Re: Ken Ogger, The Pilot speaks from the dead
Pilot'sPost Z11
Looking Over DMSMH From Hindsight
(From Post 6 – July 1997)
The question is how much of
DMSMH (Dianetics the Modern Science of Mental Health) would a modern Dianetic auditor toss out the window as being mistaken guesswork.
A great deal of Dianetic auditing has been done since the release of Dianetics the
Modern Science of Mental Health (DMSMH). The modern Dianetic techniques bear little resemblance to those used in the book. A few things have been officially recognized as mistakes, but most things are considered simply to be new “discoveries”.
Based on our subsequent experience, the original book turns out to be mostly wrong, or at best, a shaky collection of half truths. But Scientology still hangs on to basic definitions and conclusions that were drawn from this wrong data.
Here I am going to review
DMSMH from the viewpoint of a modern Dianetic auditor. I will try to avoid using any of my own non-standard-tech research in this evaluation.
The only reason that a modern Class 8 would not write such an analysis is that they work hard to make Ron always right and twist things around to avoid criticizing his early work. It is this mental twist that I'm trying to get rid of, both for them and for myself.
The modern Dianetic techniques (Routine 3R etc.) do produce results (although maybe not as much as advertised) and the original book generally just produced interesting phenomena.
For those of us who have had success with modern Dianetic techniques, we need to re-evaluate our basic premises and stop carrying excess baggage and wrong data forward from this inspiring but poorly researched early book.
AN ANALYSIS OF DMSMH
The Dianetic therapy described in
Dianetics the Modern Science of Mental Health (DMSMH) was obviously not researched and tested thoroughly before the book was released.
But the Dianetic boom itself, and subsequent use of the techniques given in the book can be used as research data to validate or invalidate the theories given in the book.
In the past, most evaluations of this book have used a black or white approach where either it was all good (because some results were produced) or it was all bad (because some things failed). Let us instead consider the entire thing to be a series of theoretical ideas of which some were subsequently validated in practice and others were found to be false.
I believe that what we really had was a series of bright ideas proposed by Ron that were based on a very limited number of experiments. He drew broad conclusions from isolated instances.
Unfortunately, the book was full of sales hype and exaggerations and was presented as a finished and validated practice rather than a series of theoretical propositions which needed to be researched.
The Dianetic boom came about because there were things in the book that were correct and easily demonstrable. But the boom collapsed because there was too much that didn't work.
The typical story of the early Dianetics practitioners was that they would begin with tremendous enthusiasm generated by the fantastic phenomena that they found when they applied the techniques. But things would not carry forward as expected, and so they would blame themselves for the failures and restudy the book or take a course with Hubbard. Finally they would realize that it was the book rather than themselves which was inadequate and abandon the subject in disgust.
But the book was not an absolute which was true or false in its entirety. It was built on guesswork, but it was brilliant guesswork.
So let us look at some of the ideas that were proposed and see what we can make of them based on hindsight.
1. The existence of engramic recordings of incidents, including sonic as well as visio and including events that take place while one is unconscious.
This one has been validated endlessly. You can easily throw someone into an engram and dredge up the most fascinating array of data. This is the reason for the Dianetic boom. Almost anyone who read the book and understood it well enough to apply the techniques correctly soon had a PC running through an incident in a dramatic manner. So they told their friends that it worked and the friends got their own books and it all expanded like wildfire.
Even Miller's critical work recounts numerous people who joined the boom because they had run through a vivid engramic experience with the techniques.
Before I ever walked into an org, I got a copy of
DMSMH and read it. Then I put my mother on the couch and explained to her about how we could run through incidents buried in the subconscious to relieve hidden stress. She was game to try it. So I asked her to move to the moment when I had walked into the living room to get her to try doing a session and then told her to move through the incident recounting it as she went through it. And she gave me what sounded like a literal replay of every word and gesture I had used. She did, however, seem to be almost in a hypnotic trance, which I took to be Dianetic reverie (you never see this with modern Dianetics).
