BASIC REASON PART II

A lecture given on 30 July 1951

Self- determinism

The consolidation of data and the resolving of problems relating to the survival of an organism, group or species is functionally very simple. It is one of these simplicities I went over earlier. It is so simple that it was overlooked.

As long as people failed to compartment function and structure the two things would keep tangling. Nobody identified function, and if you couldn’t identify function then you couldn’t completely identify structure.

Now that we have identified a lot about function and clarified it, somebody can do something about structure. This should happen fairly soon. But it is certain that nobody could resolve the problem as long as he was mixing structure and function.

People said, "The problem about the mind is that it perceives. Obviously the individual perceives. He sees something . . ." and all of a sudden they got derailed there and went off into structure. "The mechanism of sight has to do with the nervous system. And it flows down the optic nerve, and . . ." They didn’t quite say why men saw or what they did with what they saw.

Now, I may be wrong. There may be somebody— undoubtedly lost, forgotten, laid aside in the field of psychology— who has made a full definition of this. I have never seen it, although I have studied the subject quite a bit. That definition, if it had ever been advanced, if it had ever been accepted, would have resolved an awful lot of things. But it is one of these terribly simple definitions. It takes a great deal of courage to advance a simple definition.

The mind could be called a command post of an organism, which has gradually evolved into greater and greater structural complexities in order to accomplish a functional simplicity which itself never changed. The mind, in its evolution, has increased the number of ways it can do the same thing it was trying to do.

I have no doubt, for instance, that an algae thinks— no doubt about it at all. It doesn’t obviously think because it is not mobile. You can’t easily see it observe something and then walk off from it.

I conducted some experiments which would have caused gray hairs to have jumped out amongst the sable in almost any psychology laboratory. They were very difficult to do and I would hate to repeat them, though they seem very simple. You take a drop of water containing any monocellular bacteria which has a slight mobility. You can find plenty of these; you look in a drop of water and you will find lots of wigglers. It is not necessary to bother to identify this bacteria particularly. Just take this drop of water with a number of these cells and apply cigarette smoke to this drop, and watch them move away. They react to it. It is a very interesting thing. After you have done this a few times, you can give them steam instead of cigarette smoke, and they will move away. That is what is fascinating.

You can take a fresh drop of water with different animalcules and blow steam at it, and they won’t move; nothing happens. Then blow cigarette smoke at it and they move away. Then blow steam at it again and they move away. Here is a process of learning down in the microscopic levels.

This experiment is almost impossible to do. Like so many things that would seem desirable experimentally, there are so many physical limitations on equipment and on what you can do that your results seem nebulous; you have to repeat them many, many times and then hope that you were right. That is the kind of experiment this is. Until somebody resolves how to do this experiment better mechanically, I suppose it will stay in that bracket.

Now, it may be that somebody has done this experiment elsewhere. I did this experiment, by the way, in 1937. I worked with it for six weeks. The experiments were interrupted many times because I had a living to make, but I managed to get a series of them that was enough to convince me, and as long as I was only trying to convince myself I kept going on the postulate. And the postulate paid off. It said that the basic unit of life is a cell, and as the cell operates, so operates the most complex unit of life. The purpose of the monocell is also the purpose of the largest and most complex organism that exists. In other words, we can take and maintain a functional definition regardless of size and regardless of structural complexity and see if it bears fruit— and believe me, it has borne fruit.

The monocell is trying to survive. It is trying to survive as long as possible and it is trying to procreate. This means that it is necessary for it to approach and stay in the proximity of pleasure and get out of the road of, or avoid, pain. The combined vector of staying away from pain and approaching pleasure is a vector toward survival not only of that monocell but of the whole line of monocells through many generations. This is no different than the function of any organism, no matter how large.

You would seem to see a few differences, but again they are differences of complexity of the same function. A big organism has evolved so many ways to be mobile and so many ways to perceive and can combine them so much more intricately that one can easily overlook the fact that the function is exactly the same, the purpose of all of this action is the same. And yet the purpose has not varied; the complexity has greatly increased and so has structure.

Life, working in this fashion, trying to evolve into higher and higher abilities to move and perceive, has only been trying to work out better ways to keep away from pain and approach pleasure in order to survive, and it has succeeded in doing so. This is a very fundamental concept.

I am sorry that people avoid simple concepts. I recently read a book by the name of An Introduction to Psychopathology by Lawrence O’Kelly from the University of Chicago Department of Psychology, and it is the most confused treatise that I think I have ever read. There are good textbooks in psychology; this isn’t one of them. But this is the most modern one, and it says the whole function and purpose of life is to adapt, and the person who doesn’t do this is maladaptive, and with this reasoning goes on for about three hundred thousand words and winds up with a confused student on his hands. Because the purpose of life is not to adapt! What kind of a 1. philosophy is this?

What if we went around trying to adapt? The individual who would get this idea as an initial postulate sure must be, as an individual, so low on the tone scale that if a mouse walked up to him and said "Boo!" he would run for a cop.

