THE PART PLAYED BY THE ANALYTICAL MIND

A lecture given on 19 July 1950

An Analogy

This lecture concerns the analytical mind, not engrams. The analytical mind is not the name of an entity but the name of a part in a three part analogy. We have the analogy of the analytical mind, the reactive mind and the somatic mind. Never confuse an analogy with a reality.

We can’t lay our hands on one part of the physical organism and say, "This is the analytical mind." No more can we say, "This is the reactive mind." We are speaking in terms of function. In the days when no one could define an electron we still had mathematical formulae about electricity and we could measure current flow although we did not know what was flowing.

In the same way in Dianetics we have a functional analogy, and by understanding this we can arrive at answers and achieve results which have not hitherto been attained. This analogy, of course, is always subject to modification at such time as we discover the actual structural parts.

Those parts are not known to neurology or psychology or any other "ology" today. Nothing is known about structure save perhaps functions in biology. It’s quite remarkable that we can classify various things in biology without being able to describe, in many instances, their precise function.

The analytical mind in this analogy is postulated as part of the brain or nervous system or body, since it may be the whole body, and it may be the prefrontal lobes, and it may be the spinal column, and the Greeks once upon a time said it was the stomach.

The analytical mind contains certain potentialities and functions which are easily recognized in anyone studying this subject. The analytical mind thinks. It poses and resolves problems relating to the organism to enhance the survival of the organism.

The reactive mind is distinguished by the fact that although it thinks, it thinks wholly in identities. The analytical mind thinks in differences. For instance, to the reactive mind under certain conditions there would be no difference between a microphone and a table.

The analytical mind not only sees the difference between a microphone and another microphone, but it sees the difference between a table and all the other tables. It is able to differentiate. When that differentiation begins to break down, we get identification, and then misidentification of objects with objects which are not actually the same objects at all.

At the highest end of sanity is complete differentiation, and the analytical mind’s measurement of the differences in terms of minuteness of difference. A cigarette to the analytical mind is similar to, but is not, another cigarette. Although these two cigarettes look exactly alike, the analytical mind in its highest functions would not confuse them even though they seemed to an observer to be identical in appearance. They occupy, for one thing, two different pieces of space, so they can’t be the same cigarette.

The reactive mind does not conceive such differences and it does not think. It is simply one cigarette to the reactive mind. Tobacco might mean Mlrginia which of course immediately means King George, which means political history, and because this has a great deal to do with religion, tobacco then equals cigarettes equals religion to such a mind, which would follow with great ease this chain of bad logic— identification.

The analytical mind can achieve the resolution of problems in terms of differences. As long as it recognizes differences it can think, and it can make computations to arrive at new conclusions. When it ceases to make these differentiations, of course it makes errors.

It might be possible by a chemical to join up all of the hook- ups in this analytical mind, and so thoroughly short- circuit it that every datum in it equals every other datum, and you would of course have a madman. Somebody could then say to this madman, "Go down and get in your car," and this might be easily interpreted to mean that he should cut his throat. He would see no difference.

As a clue to this, one of the prime aberrative phrases in the society is "It doesn’t make any difference." This gets into the engram bank and things get very bad. "Everything is the same," in the engram bank, impinges itself upon the analytical mind and also gives this jammed up association.

Such commands as "There is no time," "I have no time," "You have no time," take the time difference out of the mind and so in terms of time jam everything together and again we have insanity.

This demonstrates that there is a distinct difference between the analytical mind and the reactive mind. The reactive mind is a collection of recordings. The analytical mind is a collection of computers which reaches back into its own standard bank, selects out data, computes on this data, resolves its problems and puts those resolutions into effect.

That is the function of the analytical mind. Sitting over the top of the analytical mind is "I," the awareness of awareness. "I," let us say, is composed of a thousand attention units. So, at the optimum we would have the computations going off perfectly in the analytical mind and all the loops computing correctly.

