Gullibility Revisited

Gullibility revisited--Part 1

A while ago I was in my car, about to leave a parking structure after seeing a movie at the local multiplex. I felt a pleasant, post-movie buzz of identification with the movie's hero. Then suddenly my mood crashed a few stories into something much colder and nastier. Search my pockets as I might, I couldn't find enough money to pay the parking attendant. I recalled it cost two bucks. I had seventy cents. I wondered what they did with people who couldn't pay. I started to feel around in the front seat crevice. There were some coins there but not enough. I checked under the front seat. More coins, but still not quite enough. For the first time in years I checked in the bottom of my glove compartment. There I found enough pennies and nickels to get me past the parking attendant. Relieved, I took stock of what other valuable things were there: Three probably expired double A batteries, ancient sinus tablets, old vitamin capsules, a mystery key, tail-light bulbs. And a cassette tape of a lecture by L. Ron Hubbard! I decided it would be interesting to listen to it again, comparing my reactions to it now to its effect on me years ago when I was a thrall of hubbard's ``standard tech.''

The lecture was called ``Engram Chain Running,'' originally recorded in 1963 in Saint Hill, England (copyright 1988, L. Ron Hubbard Library). I last listened to it several years ago, just before finally leaving scientology, but I had heard it many years earlier, as part of an auditor training course I did.

The lecture was ``technical.'' That is, it was not an introductory tape, but a discussion of techniques to be used by auditors, so it was intended for people who knew a bit about the basic ideas of auditing, though the subject of the lecture was definitely not 'advanced.' Let me first give a basic rundown of what the tape was about. "Trained' former and current scientologists will have an easy time following me, but those with little or no ``training'' (lucky you) may need some help. Contact your local expert or feel free to e-mail me any questions.

Lecture Summary:

The tape goes on for 77 minutes. That's quite a bit of talking. It wouldn't take nearly that long to say what I just said in the paragraph above, so what else did ron say? Maybe you're thinking he must have given lots of examples from case histories to illustrate how people were cured of unwanted conditions after erasing 'basics,' data on case follow-ups showing that conditions didn't return, statistics about dianetics results, that sort of thing. Well, not really. But he did talk a lot more. For fairness' sake I'll summarize some of the other points made in the tape that seemed important:

• ``Charge,'' ron says, is the ``electronic bing-bang that hits the pc in the blonk....'' That's what he says. (Funny, I used to have what I thought was an understanding of what he meant. Now it seems ridiculous. The idea of past, submerged memories containing an emotional ``charge'' that can possibly be contacted and released is of course NOT ridiculous, but ``electronic'' charge?) Anyway, engrams have ``charge,'' which can affect the preclear adversely. Get rid of the charge and the preclear improves.

• The preclear gets upset during auditing because of unaddressed earlier charge

• Dianetics is terribly, terribly simple. You can only mess it up by complicating it.

• Engrams can have earlier beginnings. This should also be checked for when the going gets rough.

• Ron mentions the ``Helatrobus implants.'' (Helatrobus implants -- Seems that long, long ago, between 52 and 38.2 trillion years ago, evil beings captured all other beings in the universe by blanketing planets with radioactive clouds, and later pulling us up into the sky with tractor beams, or, alternatively, trapping us in a bubble. [That'll do it every time.] Then we were tortured with shocks and other mayhem while being implanted subconsciously with pictures and false goals designed to confuse us about our true past and identity and make us easier to control. [No wonder you're such a klutz.] Ron, bless his soul, somehow discovered and unravelled all this in the early 60's.) Actually, at the time of the lecture, ron was having the trainees at St. Hill run these 'implants' on each other using special techniques. But when people tried it, they ran into trouble for some reason. Ron's diagnosis: The Helatrobis implants were there alright, but addressing them stirred up chains of very old engrams. This upset the preclears. So ron had to revive dianetics so that the engrams could be erased. But that still didn't work because auditors weren't going earlier to basic, hence this lecture. (Apparently this didn't work either. Ron went on in the 60's to abandon Helatrobis and create new procedures after making incredible new discoveries that finally explained why nothing had yet worked.)

