ANALYTICAL MIND

A lecture given on 20 June 1950

Operation

The subject of the analytical mind is very important although it is apparently unstressed anywhere in therapy, because one should know something of the mechanism behind aberration as it has been observed functionally.

The analytical mind is a mechanism which is extremely capable. It is capable of counterfeiting or manifesting every psychosis, neurosis, compulsion or obsession or repression on the books. It is capable of every insanity, but it is also capable of just plain coming up with it. It is the calculating machine. It is the activating machine. It is what counts in the mind.

The reactive mind has about the same importance as an idly spinning phonograph record, but it impinges its recordings upon the analytical mind in such a way (and in the absence of some portion of the analytical mind, upon the somatic mind) that you then get a direct short circuit into psychosomatic illnesses and so on.

So the analytical mind and the somatic mind are a couple. They act very closely together, and engrams can become impinged upon the pair. When the analytical mind is out of circuit one is getting direct action on the somatic mind.

In view of the fact that an engram approaching to impinge itself upon the analytical mind turns the analytical mind off to some degree, then you have it going rather directly into the somatic mind and one has automatic speech and actions which are straight out of the bank. One also gets automatic fluid flows and automatic functional regulations and so on. But that is the analytical mind’s strata that is the activator to the capable machine, to the switchboard, and so forth. This is a parasitic arrangement that is moving in against the capable machine. The analytical mind is evidently so constructed that each and every thing which you will see a person doing or saying comes out of the abilities of the analytical mind, but those abilities are being perverted. Those abilities can never be intensified beyond what they are natively, but they can be so impinged upon by engrams that if you are speaking in terms of a large automatic record changer, the record has come out of the slot and has moved onto the platter. Now all it will play is just that particular record or type of record.

Very cruel, sloppy thinking of a character that one would normally assign to the most degraded and barbaric society has been used in the past concerning the analytical mind.

So we have a situation here where the credit has been going to aberration. Aberration is the thing. The psychiatrist and psychologist are playing right into the hands of the engrams and aberration by crediting aberration itself with enormous strength, and have rendered it less possible for the problem to be solved or for people to be sane by saying that neurosis is the thing which makes a genius. This remarkable misreasoning is second only to the remarkable assumption that all a person can remember is delusion, or the circular reasoning that all insanity is without actual cause except the cause of insanity.

The assignation then to aberration of enormous power and strength has convinced a lot of the society of the great value of being crazy. To be crazy has no value whatsoever. The analytical mind by test, experiment and observation has been shown to work in a number of very precise ways.

One of the first methods it has of learning is mimicry. You have probably seen a little child going around mimicking his elders, or he mimics maybe the dog. Like the little girl that at the age of 2 goes up the steps on all fours to the door and scratches. That’s the way to get in the door. Her friend the dog says so. At Harvard they took a human baby and put him in a cage with a baby ape and the two got along just fine, with the baby ape mimicking the human child. Then the grandparents of the child who had been loaned for the experiment observed the fact that the child was scratching like the ape, and hastily removed him from the care of the university!

So, mimicry is number one in learning. That is coordinating the body as one sees other people coordinating their bodies. The little baby at the age of about three months will open her mouth as she sees other people opening their mouths and hope that some kind of sound is going to come forth that will mimic the sound that she hears from somebody else.

This is observable all around us and that is mimicry. But that the mind can mimic is no reason whatsoever to assume that mimicry is complete aberration. It’s not! It is a method of learning and there are a lot of methods of learning like this.

The standard psychiatric reasoning has been that the personality is composed of a number of insanities in small degrees. This is like saying that an automobile runs because its valves are out of adjustment and would not run when you adjusted the valves. They completely overlook the automobile and they are listening to nothing but the squeaks. Those are not harsh words, it is simply an effort to establish a reorientation with regard to this.

A reorientation of it is very simple. One sees a manic- depressive. Now a human being can get depressed, analytically. It is a natural mechanism, for instance, to feel sad if one loses something. This does not mean that as soon as one takes out aberrations regarding loss one no longer feels sad in any way if he loses something. But he can pick up his life at that point and go on.