A little less optimum, we would have loops which require inspection. The data might not be quite right, and one might not be able to trust it fully, causing him to start inspecting these computations.

Furthermore, there seems to be more danger in the environment than he can rightly take care of just by paying attention to it all. So he sets up attention units to care for various dangers which might be in the surrounding area. This condition would then continue when some of the environment mistakenly gets into the organism.

The environment moves into the organism and is stored in what we call the reactive bank. Now, that is the outside world moved inside. But the analytical mind is receiving things through perceptic circuits. Therefore, whether it looks outside or whether it looks inside, an attention unit might see much the same thing.

So, we have an engram go into restimulation. A few of the attention units are immediately attracted to this engram because it is a source of pain and danger. They can sight such a thing and then put into action the command of the engram. The more excitement this engram receives, the more restimulation, the more attention units become devoted to it and the more the command would be carried forth until at last you have the psychotic, where one thousand attention units are watching two or three engrams and the outside world has no bearing on the situation. The person is inside an engram, 100 percent, or two or three engrams in a bundle, perceiving nothing but the engram. He hasn’t even got an "I" anymore; "I" has sunk out of sight.

If we postulate "I" as a thousand attention units, you can see that in the normal course of computation, even on an optimum mind, there would probably not be more than five or six hundred of these units serving immediately to observe the particular thing on which a person was concentrated. Many of the other units would be off getting material out of the banks, remembering, and doing this and that.

So, when engrams enter and start using 50 units to each engram, to observe it, to act upon its commands, we are getting into a situation where "I" is getting a bit thin.

In view of the fact that the normal person on this computation probably doesn’t have more than 50 or 60 attention units composing his "I," we see that the narrow margin there between normal and psychotic is really quite dangerous. However, because of a person’s command of the situation and the actual great strength of the mind in resisting danger, we get a condition where it is actually very seldom that the mind goes quite psychotic, unless we have an engram kicked in so hard and so suddenly that the rest of the attention units vanish from sight.

The problem in the rehabilitation of a psychotic is restoring attention units to "I," and the problem in clearing an individual is restoring attention units to "I." The line of thought which will achieve the greatest amount of advance for Dianetics would be that line of thought which most rapidly seeks to find methods to free attention units for "I."

This can be noticed taking place during clearing. It is unmistakable. More and more attention units are freed up so that toward the end of the case, terrors, psychosomatic illnesses and so on can be easily reached and erased with one recounting.

Others, particularly the locks, require just a glance to go away. Marked recoveries can occur on straight line memory technique by simply pulling into view and pulling back to "I" the attention units which are held up in locks in the case.

You can actually turn off Parkinson’s disease in about three cases out of five in 15 or 20 minutes with this technique. That sounds incredible, but a doctor is currently using it in New York. He is an expert on Parkinson’s disease. All he knows about Dianetics is this straight memory technique, and he is getting results.

He is freeing enough attention units out of the late locks in a person’s life to actually fortify the mind to a point where it can automatically reject aberration and psychosomatic illness.

So, we could postulate the analytical mind as a series of computing loops. Some people say it works on Boolean algebra. Certainly I can run enough mathematics to demonstrate that answers can be achieved on data by the use of Boolean algebra.

Boolean algebra may be complex in its long equations but it is very simple to explain. It solves all of its problems on this order: Yes greater than No, or Yes less than No.

There is no Maybe in this. It sums up whether or not the data Yes is greater than No. Then we add up Yes, Yes, Yes; No, No, No; Yes, Yes, and we get the answer to the problem: how many Yeses and how many Noes.

The evaluation of a datum is an important step in Boolean algebra, and this is what these analytical loops are supposedly computing on. Now, on this simple method of computation, we get over on the one side right and survival, and over on the other side we have dead and wrong.

It gives a graduate mathematician hours of headaches to figure this thing out but it’s very simple. In the center is neither right nor wrong. Anything right goes one way and anything wrong the other way. We could call such a contraption the front board in the mind, and "I," the awareness of awareness, inspects this board in the mind. But this board is fed by several thousand such computational boards, for analogy, which "I" doesn’t inspect but which it would have to put a unit on if the mind was aberrated.

