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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Auditing (Scientology) | 3/5 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditing_(Scientology) | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:17:10.624540+00:00 | kb-cron |
== Rundowns == Hubbard defines a rundown as "a series of steps which are auditing actions and processes designed to handle a specific aspect of a case and which have a known end phenomena". Hubbard devised dozens of rundowns. The main rundowns are the levels of the Bridge to Total Freedom, which are the codified sequential steps to attain Scientology's concept of spiritual freedom. One of the earliest rundowns on the Bridge, which most Scientologists are expected to do, is the Purification Rundown. The "purif" is a sauna-and-sweat detoxification program requiring a high intake of vitamins, allegedly designed to remove toxins from the body that would inhibit one's recall needed for future auditing. Some of the basic levels of the Bridge include rundowns said to alleviate issues with communication, problems, and upsets. The Clear Certainty Rundown is the step where the Church of Scientology verifies that the preclear has correctly attained the State of Clear. There are specialty rundowns such as the three very high-priced "L's Rundowns" available only at Flag which are promoted as executive boosters and promise the ability to be stably exterior—outside of your body. The Super Power Rundown is intended to increase one's perceptions; Hubbard said we have 57 senses which he calls "perceptics". One of the most controversial rundowns is the Introspection Rundown, which is alleged to handle a psychotic episode or complete mental breakdown but was a key factor in the death of Lisa McPherson and has been widely written about. Numerous other rundowns are listed on the right margin of the Bridge to Total Freedom.
== Constructs ==
=== Reactive mind === The reactive mind (also called a reactive bank, or simply bank) is a concept formulated by Hubbard, referring to that portion of the human mind that is unconscious and operates on a stimulus-response basis. In the reactive mind are engrams which are recordings of incidents in one's life that Hubbard says cause most mental, emotional, and psychosomatic ailments.
What can it do? It can give a man arthritis, bursitis, asthma, allergies, sinusitis, coronary trouble, high blood pressure and so on down the whole catalogue of psycho-somatic ills, adding a few more which were never specifically classified as psycho-somatic, such as the common cold. —L. Ron Hubbard The action of auditing is to locate these incidents and "erase" them, meaning they are removed from the unconscious reactive mind and re-filed into the person's conscious analytical mind.
=== Engram === The use of the word engram in Dianetics and Scientology is different from the meaning of "engram" in cognitive psychology. According to Hubbard, an engram is a detailed mental image or memory of a traumatic event from the past that occurred when an individual was partially or fully unconscious. Whenever something painful happens while one's "analytic mind" is unconscious, engrams are said to be recorded and stored within the reactive mind. In 1950, Hubbard first described an engram as a "cellular level recording" that includes both physical and emotional pain, but later redefined his concept as being "a mental image picture of a moment of pain and unconsciousness". Engrams are said to originate from painful incidents, which close down the "analytic function", leaving a person to operate only on the "reactive" level, where everything, including pain, position, and location are experienced as "aspects of the unpleasant whole." An engram is restimulated if the person is later reminded of the painful experience, causing feelings of guilt or embarrassment – another engram. This cycle is called a "lock" in Scientology terminology. Engrams are stored as series of incidents that are similar, called "chains". Jeff Jacobsen compared the process of auditing engrams to the Freudian psychoanalytic concept of abreaction, equating engrams to the painful subconscious memories that abreaction therapy brings up to the conscious mind. He quoted Nathaniel Thornton, who compared abreaction to confession. Dorthe Refslund Christensen describes engrams in layman's terms as trauma, a means to explain the long and short term effects of painful experiences. According to Christensen, Hubbard wrote about the dramatization of an engram, where the one who suffered and recorded the pain as an engram relates all sensory perceptions during the time of the painful incident to the incident. These sensory perceptions become "restimulators" that remind the individual of the pain and triggers him or her to re-experience it. Scholar Richard Holloway writes that according to Scientology, engrams are "damaging experiences that happen by accident," bruises through time implanted on thetans through the course of millions of lives. Sometimes the damage is intentionally inflicted by thetans who desired power over other thetans. Deliberate injuries are called implants in Scientology. Hubbard wrote, "Implants result in all varieties of illness, apathy, degradiation, neurosis and insanity and are the principle causes of these in man." The Christian idea of heaven is a deceptive implant, Hubbard taught, for there is an infinite series of lives after the first, contrary to the Christian notion of the afterlife. The term engram was coined in 1904 by the German scholar Richard Semon, who defined it as a "stimulus impression" which could be reactivated by the recurrence of "the energetic conditions which ruled at the generation of the engram." Hubbard re-used Semon's concept when he published Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health in 1950. He conceived of the engram as a form of "memory trace", an idea that had long existed in medicine. According to physician Joseph Winter, who collaborated with Hubbard during the early years of the Dianetics organizations, Hubbard had taken the term "engram" from a 1936 edition of Dorland's Medical Dictionary, where it was defined as "a lasting mark or trace...In psychology it is the lasting trace left in the psyche by anything that has been experienced psychically; a latent memory picture." Hubbard had originally used various terms such as "norn", "comanome" and "impediment" before settling on "engram" following a suggestion from Winter.