Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (39 page)

The reactive mind operates wholly on two-valued logic. Things are life or they are death, they are right or they are wrong, just as the engram wording states. And the personnel of engrams are friends or enemies. The friends, the allies, mean Life! The enemies mean 153

Death! There is no middle ground. Any restimulator or associated restimulator for the pro-survival engram means Life: and any restimulator or associated restimulator for a contra-survival engram means Death!

The auditor, of course, may be a really restimulative person (one who is a pseudo-father, a pseudo-lover of mother before birth, etc.) but he is always an associative restimulator, the person who may take away these terribly, horribly vital things, the pro-survival engrams.

The contra-survival engrams outbalance this factor and, of course, the analytical mind of the pre-clear is always all for the auditor and the therapy.

The trouble comes when the analytical mind is shut down by restimulation and the auditor is seeking the ally computation. Then the pre-clear’s reactive mind dodges and avoids.

The ally computation, however, is simple to trace. And it is very vital to trace it, for this computation may contain the bulk of all the emotional discharge of the case. Freeing the complete ally computation wholly before basic-basic is reached is wholly impossible. But as much life force as possible must be restored to the pre-clear to make the case work well.

For the ally computation, above all things, encysts the life force of the individual. Here is caught and held the free feeling, the very heartbeat of life itself. A pre-clear is only placed in apathy by ally computations. The body can be almost dead in the presence of antagonism and still rally and fight. But it cannot fight its friends. The law of affinity has been aberrated into an entrance into the reactive engram bank. And that law, even when twisted with the murky shadows of unreason in the reactive mind, still works. It is a good law. It is too good when the auditor is trying to find and reduce engrams which are making the pre-clear ache with arthritis or bleed internally with stomach ulcers.

Why can’t he “get rid of” his arthritis? Mama said, when she gracefully fell over a pig,

“Oh, I can’t get up! Oh, my poor, poor baby. Oh, my baby! I wonder if I hurt my poor, poor baby. Oh, I hope my baby is still alive! Please God let him live. Please God let me keep my baby. Please!”

Only the God to which she prayed was the Reactive Mind, which makes one of its idiot computations on the basis of everything is equal to everything. A holder, a prayer for life, a thoroughly bruised baby’s spine, Mama’s sympathy, a pig grunt, a prayer to God, all these things are equal to the reactive mind and so we have a fine case of arthritis, particularly since our patient sought “survival” by marrying a girl with a voice just like Mama’s sounded when he was in the womb. Ask him to get rid of his arthritis? The reactive mind says “NO!” Arthritis is a baby is a pig grunt is a prayer to God is wife’s sympathy is being poor is Mama’s voice and all these things are desirable.

He’s kept himself poor and he’s kept his arthritis and he married a wife who would make a harlot blush and this is pro-survival: wonderful stuff, survival, when the reactive mind computes it! And in the case of the ulcers, here was baby poked full of holes (Mama is having a terrible time trying to abort him so she can pretend a miscarriage, and she uses assorted household instruments thrust into the cervix to do it) and some of the holes are through and through his baby’s abdomen and stomach: he will live because he is surrounded by protein and has a food supply and because the sac is like one of these puncture-proof inner tubes that seals up every hole. (Nature has been smart about attempted abortion for a long, long time.) It so happens that Mama in this case was not a monologist, although most of Mama’s activity on this line is a dramatization and has conversation with it; but it also so happens that Grandma lives next door and she comes over unexpectedly, shortly after the latest effort to make baby meet oblivion.

Grandma may have been an attempted abortionist in her day but now she is old and highly moral and besides, this baby is not giving her any morning sickness: she therefore finds much to censure when she sees a bloody orangewood stick in the bathroom. Baby is still 154

“unconscious.” Grandma berates Mama: “Any daughter of mine who would do such a horrible thing should be punished by the vengeance of God (the principle of, don’t do as I do, do as I say, for who gave Mama this dramatization in the first place?) and driven through the streets.

Your baby has a perfect right to live: if you don’t think you can take care of him, I certainly will. Now you go right on through with your pregnancy, Eloisia, and when that baby is born, if you don’t want him, you bring him to me! The idea of trying to hurt that poor thing!” And so, when our bleeding ulcer case gets born, there is Grandma and there is security and safety.

Grandma is here the ally (and she can become an ally in a thousand different ways, any of them based on the principle that she talks sympathetically to baby when he is out like a flounder, and fights Mama in his favor when he is “unconscious”), and when he grows to boyhood he can be found placing a large dependency on Grandma, much to the parental wonder (for they never did anything to little Roger, not they). And Roger will, when Grandma is dead, develop bleeding ulcers to get her back.

Whoever is a friend is to be clasped to the bosom with bonds of steel, says this great genius, the reactive mind, even though it kills the organism.

The ally computation is a little more than the mere idiot calculation that anyone who is a friend can be kept a friend only by approximating the conditions wherein the friendship was realized. It is a computation on the basis that one can only be safe in the vicinity of certain people and that one can only be in the vicinity of certain people by being sick or crazy or poor and generally disabled.

Show an auditor a child who was easily frightened by punishment, who was not at ease around home and who had allies who seemed more important to him than the parents (grandparents, aunts, boarders, doctors, nurses, etc.) and who was sickly, and the auditor can usually spring into view an attempted abortion background because, more often than not, it is there. Show an auditor a child who showed enormous attachment for one parent and detestation for the other and the auditor can bring out a background wherein one person wanted to get rid of or hurt the child and the other parent did not.