This individual is confessing that he as an organism is licked by the environment, so "I had better kind of fit myself to it and get along and hope I stay alive, because, sir, I can’t do anything to these great big brutes around me."

It is really a low- toned society that will keep on promoting this idea. If man had ever started in on the line of adjusting to the environment, he would have wound up with organizations like the University of Chicago Department of Psychology! No more horrible thing could be imagined

When an organism starts to just adapt or adjust, it is done for. If an organism were just trying to adjust or adapt, what more beautiful life forms could there be than the plankton and the algae? They are very well adapted. There is nothing wrong with them; there is no reason for the algae or plankton to have gone on in any direction other than as monocells. They float out there on the surface of the sea; until there were larger and more brutal organisms around, nothing even menaced the algae except maybe an occasional storm, because it lives on minerals and sunlight. People call it "the wheat of the sea." It is the fundamental food of the sea. The sea is filled with chemicals, the plankton bobs along, the sun shines down, and the plankton converts 86 percent of that sunlight to energy.

That is very efficient. You don’t convert 86 percent of your energy intake to usable energy, believe me. Your carbon- oxygen engine is a low- heat engine; it is very inefficient.. It is almost as bad as a steam locomotive on a winter day, and that is pretty bad. About 9 percent of the heat energy produced by a steam locomotive shows up on the driving rods. The rest of it just blows out the stack and radiates off the boiler and gets used up in friction. And that is what you are doing. Very little of the energy intake that you have shows up on the driving rods. But it sure does on the plankton— 86 percent!

As a matter of fact, that fact was discovered by Dr. Warburg, a very great biologist. He has been working in this field ever since Hitler kicked him out of Germany. He got some new basis of simplicity so they kicked him out of Germany, and he has been working down at the University of Maryland. That discovery is going to revolutionize the world’s food supply; it means the world can support, with photosynthesis, one hundred persons for every one it supports now.

The Reader’s Digest (which "knows all, sees all and is never wrong") came forward a few years ago with an article which stated conclusively that all the world’s greatest food experts had proven that no amount of improvement in agriculture would ever be able to resolve the terrible problem of food, because it was absolutely necessary for every man on earth to have 2. acres of arable land to support him. This condition could never be bettered except perhaps by about 2 percent of those acres, so that they might get it down to 2. acres with better agriculture. Therefore we were all going to starve to death because the world is getting overpopulated.

While this was being published, Dr. Warburg was down at the University of Maryland, happily finding out that the algae, instead of converting 25 percent of sunlight, converts 86 percent. An acre of algae raised in a vat will produce somewhere between two hundred and five hundred tons of food per year. That is fantastic; it could be just pitch- forked out of the vat straight into the mouths of cattle— green. The cattle don’t have to have any area to roam in. That increases the world’s potential food production by something like 100,000 percent.

But the algae is an "ideal" life form. It is completely adapted to its environment.

The thing about life is that it keeps trying to adapt the environment to it. When an individual stops trying to adapt the environment to him, he is sick, he is dead and he is on the road to his early grave. That is the handiest and quickest way I know of to sum up a preclear; you don’t need a tone scale if you can really estimate that. Is this bird adjusting to his environment or is he still trying to adjust it to him? If he is still trying to adjust it to him, you have a good, live, hot preclear on your hands who will go on up the tone scale. But if he is not, you have somebody who is going to try his best to bamboozle you into processing him till he kicks the bucket, because a person who is merely adjusting to his environment is dying.

Any species which thoroughly adjusts to its environment and does not try to adjust any further dies. So went Brontosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex; they adjusted to their environment and then the environment changed and they ran out of food. They hadn’t adjusted, then, to the environment which was to come; they had adjusted to the environment which was current, and every environment changes. An environment will not stay static. Therefore this postulates that an adjustment to the environment has to be an adjustment to a changing environment, and if an individual just keeps adjusting to the changing environment, he is going to lag behind it. That is going to be a mess.

So life isn’t just trying to adjust. Life is trying to adjust the environment to it, and it can’t do it as a monocell. There is that one cell; it is not mobile, it can’t get around, it can’t go out and swallow up a continent, and it will never get to the moon. So it says, "The heck with staying a monocell! Let’s get to be a sponge." Then it finds out that as a sponge it is still nailed down by MEST and it still can’t control a thing, so it says, "Let’s become an invertebrate"; and then "Let’s go up and lie on the beach and develop into an animal"; then "We’re still tied down to this MEST, we’re still not adjusting the environment hot enough or fast enough, so let’s develop into a bird." As a bird it says, "Well, we have space conquered now but we still can’t do everything we want to do. Let’s go on and be something else." It continues to evolve, getting bigger and better each time.

This is like somebody from the Middle Western Chamber of Commerce —" Got to be bigger and better." That is why chambers of commerce are so successful. Chambers of commerce are found in high- toned societies, and organizations merely calling themselves so are found in Los Angeles! Not even the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce will stand up for California right now. If you write them for some literature, you will find pretty sad stuff. They are really down the line. They used to be right up and coming; they wanted to adjust their environment, but now they are adjusted to their environment thoroughly. And what does their environment consist of? Los Angeles.

