CHAPTER 9 - AUTOMATICITY AND OTHER PHENOMENA
"A memory which becomes automatic
is not worth having."
L. Ron Hubbard
DEFINITION OF AUTOMATICITY
Automaticity is the gradient
scale of, "It's all being done," or "It must be done for me." This is an
aspect of experience and this state of mind is something which is going
to appall you in a preclear.
Automaticity is something
which has only vaguely been added into human experience. And yet it is
right there. The fellow who says, "I have to do it all myself" is at an
aberrated point on this scale. But he's not nearly as bad off as the people
there who are at the point, "It all has to be done for me." The thirst
to have it done for him is evidently inculcated into Man in earliest babyhood.
You'd be surprised how this automaticity is played upon by the modern businessman,
by the manufacturer, the advertiser and so on.
Automaticity could be said
to be the gradient scale of action, starting from doing it oneself down
to having everything done for oneself. The dead man is at the very bottom
of the scale, he can't even embalm himself. He has to have other people
do that and bury him.
This is action outside the
control of the individual. I suppose that really is the definition of automaticity.
Desire to have action outside the control of self, even though one has
initiated the action.
Automaticity is a principle
with which randomity is produced but if automaticity comes up to such a
point as to be uncontrollable, an individual finds himself extremely perplexed
after a while because he's set up so many circuits he doesn't know who
he is any more.
To make something automatic,
you hide it from yourself. His engram bank is held by this little tiny
functional thing that says, "Let's make it automatic, so we're safe."
AUTOMATICITY AND SPACE, ENERGY, TIME
The common denominator of
automaticity between 40.0 and 0.0 in this universe is energy. Energy will
do it for you. MEST objects, condensed energy, will do it for you. You
don't have to do it yourself. It's all automatic. A person's ability to
originate energy, up there at the top of the scale, declines to the ratio,
unfortunately, that he utilizes (other sources of) energy. He has a higher
and higher dependence upon energy and goes lower and lower on the scale.
The common denominator of automaticity is energy, and the final end of
all automaticity is becoming an object which is condensed energy.
One of the things of automaticy
is to have one's space made for one. You expect the wife to make the house,
the husband to provide the playground.
Automaticity, in terms of
space, is having somebody else provide the anchor points for you, namely
the MEST universe.
You get tired of duration getting upset. You want something to endure. So you start into the curve of automaticity. Automaticity is simply making things stick, making them automatic so you don't have to watch'em all the time.
CONSEQUENCES OF AUTOMATICITY
How the dickens did he get
into such a state that he can't produce a kilowatt. He doesn't want anything
to do with that. Automaticity - a long time ago (he) said, "It's better
to have something else produce force for me than me to produce the force,
because it's more fun that way." It's not more fun that way, but it's better
operational control that way for somebody else.
I can just picture somebody
walking into your home universe saying, "What you need is a little more
automaticity, all you have to do is just set up this little dynamo and
it makes all this force over on this side, and then you don't have to make
the force anymore."
It probably never occurred
to the thetan to say, "Wait a minute, why do I want something to make force
for me? I'm getting along just fine." He probably said, "Well, that's cute,
that's interesting."
You talk about teleportation.
If you start rehabilitating this, why, you start packing around the body.
There would be actually nothing easier than to pick up the body by the
scruff of the neck making sure that you didn't choke it and yanking it
over and putting it down at some place or another and kicking in a door
and sitting it in a chair and smoothing it all out so that it could be
observed properly to be doing what it ought to be doing.
If you start doing that,
however, you'll step out of the stream of agreement, or the consciousness
of intermingled ideas and agreements. You don't have to have those at all.
You don't have to pay any attention to anybody else's agreement but, you
have agreed too.
"It's best that we don't
find out what the other fellow thinks," and "it's best that we don't interrupt
other people when they're talking." that's all agreement on this line,
and it contributes to automaticity.
Another effect of automaticity
is that the individual has a developed disability in order to have something
done for him. You're just looking straight at the service facsimile chain
there.
He's tired of some set-up
and instead of saying, "Well, the devil with it!" or blowing it up or something
like that, he wants it to continue in some fashion, so he says, "Well,
I'm incapable of taking care of this segment of it. Therefore, I'll set
that up as sort of on an automatic circuit." Anytime anything is done for
one, there is an incapability demonstrated by the individual.
GOOD AND BAD AUTOMATICITY
Very often a fellow is persuaded
that he is setting himself up as an automatic piece of machinery when he's
just being himself. He's just going on a reverse on this deal. He's not
self-conscious.
He all of a sudden enters
into doing and goes on doing what he is doing, and there's no time lapse
of him saying, "Now do this and now do that and now do something or other,"
it's so fast, so convincing to him that he doesn't recognize that that
is action. That's action, the other is automaticity being played across
two or three circuits.
