More thoughs on MOL

[From Bill Powers (971226.1001 MST)]

All this talk about the method of levels is bringing back the old dianetics
days, a bit to my discomfort. Kirk Sattley and I did these explorations
only a year or so after I left that movement, so a lot of it was a
continuation of what I had learned during a couple of intense years of
dealing with walk-in clients -- I figure about 100-150 of them in that
time. I was in that movement from 1950 to 1952 -- I've thought of them as
the Lost Years, but am having second thoughts.

Hubbard's main thesis was that everything that was wrong with you was
somebody else's fault. In order to undo the problems, you had to relive
past experiences (and when Scientology came on the scene, past lives!) and
run out the charge on these incidents, freeing your mind to live up to its
full unfettered potential. As every therapist knows, this is an appealing
idea, because people usually start out by blaming others for their
problems, and dianetics made it official. I, for one, fresh out of college
and in miserable shape, thought it was a great idea -- at first.

As I became a dianetic auditor and started working 12 hours a day, 7 days a
week with some really screwed-up people, I learned a lot that was good
about Hubbard's process. This is where I learned the worth of being
non-evaluative, of giving no advice, and of simply running the process of
reliving past experiences and following the chains back as far as they
would go. The Auditor's Code was a marvellous guideline, both ethical and
practical, for preventing ignorant people from imposing their own hangups
on their clients. If all you're permitted to do is say, " Thank you. Please
return to the beginning of the incident and go through it again," or "Thank
you. Please return to the earliest previous incident that comes up and go
through it from the beginning," there's not a lot of harm you can do.

Toward the end of my career, I had a memorable session with a paranoid
homosexual schizophrenic, and I exaggerate not. Official diagnosis given to
his mother by the last psychiatrist to give up on him. The sign over the
Silver Dollar Cafe in Las Vegas where he lived at one time, on the verge of
starvation, was a radar antenna aimed at his hotel room to give him
toothaches. By this time he and I had become pretty good friends, and he
could say things to me like "I'm probably the champion paranoiac around
here." Anyway, in this session he ended up describing performing messy and
miserable fellatio on his traitorous boy-friend, and ended up by saying,
"Well, I guess it was all good protein." After we had finished cracking up,
I said "Thank you. Please return to the beginning of the incident and run
it again," and he did, until we were both bored with it. That's what it
meant to be a dianetic auditor. No matter what, you said "Please return to
the beginning of the incident ..." and kept on until there was nothing left
to run out.

The results were pretty spectacular, I have to admit. Most people quite
soon, after 10 to 30 hours of sessions, said "Thanks, I think I can make it
on my own now." And they kept coming back to tell us that indeed, they
could. That's what kept us doing it. We sure weren't making money at it,
because we never turned anyone away just because they couldn't pay. I was
living on about $50 a month then, after the rent and groceries for all of
us were taken care of.

Toward the end of this period, probably as a result of my own experiences
on the couch (we all had to go through the process as well as run it), I
began to have my doubts about the usefulness of running past incidents.
Part of Hubbard's schizoid scheme involved taking responsibility for one's
own new evaluations of these past experiences, and I began to see that this
was the _sine qua non_, the element of the process that really made the
difference. We came into dianetics eager to track down all those bad things
that other people or the environment had done to us (including the dreaded
"AA" -- attempted abortions), and we came out of it realizing that it was
our own decisions and our own interpretations that had made us what we
were. We became willing to take responsibility for our own lives, and that,
it seemed to me, was what really made the process work. The emotional
charge invested in all those "engrams" really existed in the here and now,
and to deal with it in the here and now was the only cure that existed. I
began to see that this was what all the people I was working with ended up
doing, and that this was what gave them the confidence to decide that they
no longer needed us. Maybe they needed to start out by blaming other
people, but they ended by ceasing to do that.