So here we have a problem: The hunter comes in, he is very hungry and his wife has quite a temper. As he lays the gun down in his room, it occurs to him that the gun is still loaded. So, to lay it down like that is a couple of units wrong. But at this moment he hears his everloving wife’s not quite melodious voice again calling him to dinner in no uncertain terms. She has waited some time, so now he postulates the problem, "Have I got time to unload this gun?" The problem is laying the gun down loaded. Should it be unloaded? Now we are going to get a right- wrong answer on should the gun be unloaded. Well, it’s wrong to lay it down loaded, so the gun should be unloaded. Therefore he should unload it. But just then he hears his wife and her voice is worth four units, and he is very hungry which is worth two more units. So it is wrong to stop there and unload that gun. But all of a sudden he hears his little boy down the hall and the datum feeds through— mischief: "He got into my fishing tackle and stuck himself with a fish hook last August," and it’s immediately "To hell with the wife," and he unloads the gun. He is doing problems on the basis of weighting, with little weights of "Is it right to do this? Is it wrong? How?"

If anybody was 100 percent right, he would hit the incredible absolute which would postulate the metaphysical principle that everybody would become immortal and the universe would last forever. Nobody could be 100 percent right on any problem.

There are no absolutes. If we follow Aristotle we have to say, "There is right and there is wrong." If we follow current engineering logic, we would say, "There is right and there is wrong and there is maybe, which hangs between them." This is multi- valued logic.

There is also mono- valued logic which is just one line, "Anything that happens, don’t think about it. That’s the will of God, He said so, so here we are."

With the multi- valued system of logic you have an infinity of right and almost an infinity of wrong.

A fellow loses his job so he decides to take his last 500 dollars and buy some oil stock, which makes his wife leave him, which makes him take to drink, so nobody will hire him. He starts to get hungry but he is too proud to solve this problem, although he’s a drunkard, and so he starves to death! That would be a long- term computation on this individual.

He could go in the opposite direction, of course, and by doing things right, end up surviving very well.

Now, keeping this board in mind, let’s substitute pain and pleasure. As we deal with an organism, unless it avoids sources of pain and reaches toward sources of pleasure, it is not going to survive well. If too much pain enters, it’s wrong, it’s dead.

Actually, social mores to the contrary, there really couldn’t be too much pleasure. There could be immoral pleasure, which means that the pleasure was such that it brought pain to the organism. For instance, it may be lots of fun to get drunk but it’s certainly rough on the stomach. Any act which is immoral today has at one time or another brought pain to the society in which that act was performed and thus become immoral. By social aberration some of these acts have come forward to us today in the form of blue laws and so on, but at one time they were actually harmful.

So, we take an organism and we find out that the analytical mind is doing a beautiful computation on the subject of how many data right, how many data wrong. It can do the most intricate computations on this subject. The analytical mind can outcompute any electronic brain that anybody will build for a long while to come.

It can compute enormously complex problems. For instance, to build a robot which would drive a car two blocks through traffic would probably require a moving van of parts. But look at the number of people that can drive a car two blocks without wrecking it!

So, here we have an analytical mind doing these computations, making adjustments, observations and so forth, and summing them up into muscular reactions, after which it directs the actions and files them down in the somatic mind as a learned training pattern.

You drive a car two blocks without getting into an accident, and after a while you can drive a car without any number of attention units up at "I." One attention unit can sit down in the somatic mind and keep that thing going. It is now an automatic response.

The somatic mind is a stimulus- response mind, but it is set up on a highly analytical basis. Think of the number of actions which it requires to stop the automobile at a precise place and then watch the traffic lights— the light goes off, the reaction goes into effect, gears are changed, and so on forward again. It is a pretty complex learned training pattern.

