CHAPTER 28
INCIDENT RUNNING

The being often flinches from painful incidents. Because he cannot face the contents of an incident, he will develop unpleasant and even irrational associations between factors within it. Because he is unwilling to confront things connected with the incident, there will be things which he is no longer willing to be, do, or have. And because he is unwilling to have it happen again, he will set up automatic and reactive mental machinery to protect himself and, as is often the case, he will eventually loose control over this machinery and it will operate on a subconscious basis.

This is a major source of mental charge, inability, and reduced awareness.

Unconfonted painful incidents tend to lock up on top of each other. When a person can't face something, he tends to fall into the same circumstances again and again because he can't take effective action or handle the situation. His own mental flinch at the earlier incident causes him to think and act poorly when it seems like it might happen again.

The circumstances of life can stir up one of these old incidents and trigger it so to speak, by hitting enough of the unconfronted contents. We call this "restimulating" the incident.

When an incident gets restimulated, the person tends to drag the whole thing into the present and may again feel some of the unpleasant effects of the original incident.

Running out these old buried painful incidents was the target of Dianetics. L. Ron Hubbard wrote a great deal on this subject. Many of the phenomena and mechanisms described in his book "Dianetics the Modern Science of Mental Health" (DMSMH) can be observed in practice. However, much of the clockwork behavior of the "reactive mind" and the absolutes hypothesized by the book are inaccurate and fall away in the light of more advanced theories which consider the person to be an immortal spirit.

It is the being himself who creates his own mental state, mocks up his own mental machinery, and drags these old painful pictures around. Most of this is operating subconsciously, but he can bring it back under his own control. Many of the drills in this book aim at moving various things back into conscious control.

The being's strongest reason for carrying around pictures of old incidents and giving them the power to restimulate and react (often to his detriment) is his non-confront of the pain that occurred in these incidents.

He did not face them when they happened, so he has a lack of data and awareness in the area. But he doesn't want them to happen again. So he is afraid to forget them while at the same time he doesn't want to remember them consciously. So he keeps a picture of the incident around and lets it react without looking at it or controlling it.

The solution is very simple. You raise your confront of old painful incidents until this kind of thing doesn't bother you anymore and you can toss the whole mechanism. This has sometimes been called a state of "clear" because one no longer has these old painful incidents reacting out of one's control.

Unfortunately, there has been a lot of sales hype on this state of "clear". It is not actually being cleared of all aberration. There are many other factors and we have been addressing quite a few of them in this book. But this particular point of no longer having one's mind twisted by the weight of past pain is a significant one and it is worth rolling up your sleeves and putting in some work to achieve it.

The way to do it is to begin with easy incidents and work up to more difficult ones on a gradual basis.

Early Dianetics did the exact opposite, trying to find the underlying incidents which might be the cause of something in a misguided effort to attempt to work some miracle cure. This lead to various tricks which would throw the person into incidents that were over their head. Even professionals had a great deal of difficulty with those kind of techniques and they are totally impossible for use on a solo basis. And those miracles were always elusive, only occurring on a sporadic basis, because painful incidents are far from the only source of aberration.

So don't push hard and get fanatical about finding "the incident" that explains everything or some such foolishness. Instead, just work to raise your confront of painful incidents bit by bit until the whole idea becomes one big joke.

28.1 An Incident Running Technique

These things should be written down as you run the incident.

a) locate an incident

Various things to run will be discussed later. For a first incident, run having breakfast or lunch yesterday.

b) spot or determine when the incident happened

Do the best you can. Zero in on it if needed. If you think it was between 20 and 30 years ago, then see if it feels like it was more than 25 years ago or less then, and then see what specific year feels right. Try to get or approximate the month and day and time of day.

For incidents that happened very long ago, try to get the order of magnitude of how many years ago it was.

If necessary, date the incident in terms of having happened before one thing and after another (after starting 7th grade and before you graduated, for example).

The idea is to try and focus in on the time of the incident.

For our warm-up step of having breakfast yesterday, you already know that it was yesterday, so try and focus in on the exact time when you started having breakfast.

c) spot or determine the duration of the incident

Again do the best that you can. You want to have an idea of the timespan. This helps improve your recall of the incident.

d) spot or determine the location of the incident

Pin down the location as best you can. You can even just try and feel what direction it is from your present location and how far away it was.

e) spot or determine the size of the space in which the incident occurred.

