SURVIVAL PROCESSINGA lecture given on 6 August 1951A Very Fundamental Process Now we are going to deal with the most basic process that you could probably get (notice that probably). When you start scouting out along the extended perimeters of knowledge you run into some wonderful things. The sea serpents and leviathans that people used to think you would run into if you crossed the Atlantic are nothing compared to what lies out in the field of thought, which remains to be explored. Everything you find makes the field bigger. That is an unfortunate thing. Exploring the world was a fairly finite job; after all, if you sailed far enough, you eventually got back to where you started from. It very well may be that the exploration of the field of thought approximates that. As a matter of fact, you can demonstrate this as a possibility. You draw a circle, and this would be the full swing of knowledge. Some point on the circle would represent nothing known; but that is practically nonexistent as a point, so right next to it would be one fact, the basic fact. By inductive reasoning you get that this basic fact will extrapolate into more and more data as you go one way around the circle, and as you get around the circle you find out there are quite a few facts. If you go the other way you get deductive reasoning, which is scientific "reasoning." As a matter of fact, I put those quotes on there very advisedly because the scientific process of thought all too often is simply a process of accumulating all of the data you can possibly accumulate, looking it all over and saying, "We sure have a lot of data, haven’t we?" and then trying to deduce from all this data some conclusion. Actually, it is an effort to get back to the basic fact. So you have a band that you would now call science. It has to do with a lot of facts; they are not necessarily related, and they are not necessarily well summed, but they exist as facts. On this circle you would have a point of "everything known." Starting with some fraction of everything known and going toward the point of everything known you would accumulate facts, facts, facts, till you had all the facts in the world, every possible available fact. Of course, if you kept going this way, you would look at a great many facts, and then you would take one step and say "I don’t know anything." Then the next step would be the fact; that is a unity of fact. Now, you could take this one fact, evaluate it against a second fact, and you would have all the facts there were in the universe. That would be derivation and extrapolation. This is the direction of philosophy. The other is the direction of science. Science tries to get everything they can possibly know on this subject and then go up to a fact. Philosophy tries to get some basic fundamental and come back and find out if there is anything in the material universe or in the haven of Valhalla or someplace else that sums this up. Science fails when it fails to get all the facts. Philosophy fails when it fails to extrapolate into a field where facts can be known. All too often the philosopher starts in with some very basic fact and puts it down, but he never bothers to apply it to the material universe—" That, after all, would be something that was done by crass and materialistic- minded people." There was a fellow by the name of Kant and another fellow by the name of Hegel who avoided having to think about any of this, and they, by laying down a lot of basic laws, practically blew to pieces and interrupted the whole field of philosophy— which until their time was a perfectly legitimate pursuit for any gentleman. They laid down these laws with such authority, so much thunder and such complicated language that nobody could understand them. I don’t know how complicated Kant is in German but I certainly know that Kant is not comprehensible when translated over into English. He laid down this big datum that said, "This is it. I am a high man over here at Konigsberg and you had better take my word for it because, you dumb boob, you wouldn’t ever be able to understand this anyway, and it is all too much anyhow, and so you just better not think about it anymore. This is as far as philosophy goes and that is the end of it." It was in about that mood that he laid this thing down. He said that all data worth knowing or all the facts really worth knowing or all the basic data worth knowing transcended the bounds of human experience. In other words, anything worth knowing you couldn’t know, so therefore you just better leave it to philosophers like Kant. He wasn’t human, evidently, because he kept writing on and on and on after he made the statement that you wouldn’t be able to know anything because it was beyond the bounds of human experience anyway. He called this transcendentalism. That was great! It transcended all human experience and therefore you must not apply experience to philosophy! If you got a philosophic fact, the thing to do with it was to immediately assume that any proof of it was beyond human experience, and then nobody would come around and nag you. This was a wonderful dodge mechanism. A fellow by the name of Piazzi, when looking around at the heavens, found an eighth planet. He went out and started to tell people but nobody could listen to him. It was against the law. Hegel had just gotten through publishing a book wherein he demonstrated that seven was a perfect number, and therefore there could only be seven planets. So the eighth planet was not recognized; it had been spotted within the bounds of human experience and therefore was not valid knowledge. In other words, philosophers unhinged mentally about 160 years ago and so badly separated MEST from thought that nobody could get them back together again, and the society has actually been running on this as a not- known, but actually partially understood and more or less agreed- upon, prime datum. The society has gone along with this, and philosophy has been