If he has an engram in there, the mechanism in the analytical mind which permits him to be sad is now impinged on with an engram of the subject and he can only feel sad— the depressive part of this manic. Then let us say in this particular case of a manic- depressive that he has the potentiality of being a very strong man, and he has a lot of engrams that say he is no good. But there is one ally engram that says he is some good, that he is strong, that he is able and that he is powerful. This is his manic. Move that forward into the machine and regard it as nothing more than a cheap ornament, and that thing will move in on the machine and impinge, using only as much strength as is available in the analytical/ somatic mind series. It can’t use any more than that.

You could take a moron and with a lead pipe and by other means lay in engrams to the effect that he was the most powerful person on earth, that he was a genius to end all geniuses, that he could write the greatest books in the world, and so on ad infinitum. Then key in that engram for him, and you would still have a moron acting on the stet datum that he is a genius— and there is nothing unhappier. He now has this conviction that he can do these things, but he can’t, and you get some rather pathetic things. Then, in view of the fact that he can’t do them, people are going to start breaking or stopping by their observations his dramatization of this manic. Shortly he is going to be a very sick man because he is going to fall back upon the fact that that thing was laid in with a lead pipe. Now he is constantly suffering with the pain of that lead pipe, because the compulsion is there to do this, and if he doesn’t he is going to be hit.

That is the reactive mind forcing its command upon the analytical mind. But the analytical mind can’t carry it out. Now, if the person happens to be able and does happen to have a good set of brains yet has that engram, it will still move in but it will carry too far; and if it is constantly keyed in the person will become aberrated, because remember that this thing has cut down his ability to be reasonable.

So now he is going forward on the idea that he is going to be the greatest person on earth and that he is terrifically strong and able. Well, he is strong and he is able, but it can’t make him any stronger or more able. Having the compulsion to keep demonstrating it continually actually makes him less able. Like a dynamo that has lost its governor he will eventually just fly into bits.

This is the boy wonder who burns out. However, I have also known several boy wonders who in a very quiet way went right on being boy wonders, straight on through. They didn’t make a histrionic show of it perhaps, but they nevertheless were boy wonders. Such people as Thomas Edison who, if you look back over his past, was dealing less with compulsions than anybody I ever want to read about, and he gave us all sorts of things.

I found out in another case that a compulsion to be very good along one particular line, the composition of music, had ruined a man. He was an able musician, but he had the compulsion to be the greatest musician in the world. So at any moment that it seemed to him even for an instant that he was not going to be the greatest musician in the world, he would quit on any particular line of music in which he was engaged. And he had tried all of them, because the engram did not specify.

With this engram removed, the person settled down to composing. Previously he had had no time to pay any attention to the act of composing music. The only thing he had had any time to pay any attention to was the fact that he had to.

You will run into many people like this, so this will be of value to you in working with people. They will have a tendency to hold on to these manics. The reason they hold on to them is both educational and aberrational. Most of the time the engram content says they have to hold on to them. On the educational line they have received it from the society now for decades, that the reason they are great is because they are insane. Before that it was because they were temperamental.

The person who has one of these mechanisms at work can be made a little more amenable by an understanding of the situation. He will normally look over it and look back on his past and recognize that he has had a lot of failures along this line and that you can help him by taking it away from him, because when you take it away from him then the mind can evaluate properly on the situation.

The sorriest sight in the world is a man who has a compulsion to be one thing and whose basic purpose and personality says that he must be something else. For instance, he wants to be a good sailor He likes the sea and so on, but a compulsion dictates that he has to be a schoolteacher. Such things line up to the statement: Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Basic personality is traveling on one route, and the person’s compulsions on another. So there is a dual purpose.

Once in a while a person is found in an insane asylum who has the conviction that he has the power and the secret to save the world. This is very interesting. There is the fourth dynamic held in a vise and pushed right out to the front, but he has nothing to go with it whatsoever.