Now, unless you can see this dynamic edge that the organism is trying to get on its environment continually— that it must be in advance of the environment (and mind you, that environment also includes other organisms)— you don’t appreciate the value of reason. The fastest way to find out what the environment is going to do is not by growing up and evolving a species, test by test, according to the concept of "natural selection" (which was invented by a man named Darwin, to whom I am very indebted but I still think was a crackpot).

Darwin said that by natural selection the organism evolved. That is one way organisms evolve, but it is a minor one. There is actual direction to this. In some fields of "science" where they don’t quite know what the score is, they will take a whole body of data and quickly push it under the notebook cover out of sight. For instance, the paleontologist knew all the time about the rhinoceros. The doggone rhinoceros came along and started to figure out that he needed a horn, and finally grew one. The horn didn’t come about spontaneously from rubbing trees or something like that, because paleontologists, looking things over, found out that this horn evolved. And they looked over the other animals of the day, and those animals didn’t evolve a horn.. The horn wasn’t good for anything at all. It never has been really. It is a fake as a horn; it is made out of hair. It is the most fascinating thing. Through many generations of rhinoceros they had no horn. Then the next series of generations had this little tiny bump, and the next series of generations had just a little bit bigger bump, and so on.

There is a lot of stuff in the field of evolution that, if people wanted to look at it, would reveal that organisms were trying to figure it out, trying to plan, trying to match up. There is something actively going on there that we don’t quite have a hand on yet that looks suspiciously like somebody else had a hand in it; there is some figuring going on there someplace.

I am sure, in spite of anything that a psychologist believes, or a psychiatrist believes, or a biologist believes, that somewhere in the universe there is a thinking being. I know they have a bad opinion about this, living in colleges the way they do, but there are thinking beings! There isn’t any reason we should consider ourselves anthropomorphic if we say there is a Planner with a capital P behind this sort of thing, or that theta itself can plan, because obviously something like this can take place.

There is an overreaching planning about the environment. It doesn’t quite figure out on the basis of the organism being molded by the environment, but it figures out very well when you try to see the urge and the effort of organisms to mold the environment. Then you start to get it worked out. All of a sudden reason gets introduced into it; you see that the most successful organism would be the one that could extrapolate on learned data and anticipate what that environment was going to do. That organism would be fairly successful.

What is meant by successful, then? In order to survive, an individual or an organism can’t be MEST. The organism has to be theta. In other words, an organism which is not a causative agent is a non survival agent. That is why the sheep societies considered so desirable in Russia and so forth don’t survive very long; they are based on this idea of "Every being has to adjust to his environment."

That philosophy can really get a race in trouble. I am not kidding you on that. It can get them into all sorts of incredible things— communism, Trumanism. And all these various races which have started to simmer out and go out the bottom of the spout have more or less started, limply, to adjust to the environment before the end. But adjusting the environment is something else.

Now, you have a direct index: The individual who can change the environment around him— or has an urge to change it— can reason. In reverse, if he can’t reason, he can’t change his environment very well. He has got to be able to extrapolate, in other words.

You will find that the effort to change the environment on a person who has merely been invalidated— the wide- open case, very low on the tone scale— will be wholly destructive. The only way this person can change the environment is to destroy parts of it or mess it up, knock it to pieces. That is a method of succumbing. But that individual is still trying to change the environment!

An organism actually will go on changing the environment one way or the other till it goes out the end of the spout, because part of the environment is the body of the organism.

So, there is the whole chain of evolution. You can predict what it is going to do. If man can reason better, he can go on and improve his survival potentialities in his own environment. That may seem a very funny point to stress, but actually there is alive in the world today a whole philosophy that says ignorance is truth, or strength, or something of the sort. It says "The less you people know, the better off you are going to be." I have never found that to be so.

Knowledge, learning, and the ability to think and reason are not dangerous— quite the contrary. But what would you do to a piece of MEST that was recalcitrant, that had a way of kicking back at you every time you said to it "Sit there, do this, do that," and so forth? You would try to knock apart what it was kicking back with.

What do men kick back at men with? They kick back with reason. An individual comes up and he says, "All the people on Douglas Street hereinafter have to have the left side of their faces painted red before they can come on Douglas Street." And everybody says, "What!" That would cause riots! Now, if you wanted to enforce that, you would have to either show these people a good reason so they would agree with it, which would be pretty hard to do, or take the usual, "normal" course and just beat them into line. In other words, you would have to destroy their ability and right to kick back with their reason in order to enforce that silly mandate, or any other such stupidity, such as criminal codes, property laws, red paint on the left side of the face or any one of these oddities.

You would really have to knock a person’s reason apart. You would say, "Now, look, what is important is precedent. We know best! We know best here in the court of law. After all, this law has been enforced since the early days of Rome. Therefore it is reasonable." Non sequitur! That is reasoning like a psychiatrist.

