locates that arch denyer, “forget it,” he will get the engram it suppressed; when he can’t locate the engram and yet has found a somatic, a “forget it” or “don’t think about it” or “can’t remember it” or “don’t remember it” or some other denyer will be sitting there in the context of the engram. Forgetting is such unhealthy business that when a thing has been “put out of mind,” it has been put straight into the reactive engram bank and in there it can absorb life units.
This “loopy” computation, that forgetting things makes them bearable, is incredible in view of the fact that the hypnotist, for instance, gets results with a positive suggestion when he puts one of these denyers on the end of it. That has been known now for a great many eons: it was one of the first things the author was taught when he studied Asiatic practices; from India it long ago filtered to Greece and Rome and it has come to us via Anton Mesmer: it is a fundamental principle in several mystic arts: its mechanics were known even to the Sioux medicine man. Yet people at large, hitherto unguided about it, and perhaps because they lacked any real remedy, believed that the thing to do with sorrow was to “forget it.” Even Hippocrates remarks that the whole of an operation is not finished until the patient has recounted the incident to all of his friends in turn, and while this is inadequate therapy, it has been, like the Confessional, a part of popular knowledge for lo, these many ages: yet people persist in suppressing sorrow.
L. Ron Hubbard - The Retard; Section 2
When one deals with facts rather than theories and gazes for the first time upon the mechanisms of human action several things confound him, much as the flutterings of the heart did Harvey or the actions of yeasts did Pasteur. The blood did not circulate because Harvey said it could nor yet because he said it did. It circulated and had been circulating for eons; Harvey was clever and observant enough to find it; and this was much the case with Pasteur and other explorers of the hitherto unknown or unconfirmed. In dianetics the fact that the analytical mind was inherently perfect and remained structurally capable of restoration to full operation was not the least of the data found. That man was good, as established by exacting research, was no great surprise, but that an unaberrated individual was vigorously repelled by evil and yet gained enormous strength was astonishing since aberration had been so long incorrectly supposed to be the root of strength and ambition according to authorities since the time of Plato. That a man contained a mechanism which recorded with diabolical accuracy when the man was observably and by all presumable tests “unconscious” was newsworthy and surprising. To the layman the relationship of prenatal life to mental function has not entirely been disregarded since for centuries beyond count people were concerned with “prenatal influence.” To the psychiatrist, the psychologist and psycho-analyst, prenatal memory had long been an accepted fact since “memories of the womb” were agreed to influence the adult mind. But the prenatal aspect of the mind came as an entire surprise to dianetics, an unwanted and at the time unwelcome observation. Despite existing beliefs -- which are not scientific facts -- that the foetus had memory, the psychiatrist and other workers believed as well that memory could not exist in a human being until myelin sheathing was formed around the nerves. This was as confusing to dianetics as it was to psychiatry. After much work over some years the exact influence prenatal life had on the later mind was established by dianetics with accuracy. There will be those who, uninformed, will say that dianetics “accepts and believes in” prenatal memory. Completely aside from the fact that an exact science does not “believe” but establishes and proves facts, dianetics emphatically does nor believe in “prenatal memory.” Dianetics had to invade cytology and biology and form many conclusions by research; it had to locate and establish both the reactive mind and the hidden engram banks never before known before it came upon “prenatal” problems. It had been discovered that the engram recording was probably done on the cellular level, that the engram bank was contained in the cells. It was then discovered that the cells, reproducing from one generation to the next, within the organism, apparently carried with them their own memory banks. The cells are the first echelon of structure, the basic building blocks. They built the analytical mind. They operate, as the whip, the reactive mind. Where one has human cells, one has potential engrams. Human cells begin with the zygote, proceed in development with the embryo, become the foetus and finally the infant.
Each stage of this growth is capable of reaction. Each stage in the growth of the colony of cells finds them fully cells, capable of recording engrams. In dianetics “prenatal memory” is not considered since the standard banks which will someday serve the completed analyzer in the infant, child and man are not themselves complete. There is neither “memory” or “experience” before the nerves are sheathed as far as dianetic therapy is concerned. But dianetic therapy is concerned with engrams, not memories, with recordings, not experience, and wherever there are human cells, engrams are demonstrably possible and, when physical pain was present, engrams can be demonstrated to have been created. The engram is a recording like the ripples in the groove of a phonograph record: it is a complete recording of everything which occurred during the period of pain. Dianetics can locate, with its techniques, any engram which the cells have hidden, and in therapy the patient will often discover himself to be upon the prenatal cellular time track. There he will locate engrams and he goes there only because engrams exist there. Birth is an engram and is recovered by dianetics as a recording, not as a memory. By return and the cellular extension of the time track, zygote pain storage can be and is recovered. It is not memory. It impinged upon the analytical mind and it obstructed the standard banks where memory is stored. This is a very great difference from prenatal memory. Dianetics recovers prenatal engrams and finds them responsible for much aberration and discovers that any longing for the womb is not present in any patient but that engrams sometimes dictate a return to it, as in some regressive psychoses which then attempt to remake the body into a foetus.