Over in the reactive mind the engram says, "I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead." That can also feed into the somatic mind and back into the muscular system and cause psychosomatic illnesses. Or it can feed up into the analytical mind as a record that says, "I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead."

It has two choices. If it can’t turn on the circuit, it turns on pain. It is one of these simple switching systems. A person either does what an engram says or it hurts. There is no further argument about it. There is no thought connected with this.

Supposing the engram says, "I’ve got to go to the store but I don’t know whether I’ve got to go to the store or not; I guess I won’t go to the store," one is liable to get a chronic psychosomatic illness out of it because it is impossible to do what it says. The person’s reactive mind after a while will settle for a vacillating decision on the thing and the pain sort of dissolves. But if the reactive mind says, "Run!" and the person stands still, then he starts to get keyed in, and pretty soon he has got to run because this command is going into the endocrine system, the muscles and everything else.

Take a monocell. It only has one vector and that is toward survival. When it loses on a definite vector it is dead.

So, on a pain surge, it moves one way, and if it is attracted by pleasure it moves in another direction. If it fails it dies. That is its sole computation; it doesn’t figure any further than that.

The analytical mind goes a long way further than this. This is identical thinking. Anything that is pain is death, anything that is pleasure is immortality to a group of cells. It goes so far on this identity basis that cell A has a memory to this effect, "Whatever white comes into my environment is pain, therefore I must avoid whatever’s white." That is the way it thinks.

By taking a colony of mobile cells and blowing smoke at them, and repeating the experiment in various ways, one will get them moving away from the nicotine. Now put something in there that resembles the same smoke and they will move away from it. Culture them one generation and what do we find? We find that the next generation moves away from steam, which is not painful. They never forget. They never unlearn anything. It only takes one lesson to teach them.

On a cellular level where life is very perilous indeed, this is probably very necessary, but it raises the devil with the analytical mind in the upper strata.

The analytical mind is obviously no fool, since in the course of many thousands of years it went back and, with the thoughts of various men down through the ages on up to present time, suddenly turned around on these cells and reversed the whole process and solved it. It can run the organism.

On a structural level, though, cell A contains the same memory as A’ from whom it subdivided. Then there is A", which still has the same memory. As far as A" is concerned, it is this cell. There is complete identification.

Any "memory" (which is to say any lesson taught by pain) that is in A’ is also in cell A" and cell A" ’, and continues until it is broken by the death of the organism.

So, throughout a man’s body this condition obtains during his lifetime. But when he has children, his analytical memory does not go through into the children. A genetic pattern passes to the children but that is all on the cellular level only.

The analytical mind does a differentiative computation, the reactive mind does an identity computation, and when the analytical mind starts to do an identification along the line, it starts to fall hand in glove with the reactive mind, and do nothing but react.

So, we have the analytical mind which is an able mind. It can compute and do lots of things. The way a baby learns is by mimicry. Mimicry is the most important training mechanism that the analytical mind has.

How does one learn? He learns through mimicry. Apes mimic to some slight degree. Men are wonderful mimics. As long as a man is mimicking and knows he is mimicking, that’s all right. The moment he begins to mimic and doesn’t know he is mimicking, that’s not quite so good. And when he mimics to the extent of being Grandpa all his life, and Grandpa is dead, then he is crazy to that degree and we get into the subject of valences.

How does a man learn to shoot a bow and arrow? He looks at a picture of a man shooting a bow and arrow. He could also read how to do that, but he has learned to read by observation. Then he translates it, and he takes the bow and arrow.

Or, somebody is shooting a bow and arrow. He watches him, putting his feet in the same position, and actually if you say to him, "Shift into the valence of that man who is firing the bow and arrow," he can do it a lot easier if he is loose in his valences and he can flick through. Actors do this continually.

Valences are handy things to have until they become reactive mind stet valences. At that moment a person becomes somebody else willy- nilly as far as his actions and mannerisms are concerned, and has a hard time being himself because he is unable to differentiate between himself and the other person, so he is the other person. That is psychosis. That is somebody being Napoleon or bearing a similarity to Grandpop in that he likes his coffee hot and he has this funny limp that nobody has been able to trace. But we find out that Grandpa had a limp because he was shot in the Spanish- American War.

