Well, knock me down with a feather. There is a quotation here, with reference. Instantly, I can find no modern reference to John Jacob Brooke Morgan, but old copies of his work are available. This particular work was published between 1928 and 1944, although some listing have an edition claimed to be published in 1953 by Longmans, Green. From the posthumous publication listings, I can gather than Mr Brooke passed away between 1944 and 1945. It is difficult for me to establish the value that modern society places on this particular work of Mr Morgan, but I seem to be able to obtain used copies for reasonable prices, so we'll see what this chapter has to say first.
My joy at finding an external reference is short lived once I understand that the quote, "Psychology has ... no mental standards to set up ... The psychologist does not occupy himself with the establishment of norms." is used here to illustrate that psychology has no norms by which to work. The interpretation of this depends on your view point.
If you expect that each individual is treated on their own merits and is approached without preconception, then Morgan's words hold strength. If you expect that there is a scientific basis to the human personality then the quote will disappoint. The quote therefore needs to be put further in to context; it is not enough on its own to support or detract from anything.
So. Back to the chapter.
The long story short on the first page is an expansion of the above. That the field of psychiatry has been complaining that categorisation does not lead to cure, because categorisation is impossible.
With classic medicine, if someone has broken their arm it does not matter too much that they fell off a chair or tripped over a step. You treat the broken arm.
With mental issues such as depression, the individual could be depressed because of the death of a relative or the loss of a job; in these cases the causes must be treated. Berievement for the death of the relative or empowering the person in the search for employment. Should these prove effective then the depression should go of its own accord. Even though drugs can be used in the short term to alleviate the symptoms of the depression, without addressing the cause there will be no permanent relief.
So. Point well made. In fact, psychiatry and dianetics actually agree in this avenue.
Then, however, this chapter splits. It starts by making sense, "If he is sure he has to buy everything he sees, despite his income, he has an engram which tells him to buy everything he sees." and other understandable situations along the same compulsive obsessive line, but then ruins this good, solid train by continuing, "The man who 'cannot be sure', who 'does not know' and who is sceptical of everything is talking out of engrams. The man who is certain 'it cannot be true' that 'it isn't possible' that 'authority must be contacted' is talking out of engrams. The woman who is so certain that she needs a divorce or that her husband is going to murder her some night is talking out of either her own or his engrams." This is downright dangerous. What is being discussed here is paying no heed to logical conclusion and is laying some very serious situations at the door of having engrams. Such claims do not make sense, and my concerns on this are not alleviated elsewhere in the chapter. Hubbard appears to have really meant this when he wrote it.
In order for these latter people to actually be diagnosed as being suffering from these conditions internally, then there must first be an investigation in to the substance of these fears; they can not be dismissed as psychosomatic out of hand or by automatic conclusion.
The rest of the chapter goes on for a number of pages and I, personally, draw a number of parallels between this and modern counselling as I have experienced it.
The chapter finale at the end is another show of the works age; citing the horrors of early treatments such as pre-frontal lobotomy, transorbital leukotomy and electric shock treatment, abandoned by psychiatry for some decades. I still recall walking in to psychiatric buildings which bore the echoes of such shock cables, gone from practice but not from memory.
Psychiatry has moved on from the nineteen fifties.
Beyond the above, the chapter on diagnosis requires the individual to read it for themselves as it attempts to classify the conversation had between the auditor and the patient. As such it serves no further definition to dianetics as a working science.
The Auditor's Role
This chapter is a guide for confirming the role of an auditor as being the guide that shares the persons ills and is there with them for the journey. It details the qualities that an auditor should bring to their task in the application of dianetics and, as such, contains very little that further defines dianetics itself.
For the reason I gave before, that it is possible a guilt complex can make a situation worse rather than better, I am concerned by one of the last paragraphs in this section, "If an auditor assumes the state of mind that he can sit and whistle while Rome burns before him and be prepared to grin about it, then he will do an optimum job. The things at which he gazes, no matter how they look, no matter how they sound, are solid gains. It's the quiet, orderly patient who is making few gains."
This is concerning because there is no method by which the auditor has of knowing whether the patient is actually making gains, or whether the engram is actually gaining in strength.
It is automatically assumed that confrontation with the engram is making it weaker; and to my mind this is a dangerous assumption to make.
For the reason I gave before, that it is possible a guilt complex can make a situation worse rather than better, I am concerned by one of the last paragraphs in this section, "If an auditor assumes the state of mind that he can sit and whistle while Rome burns before him and be prepared to grin about it, then he will do an optimum job. The things at which he gazes, no matter how they look, no matter how they sound, are solid gains. It's the quiet, orderly patient who is making few gains."
This is concerning because there is no method by which the auditor has of knowing whether the patient is actually making gains, or whether the engram is actually gaining in strength.
It is automatically assumed that confrontation with the engram is making it weaker; and to my mind this is a dangerous assumption to make.
Release or Clear
"The object of Dianetic therapy is to bring about a release or a clear.
A release (noun) is an individual from whom major stress and anxiety have been removed by Dianetic therapy.
A clear (noun) is an individual who, as a result of Dianetic therapy, has neither active nor perceived psychosomatic illness or aberation.
