PERCEPTICS

A lecture given on 30 July 1951

How We Perceive the Environment

Actually, as near as I can figure out, there must be several hundred perceptics, because to get the whole body to coordinate with the whole body, to coordinate with the environment, to coordinate with everything which is perceptible in the environment and get it all figured out and correlated and tied in together in a neat package, you would need a terrific amount of observation. You would have to have command posts of all sorts and descriptions.

How many perceptics would an organism need to perceive everything that was going on in the environment? I will give you a partial list here.

The first perceptic a person would have to have is time. How could he even measure how hungry he was if he didn’t know what time was? That is how basic time is.

Some more of them are sight; color perception; depth perception; relative sizes, external. As a matter of fact, a lot of people have relative sizes, external. They can compare size to size, and they don’t need depth perception and don’t have it. Such people are even flying airplanes around.

There is sound, which includes pitch, tone and volume, and there is rhythm. There is smell, four divisions; touch, four divisions; personal emotion; endocrine states; awareness of awareness; personal size— this is not in relationship to the organism, but there is a definite awareness of various sizes of the individual. If you have ever thrown an individual down the time track, you know that he feels his size. That is one of the ways he can tell he is traveling on it.

Then there is organic sensation; hunger; heartbeat; blood circulation; cellular and bacterial position; gravitic, self and other weights; motion of self; motion exterior, which is a subdivision of time; body position; joint position; internal temperature; external temperature; balance; muscular tension; saline content of cell; fields, magnetic, which would include electrical- shock phenomena; time- track motion; physical energy, weariness and so forth; self- determinism, relative on each dynamic; moisture, self; sound direction; emotional state of other organisms; personal position on tone scale; affinity, self and others; communication, self and others; reality, self and others; emotional state of groups, under which we would get an aberration of this. We would find mass hysteria here. There is compass direction; level of consciousness; pain; perception of conclusions, past; perception of computing, past; perception of imagination— past, present, future; and perception of having perceived.

There are a lot of perceptions, aren’t there? Yet kinesthesia (motion of self), time, sight, color perception, depth perception, sound (pitch, tone and volume), smell, personal emotion and motion of others just about cover what the auditor has to have. That covers about what has to be rehabilitated, because if you get that many on, the rest of them will start to come on.

There is something very funny concerning these perceptions and MEST Processing. I was processing a lady recently, and I was trying to turn on sonic with her with MEST Processing. I was really interrupting her self determinism. I was trying to persuade her she could hear something because she said she couldn’t ever hear it in a million years, and I didn’t want to go searching for that phrase because it would take too long.

So I just persuaded her to get some common, enjoyable sound. We finally found her dog, a little Boston bull, having a tug of war with her; the dog was sort of growling, and pulling with his teeth on a line. She contacted that, and I said, "Let’s pay a little more attention to it."

"As a matter of fact, it’s quite plain!"

"Now, how does he sound again when he tugs?"

And she reached out with her hand— kinesthesia. This woman was completely shut off on all perceptions, but she got that sound on and she stuck her hand out. It startled her. I couldn’t make her listen to anything for a few minutes. So we went back and we worked on it again, and I was just forcing her perceptions on, sort of with a pickax.

It was very interesting that today, when we worked a little while on it, I found out that she was unable to settle on a single perceptic because she was getting a bundle of them every time— "Which one do you want?" And before, it had been "What dog? What noise?"

So, if you work on a few of these key perceptics and work on MEST, YOU will get them turned on. All you are doing is putting thoughts back onto the time track. It is very simple.