considered to be impractical. Philosophy is simply the process of evolving something from a basic fact and then bringing it around into human experience to find out if it works. That is philosophy. I hope Kant turned over in his grave when I said that. It shows you how baffled an individual could get. He couldn’t compare the physical universe to his own philosophy, so he said, "They don’t compare!" That is a final negation. It is a wonderful bid for face, though. It is a wonderful bid for altitude to say "I have some partial grip on this mysterious fact which has transcended the bounds of human experience. Of course, it can’t be disproven because nothing within the bounds of human experience could disprove it. And I have this small grip on this, but it is not possible for human beings to have this small grip on this, and therefore I really carry weight when I stand up and talk on the rostrum." That is a great way to do it, it is an easy way to do it, and a lot of people have been doing it ever since. That is what is known as the scholastic method of thinking and teaching. It preceded Kant. That is how Aristotle got in bad odor. It wasn’t what Aristotle said; it was what people said Aristotle had said. Aristotle had Alexander the Great shipping him tons of specimens from all over the world that Alexander was busy conquering. Alexander was shipping back all kinds of menageries and specimens to Aristotle, and Aristotle was classifying them as fast as they came in. He was describing them. He catalogued things like this: "Sturgeon: such and such a length, so many teeth, so many fins, eggs such and such," and so on. England, one thousand years later, was teaching students "Sturgeon: such and such a length, so many teeth, so many fins, eggs such and such." The students could go out and look in the Thames and see a sturgeon, and this sturgeon was a different length and had a different number of teeth. But it wasn’t in Aristotle; therefore it wasn’t so! So they just threw away the Thames sturgeon and kept this other sturgeon from down in Asia Minor. In other words, they just threw away their right to view the human experience and took what Aristotle said. Now, Korzybski and others made a big point out of this; they spoke of non- Aristotelian logic and all this sort of thing. But if it had not been for Aristotle we would not have had much of a foundation of logic to go on at all. He did a beautiful job on logic. All of this is leading up to something: If you could get a very basic postulate in the field of processing, you would then be able to evolve and extrapolate from that all possible processes— if you went ahead and compared it to human experience and didn’t go off short- circuiting it in some direction. The wrong way to do this would be to say "Be calm, control yourself and adjust yourself to your environment and you will be all right. That is an authoritarian law and you mustn’t question it because it is beyond the bounds of human experience anyhow. And if you just do this everything will be all right," and then never observe whether or not it did anybody any good to do this. In other words, just throw away the evidence of the physical universe and say, "It does a lot of good to control yourself and adjust yourself to the environment and so forth." You don’t get a progress, then, in the known facts. If you have a basic postulate which won’t extrapolate more data for you, the basic postulate is no good and you ought to throw it away. Therefore what we are looking for in processing is a postulate that is so basic that it will derive the basic process. If that basic process is basic enough, it will extrapolate into all other processes. But because we are dealing with the field of knowledge, this basic process would be terrifically powerful and would do a lot of fancy processing. Now, all study and examination is actually a sort of a rocking motion between basic postulates and known facts. Somebody comes along and lays down a philosophic postulate, so- and- so; then he compares it to the known physical universe and collects some data. Then somebody looks at his data and adds some more data to it and says, "Another postulate is necessary because some of this data doesn’t agree." So he has to go back and get another postulate. The process of the evolution of a science or of any great body of knowledge would be this proposition of getting more basic postulates which give you more data, and when you look at the data you get even more basic postulates. We have hit one of those with a method known as Survival Processing. Survival Processing is pretty basic. If the dynamic principle of existence is survive, then it should evolve that the most basic process you could get would be one which would apply directly and immediately to actual survival. There is another postulate in there which says "The mission of theta is the conquest of the material universe. In doing this, theta creates, conserves, maintains, destroys, alters, occupies and permutates matter, energy, space and time." Theta does these things. But that is a description of how theta survives. The basic is what it is doing that is surviving. Let’s just test it out. You find out that to assist one individual, if this individual is attempting to survive and if he is running on an energy which is attempting to survive by handling the material universe, what you would have to do is assist him in a reevaluation of the material universe in the most basic possible terms of his own survival. That would be very basic. There are two ways of doing this. First we will look at the tone scale and add up this tone scale in terms of loss of MEST. An individual who has all the MEST he has coming to him and so forth will reside near the top of the scale. If he hasn’t got quite enough but really doesn’t need any more, he will be just a little lower. If he is losing too much MEST to really make himself survive well, he will get antagonistic toward it. Pretty soon he