Near the end of my dianetics experience, I wrote a long paper called "The
development of awareness of present time." I haven't dared to read it for
20 or 30 years, but I think I may have to look at it now, if I can find it.
This marked my final break with Hubbard, for in it I developed the idea
that the only place anyone can look for a solution to problems is in
present ideas, present feelings, and present memories -- the relationhip of
which to actual past events is 99% irrelevant. At least I think that's what
I said; if it wasn't, it's what I should have said. I'm not completely sure
I want to read that paper again -- I was coming out of a two-year dream,
and I dread seeing some of my old rationalizations. I'm sure as hell not
going to let any of YOU read it.

Anyway: the development of awareness of present time. That's what the
method of levels is about. The idea, as a therapy, is to examine how your
mind is NOW put together, regardless of how it got that way. You can't do
anything about how it got that way; you can only do something about how it
is NOW. And before you can do anything about it, you have to observe how it
works.

What my paper was about, or should have been about, was the fact that most
people have trouble staying in present time. Vast amounts of their energy
and thought go into trying to settle old scores with people who mistreated
them or failed them in some way in the long-gone past, or trying to defend
half-baked ideas they formed a long time ago and have never doubted since
then, or getting revenge for slights and insults and snubs and defeats, or
trying (as I would say now) to correct old errors that have been hanging
about for years and years. They live in memory, and lose track of what is
happening now.

Or, conversely, they are still trying to carry out plans and realize hopes
for the future that never did work out and probably never will if they
can't deal with the here and now. So they dwell on the hurts of the past or
pine for a future that seems unattainable, and forget how to live.

The method of levels is a way of getting in contact with what is happening
right now, from a standpoint in present time. In the present, you have
choices. In the past you have none, and in the future you can't see how
they turn out. The method of levels is a lot like the old dianetic process,
in that it's just a process that you guide someone through, without
steering or giving advice or even particularly caring what the
subject-matter is (like solving the problem of getting enough protein). The
guide fades into the background; all that counts is keeping the process
going. This is definitely something I picked up in the dianetics days; it
still strikes me as the core of any therapy: therapy is a process, not a
personal interaction. If it's effective, the person guiding it is
unimportant. In fact, the reaction of therapists to this idea gives me a
pretty good notion as to their ego involvement in being the therapist. All
us auditors knew that it was the process, not the auditor, that worked: we
all did exactly the same thing, as near as possible, and checked up on each
other to see that we did. How can you take credit for the result when
you're just turning the crank? The pre-clear does it all, we said.

Why did I get out of dianetics? Basically, because I realized fully what I
had known from the start, that Hubbard's scientific rationalizations were
just science fiction. I didn't know what I was doing. At one point I
allowed a friend to persuade me to run sessions on his wife who was dying
of breast cancer. It was a horrible, horrible experience to go through the
motions and know that it was all phoney and ineffective and she would die
anyway, as she did. My opinion of myself was the lowest it ever was before
or after that experience. I couldn't go on with it.

But of course I couldn't let all that I had learned go, either. When Kirk
Sattley gave me his copy of Wiener's "Cybernetics," I saw that this was a
new concept of how behavior worked. Maybe, I thought, if I learned how this
feedback stuff worked, I could work out an understanding of human behavior
that had something more than a science-fiction writer's imagination behind
it. That's what I've been trying to do ever since.

That book is still in my bookcase, with Kirk's name on the flyleaf. I've
offered to return it several times, but he probably knows how much it means
to me, and refuses to take it back. Come to think of it, I also have his
copy of Ashby's _Design for a brain_. Same deal.

Best,

Bill P.

1 Like

[From Bruce Gregory (971226.1505 EST)]

Bill Powers (971226.1001 MST)

All this talk about the method of levels is bringing back the old dianetics
days, a bit to my discomfort.

A very interesting post. I've been thinking throughout the exchanges on MOL
that the approach may well be valuable but seems to have very little to do
with PCT. The present time notion you emphasize is linked very closely to the
cultivation of awareness in the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh. I've though for a
while that what might add to this awareness is the identification of what you
are controlling or attempting to control. Simply recognizing these elements
seems to open up an awareness of what I can only call "self as control
system." Perceiving yourself as a control system seems to place the observer
at a point sufficiently high in the hierarchy, that conflicts often dissolve
without any obvious action.

Bruce