To clear(verb) is to release all the physical pain and painful emotion from the life of an individual or, as in Political Dianetics, a society."
My previous writings sum up my points on this chapter.
Firstly, a clear is not a maintainable state of being. The clear is not imune from further aberrations. Also, the fact of being clear can only be ascertained using current knowledge; which may actually be false. It is also only possible to audit known engrams and if engrams still exist which are not audited out, then the belief in being clear is simply that, a belief and not a known fact. It is, and can never be any more than, a state of belief rather than an actual, factual state of being.
Being clear is thus a state of mind; belief in being clear is just as belief in a deity. Unprovable and unshakable even in the face of fact, as the mind chooses to ignore all evidence to the contrary in the wish to maintain its belief.
The claims for a clear which are made by dianetics, have not been actually proven. In fact, all that I have encountered to this day, have actually disproven these claims and I can find no account of scientology actually providing a clear to the wider scientific community for thorough analysis of the claims made.
Secondly, achieving release has its dangers. If one seeks release from a situation where guilt is to a level where the individual must actively seek release, then there is the possibility that it can simply reinforce the guilt.
A release (noun) is an individual from whom major stress and anxiety have been removed by Dianetic therapy.
A clear (noun) is an individual who, as a result of Dianetic therapy, has neither active nor perceived psychosomatic illness or aberation.
To clear(verb) is to release all the physical pain and painful emotion from the life of an individual or, as in Political Dianetics, a society."
My previous writings sum up my points on this chapter.
Firstly, a clear is not a maintainable state of being. The clear is not imune from further aberrations. Also, the fact of being clear can only be ascertained using current knowledge; which may actually be false. It is also only possible to audit known engrams and if engrams still exist which are not audited out, then the belief in being clear is simply that, a belief and not a known fact. It is, and can never be any more than, a state of belief rather than an actual, factual state of being.
Being clear is thus a state of mind; belief in being clear is just as belief in a deity. Unprovable and unshakable even in the face of fact, as the mind chooses to ignore all evidence to the contrary in the wish to maintain its belief.
The claims for a clear which are made by dianetics, have not been actually proven. In fact, all that I have encountered to this day, have actually disproven these claims and I can find no account of scientology actually providing a clear to the wider scientific community for thorough analysis of the claims made.
Secondly, achieving release has its dangers. If one seeks release from a situation where guilt is to a level where the individual must actively seek release, then there is the possibility that it can simply reinforce the guilt.
The Mind's Protection
"The mind is a self-protecting mechanism." OK, I'm prepared to consider this as a valid statement. Let's delve deeper.
Auditors will make mistakes, but nothing that can't be remedied. There are thousands of ways to get in to trouble with mental healing. Fine. I'm happy with those statements.
When it comes to, "The mind will not permit itself to be seriously overloaded so long as it can retain partial awareness of itself; it can only be overloaded when its awareness is reduced to a point where it cannot evaluate anything; it can then be thoroughly upset." I have to admit to struggling. On the face of it, this is contradicting itself. As long as the mind is at least partially aware of itself, then it can't be overloaded. If the mind is not aware of itself then it can be overloaded. The key things I find myself asking are, how does the mind lose awareness of itself if not through overloading, and if the mind hasn't got awareness of itself then how is it aware of other things by which it can be overloaded?
The only answer of this, for me, is that the mind must be in a state of trance. According to the dictionary, "an abnormal state of suspended consciousness." Dianetics claims the state to be, "reverie," which is explained by the dictionary as, "Musing; a day dream." This contrasts with the definition of reverie given by Dianetics to be, "a label introduced to make the patient feel that his state has altered and that he has gone into a state where his memory is very good or where he can do something he couldn't ordinarily do before. The actuality is that he is able to do it all the time anyway. It is not a strange state. The person is wide awake, but merely by asking him to close his eyes he is technically in reverie."
So, in order to achieve results during auditing, the person is encouraged in to a mode which is not a hypnotic trance, but is neither being fully conscious. The mode suggested by page 236 (page 2 of this chapter) is that the person is susceptible to suggestion; the manner by which past events can be analysed by the auditor through bypassing the protections of the fully conscious and wilful mind. The event can then be revisited and analysed for the impact that it had on the person, and the power of the emotional response to the situation, re-programmed.
In short, this is coming down to the age old adages of a problem shared being a problem halved and, in the case of dianetic application of this technique, having the support of another in a calm and perceived safe environment, to go through traumas experience and analyse them. To this extent, what I have read in this chapter is what the human race has been doing for years. The fact that Dianetics has observed these events and written them down does, indeed, classify this as being science of the mind; the pursuit of systematic and formulated knowledge on the subject of the minds behaviour.
I do recall Hubbard writing, somewhere else in this book, that Dianetics can not be outlawed because it is on the basis of one man simply talking to another. In that, I am in agreement with the foundational principle.