will come on down to anger and start destroying it, and then he will go on down through to grief, loss, apathy and death. But there are really two kinds of MEST: There is pro survival MEST and there is non survival MEST. The individual, then, must have pro survival MEST close to him and non survival MEST away from him. Things which assist his survival must be available to him and he must have access to them, and things which threaten his survival must be absent from him, or access from them to him must be blocked or barred in some fashion. True survival— comfort— or, that is to say, a high state of mind concerning survival itself would have to do with this: That which is necessary or recognized as necessary to the individual’s survival must be obtainable in his proximity where it can be handled by him, and those things which threaten his survival must be absent from him or at least under heavy enough control for him to be able to block them off from access to him. Therefore, if we have someone a little bit low on the tone scale momentarily, and a heavy pro survival object such as a steak dinner comes into the individual’s proximity, then at least for a short time, while he is chewing that steak and feeling the benefit from that steak and so on, he will be up on the tone scale a bit. You have observed this, I am sure. Did you ever buy a little child an ice- cream cone? You see him crying, and then you hand him the ice- cream cone and he will sob a little bit more. Then maybe he will be a little antagonistic, and then he will pretend he is not really interested in the ice cream, and then there he is, eating it contentedly and looking out upon the material universe and feeling fine. That is raising tone by putting pro survival matter, energy, space and time into the vicinity of the individual. There is another method of raising tone, and that is taking out of his environment things that are non survival. For instance, take a fellow who has sitting on the desk in front of him an income tax blank. There he sits in apathy. Then you come along and see what he is worried about, and you just pick this up and put it out of sight. A little time will elapse and his mind will go on to something else, and you can see him come on up the tone scale. That is just on an object. If all the income tax got paid (if he could borrow enough money over and above what he made the past year to pay his income tax) he would be able to reach a tone 4 regarding income tax. In other words, he would come up tone if it were taken care of or disposed of. You have heard of people taking care of problems and disposing of problems. It is evidently non survival to have problems, but it so happens that it is actually pro survival to have problems. Take some girl who married the usual American guy. When he is close to her it is non survival. But when he is a long way away from her that is non survival too. But when he is close to her it is pro survival, but when he is away from her that is pro survival. That is what is known as anxiety. She will begin to get anxious about this fellow one way or the other. She will have anxiety concerning him; she will be worried. In other words, she hasn’t made up her mind whether or not this individual is pro survival or non survival! This is how she is evaluating it down the line: "He brings home a pay check, but he doesn’t use Listerine. I’m glad to have him gone, but is he with another woman?" She is afraid she has him and she is afraid she won’t lose him and she is afraid she will lose him. You could say, more or less, that she is afraid. So, this woman’s husband walks in the door. She is glad he is home and he is pro survival at this moment. So she goes up the tone scale. Then he comes over and kisses her and she goes down the scale. He says he thinks he will go away on a trip and she goes up the scale, and then he asks if she remembers Agatha that they went to high school with, and says as a matter of fact he has just hired her as a secretary and she goes down again. This girl is in bad shape. She gets what is known as an anxiety neurosis. She doesn’t know where to fix this object. She goes on a vacation. The sky is beautiful, the lake is lovely and she has a lot of leisure. That is a pro survival time. But there are mosquitoes and she is away from the home, and are the babies being fed properly and is somebody watering the canary? Therefore it is a non survival time. Besides, she got sunburned yesterday, and George does nothing but go down to the lake and fish! This is a period of time, then, which is both pro survival and non survival. There are a lot of things like this. For instance, during the war there was a lot of talk about gold. The United States had problems about gold. We had Fort Knox full of gold, and it would strike a person every once in a while as very peculiar and strange that we were exporting gold at a terrific rate. We were exporting about two billion dollars’ worth of gold a year during the war, but in the years prior to the war we were importing gold. Economists would say, "We are importing two billion dollars’ worth of gold a year and this is, of course, going to cause an inflation and so on." And then, "Now we are exporting two billion dollars’ worth of gold a year and this is going to cause something or other and this is bad." The only conclusion you could drag out of all this, economically, is that people worried about gold. In other words, if you brought gold in it was dangerous and if you shipped it out it was dangerous, and you had to bring it in and you had to ship it out, and there was an anxiety moving in there. Getting back to philosophy, Aristotle knew what he was talking about when he said individuals require a yea/ nay state of affairs— black and white— and that there shouldn’t be a gradient scale. There was such a thing as the Aristotelian pendulum by which he had already mapped out the fact that there was a gradient scale of values— in other words, it