TECHTALK #24;
DIANETICS: THE INCIDENT:

                    INTRODUCTION

50 years ago, on May 9, 1950, L Ron Hubbard launched the subject of Dianetics with the publication of his book "Dianetics, the Modern Science of Mental Health" [DMSMH], in which he laid out the basics of his trumpeted new "science."  It later evolved into Scientology and a global religion-business-military-crusade to take over the world and purge all unbelievers.

Dianetics is probably the most well-known and widely practiced method of regression therapy in use now.  It is probably responsible for making the concept of "past lives" real to more people in the West than any other technique.  I believe this is its greatest benefit.

                THE ELEMENTS OF DIANETICS

The key elements of Hubbard's Dianetic therapy are:

ENGRAM
a concept which he borrowed from earlier neuropsychology,
and modified to suit his untested and unproven theories.

REACTIVE MIND
which roughly parallels Freud's Unconsciousness, and
is theoretically held together by the force of engrams.

CHAINS
which are sequences of engrams, held
together by the earliest or BASIC one.

ERASURE
is the action by which the engram is supposedly eliminated, and sanity
returned, through the duplication of the earliest or basic engram in the chain.

CLEAR
the status of total health, sanity, and perfect memory,
supposedly achieved by the erasure of all engrams.

                THE REALITY OF CLEARING

In 1950 Hubbard glowingly described in expansive detail the state of "Clear," and asserted that it was easily and routinely achieved with his methods.  He and then his various organizations have continued to promote and sell this state right up to the present day.

However, the last 50 years have NOT been kind to Hubbard's theory.

Engrams have NEVER been located or demonstrated to exist.

The Reactive Mind has NEVER been located or demonstrated to exist.

Chains of theoretical engrams have NEVER been located or demonstrated to exist.

Erasure has not been demonstrated to exist, and going "earlier similar to basic" is NOT the way in which therapeutic relief is generally obtained in regression therapy.

Most damning of all, the much-hyped glorious state of "Clear" has NEVER been demonstrated.  The inevitable conclusion that it has NEVER been obtained looms large.

This is NOT to say that MUCH relief cannot be obtained through Dianetic therapy.  I have given and received much of it myself, and personally attest to its PARTIAL effectiveness.

However, its workability is limited, misunderstood, and far surpassed by other techniques.  By blindly but arrogantly mucking about in the Seeker's universe, it bypasses great amounts of charge, wastes huge amounts of time, and generally creates more case dramatizaton.

                THE ELUSIVE ENGRAM

In Hubbard's mystery play of the mind, the major villian is the the engram, which he supposes to be the root cause of ALL insanity, aberration, illness, disability and so forth.

First use of the term engram:
[CAPS added for emphasis]

According to James Floyd in "How We Perceive Memories" the term ENGRAM was coined by the German scientist Richard Semon in 1904, {before Hubbard's birth in 1911} for whom it "refers to the enduring change in the nervous system (the ‘memory trace’) that conserves the effects of experience across time."  Thus it was the physiological component of memory, assumed by neurophysiologists to locate WHERE memory was stored.
    [http://www.duke.edu/~kellogg/Classes/Mentation/Issue2/floyd.htm]

According to John Laurent, of the School of Science of Griffith University, the concept of ENGRAM then appeared in the book "The Soul of the White Ant", by the Belgian dramatist, essayist and amateur entomologist, Maurice Maeterlinck, first published in 1927.

"Now, the actual phrase that Maeterlinck uses - where he is discussing various theories which attempt to explain `memory' in termites as well as the other `social' insects (ants, bees etc.) - is "ENGRAMMATA upon the individual mneme" (Maeterlinck, 1927, p.198), and according to my dictionary (Webster's Collegiate), an ENGRAM is "a memory trace; specif.: a protoplasmic change in neural tissue hypothesized to account for persistence of memory."  For what it is worth, Maeterlinck explains that he obtained his phrase from the "German philosopher" Richard Semon."
    [http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1999/vol3/laurent_j.html]

Lashley's Search for the Engram:
According to Arun Jagota on 5/28/1998:
"One of the most intensive searches to localize memory traces--or engrams--within the brain was initiated by Karl Lashley in the 1920's.  Lashley's studies involved training an animal to perform some specific task (such as brightness discrimination or maze orientation) and lesioning a specific area of the cortex either before or after training.  Lashley then recorded the behavioural effects of cortical lesions on retention and acquisition of knowledge.  In 1950 [58], he summarized 30 years of research into two principles:  {1} The Equipotentiality Principle: all cortical areas can substitute for each other as far as learning is concerned.  {2} The Mass Action Principle: the reduction in learning is proportional to the amount of tissue destroyed, and the more complex the learning task, the more disruptive lesions are.
    In other words, Lashley believed that learning was a distributed process that could not be isolated within any particular area of the brain."
    [http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~jagota/NCS/VOL1/P3_html/node13.html]