Then we get over to the natural function of the analytical mind which is completely differentiative. The analytical mind can bob in and out of valences and become more and more able as a mimic.

It can mimic most anybody and it can still very solidly remain itself while it is mimicking. That is an optimum condition. That means that you could watch somebody step onto a tractor and start pushing and pulling on the levers for a few minutes, then merely, without even observing very closely, shift into a tractor driver’s valence and drive the tractor.

That is the way man is constructed to learn. So, we have mimicry as one of the abilities of the analytical mind. Understand that the reactive mind has no ability to mimic. It merely says, "Mimic!" and after that the person has to. But it is the analytical mind that does the mimicking.

Then there is a problem in demon circuits. The analytical mind can set up demons very easily. The person says, "Well, let’s see, I’m awfully bored, what am I going to tell this fellow?" and he sets up a synthetic demon circuit to do the talking. It consists of a couple of his own computational loops, but it will carry on a very able conversation without the person himself having to pay any further attention to it. I have met people who do this a great deal of the time and I have often suspected "I" wasn’t present. But demon circuitry can be of definite use.

For instance, any time one says to one of these computers, "Now let’s see, how on earth do I do this billiard shot? Well, I’ll think about it for a while," he sets himself up automatically a couple of loop computer circuits which go ahead and figure out how he should do the billiard shot. The next day at three o’clock while he is drinking coffee, all of a sudden his mind is blank for a moment, and into it springs the idea—" Why, of course! You give it a five bank...."

That is circuitry. It is done by the analytical mind and is one of the ways the analytical mind operates.

But now let’s take some of the abilities of a separate and individual analytical mind. This analytical mind, let us say, has a potential IQ of 199. It is quite clever along the line of architecture. It has the talent and it has the dynamics, and working in its optimum state the person can go out and build beautiful buildings.

Then an engram enters which says, "You can build the most beautiful buildings in the world," and it is like playing an organ with a stuck stop. You can’t push the stop out of sight anymore.

This engram in the reactive bank throws back the circuit and holds the ability to build buildings in a stuck position, and this poor man now has an obsession on the subject of building buildings. He has to build buildings, build buildings, build buildings.

The only trouble is that this thing has pain along with it and the answer to this engram "I can build the most beautiful buildings in the world" is "You cannot, you’re just a drunken bum." So, he has got a manic on the subject of building buildings.

Then, one day somebody shifts his valence on the engram, and he says, "After all, I’m just a drunken bum," and he knocks back and forth in this engram, and the more it is restimulated, the less analytical mind there is present to build buildings.

Remove this engram and let it play along on the organ keyboard the way it should, and we find that he can build beautiful buildings when he wants to, he likes to build beautiful buildings, he enjoys it. But he also likes to sail yachts. He also likes beautiful women and he has a very good time reading Rabelais. In other words, he has got a full keyboard he can work on now. He can do any one of these things, and because he happens to have a talent for building buildings, he goes on and builds them.

Let’s say he has a basic purpose to build buildings, together with a great ability to do so, but has an engram which tells him that he has to be the world’s greatest polo player! He happens to be rather short in the legs, he’s short of breath and his athletic coordination runs on the order of one half of a second reaction time.

So this poor individual is now the world’s greatest failure at polo. But it’s all he can do. So, life is filled with a chain of broken polo mallets and bored polo ponies. If we take that engram out, he will no longer have to play polo.

One flattens out this whole thing and lets the analytical mind take care of it, and figure it out, and a person goes off happy as a clam and becomes a great success. It is important to note, however, that it was not the reactive mind doing any thinking that made this man become a bridge builder.

Now, four dynamicsl can be postulated in laying out the analytical mind. Firstly there is his personal dynamic. Let’s say that is natively fairly strong. Natively his second dynamic is also pretty good as well as the third dynamic. His fourth dynamic is very good.