So if you want people to follow precedent, if you want them to fit in the groove of tradition, you tell them, "Your ancestors were greater than yolk Therefore, you had better do what your ancestors did and not try to do what you want." In other words, "Adjust to your environment!"

When they get you in the navy you might ask, "Why do you salute the flag, the quarter- deck, this, that and so forth?"

And they would tell you a lot of fancy reasons. Then if you again asked why, they would say, "Well, its tradition."

"What’s tradition?"

"Well, it says so."

"Where?"

"Oh, a wise guy, huh? I guess you don’t get your first boot leave. We’ll show you how to reason, we will! We’re going to forbid you to reason about anything."

As a matter of fact, that is a service maxim in the navy. There is one joke that you can usually get a tremendous laugh out of in the wardroom; it is the most foolish joke in the world. Somebody says, "I think . . ." and somebody else tells him, "You think? You are not supposed to think around here, mister! I’ll do the thinking around here as long as I’m captain." Everybody will laugh. That may not be funny to you, but it is funny to these officers. The idea of somebody in a subordinate position thinking is silly; it is hilarious, incredible. It completely fails to match the tradition.

As a consequence, the way they handle their boys and make MEST out of them is by stopping them from thinking. Any time they find a man thinking, they quickly knock him in the head to keep him adjusted to that environment of steel hull and gray paint. And if you as an officer can’t keep him adjusted to it, you are no good. It doesn’t matter how you do it.

If you have a happy ship and people are thinking upon it, some power- that- be in the navy is liable to come aboard and tell you that you are practically through "unless you can make this place shape up!" I have even seen an officer in the navy criticized for not having an appropriate number of court martials during a certain quarter. "No court martials for this quarter; discipline must be rotten." As a matter of fact, the ship’s morale was very high, so they transferred the officer. That was me! I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if there were other ex- officers who have had the same thing happen to them.

The essential difference, then, between a piece of MEST and a successful organism is the ability to reason, the ability to keep the environment under control.

You can’t own a successful organism; you have to work with it. It can’t be owned. Every time you try to own an organism which is successful, it is going to start trying to change you. Therefore the chattel system of wives won’t work. They eventually had to introduce suttee in India— that is, burning the wife when the husband died. Murder got very prevalent in India one time. They wouldn’t permit a divorce, so husband murder started to get very prevalent. The chattel system of wife ownership was tremendous there. Wives were MEST and that was all. They finally introduced suttee— burning the wife alive on the funeral pyre of the husband just as a matter of course. It had to be done to stop husband murder.

When a society gets so far out of line that husband murders get so prevalent that you have to introduce a complete custom, which is invariable, that the wife always gets burned, this is really something.

The effort to own an organism— to own, control and motivate an organism as though it were MEST— must be attended by a cancellation of the ability of that organism to reason, because the reason will keep kicking back. This organism is trying to adjust the environment, and if you are trying to own and control that organism, as long as that organism is able to kick, breathe, wheeze and stay alive, it is going to try to own and control you.

The effort of dominating an organism— another human being— may be successful to the point of driving this other human being down the tone scale, but then the other human being just starts dominating by nullification instead of by overt domination. This is covert hostility, domination by nullification, 1.1.

If somebody insists on staying at 2.0 and owning, then what is owned will go to 1. and own back. Once it gets down into that spiral, it gets pretty dizzy. An awful lot of human beings are in that level. Most marital trouble comes from this; you will find one of the partners trying to dominate the other one, and the second one trying to own back covertly. It makes an interesting pattern.

Here, then, is the whole evolution of organisms out to control the environment, and to every organism all other organisms are part of the environment.

Now, when you start processing an individual, if you were to try to process him on an authoritarian basis you would lower his reason. If you were processing him authoritarianly you would lower his self- determinism. Anything that lowers self- determinism lowers reason.

Co- auditing is not a satisfactory answer at best. However, it is the best we have at the moment so we have to run this risk, but we have to temper it by picking up the ARC very markedly.

The ability of the individual to determine himself brings about this self- determinism. Actually self- determinism shouldn’t be the complete word. That is a bad word; it gets too easily misinterpreted because it doesn’t say exactly what it means. An understanding of the operation of theta through organisms whereby theta is engaged upon a conquest of MEST shoots to pieces these older premises. When we look at this we say, "An overreaching of determinism— a self- determinism. Why should it be a self determinism? Why isn’t it a pan- determinism— that is, an overall determinism?" And that is exactly what it is.

Theta, when it walks in on an environment, tries to embrace that whole environment. The whole physical universe belongs to theta, according to theta.

It reminds me of a gag somebody said during the First World War: "The trouble with the British was they looked like they owned the world. The trouble with the Americans was they looked like they didn’t give a damn who owned it." This was a rather appropriate statement on what theta thinks about this sort of thing.

What does a person do when he owns a piece of land? He puts a fence around it, unless it is so big that he can’t afford the fence. He tries to keep it nailed down, and then he tries to determine what this land is going to do, what is going to be erected upon it, what the stock on it will do and so on.