The content of many religious engrams will also do this, but they land in the sphere of the fourth dynamic. For instance, someone has this tremendous compulsion to do something, but he doesn’t know what he is going to do; and this, combining with other things, will give him the most remarkable pattern. He has nothing to offer.

It’s a mechanism too, and it is used analytically along this line: "I have a great secret, therefore you should be good to me. And I am safe as long as I have this great secret." So he has got to act a certain way. Then there is the person who says, "I’m going to save mankind," and goes out and slaughters several million people.

Hitler probably believed quite sincerely that he was busy saving the world for his race. Hitler without that confounded aberration would probably have been quite a guy, but he was stuck in the third dynamic on the subject of the German people. I call attention to the days when Hitler was being gestated around 1889 when Bismarck was going to make Germany the world power. There was much talk by the German nationalists in the air at that time. There had to be a German nation. Take the unborn baby, while Mama is wearing too tight a corset, out to too many speeches at the picnic grounds with the band going oompah- oompah- oompah, and there you have it. Such an innocent little cause yet how many human beings did he kill?

It is nevertheless a natural mechanism of the analytical mind that if a person has something he believes man can use he will undoubtedly put it forward, not in one of these superaberrative protective mechanisms, but he will put it forward. If he has something which is going to help the group, he will try to put that forward too. But he won’t be going around looking sly and thinking he is being followed everywhere, and that the FBI is after him. He will just put it out. He is more able to put it out and more able to formulate it if he doesn’t have the compulsion to do so, because that compulsion attenuates analytical power. The mind is cut down by being impinged on by the engram, rendering the person unreasonable to some degree, with less ability.

There is another mechanism that the mind uses to save the first dynamic. For example, someone goes out and gets slapped in the head by a big Alaskan Kodiak bear. If he is very smart he will lie down promptly and play dead. He will probably be cuffed for 50 feet and he may or may not live, but there is a chance to live. There is no chance to live fighting that 1600 pound brown bear, the world’s largest carnivorous animal.

So, playing dead can be a very good mechanism. You can go out on the battlefield, for instance, trip over something, fall flat and be in a slight depression with the bullets now whizzing overhead. It would be a very good mechanism to lie there, unless you have got the third dynamic kicking in there as being a highly vital factor. Certainly when we speak of battlefields there is no fourth dynamic in question at all. That has been utterly neglected.

There are a lot of times when a person can use this solution: Be quiet and play dead, "I’m not dangerous, leave me alone." A person can live longer and sometimes win a lot of battles that way. Now, all of a sudden we have a fear paralysis engram coming through and impinging itself on that mechanism, and we get a catatonic. The person is playing dead for no good reason. There is also the case of paranoia, "They’re all against me." It would be part of the analytical mind to be quite observing of those forces in its surroundings which were antagonistic toward him.

I defy anybody to solve a problem that does not take into account the forces which are going to be aligned against the solution. He can’t go out and say, "I’m going to build a dam across this river," and completely neglect the fact that the river is full of water. The force of that water is going to stop him from building a good dam and he would be crazy if he neglected it.

In the case of a paranoid or a paranoiac, this mechanism of taking cognizance of the things which are liable to suppress one’s activities is so thoroughly impinged and held in place that the person thinks of nothing but those forces which are going to be aligned against him. He goes around doing nothing but worry about them. The power of that analytical mind has been pushed out of line so far that now we can’t really deal with the person at all because we have no rational way to meet the natural obstacles.

Another thing about the analytical mind is that it runs on targets. It runs on obstacles. It has to imagine or pose obstacles in order to do anything. It has to conceive of what obstacles it is going to meet just in the process of walking from the living room to the front door. So it is a machine which runs very ably on the idea of taking obstacles into account, and it has a lot of fun getting rid of them. It actually, in its natural state, rather enjoys obstacles so long as they are known. As soon as the obstacles become unknown, it then has to search in such a wide sphere that it becomes a bit unsettled and not too well aligned.