This would be spotting things such as it happened in a small room or maybe it was a car chase that covered miles etc.

These steps all help bring the incident into focus.

f) close your eyes

g) Move To The Beginning Of The Incident

"Move" to the actual time when the incident occurred. Try to recreate the incident around you, as if you were actually being there. See what you can spot or perceive there.

h) Move through the incident

Try as best you can to re-experience the incident, doing your best to face up to everything that happened in it.

i) Write down what happened

Of course you open your eyes to do this. You want to write it down so as to get separate from it.

j) Repeat steps f to i.

You run through it again.

One of two things will happen, either the incident is running out or there is earlier material which is preventing it from running and therefore needs to be looked at.

If the incident is running out, new parts of it that you didn't see the first time will surface (for example, you realize what the color of somebody's shirt was), or details will rearrange as you get them right, or things that had impact will begin to weaken and become unimportant.

If, however, the incident is becoming harder to run, seems heavier or more solid, or you start feeling worse about it, then there is earlier material that needs to be run.

If this happens, begin by looking for an earlier beginning to the incident that you are running. For example, you might have started running an operation and the earlier beginning might be the accident that put you in the hospital.

If the incident is becoming harder to run and you cannot find an earlier beginning, then you should find an earlier similar incident.

As you face an incident, it should become easier and easier to confront and if that is not happening, it is because looking at the incident is stirring up an earlier incident. Since you are not looking at the earlier one, your attempts to look at the later incident just keep stirring up more without bringing any relief.

Since the earlier incident is being stirred up, it will almost seem to be there "behind" the one that you are running. It should be easy to get some sort of feeling or impression about it even though it might be far out of your ordinary recollections, possibly even something from an earlier lifetime.

You shouldn't go looking for earlier incidents unless you have already run the current one at least twice through, but if you suddenly realize that there is an earlier incident without having searched for it, then it is ready to run and you can take it up immediately.

It is also desirable to push through periods of unconsciousness and get some idea of what happened during the unconsciousness. It generally takes a number of passes over an unconscious period before it begins to lift and you start to perceive a bit of what happened.

Note that increasing ITSA (saying It is a ...) on the incident (meaning that you are perceiving more and retrieving more of the content) takes precedent over any feelings that the incident might be getting a bit more solid or harder to run. You can always take another run through it and see if you are going to find out more before looking earlier.

Another thing to be aware of is that heavy "charge" will distort an incident, and can give you dubbed-in incorrect data. If the content keeps shifting around, you are probably taking off layers of dub-in and should keep running through the incident until it settles down one way or another.

This dub-in factor also means that you cannot entirely trust the contents of an incident unless it cleans up to the point of clear and conscious recall.

One important rule is to always run whatever comes up and not question its reality. You need to confront whatever is presented to be confronted. But as long as there is significant "charge" in an area, the data might not be entirely accurate. So don't run off half cocked using data that you learn in running an incident. If the contents are important, look back later when there is no charge present and see what is really there to remember.

Things do sort out eventually and you will start getting good recall. The warning is mainly for when you first start working on an area. Things generally look a bit different once you get a bit further down the road and you will see what was real (some of it will be real even from the very beginning) and what wasn't.

When you start running an earlier incident or an earlier beginning to the current incident, do the entire set of commands beginning with step a). On subsequent passes through an incident, just use steps j) onward. In other words, you should do the dating and locating steps whenever you begin running from a new starting point.

k) Erasure

You are finished when the incident or earlier similar incident runs out completely. This is called an "erasure". But note that what has really "erased" is one's mental "charge" about the incident. The mental picture can, of course, be recreated at will but there should be no tendency for the picture to "hang in one's mind" (that would indicate that there was more charge on it).

When the incident "erases", you should feel better about it and have no flinch or backoff from it.

A sudden new realization or awareness often indicates that the charge has erased because one can now think clearly in the area.

It is also possible to get an immediate erasure when one first looks at an incident. One just sees the whole thing and it falls apart and one feels better about it.

Once an erasure has occurred, you should do the following step to get some more out of it.

l) Spot any postulates or decisions that you made at the time of the incident.

This last step is a real horsepower booster.

28.2 What To Run First

BEGIN WITH EASY THINGS.

Do not attempt to run anything heavy until you have the steps down and the routine seems easy.

First do some innocuous things such as running an "incident" of eating breakfast. These will not really have "charge" on them, but you should be able to run through the incident a few times with a significant improvement in recall and end on feeling good about remembering it clearly.