wasn’t all black and all white after all. But he said people like to have things either black or white. As a matter of fact, that is a very comfortable state of mind. The mind evidently tends to compute on a mathematics known as Boolean algebra. l Boolean algebra requires that you have a yes- or- no answer to the question. Questions are asked of the material universe which can be answered in terms of yes or no. But there are three things that can happen: yes, no and maybe. For instance, we have a yes- or- no question on survival: "Is the husband survival when he comes home?" The computer adds up yes. But there is another computer and this computation is saying no! So you have one set of computers saying yes and one saying no, and they cancel each other and you get a maybe. The organism doesn’t get along well with too many maybes. I don’t know if you have ever lived in the vicinity of somebody who couldn’t make up his mind. I think that is more trying than somebody who is downright vicious or who is very good or very bad. A computer can’t operate if too many of its questions of the universe are answered with maybe; the maybe comes in on this pro survival- non survival level. "I bought a new pair of cuff links. They are very beautiful cuff links. I wanted to have them. I like these cuff links. They cost five bucks; I couldn’t afford it. It is cutting down my survival level because of the five bucks, and I am not supposed to have any cuff links anyhow. And cuff links are dangerous because you lose them. I am sure glad I got these new cuff links; I am sorry I got these cuff links." Every time these darn cuff links show up in the fellow’s vicinity, which is every morning, some part of his mind says maybe. And if he gets too many maybes, he starts answering the whole problem of life "Am I alive or am I dead?" with maybe. "Am I sick? Am I well?" Maybe. He goes down to the corner: "Should I turn to the right or should I turn to the left?" Maybe. All these objects of pro survival and non survival are threatening him, because it is a threat to have a maybe there. He has to have this pro survival object because it is pro survival but actually it is non survival because it is liable to kill him. But he has to have it because it is pro survival so he keeps it in his vicinity, but it is very dangerous. Now, he transfers that off to the whole field of thoughts: "Do I dare think about this or shouldn’t I think about this? Shall I lay this thought aside or shall I bring it back into recall? What shall I do about these thoughts?" Maybe is the answer he gets. A person on whom this goes too far just disappears out of reality with a small sigh. Unreality is the process of seeing too many maybes. Reality is the process of seeing a lot of positives. These are not necessarily either pro survival or non survival, but one is certainly certain about what his environment is. Once the environment starts to get into the maybe category, and the objects of the environment start to go maybe this and maybe that— "Maybe that pillar is survival but maybe it is non survival, but maybe this is survival, maybe it is non survival," and "Water is very bad. You drown in it, therefore you have to get it away from you; but you get awfully thirsty, so you have to have it"— the fellow starts moving away from his environment mentally, because he wants to get away from it physically but he has to approach it physically. So his thoughts approximate this same action and you get a fellow who has a bad memory and who is very "normal." He gets that bad. A person can get many of these objects in his environment. Take cigarettes, for instance: "I like to smoke cigarettes. If I am a man I will smoke cigarettes. Men smoke cigarettes. I have to demonstrate the fact I’m grown up by smoking cigarettes, but cigarettes are very bad for me and they make me cough and they don’t taste good anyway." Cigarettes therefore are maybe. And then "Chalk is liable to scrape but you need it to write on the board," so that is maybe. What do you think happens to reality in that level? If reality goes, believe me, affinity and communication go; the perceptics go the same way. As a matter of fact, it isn’t that ARC has to run together; it is that this is maybe. The person has to have it, but it is dangerous! Therefore, does he dare clearly perceive it? So the person just kind of wipes it out, he tries to get rid of these maybes, because the big effort of theta is to clear the computer. That is a mental action. Resolve the problems, don’t keep them hanging in the center! If you make a person too indecisive about a situation he will get upset and start to think, and the first thing you know, if the situation is unresolvable, he will go over into daydreaming and daydream up a solution that says the thing is all solved and he will say, "The dickens with it." But it is not solved at all. Or if he is at the point where he doesn’t dare daydream (in other words, he has been raised in America), he goes into apathy and says, "I can’t even daydream a solution about it." Do you know that all law is derived from ownership or non ownership or the threat or need of MEST? It just extrapolates beautifully when you look at it along this line. The only time people go to court is when there is an argument about MEST. Of course, on a criminal line, the argument is "He threatened to punch me"— in other words, "He threatened my MEST"— or "He did punch me, and therefore I want him arrested because he is threatening the most personal MEST I can have." All these arguments evolve. Divorce, by the way, would never be very trying if there weren’t property always connected with it. That really gets into a terrible snarl. Of course, the lawyers get in there immediately and see all this property lying around, and then they really want it snarled up. There is a general anxiety about MEST, then, which confronts every individual, and that anxiety most basically is the way the material universe has