Satisfied that she could run through an incident, I then asked her to tell me the first thing that popped into her mind when I snapped my fingers. Then I asked “How Old Are You” and snapped and she answered “17”. I said good, move to when you were 17 and she let out a scream. There was a fire and she had climbed out of her second floor bedroom window onto the lower roof that extended over another wing of the house. She had panicked and run screaming across the roof and fell through a skylight onto a table in the room below and passed out.
I was impressed. Obviously Dianetics worked. Except that this was only one of the many ideas in the book. This one was valid, but some of the others were not. This was a situation that I was not prepared for, namely that we had a series of unconfirmed hypothesis rather than a tried and true science.
2. The ability to come up with accurate data by running through incidents Dianetically.
This one is half true. An amazing amount of data can be pulled into consciousness by repeatedly scanning through an incident. Often it is found to be correct or mostly correct, but occasionally it’s not quite right or even blatantly wrong.
What appears to be happening is that you get better data than you would by simple recall, but it is nowhere near perfect.
3. The idea that at some level we all have perfect recordings of everything we have experienced.
This is a nice idea, and it could be true, but I can't see where it has ever been proven. It is also an idea that is very hard to disproved since you can always say that more needs to be done to achieve full access to these recordings.
We do see improvements in people's ability to recall things, and we even find that the ability to recall sounds, tastes, smells, etc. can be improved, but none of this is absolute.
We can, however, state with certainty that a “clear” does not have perfect recall even in the current lifetime.
4. The idea that prenatal incidents are recorded as engrams.
Here again we are on shaky ground.
We know from modern Dianetics as used in Scientology that the person himself (the thetan) does not sit there in the womb as the body grows. The most common experience seems to be one where the thetan hangs around the mother for awhile and enters the body just before birth.
Modern techniques use a lighter style which is closer to recall type processes and the person finds his way back down chains of incidents. Doing this, the person tends to slide back into past lives rather than into prenatal incidents.
So we do not have enough modern data to evaluate whether or not these prenatal incidents are real.
The only technique which ever brought up a significant number of prenatal incidents was repeater technique. Here the PC says a phrase over and over again until he falls into the incident where the phrase was recorded engramically.
The early Dianeticists observed a great deal of interesting phenomena while playing around with this. But as far as I know, there was never a serious effort to validate or invalidate the incidents that were being dredged up.
To the best of my knowledge, modern clears and OTs do not have any significant recall of the prenatal area. And the general supposition is that they were not in the body at that time anyway.
If there are prenatal incidents, then we are dealing with a different mechanism than the thetan's own engramic recordings. The 1952 speculations were that it was the Genetic Entity's recordings, and the modern idea is probably that it comes from BTs who were in the body before birth (but there is so little discussion of confidential data that it’s hard to say what is currently thought about this).
This would have to be researched to determine if these recordings are accurate and to determine what is doing the recording.
The only thing here that we can say with certainty is that Ron found a wild phenomena and built a lot of incorrect speculations around it and that we still don't know to this day exactly what the real truth is in this area.
5. The idea that a later incident can gain force from an earlier incident.
Here I'm going to carefully avoid mention of related ideas such as erasure and chains and basic incidents and try to deal with this concept in isolation so that we can look over the other points separately. Ron bundles many different concepts together here and I wish to raise the point that some may be true but not necessarily all of the ideas.
If, in running a later incident, an earlier incident is stirred up (restimulated), then the later incident begins to draw force from the earlier one and become more severe instead of getting better.
This is valid and is easily observed in modern Dianetics.
I don't think that this idea originated with Ron, but it is a key point that is often missed in the psychiatric field. The normal disproof of incident running as a therapy is by showing that the patient sometimes gets worse instead of better by running through an incident, and these shallow refutations never try to find an earlier underlying incident which can be run successfully.
6. The idea that these engrams are arrayed in chains which are anchored in “basic” engrams.
Here I think that the idea is oversimplified and slightly off.