Self- determinism? Let’s say, then, that an organism in good shape has itself pretty well confused with the whole cockeyed universe. It is trying to determine the course of existence of practically all the MEST around it.

Where do we get this milksop, stupid postulate of trying to adjust to an environment? Anybody with half an eye could have stood and watched a man for five minutes and asked, "What is this fellow trying to do?" But this would have been observing the real universe instead of observing what somebody said they said they thought that somebody else had thought about what somebody else had thought about somebody’s writings. That is good valid data in a lot of fields.

They would have observed an individual, for instance, driving a car. Why does he like to drive a car? Automobiles sell like hotcakes. They cost a lot of money and they are very inefficient.. It is silly. Anybody could figure out something better than an automobile, but they build them just as lousy as they are and then sell them. There are automobiles today that are so far in advance of these hacks that are running on the street that it is fantastic. There are automobiles that get about forty miles to the gallon of gas. People happily buy Buicks that get twelve to the gallon.

The person wants maximal action out of and control of MEST for minimal output of energy. There is the efficiency, the output- input formula, of theta: It wants maximal action out of and control of the physical universe for a minimal output of energy.

People will look at this and say, "Man is lazy." Yes, very aberrated men below 2.0 are very lazy. Above that level they start getting efficient: "How much physical universe can I control now? I have just so much energy," and so on. As a matter of fact, theta never even gets that reasonable. Theta says, "Huh! Physical universe— let’s control it!" and then all of a sudden finds itself completely snowed under and having to adjust to the environment. It gets crushed, in other words. It becomes completely apathetic.

By the way, the reason I am so mad at that psychology text I mentioned earlier is that there is a cockeyed crack in it which says, "Of course, the basic problems of the human mind are far too complex for solution by a human mind." If that isn’t an apathetic statement, I don’t know what is! Any organization, any outfit or any person who is saying to you that the problem he is working on and the data he has cannot be solved is working on a defeatism, and of course must be in the zone of apathy and of course would be putting forth tenets such as "adapting to the environment."

So, here is control of the physical universe. You start to pick up an individual’s ability on the subject of the physical universe and you have picked up the individual’s self- determinism, because you have freed him in his choices regarding the physical universe. The second you free him in his choices regarding the physical universe, you will free up his self determinism, because you will have permitted him to reason about them.

The greatest inhibitor on reasoning is the person’s trying to decide what he is going to reason about. Unless a person can decide what he is going to reason about, he can’t reason. And unless he has had the physical universe pretty well adjusted around him, and unless he himself by his own self determinism has adjusted this physical universe around him, he is not going to figure out on what he ought to reason. Therefore he is not going to figure out what his problems are, and if he can’t figure out what his problems are he of course can’t ask any questions regarding these problems— he can’t find any data to compare with them— and the next thing you know, he has dropped into apathy.

Now, let’s take a fictitious being, a fictitious monocell, and call it the "monopercept." It has just one perceptic; it can perceive light. It has to have light to live and it will die in darkness. That is all it does. This is fictitious because there isn’t any such beast; there is always more than one perceptic in an organism. But this monopercept responds to light and dark.

Did you ever see a moth going round and round a light? You can put a light on a table and get a bug to crawling on the table, and you will find out that the bug will crawl around that light at about the same distance from it. Move the light over and the bug will start another circle, but it will swerve off toward the light. There seems to be in lower- order animals— and probably in man hidden away someplace, which he has enough perceptics to overcome— a turn- toward- the- light mechanism.

The food of a basic life unit happens to be light. So we find this cell, if it has any ability to move at all, going toward the light. Therefore sight becomes "light equals survival; darkness equals non survival."

This is one of the finest reasons why children cry in the dark, completely aside from the fact of the extrapolation that it is dark in the womb and the womb is sometimes painful.

So there seems to be a repulsion from absence of light and an attraction toward light. All sorts of wonderful myths and symbolism come out of this. The whole country of Persia bought the religion of the Magi— the purity of the flame, worshipping flame, and so forth. That is the basic perceptic on it.

Now we say that this monopercept organism has just smell. If we put him between an area of no food, an area of bad food and an area of good food, this monocellular organism will move toward the area of good food, and it will be repelled from the area of no food just as it would be repelled from the area of bad food.

In order to eat, this monocell has to have the perceptic of smell and it has to have the ability to perceive light. It can’t survive without eating and so on. Also, light is warmth, and it can’t survive without some external warmth because it can’t eat enough food to heat itself up to a point where it could resist very great cold areas. That is two perceptics.

Next, let’s take the perceptic of sound. This is a sea organism, the basic unit of life we are using here. To one side of this organism is the surf, waves, tumult, noise— death. There is no light in this area, but completely aside from that there is sound— jagged sound waves. To the other side is quiet.