Now that I have reached this point in understanding, I have to take issue with the protection of the mind in these circumstances and the claim that any damage encountered through such a process can be undone. This is combined with the moral aspect of treatment. Where confronting a truth of a situation can, in itself, incur damage to the mind. One strong example is where this is a result of actions that the individual perceives as being bad and shameful, for example post-war veterans who pulled the trigger and killed people; whether enemy or innocents; this changes a person. To remove that responsibility, there seems from what I have been reading, to be only two ways out. One is to remove or shift responsibility for the actions; eg. following orders for the greater good. The other is to enforce belief that the end justified the means.
When public support wanes for a war and the justification in a war is thrown in to question, or the soldier in question ended up killing innocents, even by accident, then it can be seen that in order to alleviate the guilt in these cases, may be seen by some as introducing or reinforcing lies in order to alleviate engrams of guilt. That is, then, a very awkward ethical question.
In the everyday, it might be the result of seeing someone lying on the street, crying for help but walking past them doing nothing. What is worse, the guilt of doing nothing and walking by, or trying to do something for them but ultimately losing the battle to save their life? Seeing a pickpocket at work but failing to raise the alarm. Little things like that will result in engrams that can only be faced by repentance, or by forging a means of justification to appease the guilt.
Messing around with serious guilt complexes can send people in to downward spirals from which they might never come out, if they refuse to accept the forged justification and haven't got the soul to feel genuine repentance and acknowledge their feelings for their actions.
Thus, I take issue with the claim that an auditor can do no damage by reverie.
Auditors will make mistakes, but nothing that can't be remedied. There are thousands of ways to get in to trouble with mental healing. Fine. I'm happy with those statements.
When it comes to, "The mind will not permit itself to be seriously overloaded so long as it can retain partial awareness of itself; it can only be overloaded when its awareness is reduced to a point where it cannot evaluate anything; it can then be thoroughly upset." I have to admit to struggling. On the face of it, this is contradicting itself. As long as the mind is at least partially aware of itself, then it can't be overloaded. If the mind is not aware of itself then it can be overloaded. The key things I find myself asking are, how does the mind lose awareness of itself if not through overloading, and if the mind hasn't got awareness of itself then how is it aware of other things by which it can be overloaded?
The only answer of this, for me, is that the mind must be in a state of trance. According to the dictionary, "an abnormal state of suspended consciousness." Dianetics claims the state to be, "reverie," which is explained by the dictionary as, "Musing; a day dream." This contrasts with the definition of reverie given by Dianetics to be, "a label introduced to make the patient feel that his state has altered and that he has gone into a state where his memory is very good or where he can do something he couldn't ordinarily do before. The actuality is that he is able to do it all the time anyway. It is not a strange state. The person is wide awake, but merely by asking him to close his eyes he is technically in reverie."
So, in order to achieve results during auditing, the person is encouraged in to a mode which is not a hypnotic trance, but is neither being fully conscious. The mode suggested by page 236 (page 2 of this chapter) is that the person is susceptible to suggestion; the manner by which past events can be analysed by the auditor through bypassing the protections of the fully conscious and wilful mind. The event can then be revisited and analysed for the impact that it had on the person, and the power of the emotional response to the situation, re-programmed.
In short, this is coming down to the age old adages of a problem shared being a problem halved and, in the case of dianetic application of this technique, having the support of another in a calm and perceived safe environment, to go through traumas experience and analyse them. To this extent, what I have read in this chapter is what the human race has been doing for years. The fact that Dianetics has observed these events and written them down does, indeed, classify this as being science of the mind; the pursuit of systematic and formulated knowledge on the subject of the minds behaviour.
I do recall Hubbard writing, somewhere else in this book, that Dianetics can not be outlawed because it is on the basis of one man simply talking to another. In that, I am in agreement with the foundational principle.
Now that I have reached this point in understanding, I have to take issue with the protection of the mind in these circumstances and the claim that any damage encountered through such a process can be undone. This is combined with the moral aspect of treatment. Where confronting a truth of a situation can, in itself, incur damage to the mind. One strong example is where this is a result of actions that the individual perceives as being bad and shameful, for example post-war veterans who pulled the trigger and killed people; whether enemy or innocents; this changes a person. To remove that responsibility, there seems from what I have been reading, to be only two ways out. One is to remove or shift responsibility for the actions; eg. following orders for the greater good. The other is to enforce belief that the end justified the means.
When public support wanes for a war and the justification in a war is thrown in to question, or the soldier in question ended up killing innocents, even by accident, then it can be seen that in order to alleviate the guilt in these cases, may be seen by some as introducing or reinforcing lies in order to alleviate engrams of guilt. That is, then, a very awkward ethical question.
In the everyday, it might be the result of seeing someone lying on the street, crying for help but walking past them doing nothing. What is worse, the guilt of doing nothing and walking by, or trying to do something for them but ultimately losing the battle to save their life? Seeing a pickpocket at work but failing to raise the alarm. Little things like that will result in engrams that can only be faced by repentance, or by forging a means of justification to appease the guilt.
Messing around with serious guilt complexes can send people in to downward spirals from which they might never come out, if they refuse to accept the forged justification and haven't got the soul to feel genuine repentance and acknowledge their feelings for their actions.
Thus, I take issue with the claim that an auditor can do no damage by reverie.
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