the present and part went back to the past. These abilities of the mind were supposed native only in hypnotism and were used only in hypnotic technique. The art is very old, tracing back some thousands of years and existing today in Asia as it has existed, apparently, from the dawn of time.
Returning is substituted for “regression” here because it is not a comparable thing and because “regression,” as a word, has some bad meanings which would interrupt its use.
Reliving is substituted for “revivification” in dianetics because, in dianetics, the principles of hypnotism can be found explained and hypnotism is not used in dianetic therapy, as will be explained later.
The mind, then, has another ability to remember. Part of the mind can “return” even when a person is wide awake and re-experience past incidents in full. If you want to test this, try it on several people until one is discovered who does it easily. Wide awake he can “return”
to moments in his past. Until asked to do so he probably will not know he has such an ability.
If he had it, he probably thought everybody could do it (the type of supposition which has kept so much of this data from coming to light before). He can go back to a time when he was swimming and swim with full recall of hearing, sight, taste, smell, organic sensation, tactile, etc.
A “learned” gentleman once spent some hours demonstrating to a gathering that the recall of a smell as a sensation, for instance, was quite impossible since “neurology had proven that the olfactory nerves were not connected to the thalamus.” Two people in the gathering discovered this ability to return and despite this evidence, the learned gentleman continued the dispute that olfactory recall was impossible. A check amongst the gathering on this faculty, independent of returning, brought forth the fact that one-half of those present remembered smell by smelling it again.
Returning is the full performance of imagery recall. The entire memory is able to make the organ areas re-sense the stimuli in a past incident. Partial recall is common, not common enough to be normal, but certainly common enough to have merited considerable study. For it again is a wide variable.
Perception of the present would be one method of facing reality. But if one cannot face the reality of the past then, in some part, he is not facing some portion of reality. And if it is ageed that facing reality is desirable, then one would have to face yesterday’s reality as well if he were to be considered entirely “sane” by contemporary definition. To “face yesterday”
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requires a certain condition of recall to be available. One would have to be able to remember.
But how many ways are there of remembering?
First there is the return. That is new. It gives the advantage of examining the moving pictures and other sense perceptions recorded at the time of the event with all senses present.
He can also return to his past conclusions and imaginings. It is of considerable aid in learning, in research, in ordinary living to be able to be again at the place where the data desired was first inspected.
Then there are the more usual recalls. Optimum recall is by the return method of single or multiple senses, the individual himself remaining in present time. In other words, some people, when they think of a rose, see one, smell one, feel one. They see in full color, vividly
-- with the “mind’s eye” to use an old colloquialism. They smell it vividly. And they can feel it even to the thorns. They are thinking about roses by actually recalling a rose.
These people, thinking about a ship, would see a specific ship, feel the motion of her if they thought of being aboard her, smell the pine-tar or even less savory odors and hear whatever sounds there were about her. They would see the ship in full color motion and hear it in full tone audio.
These faculties vary widely in the aberree. Some, when told to think of a