This matter of prenatal life is discussed here at length in this synopsis to give the reader a perspective on the subject. We are dealing here with an exact science, precision axioms and new skills of application. By them we gain a command over aberration and psycho-somatic ills and with them we take an evolutionary step in the development of Man which places him yet another stage above his distant cousins of the animal kingdom.
L. Ron Hubbard - The Retard; Section 3
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 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 not 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.
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L. Ron Hubbard - The Retard; Section 4
There is therefore a necessity for pleasure, for working, as happiness can be defined, toward known goals over not unknowable obstacles. And the necessity for pleasure is such that a great deal of pain can be borne to attain it. Pleasure is the positive commodity. It is enjoyment of work, contemplation of deeds well done; it is a good book or a good friend; it is taking all the skin off one’s knees climbing the Matterhorn; it is hearing the kid first say daddy; it is a brawl on the Bund at Shanghai or the whistle of amour from a doorway; it’s adventure and hope and enthusiasm and “someday I’ll learn to paint”; it’s eating a good meal or kissing a pretty girl or playing a stiff game of bluff on the stock exchange. It’s what Man does that he enjoys doing; it’s what Man does that he enjoys contemplating; it’s what Man does that he enjoys remembering; and it may be just the talk of things he knows he’ll never do. Man will endure a lot of pain to obtain a little pleasure. Out in the laboratory of the world, it takes very little time to confirm that.
And how does necessity fit this picture? There is a necessity for pleasure, a necessity as live and quivering and vital as the human heart itself. He who said that a man who had two loaves of bread should sell one to buy white hyacinth, spoke sooth. The creative, the constructive, the beautiful, the harmonious, the adventurous, yes, and even escape from the maw of oblivion, these things are pleasure and these things are necessity. There was a man once who had walked a thousand miles just to see an orange tree and another who was a mass of scars and poor-set bones who was eager just to get a chance to “fan another bronc.” It is very well to dwell in some Olympian height and write a book of penalties and very well to read to find what writers said that other writers said, but it is not very practical. The pain-drive theory does not work. If some of these basics of dianetics were only poetry about the idyllic state of Man, they might be justified in that, but it happens that out in the laboratory of the world, they work. Man, in affinity with Man, survives, and that survival is pleasure. In the original equations of dianetics, when the research was young, it was believed that survival could be envisioned in personal terms alone and still answer all conditions. A theory is only as good as it works. And it works as well as it explains observed data and predicts flew material which will be found, in fact, to exist. Survival in personal terms was computed until the whole activity of Man could be theoretically explained in terms of self alone. The logic looked fairly valid. But then it was applied to the world. Something was wrong: it did not solve problems. In fact, the theory of survival in personal terms alone was so unworkable that it left a majority of behavior phenomena unexplained. But it could be computed and it still looked good. Then it was that a nearly intuitive idea occurred. Man’s understanding developed in ratio to his recognition of his brotherhood with the Universe. That was high flown but it yielded results.Was Man himself a brotherhood of Man? He had evolved and become strong as a gregarious being, an animal that hunted in packs. It seemed possible that all his activities could be computed in terms of the survival of the group. That computation was made. It looked good. Man survived, it was postulated, solely in terms of the survival of his group. It looked good but it left a majority of observed phenomena unexplained. It was attempted, then, to explain Man’s behavior in terms of Mankind alone; which is to say, it was assumed that Mankind survived for Mankind in a highly altruistic way. This was straight down the sylvan path of Jean Jacques Rousseau. It could be computed that Man lived alone for the survival of all Mankind. But when addressed to the laboratory -- the world -- it did not work.
Finally, it was recalled that some had thought that Man’s entire activity and all his behavior could be explained by assuming that he lived for sex alone. This was not an original assumption. But some original computations were made upon it and it is true that, by a few quick twists of the equation, his survival activity can be made to resolve on only the sexual basis. But when this was applied to observed data, again it failed to explain every phenomenon.
An examination was made of what had been attempted. It had been assumed that Man survived only for himself as an individual; it had been computed that he survived only for the group, the pack, for society; it had been postulated that he survived only for Mankind; and finally, it had been theorized that he lived only for sex. None worked alone. A new computation was made on the survival dynamic. Exactly for what was man surviving? All four of these factors, self, sex, group and Mankind were entered into a new equation. And now it was found, a theory was in hand which worked. It explained all observed phenomena and it predicted new phenomena which were discovered to exist. It was a scientific equation, therefore!
From the survival dynamic, in this fashion, were evolved the four dynamics. By survival dynamic was meant the basic command, SURVIVE! which underlay all activity. By dynamic was meant one of the four purpose divisions of the entire dynamic principle. The four dynamics were not new forces; they were sub-divisions of the primary force. DYNAMIC ONE is the urge toward ultimate survival on the part of the individual and for himself. It includes his immediate symbiotes*, the extension of culture for his own benefit, and name immortality.
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