However, this person has an engram that says, "I’ve got a secret. It’s a very valuable secret and it will save the world." This can be heard with great frequency in institutions where somebody has got this secret that the United States Government is after him and somebody else is after him. This would be a paranoid reaction in which the poor man has got his fourth dynamic completely exaggerated.

Or we get the religious zealot who says, "I have a message, my name is Ali Pasha and I am the prophet. And we’ve got to have a good, solid jihad here, boys, and Christianity has to disappear off the face of the earth because there’s only one God." As far as he is concerned, he’s stuck on the third dynamic. He is for his group but he is going to save the world for Allah.

It’s a type of zealotism that is simply the reactive mind pushing one of these dynamics out of line and exaggerating it. Because of the rest of the engrams, it caves in all other abilities of the mind and we have a paranoid.

When only dynamic one is in shape we have somebody who is selfish. When the second dynamic is pushed out of shape we have somebody who is a nymphomaniac, or a satyr, or something else. When the third dynamic gets pushed out of shape, this is somebody who has got to carry the "word" to some mission in the Congo, and to devote his whole life’s work to it even if he gets thrown into a stew pot the next day. Then there is the fourth dynamic misaligned to the point where the person has a secret that he thinks everybody is trying to extract from him, whereby he has got to save mankind from some awful menace.

But these are all analytical mind stops. The only ability there is the analytical mind ability. The reactive mind has nothing in it but a record.

Let’s take a juke box as a crude example. It has some records inside, together with the needle and the arm and the motor and so on, and it just keeps getting fed records. That’s all it does, and all it’s supposed to do, but it takes a lot of equipment to get that music out of that record.

Of course the analytical mind can do a lot more than just play the record. It can play and compose and reform and store its own records. It’s like a whole manufacturing plant with one juke box sitting in the center.

Now let’s turn the whole machine over to a juke box which plays a single record. The record has nothing on it but bumps on wax. It can’t think, it can’t play. You can take this record and hold it in your hand and wait for a long time without hearing anything coming out of that record. That’s an engram.

The basic strata of the analytical mind composes an identity which is strictly a cellular level mind known as the somatic mind. That mind goes toward food, it goes away from pressure, it tries to procreate. It is basically a stimulus- response mind. Then there is the reactive mind, the analytical mind itself and "I." The analytical mind goes out during unconsciousness. The perceptics start recording, and these recordings are stored in the reactive mind.

If someone is knocked in the head and told, "I hate Stalin, Stalin is going to kill me," it is stored in the reactive mind. It may lie in there completely inactive, nothing but a voice and pain together with various perceptics. But after a while, using the juke box analogy, something fetches it out of the bank of records, and that something is a similar experience observed on the level of the analytical mind.

People are fond of asking, "Can you give engrams to clears?" The answer is that you could give an engram to a clear but you would have a hard time restimulating it for the following good reason: The analytical mind as it exists in an uncleared state, possessed of engrams, is never completely awake or alert. So, if there are a thousand engrams in the bank with all their attendant locks, some of those are very mildly in restimulation, therefore there would never be a moment when one had 100 percent optimum alertness of the analytical mind.

The reason why is that any engram which is keyed into the analytical mind has a little tab on it which says, "Analytical mind, unconscious." Now maybe that only takes down the power of the analytical mind as an organ or as an entity a very slight amount, but it is still not optimum.

Now, maybe there are two engrams keyed in, but usually there are fifty or sixty or a hundred that are mildly kicked in.

The person doesn’t have to be slightly unconscious to have an engram restimulated, though usually he is slightly unconscious. But it will most often restimulate if he is worn out. All of a sudden he walks into the office one morning and everybody looks sour, and he goes into the boss’s office. The boss says, "You’re fired, here’s your pay. I’m giving you a dishonorable recommendation. I’m going to make sure that you never get a job again anywhere."