I wish I knew where on the line organisms picked up the idea of going toward a smooth sound, being attracted to a smooth wave. An organism will go away from noise; noise is non survival. Jagged waves mean surf, rocks, reefs, anger, tumult, storm, avalanches, boulders. Up the whole survival chain of evolution, noise has meant death. This attraction may be only in the field of sex, or in the fact that later on an organism found out it could eat organisms which were making smooth sounds because they weren’t angry, or something of the sort, but out of this attraction toward smooth sounds came symphony orchestras. But there is a natural impulse to avoid noise.

We take tactile (there are several tactiles), and we find that the smooth, the silky, the velvety, have a definite attraction for the organism, and that the jagged, the rough and so forth have a definite repulsion.

Even on the plankton level of life organism, you could say that smooth, well- mixed water would have chemicals in it which could be well enough picked up and digested and so forth, and that water which was very muddy, "jagged" and so forth would have a different sensation. Completely aside from this, however, organisms up the evolutionary line pick this up.

Each one of these perceptics, then, moves the organism toward survival. But an impulse away from pain can be matched up because pain is an impulse; the usual pain is an actual force impulse. It has a tendency to propel the organism away from the impact.

You could say, for the benefit of the biologist, that this is the only way the organism can do anything about pain and this is the only reason the organism avoids it. However, the organism is not that stupid.

So pain is necessary to keep the organism alive, and so is the experiencing of pleasure necessary to keep it alive.

By the way, it is very, very humorous how many philosophers back down through the years have tried to take one section of this and make a whole philosophy out of this little section. For instance, if you want to have a gruesome experience, and like the Russians do, go down into the cellar and be morbid and happy, read some Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. According to Schopenhauer, the way to lick the whole universe, the way to really beat things, is to die! That shows them! This aberrated character’s philosophy finally culminated in Hitler.

Aside from that point, we have these various impulses. Do you see how the impulses continue to be trained into the individual, completely aside from the fact that they have enormous survival usage’s?

Given mobility, given any way to move, an organism reasons like this: "Here is darkness and the smell of good food." That is a conflict. So you get "Darkness— no! Darkness = non survival. Smell of good food = survival." Now we have to compare this to a third factor: "How hungry am I? Am I so hungry that I will die if I don’t eat? If not, I can afford to go a little bit further." That is the weight factor of basic reason, and if the hunger is there to a great extent the organism will go into the dark place because it smells good, although the dark place is dangerous.

There is the process of reason: a yea/ nay decision on every datum. Every datum that comes up has to have a yea/ nay. There are enough neurons and so on to build up these things so that you get a yes or no.

Every time there is a hang- fire you get an unhappy organism; it is unhappy about the thing, and it will remain unhappy, confused or anxious or something of the sort until another datum comes up which is sufficient to overbalance the hang- fire, and then you get a new yea/ nay decision.

In other words, "Shall I go into this dark place and get something to eat? How hungry am I? Am I so hungry that I am going to die if I don’t eat soon? Yes! Does it smell very good? Yes! Is it very dark? Yes!" So it goes into the dark place and gets something to eat. All of the various combinations work out directly by perception

Of course, the individual organism’s ability to move would eventually get hooked up in such a way that once the equation was all balanced through there would be automatic action in that direction. There is movement toward survival and movement away from non survival on an automatic action basis of the brain and nervous tissues hooked up to the organism’s motivating motors, so that the organism will walk, swim or move in some way toward light, toward good things to eat and away from noise, and this all hooked together makes reason. That is reason.

This can become terrifically complex, but no matter how complex it gets, you can extrapolate it clear on out. The most vital and complex problems on an international sphere resolve on "How hungry am I? How dark is it? How light is it? How good does it smell?" on a yes- or- no basis.

There is a mathematical system called Boolean algebra; telephone switchboards are set up with it. The system that is used in the mind can be demonstrated to be not unlike Boolean algebra. Boolean algebra simply states that everything can be solved on the basis of a yes- or- no answer, so all the questions in Boolean algebra have to be set up in such a way that they can be answered yes or no. And if you set up all the questions you ask of the universe so that they can be answered with a yes or no, you can really find out data in a hurry, because the mind basically seems to operate that way.

You can work out the most complicated problems in calculus, by the way, with Boolean algebra. It is fantastic; it takes just pages of calculations. However, the mind has all sorts of space to spare. I dare say that every computation is probably being run three or four times by the mind, on three or four parallel circuits. The mind doesn’t figure it out once; it figures it out simultaneously four different ways, or in four different columns. Nature just seems to waste stuff like this. If a man were building a machine, he would figure every way he possibly could to get it down to its last economical level. Nature doesn’t work that way; she gets lush: "The best way for herrings to survive is to procreate."

Now, how does an organism get aberrated? How could you really mess up an organism’s computer, whether it is a little tiny organism or a great big organism? The way to do it would be to not allow him to conclude his solutions on his own data— inhibit his acting upon his own data— or cause him to act upon data enforced upon him, one or the other. That is the rock bottom of aberration. "If it smells good, go away from it!" An organism has to be punished with pain before it will put that into effect. This is why pain has to be there as a whip.