We get allowable automaticity,
when we say, "This operation is going to continue." And you're saying at
the same time, "I am continuing this operation." Next allowable automaticity
is, "We are a group of individuals and we have a subdivided set of functions
here in order to smooth this out." It becomes unallowable the moment when
we say, "The reason we have done this is these people are particularly
skilled in these lines and could not handle the other functions." When
we've said he couldn't handle the other functions we've introduced a disability
and we've said therefore the group has to be served.
An automaticity set-up or
a functional set-up which heightens self-determinism is not only allowable
but desirable, because you can heighten it at a greater speed. But an automaticity
which is entered into to depress self-determinism or demonstrate disability
becomes highly aberrative and will wind up with this dwindling spiral into
something like the MEST universe.
Here's this fellow all set
up. He's got a lot of circuits and one of his circuits is to be able to
drive a bus - up and down the bus route, back and forth on the bus route.
He knows he's driving a bus. His circuit responses actually are minimal.
It's only when one day he would say, "Now this body's going to sit here
and drive this bus automatically and I'm not going to have to pay any more
attention to it." or he sits there driving the bus and dreaming he's someplace
else and thinking about something else. There he's removed himself from
the environment and he is setting it up with automaticity in order to secure
his own freedom. (but) That's the wrong way to secure a freedom - what's
he doing driving a bus in the first place?
Bad automaticity would also
be that which depressed self-determinism by pretending sympathy or service
for others, and good automaticity would only be that which raised the self-determinism
of others and let them more and more on a rising scale think, act and provide
for themselves.
THE SCALE OF AUTOMATICITY
There's great fluidity. He
has set himself up to agree to the arrival into the possession of an object
by the adoption of a cycle of action. And he has even gone so far as to
think he has to have an object, to have a memory.
He manufactures in Homo
sapiens facsimiles, engrams, secondaries, locks, data, pictures, words,
books, all that sort of thing, - he's gone into this scale. It's a new
scale here, a gradient scale, quite important, the scale of automaticity.
He's gotten everything to a point where it's automatic.
It's all got to be made
for him, it's all got to be pre-existing objects before himself. He exists
before any object exists, but he's got it so twisted by this time that
the object exists before he exists. And he's starting low and diving full
throttle.
When you draw this scale
of automaticity you are really drawing a scale of self-determinism. At
the top, 40.0, you have high self-determinism. At 20.0, you have interacting
determinism and that itself is action. Interacting determinism with 50
% self-determined. Very rough figure. And down here at 0.0 we have total
lack of self-determinism.
At the top you have a total
lack of automaticity, in the middle you have 50 % automaticity, and at
the bottom you have total automaticity.
From zero to -8.0 the thetan
is running on total automaticity. Everything is being done for him by the
body, and by other bodies. Of course, when you get total automaticity,
you get total non-beingness so he doesn't even appear to be there, and
he doesn't know he's there and he wouldn't know what to do about it.
REHABILITATING SELF-DETERMINISM
A freight elevator is moved by a motor. A motor is the automatic part of a freight elevator. Therefore the thetan is actually serving the body instead of the body serving him. And that is the fate of any robot, he will wind up as a servant because he can be handled and placed in time and space and anything.
Automaticity, then, as it manifests itself in illusions and creative processing in general, takes on a new meaning and a new significance. It is a consequence of the thirst of the individual to have things done for him. And in handling, then, these things, you want to be very careful that you handle these illusions simply enough so that automatic tendencies on the part of the illusion do not take place.
Automaticity runs from self-determinism, partial automaticity over to total automatic. On a sensation scale, - provides own sensation, needs own, and sensation is always others. He provides no sensation. You get somebody low on the tone scale, they don't even use it. They don't feel any responsibility for giving anybody any sensation. They can't give anybody any sensation, and they don't either. Remark: example, frigidity.
These cycles of automaticity fit in with start - change - stop, with be - do - have, with space - energy - time, and with cause - effect. This is just an additional set of cycles tieing up a little tighter the package of Man's experience in this universe and the experience that Man and thetan are.
That is a very essential
step of clearing. This thetan, on the automaticity scale, has gone to a
point of automaticity where he is dependent upon a MEST object, a material
object to do all of his communicating for him, and you ask somebody to
cease to communicate in a form that he's positive on and you just practically
ask him to lie down and die. Because when you've asked him to get rid of
his communication line, you have asked him to get rid of his friends and
anything he loves, and you can't ask a man to do that, certainly not in
the name of therapy and processing.
So remember that a very
important thing to rehabilitate is the ability to communicate without depending
on the body to do it automatically. The toughest side of automaticity is
dependence on something else to communicate.
IDENTITIES AND VALENCES
Identities have two uses: one of them is to group and label something, and another one is to do a vicarious survival for somebody - a life continuum.
When he's got all the fame
he can stand, a person becomes an identity, becomes a solid object, becomes
as handled as a solid object, and he has no rights any more.
That is the very spooky
trap that the MEST universe has all pegged out. The more of an identity
you become, the more of an object you become, why, the safer you think
you are - Uh-uh.