demonstrated to the individual that the pro survival objects are non survival and the non survival objects are pro survival, and the way they have mixed him up. He hasn’t, then, had an opportunity to evaluate his environment, evaluate the people (they are MEST to him as far as all perceptics are concerned), the animals, the living things, the spaces he occupies, and the energies in his environ. For instance, take energy: Have you ever run into anybody who had photo phobia— didn’t like bright light? That is very interesting; light is something you have to have and here is somebody who doesn’t want anything to do with it, who will live in a dim light, preferably— not bright, though. Every quarter, every segment of the whole physical universe— matter, energy, space and time— can fall into the indeterminate middle ground because at one time the object has been threatening but it is necessary to survival. Therefore life is saying, "You have to have this to live, but if you have it you will die!" That is what Survival Processing is all about— processing evaluation. The way you work this is very simple. You work Validation Processing on the basis of discovering the times when non survival objects, energies, spaces and times were distant from the individual or away from him or he was out of touch with them. And you also use Validation Processing along the line when pro survival objects, energies, spaces and times were available to the individual and he was in touch with them intimately. Pro survival objects in proximity, contra survival or non survival objects absent— that is Validation Processing. Entheta processing would consist of running times when non survival objects, energies, spaces and times were in his proximity (that includes organisms, and it includes anything in the physical universe that is non survival being close to him or threatening to be close to him), and times when pro survival things were absent from him. Whether you are choosing entheta processing or theta processing, you follow that general formula and you can get some quite interesting and rapid results on an individual. What is commonly mistaken for love in this society is a propitiation. There is actually a thing called love. But most of the "love affairs" that people swoon away and die over and all that sort of thing are at 1.1. I don’t think anybody has died of love, but people have certainly died of 1.1! This is normally the case when the beloved object cannot be trusted out of view and cannot be tolerated completely in view, and if you get enough confusion about this you will get a fixation on the "beloved person." That is a very interesting and horrible manifestation. People who get into this one really are into it, but it is fantastically easy to resolve with Dianetics using this type of processing. All you do is start picking up all the times this person walked away from the individual and all the times the person approached the individual— just to do anything or go anyplace. Then find an earlier person of the same category, and pick up every time that person left the individual— just walked away from him— and every time that person came back to him. Just work this and keep it up until you get the position of people in the environment straightened out— are they away or are they close?— because the anxiety of the dangerous person being too close and the anxiety of the pro survival person being too far away is such that it mirrors into the thought plane that they are constantly in the middle ground. They are neither gone nor close. The individual cannot contact them, then, with thought. These people are occlusions and they are what is known as occluded persons. These people are dangerous present and dangerous absent, so they stand in the middle ground and the thought simply occludes them. Therefore, as soon as you get an occlusion like that, it doesn’t get measured up against the concept of time, and one has the continual illusion that they are always not quite there and not quite gone, even though these people may have been absent from this individual’s life for many, many years. What you are doing is just a positional resolution for the individual. You are solving for this individual whether the other person is gone or close. You just pick up all the times you can find when the person left and all the times you can find when the person was close, and the individual all of a sudden will make the evaluation adjustment of whether that person is close or is gone. You don’t even have to go in and find out why the individual considered this person pro survival or non survival. Take that up on the basis of evaluating the environment of the individual. Let’s just take his environment. You will find a hint of this in Present Time Processing in Science of Survival. 1 Now, in survival evaluation on theta processing, we take each thing we can find in the individual’s environment, including space, and evaluate times it was gone and by being absent made him feel comfortable and times when objects similar to it were present and made him feel comfortable. He will finally come around to a resolution on whether this object is dangerous or isn’t dangerous and you get him over into a yes/ no decision about it. "Is the object dangerous?" He finally is able to answer. He has enough evaluation of it now to say "No, it’s not dangerous." What you are doing actually is fitting it into its proper time frame. An automobile in the process of running into a tree and turning over is a dangerous item. An automobile carrying you along a lovely highway on a very beautiful spring day is not a dangerous item. But the individual who has been run into a tree and turned over gets into the automobile and evaluates this automobile as running into the tree and turning over; therefore he doesn’t enjoy the beautiful spring day. It is a confusion of time and space. You just put these things back into position where they belong in his life, and I think you