There are engrams which can be run successfully and ones which can only be handled by tracing back to earlier similar engrams until you do find one which can be discharged.
DMSMH is primarily concerned with earlier similar content and modern Dianetics discards this in favor of earlier similar somatics (pains, sensations, emotions, and attitudes). Interim techniques such as 1966 style simply used a vague “locate an earlier similar incident” type command that could go either way, and this is even used in modern Dianetics in special circumstances.
The modern technique seems in general to work better, but all methods of going earlier had some success. This implies that every engram is on dozens of chains, including chains of the various somatics in the incident and various aspects of the incident's content.
If it was the mere fact of an earlier similar engram existing which prevented discharging the incident, then you would never be able to run anything because there would be so much pulled into restimulation.
So we have to back off a bit on this idea and take a more practical approach. Which is to say that sometimes running an engram restimulates an earlier one so you have to run that one instead, rather than assuming that these things are arrayed in some permanent fashion.
I would like to continue using the word “basic” to refer to an incident which can be discharged, but I wish to discard any notion that these “basics” are the first times that anything happened.
If any of our ideas about past lives are correct, then the amount of earlier incidents that exist are great enough to imply that we have almost never run the first time that a particular pain or experience happened. And yet we can often successfully run and discharge “basic” engrams.
It may be that the person either simply faces something or doesn't quite confront it and thereby becomes restimulated by the earlier incidents. So we work earlier and undercut the current incident and also get the added benefit that we are addressing something that is more remote from his current existence and therefore is easier to face.
When we hit one that he can face without pulling in earlier restimulation, it runs and discharges and we then consider that it was a “basic” incident. But there is no reason to assume that if we had run this at a different time, when the person was in better or worse shape, that we would have hit the same basic incident. And on a general basis, we observe this in case supervision, where there is a recognition that a case on Dianetics can run shallow or deep.
7. The idea that these engrams “erase”.
What we observe in running Dianetics is that an incident can be charged up and difficult to face, or it can be discharged and easily confronted. In other words, it is capable of bothering the person, or it is incapable of bothering the person any more.
There is the idea that the incident is a picture which vanishes upon erasure. But you can always visualize that picture again. All that has changed is that the person is not compulsively creating the picture and it is back under his control. And there is a later statement by Ron, around 1958, where he considers that most of the person's pictures are not being compulsively created all the time, but only the ones that are currently restimulated. My own observations are that this is correct.
The book also contains a statement that there is no recall of pain outside of these engrams and that it is the pain which erases and can no longer be recalled. I certainly have not found this to be the case. But, since pain is generally undesirable, once an incident is under one's control, one is not particularly inclined to summon the pain back up again except perhaps as an exercise or for a point of research.
So nothing actually erases. It is simply discharged and ceases to affect the person. It comes back under his control. However, it would be reasonable to keep calling this “erasure” on the basis that the “charge” is being erased. As far as I can tell, these incidents don't “charge up” again after they have been run out properly, so calling this an erasure would seem to be appropriate.
But I am playing a word game here, redefining the term to match the phenomena. The original idea of erasure as explained in the book is not really correct.
8. The role of unconsciousness in engrams
DMSMH considers that being unconscious is a key factor in these engrams. It is part of the definition (a moment of pain and unconsciousness).
Later Dianetic techniques consistently worked better by simply running any stressful incident and ignoring the question of whether or not the individual was actually unconscious. This was justified by explaining that there was always a bit of unconsciousness present when the person flinched at anything.
Furthermore, the results improved significantly when the running of engrams was balanced by running incidents of giving an “engram” to another person (in other words, run the incident of hitting somebody else as well as running the incident of somebody hitting you). These “overt engrams” run successfully in the techniques. But it should be obvious that you are not normally unconscious while hitting somebody else.
I suppose that we could say that anything which is not fully confronted is to some degree unconscious. But we are redefining the word in this case. The
DMSMH book did not use the word in that sense. It said “unconscious” and (obviously from the examples) it meant truly physically “unconscious”. On that basis the book was totally wrong.