"Go into darkness and stay away from the light!" That is a big aberration. Every time this organism tries to run its own independent series of yes- or- no decisions, "Is it dark? Stay away from it. Is it light? Go to it," all of a sudden it gets this haywire one with a lot of pain on it: "If it is dark go to it, and if it is light stay away from it." And it starts to run down the line and gets into this confused area. Whenever you get one of those spins, another piece of theta can come in over the top of that organism and direct it.

The less self- determined this organism is, the more it approaches MEST. The less self- determined this organism is, the more it can be controlled by other organisms in its vicinity. The less theta is clear, smooth and reasonable in this organism, the more easily smooth theta can move into it and possess it.

For instance, the thing to do with game, if you are hunting game, is to get the game confused. And if you haven’t got very many weapons, get the game thoroughly enough confused and it will probably just fly right straight into your arms. That is the hunting instinct.

Now, take ownership: In training a dog, you have to make him do things which are apparently, to him, non survival. They are not very non survival or he wouldn’t do any of them, but really, when a good dog is trained, he will do anything for you. This is why I would never allow someone else to train any dog of mine— because that dog becomes part of and comes in under your own theta, and don’t think for a moment he doesn’t. He is an extension of the organism. And every time a man owns, every time a man possesses, any part of the physical universe— really owns or possesses it— he is extending over it his own theta. When his own ability to determine the course of organisms and entities around him is cut down, he can’t extend over this much theta and he will make a mess out of it.

But when you start training a dog, you lay your theta right straight into that dog. You don’t have to beat it into him. If he is a very stubborn dog, what you do is confuse him with a "Light— go away. Dark— approach" computation, and you train him, "Every time I say ‘Lie down, ’ lie down." After that, you have an automatic mechanism; his computer is saying, "Oh gee, a rabbit!" and he is about ready to take off, but you say, "Lie down," and he lies down. What causes the dog to do that? You have interrupted his self- determinism .

A cat is an individual and independent hunter, therefore you want to enhance a cat’s self- determinism; don’t try to train the cat. The cat is an individual hunter; the cat has to think. But the dog is an extension of the hunter’s hunting, an actual extended part of his own organism. It is the same way with a horse.

This ought to teach an individual that he should be careful what he extends his theta over because his own theta can be enturbulated too. If you try to keep around you organisms which are terribly enturbulated or which have had too much of their determinism interrupted and not then reconsolidated, you are extending your own theta over areas of aberration.

Now, as far as your voice is concerned, that dog had better be in a very loving apathy. In other words, he had better be completely interrupted when you talk; your voice must mean more to him than his own thoughts, every time.

Don’t try to train a child this way! If you train a child this way you will practically kill him. He will be no good in the society, because you will have cut down his self- determinism. You don’t want a child trained in such a way that when you say "Lie down," he immediately drops his funny papers, books or whatever he is doing and lies down on the floor. You would feel silly if you had such a child.

As a matter of fact, when a parent has finally beaten his child into apathy, he stops respecting his child ordinarily; he thinks, "This is a hell of a human being," So you can’t train a child this way. Raising children is tough! You can’t have this instantaneous response. However, the child is reasonable; if you can possibly reach him through the lines of reason, you try. But if you try to extend your own theta over enturbulative organisms which are trying to get back at you because you are trying to dominate them, you are going to enturbulate yourself. The raising of children is a very tough job.

So, this is what aberration is: The organism is trying to make a yea/ nay decision on light, dark, food, hunger, noise perceptions, and you just cut right straight through that and implant another one. If you are trying to aberrate this organism you implant something that will short- circuit all this reason and disturb it and cause your statement to the child, the individual, the dog, the organism, the MEST— whatever it is— to be conclusive. That is an aberration.

You, then, take over moving this organism around if you are aberrating this organism. You aberrate it so that it can be moved around by you; it is then an owned organism. Cast adrift and on its own and not directly regulated in every breath, in every motion, this organism would no longer survive.

A parent who trains his child in this fashion, then, is training his child not to survive.

The aberrational line is in the society too; theta is there and it is trying to control MEST. It says, "All other organisms around me are MEST; I am going to control them too— interrupt their self- determinism." But every other organism that gets its self- determinism interrupted comes back on the individual who is trying to interrupt it.

In other words, there is a terrific interaction. Organism A is trying to control organism B; organism B resents this and tries to control organism A— back and forth, back and forth. This is the tumult which is called modern living.

Now, all of the problems of thought are on that level, with this addition: Former perceptions are also reviewed and compared to present perceptions in order to establish a future action. That is where a mind is starting to get very slippy; it is doing the same thing but it is starting to get very clever now: "Why use up all this energy to make a new conclusion and extrapolate the whole data out of my immediate impressions right here? Let me go back and recall my conclusion two weeks ago last Saturday, which is right there on file. I had a similar situation." It picks up the former conclusion and puts that former conclusion into action.