So, it is going up against the unknown, and all of the monitors start idling, searching in various directions. There is no alignment with what it has to do and it can’t find the target, so it does nothing.

But give the analytical mind a target, demonstrate the fact that the target exists, and it will attack it, or it will avoid it, or it will do something else with regard to it, and it may even be a good solution to succumb to the obstacle, temporarily.

Anyone who takes a job, for instance, in a large corporation is succumbing to the obstacles of food, clothing, shelter and authority.

This can happen on a mechanical arrangement. You can hypnotize a person and tell him that when you pinch him in the hand it is not going to hurt. You have automatically lined up against that hand pinch to come in the future, a certain number of resistive units. So when the pain comes through they file it under the heading of waiting. They don’t register it. They are prepared. But when we simply pinch the person’s hand, the pain comes straight on through and it will knock out of alignment some of these items. In such a way, take a horizon of activity which the mind sees as having no target but which is full of danger of an inexplicable source. It finds that there is real danger there. The units start diving into the standard banks to discover what data we have regarding this situation, and units dive this way and that and begin fanning out. There is less and less alignment. The alignment is just as wide as that horizon of the unknown is wide, and suddenly you get the impact of a shock if you say "Boo!" to the person.

Take a little boy, out at night alone. It is dark. He can’t figure it out and he’s walking along without knowing that you are there, and you suddenly say, "Boo!" He will jump about a foot off the ground. He had nothing aligned toward a "boo," so it came straight through and he got quite a shock out of it.

In this fashion, but on a higher computational level, there could be a field of action out of which the mind could not select obstacles, a field in which it could find nothing to attack, no targets, nothing explained, and in which it is in a highly disorganized state because it is not aligned with anything. Of course at that moment the minutest stimuli could reactivate an engram.

This can happen to a boxer out on his feet who is traveling 100 percent on his training pattern. l There was a case of a boxer on whom some doctor had the temerity to operate, without realizing that this man was a trained wrestler. So, as they started to put him out, what clicked in were the training patterns which were all mixed up with engrams by that time because he had been observing other wrestlers in engramic moments. He was in more valences than you could count after all the bouts he had been through. So, this doctor strapped him down easily enough. He was perfectly meek and mild up to the moment when the analytical mind was attenuated to the level of the training pattern. At that moment the boxer, being rather slim hipped, came out from underneath the straps. (Because any time you find yourself on your back, what you are supposed to do in boxing is roll over on your face and get your knees under you and come on up, which of course he proceeded to do.) He slid out his hips, rolled over, and came up with the popping of the chest straps which he had pulled loose, and proceeded to clean up the hospital.

When he woke up there were about 12 people in the room holding various parts of his anatomy and, although he had no recollection of it, some of those people had black eyes and twisted wrists. He had evidently put on a very intelligent exhibition all on the basis of a training pattern.

This is starting back at mimicry again, which is where you get valences. In order to mimic somebody, you have to be able to set up a mock circuit to be that person, temporarily. That is mimicry. So you can set up a valence, and the mind sets up and tears down these circuits at a terrific rate. But during moments when the circuits themselves can’t be intelligently monitored into and out of being, we get a permanent mimicry setup, and we get a valence. When you take the permanent valences out of a person, all you are doing is taking the solder out of the circuits so that he himself can now shift at will through these various valences.

Right at the present moment you or I could set up valences that would go right straight through on a complete parade of people we know, and then tear it all down. It is simply an analytical setup and is very easy to do.

The way you learn to shoot a bow is that you have seen Ugh out here shooting a bow, and he stands a certain way. You don’t examine on an archery professional basis that one plants one foot 45 degrees from the other foot and at a distance of 27 1 / 4 inches, and that one draws back the bow with a certain flick— you just don’t go into this. One sets up the other person complete, and then at that moment picks up the bow and just shoots it. You will find that once all of the aberration about training and not being able to learn is out of a person, he could just glance at another person going through a certain action and then with full confidence do the action. It is quite remarkable.