Summary of Lashley's Work:
According to BACKUSS@WABASH.EDU:
"Karl Lashley is generally considered the founder of that subdiscipline...neuropsychology."     (Crinella et. al. p. 159)
"Karl Lashley worked extensively with rats in order to find the memory trace, or, as he defined it, the ENGRAM (the neural component of memory).  Lashley trained rats in different tasks including mazes, jumping stands, and visual apparati.  After the rats had learned the task well, certain portions of the brain were lesioned or removed.   Using this method, Lashley was unable to find the location of the ENGRAM." ...... SNIP.......
"I sometimes feel, in reviewing the evidence on the localization of the memory
trace (the ENGRAM), that the necessary conclusion is that learning just is not possible."
(Cited in Bennett, p. 185)
    [http://www.wabash.edu/depart/psych/Courses/Psych_81/LASHLEY.HTM]

Thus, when physiologists had concluded that memory was NOT stored in any specific area of the brain, Hubbard made an inductive leap [that I believe was quite correct] and assumed that memory was NOT stored in the *BRAIN* AT ALL, but in the MIND, which he thought was separate from body.  However, his description of the engram as including ALL DATA, which continues to be recorded even by an unconscious person, has NOT been demonstrated.

Only one experimental attempt to validate Hubbard's concepts of the engram is known, and it was a complete failure.  It is recounted in "An Experimental Investigation of Hubbard's Engram Hypothesis (Dianetics)" by Jack Fox, Alvin E. Davis, and B Lebovits in the Psychological Newsletter, 1959, 10 131-134. You can find the entire article at:
    [http://www.xs4all.nl/~kspaink/cos/comments/engrams.html]

Essentially, the test subject was rendered unconscious by sodium pentothol, and while he was out cold, a 35-word physics text was read to him. Over 30 hours of auditing by various auditors completely failed to retrieve the 35 words . . . or anything similar thereto.

This does not mean that perhaps surgical patients have not in fact recounted in great detail what was said by attendants during their surgeries.   I have heard many anecdotes of such occurrences, but know of none firsthand.   However, even if they exist, they do NOT prove that Hubbard's engram concept is valid.  They may even DISPROVE it.  Perhaps those patients WERE conscious, even though their bodies were not.  Perhaps their knowledge stems, not from UNconscious recordings by the "reactive mind" during an engram, but from their CONSCIOUS awareness AS BEINGS while their bodies were being carved up.

                THE REACTIONARY REACTIVE MIND

In Hubbard's mental morality play, the sum total of the evil engrams and the lesser villians, secondaries and locks, is the REACTIVE MIND, which automatically seizes control of the being's awareness and life, and forces him to do things he is unaware of.  As Hubbard was himself heavily in ENEMY and TREASON, and forcefully dramatizing "opterms," his modus operandi of "therapy" was to DESTROY the evil "reactive mind," or "bank" as he termed it.

The basic computation is this:
ME [Person] = Good [effect]
Reactive Mind = Bad [cause]
KILL! [destroy, erase, obliterate] = Therapy!

This directly contradicts all the noble sounding guidelines about auditing the client at cause, validating his responsibility for his condition, and so forth.  Of course, that is nothing new for Hubbard, whose policy directives usually frontally assault his philosophical platitudes.  For instance, his "religion of communication" is actually based on: don't talk about this, don't talk about that, never say this or that, don't talk to ANY of those people, and DISCONNECT from anyone and everyone who says ANYTHING we don't want you to hear or know about.

Unfortunately, opterming the "reactive mind" works as a massive service fac for the client, and convinces him that he cannot function sanely or analytically, because his engrams [reactive mind] won't let him.  It sets up the model of his "reactive mind" as some OBJECTIVE THING, separate from himself, that he CAN attack and destroy.

This encourages ATTACK as the action of "therapy."  When you realize that the "reactive mind" is actually just PART OF THE PERSON OR HIS MIND THAT HE DOESN'T LIKE NOW, then you can SEE that attacking the reactive mind is actually ATTACKING ONESELF.

Believing and behaving in this mode locks you in to ENEMY or below as an ethics condition.

                SHACKLED BY CHAINS

Believing that all incidents causing aberration are neatly arranged in linear chronological chains that can be pursued back to a BASIC INCIDENT is simply another fixed idea service facsimile which sounds good, but has NO relationship to how the mind is put together.  The logic of the mind is NOT convenient linear engineering logic.  It is the amorphous complex spider-web logic of DREAMS.  Having the auditor direct the client to what the auditor believes the client should look at is the height of folly.   ONLY the client knows what pictures, thoughts and significances are in his awareness.  THAT is what he must look at to resolve.

Using a meter to find forgotten things in the far corners of the clients mind simply BY-PASSES WHATEVER the client's attention is already on, that he easily COULD confront, and totally by-passes his ACTUAL case, which is completely overlooked!