The ally computation, then, is important. And it is also very secret. Trying to get the real allies in a case is often a great struggle. It may be that a patient had eight or ten of these allies in some cases and tried desperately to hold to them, and when he could not, searched and found mates and friends who were approximations of his allies. A wife, around whom A is continually ill but whom he will not leave under any circumstances, is usually a pseudo-ally, which is to say she approximates some mannerism of the actual ally, has a similar voice or even a similar first name. B, who will not leave a job and yet who is working far below his ability level in life, may be there because his boss is a pseudo-ally; further, he may be working at this job because an ally had a similar station in life and he is being the ally.

Anything which can so far corrupt a person’s life is naturally going to be difficult to some degree in therapy, for when he is asked to get rid of his ally computation, it is as likely that he will give any clue to it as it is that he would have spit in his ally’s face.

These pro-survival engrams containing the ally computation can be described as those which contain personnel who defended the patient’s existence in moments when the patient conceived that his existence was under attack. This need not be an actual, rational defense: it may only be that the content of the engram seems to indictate it; but it can safely be assumed that the worst ally computations are those when the life of the patient was defended against attackers by the ally. Most ally computations have their genesis in the prenatal area.

The ally computation is sought as the first action in any case and new ally computations are sought throughout a case.

These sympathy pro-survival engrams, which make up the ally computations, vary only in intensity from the standard pro-survival engram. A standard pro-survival engram is bad only because someone has expressed friendship for the patient or another person when he was

“unconscious”: it is difficult to discover and clear even when it actually has been entirely 155

misread -- which is to say that the pro-survival content was intended for another person than the patient but is only misconstrued by the patient. If the patient is “unconscious” and somebody says “he is a good guy,” actually meaning another person entirely, the egocentric reactive mind takes the phrase to have been meant for oneself.

In the sympathy pro-survival engram (the ally computation is composed only of these) there is an actual defense of the person from danger by some ally: this can vary from a dramatic scene wherein somebody has been bent on killing the patient and the ally has arrived, like the cavalry, in the nick of time, to the incident wherein the patient was simply saved (or assumed he was being saved) from destruction such as drowning, being run over, etc. And the sympathy pro-survival engram is only as good as its content in words, for it does not rationalize the action. Engrams have been discovered where the patient was actually being murdered but the content was such that he was convinced he was being saved: such a case would include what auditors call a “mutual AA” -- a father and mother together attempting an abortion, AA meaning “attempted abortion” -- wherein Mama was in utter agreement and disposed herself for the operation but became frightened and began to scream about “her precious baby” in an effort to save herself from being injured: patients with this sort of sympathy pro-survival engram can get pretty confused about mother.

The insidious aspects of the sympathy pro-survival engrams are several. (1) They are aligned with the fundamental dynamic of survival in the most literal sense and are therefore aligned with the purpose of the individual; (2) they are like cysts round which contra-survival engrams serve as the outer shell; (3) they most sharply affect the health of the individual and are always the basic factor beneath the psycho-somatic illness which the individual displays; (4) they cause the reactive mind (but not the analytical mind) to resist therapy; and (5) they are the largest drain upon the life force units.

In (3) above, the pro-survival sympathy engram does more than just carry forward the injury which becomes the psycho-somatic illness. Any engram is a bundle of data which includes not only all perceptics and speech present but also metering for emotion and state of physical being.

The last, the state of physical being, would be serious enough. This metering says that structure was so and such at the moment this sympathy pro-survival engram was received: in the case of an embryo engram, then, the reactive mind, in forcing the engram back into action, may also force the structural pattern back upon the body: this occasionally results in retarded development, embryo-like skin, embryo-type back curvature, and so forth.

The glands themselves, being physical organs, are also sometimes so suppressed in the reactive mind’s effort to approximate all conditions. The underdeveloped gonads, the sub-level thyroid, the wasted limb, all these things often come from sympathy pro-survival engrams.

This is so observably the case that when an individual is being cleared, growth process begins to bring the body up to genetic blueprint even before the case is completed: the change which takes place in the physical being of the patient is sometimes so remarkable and so marked that it is far more startling than the mere disappearance of a catalogue of psycho-somatic ills such as coronary, ulcers, arthritis, allergies, and so on.

It would be supposed that anything powerful enough to twist the physical blueprint and keep the body from developing or make it keep on growing where it should have stopped would resist any therapy. This is true only in a most limited sense. Once one is aware of what suppresses a case, one can go about vanquishing the suppressors because a pro-survival engram, unlike a contra-survival engram, has an Achilles heel.

The most workable answer now known to dianetics lies in the principle of life force units and a technique for throwing them back into circulation. The pro-survival engram collects and holds such units, according to this theory, and collapses when its power to hold units is broken.

Entering a case, then, where one has a chronic psycho-somatic illness (and what case doesn’t have, even though it is as slight as an occasional fit of sneezing or hiccoughs), the auditor first scouts it, going through a returning routine to find out how early he can get for 156

material, how the state of the sonic recall is, how occluded is the youth of the person, and so forth. When he has made this survey, he begins to make his computation on the case: first, was the child happy with both father and mother, and if not, where was the child happiest (there will be where the allies live). Was either parent an unreasonably powerful factor in shaping the thinking powers of the child: here again may be an ally, even if a poor one. Did the patient have grandparents or other relatives; how did he feel toward them? All this data will be more or less occluded and warped by demon circuits and is about as reliable as the data this patient will inevitably try to get from “loopy” parents or relatives, who not only do not know what happened to him but might be most anxious not to have anything discovered.

What really did happen? Don’t let patients ask relatives or parents anything if you can help it, for these are restimulators in the extreme and never have any data you can use; the patient is just trying to use them as by-pass circuits to avoid the pain of recalling things himself. When the case is finished he will no longer want to hound these people and if you want a check for research reasons, get one of the relatives and put him through therapy.