With hindsight, a better explanation would be to say that things which you don't face can feed into the “subconscious” (or “reactive mind” or whatever you want to call it) and can thereby affect you. And that one way of handling this is to face up to the incidents now by means of incident running techniques. This would apply to anything that was done to one or that one has done to another or even that one has seen people doing to each other with the only proviso being that the person did not face up to it at the time.
9. The idea that engrams are basic and that secondaries and locks build up on them.
Modern Dianetics still has this idea, but I don't see that it has ever been proven.
Things that seem trivial or light incidents that appear to have effects all out of proportion to the severity of the incident might well be drawing their power from earlier heavier incidents. I think that we have seen this enough in practice to consider it to be proven.
But this doesn't prove that an engram is always heavier than a secondary or “lock” nor does it prove that a lock or secondary might not be basic.
If the Scientology ideas about theta are correct, then the early basics could not be engrams because the thetan would not have been subject to force at the beginning but would have to have gradually decayed to the point where he could be hit. Therefore the early basics must be “locks”.
If it was originally this way, then it still might work this way at least sometimes.
Let's take a hypothetical example. Is it that the person decides that Volkswagen's are ugly and then gets hit by one (because he doesn't want to see them), or is it that the person gets hit by a Volkswagen and then begins to think that they are ugly because he has been hit. I think that it can go either way, and I think that we have observed it happening either way in auditing.
Might not disconnecting from a friend launch one into a series of secondaries and engrams which build up on top of one's regret at such an action?
But here I am speculating. My point is not to say which way it is, but only to point out that we do not have any proof in either direction and that therefore the book's assumptions are unfounded.
10. The idea that one comes “up-tone” to cheerfulness as an incident runs out.
We have seen this one in practice. We assume that as long as the person feels apathetic or angry or whatever, there is more that must be run either by continuing to go through the current incident (if it is discharging) or by going earlier to an underlying incident.
We rarely see “clockwork” progressions from emotion to emotion as we run something out, but we do see that this general rule is important and does work.
There is a great deal of later material on the tone scale, but that is not in the Dianetic book and can be set aside for the purposes of this discussion.
Note that this indicates that if the person is still worried or upset or angry about the contents of an engram they have run, it means that the incident was left unflat. On this basis one might guess what incident Ron left unflat on his own case (listen to the RJ 67 tape).
11. The idea that illogical associations can develop between different things in an incident.
I think that we do see this in practice. The person is beaten up while Beethoven's fifth symphony is playing on the radio and then sometimes he begins to dislike the symphony.
And I think that we also see a widow taking a dislike to red sports cars when she has seen her husband run over by one. In this case there is no pain and unconsciousness, just a severe loss.
But nothing shows that the majority of factors in an incident become associated in this manner. To go a bit further, I think that we can show that it does happen occasionally, but that it does not happen usually and that it is certainly not all embracive. One or two factors in an incident may become irrationally associated, but certainly not everything in the incident.
Here I believe that the book is addressing a significant phenomena, but the slant on it is far too sweeping and generalized.
12. The idea that one dramatizes an engram when it is restimulated (keyed in).
I think that I have seen this occasionally, but it is rare.
My own experience was that I would get nervous or fearful without a direct cause and that I could later look back and find an engram that was the real source of the fear and which was keyed in by something in the environment. But as far as I know, I never actually dramatized the content of an engram with the possible exception of turning on a somatic (pain, etc.). Please note the difference between an emotional reaction and the actual dramatization of contents.
Turning off a psychosomatic pain by means of running engrams does not necessarily mean that the pain came about because the engram was restimulated. The pain might also turn off because confronting the engrams acted as a way to practice confronting the pain. But maybe I think this because most of the engram running I received was after I went clear and that might change things in this regard.
Again we have an occasional phenomena that is blown out of proportion. We do see the restimulation due to earlier engrams causing a person to be disturbed or avoid things, but we do not see true “dramatization” very often.