The future is handled by imagining. We take in all these perceptions: Here is food and it smells good. We imagine, "If it were dark, would it smell that good?" That is in case it is dark by the time we get to it. That is the simplest level of imagination. Change the situations and imagine what you would do if, and then imagination goes on out to the most towering constructions and creations on that. But we can imagine shot we would do if the situation were a little bit changed.

Then we can work in a real emergency basis; we can work in a split second. Three things could be wrong when we get there: It could be dark, there could be no food or the food could be bad. For each one of these situations we would have a solution. We would have actually gone up the time track and dubbed in possible situations so that we would have solutions which could be put immediately into effect.

Theta gets so eager, it reaches into the future and tries to solve the future. That is imagination in its simplest form. Now we start building imagination up along the line and it gets terrifically creative. The organism doesn’t get an inch, though, without what is commonly called imagination. Imagination is the gradient scale of postulating a future solution for a future condition and resolving that condition, and it goes on up to tremendous levels of complexity.

Any time, however, that this organism’s motor impulses are not directly connected without interruption into these yea/ nay, light/ dark, smell good/ smell bad, smooth/ noisy decisions— the motor impulse is interrupted by some other determinism in the surroundings— you have aberration; you have slowed- down reaction.

Now, note that these are the prime things by which you can tell an aberree. He has a slow reaction; his motor impulses are not smoothly translated into his motions. In other words, he thinks of walking and doesn’t walk.

Of course, he would be psychotic if he just said "Let me see, if I think ‘Walk, ’ I’ll walk." When a person wants to walk he walks, balancing everything in his vicinity. If he doesn’t do that he is aberrated.

What does an aberree do? He tries to use the MEST around him and he uses it improperly. I am sorry to get simple on you, but that is the whole, complete and entire scope of aberration— the interruption between perception and motor impulse.

You can interrupt perception in various ways: You can occlude it, you can perform a prefrontal lobotomy, you can electric- shock the individual, you can run him under a truck— all sorts of things can be done— or you can simply prevent him continually from moving in the direction he is supposed to move in, prevent him from touching what his impulses tell him to touch, make him touch things he doesn’t want to touch. Just keep reversing these things. And if they are reversed very irregularly, he gets more and more confused.

Hypnosis is confusion. If you want to hypnotize somebody you get him confused, and the first thing you know, he can be put into sleep. It isn’t sleep, but he gets thoroughly confused. That is hypnosis. It is also aberration.

Knowing this, you should be able to see what is the matter with a person. For instance, why does an individual get thin? He hasn’t even got possession of his own physical body! If he is thin, scrawny, wasting away and so forth, all the theta he has is just sort of eating him up. He hasn’t even got control of the growth factors in his own body. That is pretty aberrated, and believe me, that really is reaching deep into the organism to mess it up.

An organism handles self, other organisms and MEST, in all lines and areas, poorly in ratio to the amount of interruption there is between perception and motor action.

A person who is pretty aberrated goes out and gets in his car and wrecks it. Why? His perceptions tell him "Light/ dark, Minnie and I had a fight. And a cop is liable to arrest me; that stops me. I don’t dare turn here because of— this is a wheel, that is a throttle..." Crash! He is not settling on any motor actions; all of a sudden he is incapable of operation.

It is a very interesting thing that a minute before any crash, the drivers of both sides can ordinarily be found to have fallen into that state of confusion. There is almost no such thing as an accident. It is a state of confusion —interruption— between perception and motor action. If there had been perfect perception and motor action on either side, on either part, both of them would have gotten out of it.

I get a lot of data on this. As a matter of fact, I have quite a bit of data that isn’t ordinarily available, just as you as auditors get data. It is the same order of data. You suddenly know more about what a baby thinks about being born and you begin to know more about accidents. By the time you have run automobile accidents out of fifteen preclears and you have run this kind of an accident and that kind of an accident, you have started examining the front ends of the accidents and finding out what the dickens d id happen, and you find that there was a considerable interruption and paralysis regarding it.

As a matter of fact, we found on one man I was processing that he had the horrible impulse, every time he saw that an accident was even vaguely possible, to go on and make it the worst possible accident he could possibly make it! In other words, he would manufacture a big accident out of something that would have been a slight accident, and he would do it in just about the tiniest amount of space and time imaginable. That is aberration.

Theoretically, you could go out and give an individual calisthenics, physical exercise, and "To the rear march! To the rear march! To the rear march!" and get him smoothly coordinated. You bet you would get him smoothly coordinated! You would get him smoothly coordinated under the drill instructor, not under himself. That is important. A person has got to be smoothly coordinated under himself. But under a drill instructor he sure would get healthy.

As a matter of fact, with drill and exercise you can get people up to a point where they are almost completely disconnected from any reason or perception of their own, if they are drilled and exercised by someone exterior to themselves and not on their own self- determinism.

If you save an individual’s self- determinism you have saved all the person. Rehabilitate an individual’s self- determinism and you save all. If you do not feel as an auditor that you are accomplishing this with a preclear. you certainly should find out why you aren’t.