The person doesn’t know what he has done. He goes into a state of confusion. The boss says, "I’ll tell you what you’ve done. You’ve bungled up everything, you bungler! " That’s a lock. But the engram has now been keyed in, and after that it sits up in the front of the juke box like a record on ready, restimulatable at any time. Now, it doesn’t need a new tough experience to key it in.

Let’s say the thing carried with it a headache together with the phrase "I can’t get a job anyway, I’m a failure, I’m no good, I bungle everything." So, now when the person starts to do something, he bungles it.

Somebody gets angry with him and because they have heard him say this, they say it back to him and key it in harder. After this, every time anything happens whereby he fails, even slightly, he gets a headache and becomes sad and apathetic.

He has got an engram in charge. The engram is keyed in, it is functioning, and it destimulates and restimulates alternately from there on out, once it has been keyed in, because it is always on ready. One single perceptic in the person’s environment, such as somebody breaking a plate, and all of a sudden the person thinks analytically, "I am a bungler."

Maybe it also had a train whistle. So when he hears a train whistle, that means he’s a bungler. Why? Because every time a perceptic in this engram restimulates it reels off the rest of its record, and the only way to get this juke box running is to drop one perceptic contained in it and thereby get the whole record.

In this case the whole record had to do with the train whistle, the breaking plate, Mama screaming, Papa saying something, and so on. Restimulate any one of these things, and just like the nickel in the slot, this record goes on and plays its tune, only it’s playing its tune simply because the analytical mind exists.

In neurosurgery one can take some sections of the mind, which may be switchboards or the analytical mind itself, and cut them up in such a way that the engrams no longer have any way to play the record. That would be like taking a juke box, and because it had a bad record in it, tearing out the speaker, breaking up the motor, short- circuiting the line and blowing all the fuses in the system. After that, of course, that record isn’t going to be heard anymore. And that is precisely what happens. If you investigate the prefrontal lobotomy case you will find out that the person can’t be restimulated anymore along certain lines. Of course, the insidious part of it is that they don’t know which circuit to cut, so they may cut it in such a way that what repressed the restimulation and fought against it is now gone as well, so the person now has all records playing in the juke box simultaneously. It is a shotgun technique.

To show you how one of these engrams works, let’s take a fellow by the name of Bill, and let’s say he is the analytical mind. Then let’s say that the reactive mind is on the other side of a door and it has a phonograph record. And let’s say Bill has got an office staff of attention units. Suddenly he hears the rattle of a cup which sounds like a dish breaking. This restimulates the record behind the door, and it starts playing. Bill says to one of his attention units, "Go on over there and see what that is. I’ve got a message here that says some cells are in pain."

So his assistant goes over and opens the door and this record says out loud, "You’re a bungler." The assistant turns around and says to Bill, "It says you’re a bungler." About that time Bill starts to say, "The hell I’m a bungler," when a gadget nearby shoots out a little bit of sleeping gas, so Bill can’t think quite so well and the attention unit stands there and keeps looking at this thing.

And pretty soon Bill says groggily, "Must be a lot of trouble over there." Unconsciousness starts coming in because this thing has got an unconscious perceptic that knocks out the organism and its feed supply.

So, he sends over a couple more attention units. Now, if Bill really wants to get psychotic, he not only sends all of his assistants down there but he goes down there himself! The closer he gets to this thing, the more gas he gets. And finally everybody is standing around listening, and it says, "You’re a bungler, you’re a bungler, you’re a bungler."

"Who’s that?"

"You’re a bungler."

And we get the situation whereby the attention units are tracking back to the engram. But now supposing this engram wasn’t saying, "You’re a bungler"; supposing it was saying, "Wachatabe, wachatabe, wachatabe." Nobody in the attention unit bank knows anything about Japanese, so they simply slam the door again and report to Bill, "Some fool down there is saying, ‘Wachatabe," ’ and that is the end of it.

Or the attention unit opens the door and the engram command says, "I’m very tired."