• Ron discusses another phenomenon called ``out-of-valence.'' This means that the preclear is ``seeing'' the incident being run from a vantage point ``outside himself.'' When the auditor encounters this, it invariably means that there is an earlier, unaddressed part of the engram being run.

• There are ``overt'' engrams (incidents in which the preclear harmed others) as well as engrams in which the preclear received some sort of trauma. These can be run too.

• Ron briefly discusses the ``overt-motivator sequence.'' (The idea of this is that beings normally do something bad to others--an ``overt'' in scientologese-- FIRST, then feel they need to justify it and so crave and ``pull in'' something bad done to them, which now seems to the supply missing ``motivation'' for the original overt and to prompt another overt in revenge. The notion is akin to and probably derived from ``projection'' in psychology and ``Karma'' in Buddhism and Hinduism. The idea may have some value, but ron presented it as a near universal principle of life, which it was'nt. This belief caused many scientologists to become obsessed with chasing down the past life overts that must have preceded unwanted conditions they were experiencing in the present--imaginative overts like blowing up planets, ``electronically'' trapping and implanting billions of beings, etc. The over-emphasis on this concept also created the habit in many scientologists of looking sheepishly inward for the causes of bad things that happened or were done to them.) In the tape, ron says that the overt-motivator sequence was ``installed'' in us beings by implanters way, way back on the time track, but these implants are much too hard to get to right now, so we're stuck, at least for the time being, with the 'overt-motivator sequence' as a basic mechanism of life. (Darn.)

• Ron also says the the only reason the preclear can't run engrams, provided the auditor is using the procedure given here, is that the person is too low on the ``processing scale.'' This means that the preclear needs to have some preliminary scientology processes run before he's ready to confront actual engrams like the ones during the Helatroban period.

• Another reason is that the preclear can't duplicate well. This is bad. It means you look at one thing and ``see'' something else. Of course you can't see past-life engrams correctly if you can't duplicate. The remedy is lots of ``lower level'' scientology processes.

• Yet another reason is that the preclear is a ``dub-in'' case. This means that the preclear ``dubs in'' a false content rather than confront the real content of the reactive mind. (I'll give an example to illustrate: You're trying to run an engram during the time of the Helatroban civilization, say 50 trillion years ago. Instead of seeing real Helatrobans, you see weird, confused, dreamlike or even silly this-lifetime images. Seems like it's your imagination. This is dub-in, a low level phenomenon. You're not ready to run the real stuff yet. You need lower level scientology processing to get you up to the point where you can really see and feel your engrams.)

• Well, the preclear could also be too low on the ``effect scale.''

• Fundamentally, it's all different aspects of the same thing: If the preclear can't run engrams, the person is being run ``too steep'' and needs to be ``prepared'' with lower level scientology processes.

• ``Basic-basic'' is the original engram, the first one ever. It holds all later engrams in place. Trouble is, it's awfully hard to get to and you have to spend a long time auditing out later stuff before you'll be ready to confront it.

• Ron also talks about a number of other ``phenomena'' one can expect to encounter while running engrams. Too much detail to go into here. The authoritative-seeming rules and laws about what the phenomena mean help to create a sense of credibility, but it's worth noting that no mentioned phenomenon is ever backed up with data from case histories.

Dianetics fundamentals

Dazzling, but evidence has never shown the ``reactive mind'' to be other than a fictional villian.e

Much of early dianetics should seem familiar to anyone who has seriously studied psychology and computer science. I unfortunately had not when I first came in contact with Dianetics. Dianetics incorporated a number of ideas from psychology: engrams, abreaction, the subconscious, 'charge,' the value of talk therapy, some rules of therapist behavior, etc. Hubbard added in some half-understood concepts from Korzybski's General Semantics (the 'semantic reaction,' 'A=A') and Eniac-era computer technology (clear, key-in, bank, erasure, electronic files.) Also interesting was what hubbard discarded from his sources: 1) Uncertainty about the nature of the mind. According to Hubbard the mind consisted of two compartments and their natures were fully known. There was no more uncertainty about what the 'mind' was; hubbard had discovered all there was to know. 2) The need to back claims of success with actual evidence. 3) The need to prove the workability of hypotheses. 4) The value of the contributions of other thinkers. 5) Any need for dialog.

