Engram
Mental recordings containing pain and unconsciousness.
Your mind contains mental image pictures of the moments of your life. Most of these pictures are simply remembrances. However, engrams are mental image pictures that contain moments of pain and a greater or lesser degree of unconsciousness. These pictures get stored in your reactive mind and create a stimulus-response situation outside of one’s full control and awareness.
Examples:
Sherry gets in a car accident and bumps her head so hard she blacks out. During that time, her rational mind becomes inactive. The reactive mind is the portion that records everything that happens. It records sights, smells, sounds, temperatures, everything that Sherry could possibly perceive.
When the EMTs come to help her she is still unconscious. One of them says, “Yikes! That’s going to hurt for a long time.” And she smells burnt rubber from the accident. Because this portion of the mind doesn’t act in a rational way, it creates problems that aren’t logical. After months of not feeling better, Sherry visits a neurologist. The doctor tells her there’s nothing physically wrong and that her head has long since healed. But Sherry’s reactive mind believes her head is “going to hurt for a long time.”
Unfortunately, Sherry also drives by a tire manufacturer on her way to work every day and the smell of the burning rubber triggers the car accident, giving her a headache. Sherry will have some awareness that her difficulties stem from the accident, but because her analytical mind doesn’t recall everything that happened she won’t be able to fully access that memory. If she teamed up with an auditor and applied the correct procedure, she could regain access to all the things that happened and any other related incidents. This would enable her to erase the engram and relocate those mental image pictures to her analytical mind where they couldn’t adversely affect her.
Here’s another example, with a lesser degree of unconsciousness. Let’s say Bernard gets up for a drink of water in the middle of the night and bangs his shin so hard his eyes water. He doesn’t pass out, but his analytical mind drops in awareness. And his reactive mind engages and starts recording. It records the pain, the sensation of feeling thirsty, the temperature in the room, the wetness of his watering eyes, and everything else that’s going on. Bernard is a runner. He likes to run half marathons. But after this shin-banging incident, he develops a new pain while running. Whenever he gets a little dehydrated, his shins begin to ache, and his eyes water up and blur his vision a bit. He may not connect this at all with banging his shin in the middle of the night. And because the shin-banging incident was relatively minor, he likely also has some earlier-similar incidents that an auditor could help him find and address.
There is a lot more to know about engrams and the reactive mind. A much fuller understanding of this subject can be gained by reading Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.
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