will get the highest level of recovery on the tone scale that can be attained in a rapid space of time. This can be done by Straightwire, by Repetitive Straightwire or by scanning. Any one of these things can be used. Just start picking out his environment. Take his wife, his kids, his car, cars that he hears in the street and rooms he is in, on and on, and just take them down the line. "Let’s evaluate a time when this thing was absent and you were comfortable because it was absent, or something like it was absent.... Let’s take a time when you were glad it was present." You just start evaluating this stuff and the next thing you know, you are doing MEST Processing. You don’t want anywhere along the line times when he was told it was present or told it was absent; that is hearsay evidence. Hearsay evidence is not admissible in a court of law. Therefore, what people say about MEST is not admissible to the individual who does not himself observe it. Now, you might wonder how this goes over into imagination. Imagination is a future computation or combination of MEST. This is illusion, true, but if one feels pretty safe with the MEST he has around, he can throw it into any kind of combinations he wants to. In other words, imagination will increase along with the individual’s ability to get along with the MEST. He will dream up MEST. Or, on the other side of the ledger, MEST can be so horrible to him he doesn’t dare face any of it, so he just counterfeits it as an illusion. This can get so bad that the illusion can finally get up into present time: the individual sees somebody walk in where nobody has opened the door; or a person opens the door and walks in and the individual doesn’t see him. In other words, where a person is, the individual will wipe him out, and where a person isn’t he will put one in. It is fantastic. Imagination is an effort, then, to fill in the blanks. But an individual who is doing very good imagining and is able with his imagination is really doing computation on a MEST level. He would be very good at imagining things, then, in one of two categories: The first is where MEST is so confoundedly dangerous he does not dare face it, so he just lives in a world of illusion. We get "sciences" like psychoanalysis and things like that based on this one. There is a type of art that is based on this, such as the work of Dalil—" MEST is so horrible! We don’t face anything like MEST, and we don’t even approximate it." The world objects to that operation, by the way. They feel the artist ought to pay some attention to MEST. SO that is when the imagination goes on the wrong side of the ledger. This is artistry at 0.9. The other category of imagination is high- tone- scale stuff where the fellow is perfectly competent about MEST, he really feels MEST is his oyster. He has the right to compose or dream up any kind of MEST he wants to. That is high- level imagination. If a fellow hangs down in the middle ground on MEST— he has too many maybes on it— his imagination damps out. This is the artist who starts out in life and does a beautiful job, but then starts going down the tone scale. MEST objects around him gradually convince him that he can’t handle his thoughts either, and he goes down the tone scale and gets to a point where he is not producing, and then all of a sudden he will go on through and start producing nightmares and be half- psychotic. It is a cycle. If you want this artist to produce, bring him up from 0.9. The first thing you know, his 0.9 artistry will damp out and you will bring him into a null. Prefrontal lobotomy damps that out too, but we have more hope with processing because we move him on up the tone scale, then, into control of MEST and his imagination turns way up in volume. You can uncover a lot of secondaries by using this process, and you can uncover a lot of physical pain engrams, but you don’t want to uncover those. You want to establish the freedom of motion in space. When you are using this process, don’t forget that individuals feel that their hands, other portions of their body or their whole body can be non survival. That is where you really get an out- of- valence case. The individual is completely convinced that the body is non survival; he therefore has the sensation of theta standing over to one side and the body standing somewhere else. This really kicks him out of valence. Or he could just be out of valence on one hand. There are selective valences. Did you ever run into anybody blaming his hand for having done him dirt? For having slipped? For having caused him pain and so forth? This fellow has sort of compartmented himself up. There has been a secession from the union. That hand no longer belongs, as far as he is concerned, and he will start to get clumsy with it. He has cut off communication with it, so he doesn’t control it as well. As a matter of fact, this has happened so often and is so chronic and so common that almost anybody handling a pen or playing a musical instrument can be doubled or trebled in his ability or skill by simply taking his hands and processing his hands. Reaction time speeds up as you do this, because the communication lines of the body are internal as well as external. In other words, to have good control over a portion of the body, it is necessary for the mind and the general setup of the organism to believe or feel that that part of the body is part of the organism, or it won’t communicate with it. It sounds sort of strange, not communicating with a part of the body, but that actually is what poor health is! "Not only are we not going to communicate with the right toenail, but we are not going to send it any supplies because it is not there! " So the right toenail rots off. "There is no skin on the backs of the hands, we know that very well. We don’t communicate with the skin on the backs of the hands, do we? So why send it any supplies?" Or, "Things are really going wrong with the backs of the hands; let’s send