                    INVISIBLE ERASURE

Erasure itself is a completely fallacious concept.  The client does not get relief by "erasure."  Incidents do NOT resolve by DIS-appearance.  They resolve by APPEARANCE and INTEGRATION.  The PROBLEM is that the client HAS "erased" incidents, through NOT-IS.

The effective solution is to make them RE-appear, confront them, view them, understand them, and integrate them into one's complete and undivided universe.  What needs to be viewed will appear when viewing what has already appeared.  This is NOT a single-topic linear romp back through time, but a complex tour of many apparently different subjects woven through past, present and future.   The End Phenomenon of this is NOT F/N, COG, and VGI's, which are usually just ARC-X needle, DUB-IN and GLEE, but confronting the contents of the mind/awareness until one comes up to KNOW in the now-revealed area.

                UN-CLEAR ON THE CONCEPT

The MOST massive failure of Dianetics is its complete inability to ever make even one "clear."  Hubbard waxed massively poetic for many years about the marvelous attributes and abilities of clears, including, total eidetic memory with exact recall of everything they have ever experienced on their whole track, marvelous health, absence of ALL psychosomatic illnesses, including colds and flu, increased intelligence, acute vision that never requires eyeglasses, the ability to change the size of body organs by intention, and an entire catalog of other wonderful aspects of the "clears" that were being routinely produced by Dianetics [and later Scientology].

Unfortunately, this was simply *ALL LIES*. NO such people were EVER produced.

Hubbard himself had terrible health, was a drunk and a drug addict, and wore glasses all of his adult life.  The Church has dealt with this thunderous embarrassment by downplaying ALL of the LRH definitions of "clear," and substituting something so vague and amorphous that you could convict my pet turtle of being a "natural clear."  The bait is the preposterous DMSMH *HYPE*, and then they switch you to the new meaningless definitions.

                    REGRESSION REVISITED

There are much more efficient and effective forms of regression therapy.  For simple direct plain vanilla regression, even hypnotism supercedes Dianetics.  It is not surprising that they are related . . . remember that Hubbard himself bragged about being a Master Hypnotist, and incidents of his public mass hypnosis of others are confirmed by surviving hypnotees.

In my very first Dianetic session, I contacted an incident which we proceeded to "standardly run out," and I forget about it.   I had many hundreds of hours of Grade Chart auditing after that, including Dianetics, Drug Rundown, assessments, repair lists, GF40's, "OT" levels, etc.

Many years later, I attended a public demonstration of therapeutic hypnotism.  I volunteered as a test subject in a convention lobby with about 30 strangers present.  I had never seen the hypnotist before.  His "assessment" was to have me tell him a physical sensation I wanted to handle.   He got emotion from the sensation.  Then he pulled the thought out of the emotion . . . and I was right back in that first Dianetic incident I THOUGHT I had handled, and which had NEVER been re-addressed by any of my complex fancy Dianetics and Scientology technology, and which was obviously screamingly unflat.  It took about 90 seconds, and he didn't need to study the worksheets for a week, buy an expensive emeter, assess any long lists, or do anything complex.  He KNEW what he was doing, and he got me IN SESSION INSTANTLY in a VERY UNSAFE PLACE, and kept me there until the incident was resolved.

NONE of my fancy flag-trained Class 8 and Class 9 auditors and C/Ss had been able to accomplish this simple and powerful feat during my many years in the much-vaunted cult.

Of course, simple regression is NOT the answer to "case," because the client's universe is NOT LINEAR.  Simply duplicating pieces of the past is NOT enough to heal the client's universe.  Popping yourself into incidents here and there all over your past track will often resolve SOME of the SPECIFIC somatics you are looking at, but will ALSO probably "key-in" or restimulate HUGE amounts of UNKNOWN charge from the RELATED items and incidents you do NOT examine in detail.  For instance, you MAY get rid of the somatic in your chest where you were shot in battle, but you might also find that you are now constantly and COMPULSIVELY DRAMATIZING THE IDENTITY OF A SOLDIER.

                    A BETTER WAY

To the extent that the past exerts unhandled influences on the present and the future, regression therapy of some form IS appropriate.  However, simply regressing a person into the past does NOT handle its present and future effects, and in fact MAY simply burden the person with MORE unhandled confusion.  What is necessary is some form of therapy which unravels the connection between past and present, and INTEGRATES the past seamlessly into their cohesive understood universe.

That better way is the Universal Clearing Process [UCP] which DIFFERENTIATES the past from the present by COMPARING them, CLEARLY separating the person into present time.

In addition, UCP also RE-CREATES the future by comparing IT to the present.  UCP thus
combines the useful aspects of both Dianetics and $cientology, while DISCARDING the huge accumulation of lies, errors and fixed ideas which abound in those two subjects.

In fact, UCP will even run out Dianetics and $cientology!

WHY MISS OUT?
DO UCP & SEE!

O
    ---  )
\

Konchok Penday
<KP@net-prophet.net>
Research & Technical Writing
Recipient of the Alex Yakovlev
Technical Excellence Award :-)

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