13. The idea that engramic “command phrases” act like post hypnotic suggestions.
Again we seem to be looking at a rare phenomena.
I did once (and only once) blow a somatic on myself by finding a command phrase that was holding it in place. As far as I can tell, this is the only command phrase that ever affected me in this lifetime. Of course I'm ignoring the matter of whole track implants, but even there it only seemed like I was obeying the things in rare instances so that it was a minor rather than a major factor.
Engrams and implants do have their effect in making one flinch at various things or distorting one's thinking, but the major effect seems to be in avoiding things or becoming upset about things that have heavy force associated with them rather than a simple minded obedience to orders given during painful incidents.
We do know that post hypnotic suggestions can be implanted by means of hypnosis, and we can probably assume that the use of pain and drugs in the hypnotism can beef up the power of these commands considerably. This is the logic by which Ron drew his conclusions about engrams. But we don't really have much data about the long term behavior of post hypnotic suggestions. My own impression is that these things wear off fairly rapidly and you wouldn't find somebody continuing to obey orders a decade later whether those “orders” are chance phrases within an engram or post hypnotic suggestions.
Of course there is brainwashing / conditioning, and most of the data on that is kept top secret by the governments who engage in this. But all indications are that they use far more than simple verbal commands. The hints that we see in various movies imply the use of tailored painful false experiences in combination with drugs and hypnosis. And even here I have my doubts about the long term effectiveness.
The popular spy movies have legions of conditioned plants living as ordinary citizens and waiting to be triggered by conditioned command phrases, but this may be just as inaccurate as the old rocket to Mars type science fiction stories. We do have space ships, but they are pretty far from the simpleminded fictional ones. And we do have conditioning and brainwashing, but it might be a mere shadow of the fictional presentation.
If, for example, “the control of Candy Jones” is an accurate account, then they were only able to use her as a courier (not doing anything very repugnant) a number of times before she began to shrug off the conditioning. This might be the best that they can do unless they get their hands on a psychotic who wants to kill everybody anyway for his own reasons. And in that case they are simply encouraging the person's own aberrated desires rather than creating a new aberration.
So I don't think that you'll find aberrations stemming from command phrases. At best they would stir up or reinforce existing aberrations. So in this respect also the book is wrong, and modern Dianetics pretty much ignores the subject of command phrases.
14. The idea that you run secondaries late on the track (unlike running engrams where you try to get as early as possible).
This was done to relieve charge from the case so that the PC could find earlier engrams more easily.
I think that we have seen this work in practice.
But modern rundowns handle secondaries in the same manner as engrams. This primarily shows up in Scientology rundowns which use Dianetics, such as the ext/int rundown. In these procedures, the standard approach was to run recalls followed by secondaries and finally followed by engrams with all of these being run on either 3 or 4 flows. Occasionally the secondary chain drops into an engram before it erases, but usually not.
So here we have an approach which does work, but later alternate approaches might be better. In other words, again we have a practical idea which is not all encompassing.
15. The idea that all psycho-somatics stem from secondaries and engrams.
Obviously false if we use the original
DMSMH definitions.
Overts (harmful acts) are just as likely to bring about a psycho-somatic as are engrams. The modern Dianetic technique handles this by running overt engrams as well as incidents which happened to the person.
Modern Scientology has other sources for psycho-somatics, one example being NOTS.
We call these somatics for short and they represent any pain, sensation, emotion, or attitude that does not have a current physical source.
If we survey all of modern Scientology and Dianetics, it should be obvious that no more than 20 to 30 percent of a person's somatics could come from engrams that have been done to him. And this is assuming that we currently know all the answers, which I believe to be highly doubtful. So the real percentage is probably far lower (maybe 10 percent).
No matter how we look at the numbers, the success ratio of alleviating somatics in 1950 must have been extremely low.