Do these "uncharged" incidents until you are comfortable with the technique.

Then run some trivial painful incidents where the actual impact that caused the pain is obvious. Stubbing your toe or banging your shin is a good starting point.

This could include things such as banging your head, but do not start with things like having a headache because that will require digging back to earlier incidents where you actually hurt your head. Don't start with things like illnesses where there is a whole bundle of different aches and pains.

Note that something like stubbing your toe might have happened many times. You do not have to meticulously run back earlier similar through each and every individual occurrence. When you go to an earlier incident, go as early as possible if multiple ones are available. You are really raising your confront of the entire category of incidents.

Get good at these easy ones before you move on. The actual target is to gradually raise your confront of pain in the past until you can confront anything that might have happened to you without a lot of discomfort.

28.3 Running Aches and Pains

Many random aches and pains either stem from or are exaggerated by earlier incidents being restimulated. Furthermore, the action of confronting earlier times that something was hurt makes it easier to confront and handle a current injury.

In trying to run out or reduce a specific pain, we are interested in following down chains of incidents which contain that specific pain. Therefore, when you look for an earlier similar incident, try to look for one which contains the same pain that you are trying to handle.

If you simply feel a pain or discomfort without some direct reason, it is probably a time when an incident was restimulated. It is not unusual for this kind of thing to happen as a result of some kind of stress or argument which is restimulative of earlier incidents where there was actual impact.

You want incidents that actually could cause the pain that you are trying to run rather than simply picking up times that the pain was restimulated. If necessary, you can begin by picking up a time when it was restimulated, because this does raise your confront of the pain, but try to get to real impacts as soon as possible.

If at all possible, leave sickness for later and concentrate on impacts and injuries.

The brain is a special area which is very intimate to a spiritual being because he normally controls the body through it. There are other things (discussed in a later chapter) which can be involved in headaches besides simple impacts to the head.

For now, if you suffer from headaches, you can reduce their intensity by running incidents of impact to the head, but don't get evangelistic about trying to cure headaches and don't try to start by running through an incident of having a really bad headache because it will usually contain dozens of different and individual head pains. Instead, take a specific head pain (a particular hurt in a specific area) that you might have experienced during a headache and look for an incident of impact that might be a source for such a pain. Doing this for many specific head pains can greatly lessen the strength and frequency of headaches.

When running a pain, it is often not enough to simply handle incidents where the pain happened to you. There will usually also be times that you did it to somebody else and these are also non-confronted and contribute to your subconscious recreation of old pains.

So, after running an incident of having a particular pain to the point of erasure, then look for and run a chain of incidents of giving that pain to somebody else. After this, you should also check for an incident where somebody did it to another or others because sometimes the basic source might be your non-confront of seeing this done to others.

The keynote here is always to raise your confront of pain and force rather than attaching a great deal of importance to the stories or significance behind what happened. As you begin to really explore your past existence, you will find that incident running is too slow and does not give you enough context. The recall techniques given in the early chapters are the real tools for exploring your past lives. But you need to get your confront of past pain up to the point where you can push through heavy painful incidents with simple recall before the recall techniques will become fully effective.

28.4 Accidents and Operations

 Of course running a simple pain might take you back to a major accident, but you should always have been starting from simple pains while doing the previous section and concentrating on following down one pain at a time.

You should have a good confront of painful incidents and be doing well on them before you move on to this section.

When you address an accident or operation directly, using it as your starting point, you are addressing a composite of many different pains, drug effects, unconsciousness, and the narrative content of the incident.

In this case, you may have to go over the incident many times. If the incident includes being unconscious, which is especially true of operations, then you will want to run this to the point where the unconsciousness lifts to some degree and you can spot what was happening during the unconscious period.

The spiritual being is never actually totally knocked out, it just gets dazed and numb and unthinking. As you take repeated passes through the incident, you will gradually push through the unconsciousness and find your experience of the incident. This will often be from an exterior point of view, with you as a spirit perhaps looking down at the body and hoping that everything goes well.

You should, if possible, push all the way through an incident where you were unconscious in this lifetime because this is useful for both your confront and understanding and develops a practical skill which has applications in terms of determining what happened to you.

But the rules on going earlier if something is getting harder to run still hold true.

The greater your confront is, the easier it will be to simply confront an incident as itself and erase it without dragging in earlier incidents. A complex accident or injury will actually be sitting on many different chains of earlier incidents, both earlier similar content (an earlier auto accident, for example) and earlier similar pains and sensations.