them too many supplies," and you get dermatitis. You can have all sorts of physical malfunction. What is wonderful is not that we can fix this sort of thing up, but that with all the knocks and bangs the organism gets, it stays in communication with any part of itself. It shows that the organism is basically very hardy and basically very determined to communicate, because even the fellow who is out of valence in thought still goes on living and most of the time goes on eating. One of the symptoms of suicide in a psychotic is refusal to eat. Of course, a "solution" for this is to feed him a lot of electricity! This doesn’t encourage him to eat but it encourages him not to complain. As a matter of fact, I have heard that explanation around institutions: "The reason we had to give her 192 electric shocks was that when she came in here she refused to eat." "Sure," you say. "Don’t look now, but she weighs about eighty pounds." "Oh yes, she hasn’t eaten subsequently, but we had to give her these shocks." "Why? What did it do for her?" "Well! . . . Huh!" You are dealing there with an organism that is out of communication— somewhat in communication with itself, perhaps, but certainly out of communication with the environment. Now, when you want to reason with somebody it is necessary for you to be in communication with him. You can’t work with an organization unless you can reason with its various parts to some degree. You can’t work with an individual unless you can find something in common or an agreement— reason. In other words, if you work with an individual, you must find him more pro survival than non survival. An individual who is unable to work with other organisms is operating on the same pattern as the skin which rots on the back of the hand. He is not able to work with other organisms simply because they are all contra survival, and of course they won’t go toward the goal of his survival. He is convinced, then, that no other organism will participate in his survival, so he cuts communication with other organisms. He becomes a psychiatrist or something! Psychiatry has done the country a lot of "good." They have collected a lot of money, they rent a lot of offices, give a lot of nurses employment and pay taxes. Also, they have taught us bounteously what not to do ever. But they are out of communication! Some people have been very fond of rushing up to me and saying, "You know, I’ve got a big idea of how we can sell Dianetics to psychiatry!" I can just see some fellow standing on a man- of- war, up on the signal platform working the shutter of a big searchlight, and it is going bippity- bap, bippitybap, and he is signaling to a submarine that is three hundred feet deep with no periscope up. The person rushing up to me saying "I know how we can sell Dianetics to psychiatry" is telling me to start that searchlight going. That is a waste of effort. As a matter of fact, I tried honestly and sincerely for quite a period of time down in Washington, D. C. (which is one of the nests of psychiatry in this country; it is infested), to deliver anything I could to psychiatrists. They would come and listen to talks on Dianetics. We had a class going, and they would come in and hear the first talk: "This is Dianetics: C- A- T, cat." And then they were supposed to go on to another class and they could be taught there. This was all free. But night after night the same psychiatrists would come in and listen to the "C- A- T, cat" beginning lecture, and they would always say, "Ahhhh." Then the next night you would say, "C- A- T, cat" about Dianetics and they would say, "Ahhhh." After about the fourth or fifth night of talking to the same people I got the idea that they weren’t quite getting what I was talking about! So I asked one of them, "When I talk about narcosynthesis, does it make sense to you what I say about narcosynthesis? That is to say, does it register with you that you can shove a needle in a patient and then tell the patient things which register with him and will become compulsive with him?" "Well, as a matter of fact," he said, "I was a part of the government project on narcosynthesis. As a matter of fact, I had a unit in North Africa on the subject." And I said, "Thank you. But does this make sense to you?" "That’s right! That’s right. I was in North Africa for about three months. We had over two thousand cases under narcosynthesis there." "Yeah. But when you shoot the patient in the arm and tell him something, have you found out that it becomes compulsive to the patient afterwards on the order of a posthypnotic suggestion?" "We came back in May of ‘45." I went down the tone scale. One woman psychiatrist turned to another doctor one night and said, "Doctor, doctor, please, please tell me, please tell me that babies can’t know anything, please!" The doctor looked at me and he looked at her and he said, "Well, really, I don’t know." "No! No! Please tell me!" "Well, all right— babies can’t know anything." And she smiled and sat back. That got a load off her chest! This was happening day after day after day, week after week. All these people were perfectly friendly to me but they were completely out of communication. We were not in communication. So I went into communication with one of them, just to be ornery— a fellow who subsequently kept recommending Dianetics to all of his patients. He didn’t know what it was about— he said he didn’t— but he knew it was very interesting and knew it was very good because I was connected with it. He is one of the leading psychoanalysts in the United States. How did we converse about Dianetics? I know a lot of double- talk about the ancient East. I can talk about "Yogi- Vishnu- itis" on the fakir spikes along with other people and possibly make it even more mysterious than it is. There is a lot of information there, undoubtedly, and if you scramble it up sufficiently it sounds very good. This psychoanalyst was in the grip of a character by the name of