Therefore there must have been a lot of wishful thinking and quite a bit of justification in the form of “we haven't managed to find the right engram yet”.
The extreme mistake was to think that when you found the source for one person's headache, you had found the general source of all headaches.
In practice, the causes currently known in Scientology would include the following:
a) the pc goes to a baseball game and gets a headache because he was once hit over the head with a baseball bat.
b) the pc has a headache because he used to hit his brother over the head (overt).
c) the pc has a headache because he sympathized with somebody whose head was crushed under a falling safe (flow three).
d) the pc has a headache because the thetan interiorized forcefully and smashed into the head (ext/int rundown).
e) the pc has a headache because mother used to have headaches and she died and he wants to bring her back. (life continuum).
f) the pc has a headache because he used to use them as an excuse for staying out of school. (justifier)
g) the pc has a headache because it solves a problem
h) the pc has a headache because of entities
i) the pc has a headache because he is flinching at communicating with his head (maybe he has decided that bodies are evil or that his head is ugly or whatever - grade 0 from where could you communicate to a ... type processes).
j) the pc has a headache because he has some kind of theta machine that is hitting the head for some reason (maybe to remind him to go to the store - see 3rd ACC & other early references on mental machinery).
k) the pc has a headache to gain sympathy.
l) the pc has a headache to make others wrong.
Here I already have a dozen different potential reasons for a headache. And there is no indication that there aren't another dozen reasons we haven't figured out yet.
We have always beefed up our success ratio by using assists that don't try to find out the source of the somatic but simply cool it down temporarily (such as a touch assist or pushing the somatic into the walls etc.).
And modern Dianetics might sometimes work by accustoming the person to confronting and mocking up pain and force rather than by actually finding the actual source of something.
I have had a handful of times where I experienced a true magical disappearance of a somatic on running an engram. I consider those to be the cases where an engram was the correct source for the somatic.
But most of my gains while running Dianetics were in the form of something lessening or becoming easier to turn off or handle. This I attribute to the fact that the incident running can act as an exercise in confront and cool something down in that manner even if the true source was not an engram. Obviously, engrams are only the tiniest part of the picture.
16. The Dianetic techniques
The overall idea was that one could run through an incident multiple times, gradually raising one's confront of it, or, if necessary, find an earlier incident until the “charge” could be relieved. This does appear to work as a general approach.
But the original techniques included many things which were inherited from hypnosis. Things such as installing a “canceller”, etc. My own experience with the book before going into a Scientology org was that it did tend to encourage some sort of trance state. Furthermore, Ron himself had them change from having the PC lying on a couch to making him sit up in a chair to reduce the likelihood of inducing a hypnotic trance (this is on an early tape of 1950-51, but I forget which one).
And practices for locating engrams, such as repeater technique, tended to throw the person in over their heads in an incident that they had little perception or understanding of.
In general the techniques were difficult for the auditor, and rough on the PC, and didn't work very well.
In comparison, all the later incident running techniques are light and easy and simple. Modern tricks such as locating incidents on an easy gradient, getting the date and duration, searching for an earlier beginning, and so forth, are major advances which show the original methods to have been crudely researched and poorly worked out.
And you do not see any trance like behavior with modern Dianetic techniques, which, in my opinion, makes them much safer.
17. The Dianetic phenomena: holders, bouncers, and deniers
A holder keeps a person stuck in an incident.
A bouncer causes him to bounce out of the incident.
A denier makes the incident seem unreal or non-existent.
All of these are described in the Dianetic book and attributed to command phrases. For example, an engram might contain the phrase “I can't stay here” and therefore the person bounces out of it.
I think that this command phrase behavior was observed occasionally when tossing people into incidents by means of repeater technique. The incidents would be overcharged, outgradient, and unreal to the person and the early Dianetic techniques did tend to be hypnotic so that the PC was liable to follow orders given in the engram when he was in the middle of running it. But this doesn't mean that he was following those orders in everyday life.