The cure for an identity is the possession of power. And what's above power? Space. You have to recover the ability to use power before you can get into space. When he's able to use power he doesn't give a damn what identity he is.
One of the things that's really nice to run on Homo sapiens are the times he denied that he had said it when he had. The times when he denied himself, and when he denied himself, he was dead. And a lot of little mites dance around in this society, around people, and some of them say all the time, "Admit you didn't say that." And if he does, he's saying, "Any time I administer force, or use force even in the shadow of a communication line, that isn't I." And what do you know, he suddenly winds up as not being himself. He doesn't know who he is.
When we talk about valences, the fellow hasn't got any center to put any of his anchor points out from. Why? The center's being occupied by somebody else. How do we solve this? We just give him locks of the other person doing all the things he wants to be and do and we just scramble up identities by having everybody be him and him be everybody, and we do it in this orderly fashion and we've got the thing solved.
You can simply ask the preclear,
"Who can't you see?" And you find out who he can't see, that's the person
that was driving in his anchor points.
If you want to find the
most aberrative person on the preclear's current life track, all you've
got to do is find who gave him the worst news oftenest. And on that person
he'll have a complete occlusion. How do you solve that occlusion? Get your
preclear to sit there and be as occluded as he wants to be, and imagine
this person out in front of him someplace, not seeing him, but just getting
the concept that the person's out there someplace with a cricket bat knocking
in anchor points.
Just have the preclear get
the idea that somebody out there is bonging in a flock of bright balls
or some-thing of the sort. And get the idea that these balls are arriving
in the vicinity of his own face and his own head.
And what do you know, this
person will show up. And then you can build that person as a mock-up. By
the way you'll get some of the fanciest somatics if you ever run one of
these things.
THE MIND'S BUFFER
On the big ENIAC they have
what they call a bullpen. Material comes in on this bullpen, shoots in
there and halts for more material to be fec on it. And when new material
is fed to this material, which is only part of a solution, then that material
can clear and go through, into the conclusion of the banks.
There are people, they get
the datum in the bullpen over here and it won't clear. It's just stuck,
right there. It's not going to go anyplace. Somebody has told them a joke
and they haven't gotten the point of the joke. And two or three years from
then, this joke will boomp them. Now that is a bullpen datum. I just won't
add up any place according to their frame of logic.
A person has to be willing
to disassociate grandly, in order to clean up his bullpen just at will.
Just look through there and say, "Well, gee, what a lot of disrelated garbage,"
and give it the yo-heave. If a person's quite bad off, he just never cleans
his bullpen. The bullpen is an actual geographical thing. it's the unrelated
datum on the ridge.
It just bounces around,
and you get this reaction on the machine. You'll see that that confounded
thing is very plain on the machine.
Remark: in a historically
interesting way, Ron describes what is known as a "buffer" in more modern
computers. The needle reaction he describes in the last paragraph would
be something like a Dirty Needle.
CYCLES OF ACTION AND THE MIND
The reason something is in restimulation is that it's an interrupted cycle of action and he's now trying to finish it. And every time he tries to finish this cycle of action he runs into the engram so now he's permanently stuck in the engram.
The Service Facsimile, then,
boils down to the computation which permits one to pretend he has finished
some cycle of action. He uses it as a dramatization rather than to finish
cycles of action. The Service Facsimile is the excuse as to why he didn't
complete a cycle of action. His Service Facsimile chains go into restimulation
whenever he can't finish a cycle of action.
Restimulation is a recalled
association on not having finished a cycle of action. He realizes that
he hasn't finished some minor cycle of action in present time, and it calls
into effect all the cycles of action which he hasn't finished, and he calls
into existence in the present all the reasons why he hasn't finished those
cycles of action, and then it's all justified.
Then he gets into trouble
with the Service Facsimiles because it's no explanation at all. Everybody
challenges it and he gets upset about it.
OTHER PHENOMENA
In Dianetics we used to get wide-open cases that were strictly fruitcake, and they would often become densely occluded cases before they'd been processed very long. But a while after that, they would unocclude again. Only this time, they were really getting what they asked for in terms of engrams.
If you break bad news suddenly
to somebody - it's actually the rate of change of distance to anchor points.
There is a method of breaking
bad news that must be broken, and that would be to take him out of the
brightness and take him down to somplace that was fairly close and dark,
and then say whatever it was. You would find out that the amount of shock
wouldn't be very great.
Your little kid - the second the lights go out, noooo, down comes the room on him. He can't locate himself, he's out of orientation. So give him a light for heaven's sakes.
The dispersed case is stuck on the track, in lots of places. His aberration directly derives from all the places he's stuck on the track. Those are the most aberrative things. And his stuckness on the track is represented by (1) a theta bop of some narrowness, which means a body, and (2) a theta bop of some considerable width, which means an area. Such as home universe.
THE FILECLERK'S GUIDE TO THE PDC
CHAPTER 9