The reactive/analytical mind model would have been an elegant solution indeed, if only it could have been gotten to work. Imagine being able to 'cure' people of all unpleasant mental and emotional phenomena and achieve flawless memory and intelligence just by having an auditor ask exactly the right questions until the patient mentally erased and 'refiled' all information from the bad mind into the good mind. Had it worked, ron would surely have been the greatest man in history. But the model was wrong and it never worked.

My reactions then

My memory of it is a bit vague, but I seem to recall that a few incipient critical thoughts did pop up. I didn't know what ron was talking about when he mentioned the helatrobis stuff. But I didn't think about it much. My job, as I saw it then was to understand what to DO, to do it, and to observe for myself what happened. Only what you observe for yourself is true for you. It occurred to me that ron might not know exactly how long ago a trillion years was, that he might not realize that 285 trillion years ago (a date mentioned) was about 20,000 times greater than the current estimated age of the universe. But maybe he was talking about an earlier universe. And again, I had to reserve judgement on it as I really hadn't yet 'observed' whether or not it was true. I also hadn't observed most of the interesting phenomena ron mentioned in the tape, despite having run quite a bit of dianetics on people by that time. I figured that in the early days ron had paid a lot of attention to things we didn't need to worry about now due to advances in the tech. There was also the tiny beginning of the thought, 'If dianetics was so effective, why did it have to be extensively reworked in 1963, and again in 1969, and again in 1978?' But this thought didn't live long. It was not my business to sit there and think. In fact, in scientology, thinking is a pretty low-level activity. On his 'know to mystery scale,' ron placed 'thinkingness' below 'knowingness,' 'lookingness,' 'emotingness' and 'effortingness,' and just above 'symbolizingness,' 'eatingness,' 'sexingness' and 'mystery.' (page 118, Scientology 0-8, originally printed in the early 50's, copyright 1976, L.Ron Hubbard) It was my job to understand, exactly apply, and eventually, observe and know. And that could take time, naturally. I was the ultimate philosophical pragmatist, at least in my own imagination.e

I accepted the idea of past life incidents and implants. I accepted their existence even though I had never 'observed' one for sure. This needs explanation. By then I had 'run' plenty of past-life stuff in session. I, unlike those pathetic 'low-level' cases, had little trouble with engrams. Early on, I decided I would just let my imagination 'run' and see what happened. Since the reactive mind was not under my control, whatever I 'saw' or sensed was probably content of the reactive mind, even though it seemed to be imagination. Smart huh? To put it simply, I was imagining things and and then considering that they were probably real. Kind of like painting a fake window on the wall and then looking 'through it' to see if it's raining. How does one do this and maintain any sense of personal integrity? Not easily, but it can certainly be done. I--we--have a profound capacity for self-delusion. Ron and other scientologists often facilitated and encouraged it, ron by speaking for thousands of hours in his taped lectures about the 'whole track' and the fantastic abilities of 'OTs,' and other scientologists in their conversations about people they had known in past lives, their superhuman experiences, etc. And people were constantly giving 'wins' they'd achieved in auditing--this or that hopeless condition gone, this or that mysterious 'thing' that had been ruining a life now 'totally handled.' No one was permitted to challenge the validity of anyone's past lives or wins in auditing. That would have been 'invalidation,' a very serious offense in scientology.

I myself had experienced a number of interesting things in auditing, but I had certainly never experienced any lasting gain in ability or personal happiness. I had had periods of feeling a lot better, but these never lasted. I had even felt 'exterior' at times, but this didn't last either, and I was no happier or more able as a result. I figured I must have some pretty bad overts in past lives that were preventing me from fully experiencing gain. At times I wondered about why ron always seemed to be coming up with something new that explained why previous tech hadn't worked, while at the same time claiming that all earlier tech had worked just fine. This must have crossed my mind as I listened to the tape long ago. But there was always something new and very promising to try. I had *faith* that things would eventually turn out well--a faith that overrode my often contradictory thoughts. Even though Scientology is supposed to be rooted in science and real results in the present, it required a great deal of faith that, somewhere in the future, the truth of dianetics and scientology would be manifest in the real world.

Next: Gullibility Revisited Part 2--My reactions now