You almost never find this command phrase behavior in modern Dianetics and Scientology. But you do see manifestations of holders, bouncers, and deniers on occasion. These do not stem from the commands given in engrams. They come from the persons action in response to things that they don't want to face up to. People get stuck in things, or flinch away from them or pretend that they are not there. It is a valid manifestation of mental charge.
The mistake is in thinking that this behavior comes from engramic command phrases. That puts a wrong slant onto the Dianetic view of human behavior. Later Scientology handling consists of raising the person's confront of things so that they don't flinch from them. But the question of why does a person handle things by flinching or whatever might be a lucrative line to pursue in future research.
18. The role of engrams in everyday life
Here I am generalizing, because there is a lot in the book which analyzes behavior in terms of engrams and there are many conclusions drawn about society etc.
Based on number 15 above, engrams are only a minor source of behavior. And the various factors such as command phrases did not turn out to work to the degree predicted although the phenomena of denying or bouncing away from hot mental areas does seem to occur occasionally. Therefore, all the broad conclusions that are based on a theory of engrams exclusively are obviously wrong.
Some of these ideas have been revisited from a Scientology perspective which includes things such as overts and justifications etc., but that is its own subject. As far as the Dianetics book goes, we pretty much have to toss it and restart from scratch.
19. The idea that a stimulus-response Reactive Mind underlies all aberrations.
So much of the book has already gone out the window based on the above discussion that it should be obvious that there was insufficient data at that time to support such a sweeping conclusion.
Reactive stimulus response behavior can be shown to exist. But I think that we can see very easily in Scientology that most aberrations are not reactive in nature. How many overts are an unthinking reaction and how many are conscious? I think that anybody who has experience with running grade 2 should find the obvious conclusion that most are conscious rather than reactive.
Furthermore, although we can trace some reactive behavior back to engrams, this does not prove that all reactive behavior comes from engrams. Just because some houses are made of wood does not mean that all houses are made of wood.
Therefore I think that the above statement is an unfounded excessively generalized conclusion.
The correct statement would be along the lines of recognizing that there is an unthinking stimulus response phenomena which forms part of the picture of human behavior and aberration. The person has unthinking reactions and some of them stem from engrams.
But I do believe that we could state that all aberrations stem from some kind of mental “charge”. That is almost inherent in the definition of aberration (in other words, a distortion has been introduced). But that is not to say that all of this mental charge is reactive nor does it prove that the charge all stems from engrams.
We could, from a Scientology perspective, point out that the person ceases to think in areas that are too heavily charged. But that is not quite the same as this picture of a “Reactive Mind” fed by engrams.
20. The idea of a “Clear” who is free of all aberrations.
Obviously, from Scientology theory, the idea of a one lifetime "Clear" attained by running the basic-basic prenatal incident of this lifetime, resulting in perfect recall, computer like computational capabilities, and other super abilities is totally false.
If such a state exists, it could certainly not be attained by running the technique described in DMSMH. Is there any Scientology auditor who could honestly believe that Ron could have made a “Clear” without ever running an overt or pulling a withhold or running a past life incident? I think not.
That means that there were no “clears” when the book was written and therefore the state was hypothetical, an ideal to shoot for rather than a verified result.
Was there any basis for this ideal?
Actually yes. If the mind is distorted by mental charge, then removing that charge should produce a cleared condition.
As to the theoretical attributes, these can be hypothesized on the basis that anything which is attainable on a one of a kind occurrence must be an inherent capability of the mind which could become universal if all aberrations were removed.
In other words, if one person can have a photographic memory, then this must be a property of the mind and it should be theoretically available to everyone if they were not abbreviated.
This does actually make a nice theory and a good target to aim for. But it is a theoretical ideal rather than a cast iron truth.
When we enter Scientology theory into this, we find ourselves in a totally different landscape. We run engrams to raise the PC's confront of force. We ask for postulates made at the time of the engrams. And we get the person up to the point of controlling his mental pictures and being at cause over mocking them up at will. And from this something really does happen, and we call that the state of Clear.