Krishnamurti. I suppose Krishnamurti’s name was once Joe Berkowitz of Brooklyn. He is out in a place "outside the United States" called California, and he teaches that one must neglect all of the past and all of the environment and be in present time. This is his mission to the world. He says that the way you get into present time is to just forget everything and say that the present time environment doesn’t exist and therefore you can neglect everything and you don’t have to face any of these things, and there is no reality anyhow. And then you are happy! This is known as "action through perception," or something like that. I went down and talked about this stuff with the psychoanalyst. It was indefinite, had nothing to do with anything, vague— it was just the kind of stuff you can talk out of communication about! We became bosom buddies, and as a matter of fact, he wanted to come up to the Foundation and write a book with me on this subject. He was very delighted about the whole thing. Actually, I am making fun of him; he undoubtedly makes fun of me. But I can still go and talk to him about this and he would still talk to me about it. When you get into communication, however, you have to be on some sort of a fundamental that a person will accept. Is there such a thing as a living organism? If we can agree on that, we are in communication. Is there a material universe? If we can agree on that, we are certainly in communication. We can agree even as faintly as "Yes, we both perceive there is one." If I tap on a desk and you hear that, we agree there is a desk there. A communication will go out only as long as we agree about these things. And if we agree that it is a pretty good thing to survive, if we can extrapolate from those basic principles of survival, we can agree on all the rest of this. Therefore, we might come into some sort of an agreement about Survival Processing— Straightwire on Survival Processing— whereby you agree, for instance, that there are times when water has been nice stuff to have and there are times when it is pretty bad to have. So, if there was an individual who clearly, analytically or otherwise, could not decide whether water was good for him or bad for him, he would get to a point where he would not take a drink of water. You can go down to institutions and start scouting through their patients and find patients who won’t touch water. You will find patients who won’t touch this, who won’t touch that, who won’t do this, who won’t do that. In other words, they have gotten hung up on too many maybes on the subject of some MEST, and they have gotten hung up so thoroughly that they are fixated on the subject; or all of MEST is SO thoroughly bad that they can’t get into agreement about any of it so they are just idling. Their attention cannot be fixed or dispersed, and that is psychosis— when the attention is fixed and cannot be dispersed or when it is dispersed and cannot be fixed. The reason attention gets fixed is that out of all the indecision’s, the mind suddenly decides that the only thing dangerous is water, for instance. Therefore the person does nothing but watch water to keep it away. That is fixed attention. If you can’t dispel this easily, then he is very psychotic. If you can dispel it easily, then he is neurotic. If you can knock it out the second that you point it out to him, he is normal. If, as soon as he just hears about the principle, he can figure this thing out and so forth and decide not to be so foolish about water anymore, then he is sane. That is your gradient scale. That, by the way, is a very good definition of psychosis for you to use. Don’t expect the definition to parallel other definitions exactly, because those definitions did not parallel anything. They were not in agreement with the material universe; therefore they cannot be succinctly paralleled. When attention is fixed and cannot be dispersed, a form of psychosis can be said to exist, and when attention is dispersed and cannot be fixed, that is the other form. So there are the two brands. Now, on survival level processing, what you try to fix the attention on when it is dispersed is the fact that safe items exist in the environment of the individual. When the attention is fixed and cannot be dispersed, you try to get into his area of observation the fact that other items exist in the environment which are safe; he doesn’t have to avoid them all and just fix on one. If you can do those two things and keep that in mind in the processing of psychotics, you will go a long way. The first thing a psychotic is fixed on the subject of is an engram. He has been put in a physical position some time or another and has been unable to move in that position, so he confuses space and time and thinks he cannot move through time because at that time he was fixed in space. You get that confusion. That is a holder; that is simple. That is the basic definition of a holder. A holder is a time when an individual was fixed in space somewhere, immovable in space, and he confuses that with being fixed in time. So if you get him loosened up in time he will begin to be able to move in space. That is always part and parcel of the psychotic, and any other manifestation of action phrases finishes off the rest of it. You are doing a basic level of processing; you are demonstrating to him on recalls that it is perfectly safe to move on a recall basis. The recall is easy because you are not asking him to move. You say it is safe to move; therefore if you can demonstrate this to him clearly enough so that he recognizes and agrees with you that it is safe to move, you have broken him of considering motion non survival. Motion is definitely survival. When a person’s ability to move is completely interrupted so that he can’t move, he is in a bad way. Nothing is going to take place in all of life for him if that happens. Now, I want to demonstrate to you how this works.
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