If you do need to look for an earlier incident, simply pickup whatever seems to feel right, whether earlier similar content or an earlier time that you had the same kind of pain.

If something has happened multiple times in this lifetime, the earliest one will be easiest to run.

On one of these heavy current lifetime incidents containing real unconsciousness, if you can recall the incident but not the unconscious period, it indicates that the incident has not completely erased. If you go earlier and run out an underlying incident, this takes weight off of the later incident but does not necessarily cause the later one to erase completely because it can be on more than one chain and because your confront of things that have happened to the current body may be lower than your confront of things that happened long ago to bodies that are long gone.

If a this lifetime accident or operation didn't actually erase (the unconscious period didn't lift when you ran out an underlying more basic incident), you can come back to it again later and get further with it. You might have to run it a number of times, getting a different underlying chain of incidents each time before it will erase completely. If the incident is drawing your attention, go ahead and run it again immediately, but if not, then run other incidents to build up your confront and come back to this one later.

As in the previous section, it is also of benefit to run incidents of doing or causing the same thing to happen to others.

28.5 Other Techniques

There are other ways to run incidents.

The fastest is simple recall if you are up to taking the incident apart completely just by recalling it. As your confront comes up, you will find that more and more can be handled this way without resorting to heavier techniques.

If something is coming apart on simple recall, then do not use the above technique on it because a slow and pedantic technique may encourage you to put the incident back after it has erased.

Eventually you reach a point where the whole weight of painful incidents pretty much falls away. After that, you just use as much as you need to get your confront up on something, and usually recall will be enough.

Another technique is to simply spot something in the incident and then spot something in the present environment as an alternating repetitive command.

When you are beginning, this can be used in addition to the incident running technique as an aid to handling a picture that seems to be stuck.

At the more advanced stages, when you are generally only running incidents by recall alone, this alternate spotting technique can be used on the occasional difficult thing that wouldn't come quite into view.

The idea behind the alternate spotting is that spotting the current environment (as in chapter 1) keeps raising your perceptions and letting you push harder when you look back at the incident. Like the incident running technique, this one will let you pull data up out of unconscious periods. The alternate spotting also keeps you from getting knocked out by the incident if it is too heavy for you to handle easily.

28.6 Memory

The trick of moving to the time of something and running through it is a different memory trick from ordinary recall.

It is a step towards developing a "photographic" or "phonographic" memory. This is the mechanism used for that, namely to move back to when you looked at something or heard something and see it or hear it again.

Pushing through incidents of unconsciousness will improve this ability.

Once you have done enough of this, you will find that you can begin working with this skill in everyday life. If you look at something carefully and with strong concentration, you should find it possible to move back to that time and look at it again as needed. If you pay careful attention at a meeting or concert or lecture, you should find it possible to move back to that time and hear it again. Try these things and work with them a bit. The skill improves with use.

Other contributing factors include interest and attention and concentration and the absence of other blockage on the kind of thing that one is trying to recall.

You can also get at "recordings" of things that you were not paying attention to, but it is much harder. If somebody says something and you weren't paying attention, you can quickly run back the recording and "hear" what they were saying even though you weren't really listening. But it takes practice and the ability to muster a sufficient degree of concentration to be able to do this.

You can also work at retrieving things that were said around you while you were asleep.

Pushing this to the point where it is clear and accurate over the span of the current lifetime is a major endeavor and requires far more work than simply confronting painful incidents.

Don't, for example, expect to remember numbers accurately if you don't like math.

And getting past life recall to the point where you can retrieve useful skills and data is an even bigger step.

These are targets that you work towards and attain gradually over the course of years. So don't expect this kind of ability on a first pass through the book. Just get your confront up on pain and some skill at handling incidents and then move on to the other chapters. We will be doing some more incident running later, and you can always carry these things further when it feels like the right time to do so.

But even if you don't push it that far initially, you should be aware that the mind does contain complete records and you can get access to these if you work at it.

28.7 Afterword

There is a lot of material on the subject of incident running. Orthodox Dianetics and Scientology did a great deal of work in this area, the "freezone" splinter groups have done more, and even psychology has been getting into past life regression techniques.

There are many useful tricks, unusual phenomena, and extended techniques in this area.

If you begin by raising your confront of painful incidents as discussed here, you should be able to experiment with or try anything else in this field safely.