And it is a wonderful state. One's mind is no longer twisted by the distortions of forces long gone.
But it is not the “clear” of DMSMH. And it is not freedom from all aberration. And it is not total recall or total consciousness or some kind of superman condition.
Efforts to twist the modern state of clear so as to match the theoretical ideal given in DMSMH is nothing more than sales hype. It is a nice state. Why not let it be what it is and stop the bullshit?
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This analysis is, of course, only a lick and a promise. A thorough chapter by chapter review should really be done.
Furthermore, a detailed compilation and review of actual experience with modern Dianetics in the handling of cases is needed. The current attitude is fanatical and assumes that the technology is flawless rather than examining each individual point in detail and determining which components are extremely workable and which are actually inhibiting the results.
Every scientific breakthrough has been followed by decades of review and refinement. It is not enough to say “it works”. The original light bulbs and DC generators “worked” but they were a poor and shabby product compared to the tech that lights our homes today.
As to independent scientific reviews, that would be nice but is currently impossible. There is a war on, engendered by the fanatical attitudes of those who currently run the subject. Everyone on both sides of the fence has too much of a vested interest in either proving it all wrong or proving it all absolutely correct. No science can take place in such an atmosphere.
And there is the problem of needing qualified reviewers. There are almost none in existence. The org can't produce them because of the fanatical viewpoint and the lack of adequate scientific training among the bulk of the membership. And outside “experts” do not generally know the subject well enough and are rarely qualified to review it in a true sense.
A zeppelin expert has no authority in reviewing airplanes. He would have to learn the subject of heavier than air flight first. Imagine that you have a very poorly designed airplane which just barely flies. Now you bring in a zeppelin expert (who is truly competent in his field, it is a quite complex one) who doesn't believe in heavier than air flight and he wants to solve the plane's problems by adding balloons to the wings because that is what is obviously wrong to his eyes.
There have been a handful of people who have trained both in psychology and Dianetics/Scientology (if I recall correctly, Ray Kemp was one) but they have been placed in an impossible position and generally end up hiding in the freezone.
And there have been a few psychologists who do investigate past lives or out of body experiences. These would at least be capable of investigating the subject without prejudice. But they themselves are often attacked by the bulk of the “authorities” in the field.
Note that the lack of proper laboratory validation does not disprove a theory. The Quantum Mechanics double slit experiment remained a “thought” experiment for decades before the laboratory techniques caught up. And most of Einstein's “experiments” were “thought experiments” rather than laboratory tests.
We have phenomena here which are mind boggling and in serious need of thorough scientific research and analysis. But the outside “experts” wouldn't look and the Scientology “experts” wouldn't think. I can only pray for a time when this area can be looked at without prejudice or fanaticism.
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In conclusion, there is surprisingly little that can be salvaged from the book. Its best work was in providing an ideal to shoot for and popularizing the idea of a theoretically perfect mind distorted by aberrations which could be alleviated by confronting the right things. It identified one out of a long list of aberrative factors and resulted in a long search for others.
It does contain some useful basic concepts, but those are better stated from a Scientology perspective.
We could really use a modern Dianetic home co-audit book that was a bit more accurate. That would be the one to mass market.
DMSMH would then remain only to provide professionals with a historical perspective.
At one time, the ponderous and outdated
“Science of Survival” was regulated to the back shelves and replaced in practice by Ruth Minshull's
"How to Choose Your People" which became the popular public book about the tone scale. This had very good results and resulted in much more application of the tone scale data. Of course the fanatics have seen to it that the Minshull books have long been gone from the org's bookstores.
I wonder how many people will be able to read the above without starting to rant at me one way or the other. Sometimes I feel like a Gulliver who wants to scramble the eggs instead of breaking them at either the top or the bottom.
Best
The Pilot
************************************************************
Ant Phillips
(this comes via my webmail, not my email programme)
[email protected]
) on the sofa. My head has become a wolf's head, and terror has turned on.