So the analytical mind attention unit reports back to Bill, "You know, it’s a funny thing but he says he’s very tired."

And Bill says, "I don’t feel tired at all! " At that moment this thing turns on some more sleeping gas, so Bill says, "Yes, I do feel tired," and then he’s more comfortable. He has got to agree, because the original person in the engram was trying to get some form of agreement.

Now that is simply aberration. It is just a statement of condition.

We are not very concerned with aberrative phrases. They may be very terrible, they may have somebody climbing the lamppost to find out why the green lizard on top keeps spitting at them, but that is just an aberration. It is not important in an engram.

But the next thing that occurs is that Bill’s assistant goes over to the door, opens it, and something says, "Get out!" The assistant backs off and says, "It says, ‘Get out." ’ He goes back over to it again and it doesn’t say anything until he gets close to it and then it says, "Get out!"

So he gets out. And in this way one attention unit can keep on idling off a restimulated engram.

Or an attention unit opens the door and it says, "Stay here," and drags

. .

m ln.

So, action phrases such as bouncers, denyers, misdirectors and holders cause attention units to idle back and forth. Last of these action phrases are groupers which furnish the data to other computational loops and so forth.

The next thing that ties up and agitates a lot of attention units is valences.

"I" would normally give the commands, do the observing, and say to a series of loops something like, "Be like Oscar while you’re driving a tractor." So the whole organism, not just the analytical mind, is like Oscar when driving a tractor. It is an automatic setup mechanism, but only the action part of him is Oscar; his own mind is floating free. Maybe there are only three or four attention units devoted to being Oscar, but there is also a carbon copy setup.

Now supposing one is doing just plain mimicry. Let’s take a hunter up in the north woods who wants to make a moose call. So, he goes into the valence of a moose and does it. You may have heard a hunter say, "The best way to hunt moose is to think of yourself as a moose and then you do what they do, and you wind up with a moose."

So, there are valences. But now what happens in the engram circuit (using the analytical mind and attention units analogy) when all of a sudden something restimulates the engram bank, the attention unit walks over and opens the door, and a record says, "You’re just like Oscar," and another one says, "Stay here," and another one says, "Come back"? There’s nothing for this analytical mind to do but set up an Oscar valence 100 percent because obviously to survive he has got to be like Oscar.

There is the mechanical idea that every engram has three or four valences. There are three or four people by a switch- over: "You’re just like your mother," or, "You can go elsewhere to find it," or, "You can go elsewhere for all of me," which was an actual engramic phrase. Then there is "If that had been you, you would have been killed," or "If that had been me, I would have been killed," or something similar. So we get this computational problem which has to set up a valence which isn’t in any valence, because every valence is you or me. Naturally we could only then get a synthetic valence.

It’s the exterior world getting interior. So the analytical mind would set up a valence, meaning a full- dress mimicry of one of the valences in engrams.

The next one is demon circuits. Let’s take the most villainous demon of all. In the outside world we have something that tells the person he has got to control himself. Maybe he is injured and in pain. But there are some wild animals close to hand and his yelling would bring the wild animals down on his fellow huntsmen. So they say, "Control yourself, be quiet."

"I" receives this command. It is not particularly engramic, even if he is slightly wounded, if he doesn’t have something really engramic for it to sit on. That’s a perfectly reasonable remark. Someone might even say, "You’ve got to control yourself now, there are wild animals around," and the person would lie quietly until the wild animals left— it is a survival mechanism.

But let this outside world get inside and the attention units are attracted to the door. They open it and this thing says, "You’ve got to control yourself. I’m going to tell you what to do and after this you’d better do it!"

They come back and they tell Bill, "Hey, there’s somebody else aboard!"

So, the analytical mind sets up a circuit. It puts another "I" into the computer.

Sometimes there is a sonic circuit, but it isn’t saying, "You’ve got to control yourself," it may be telling the person how to control himself and dictating his every action. It may even make him feel that unless he does control himself he is going to be in bad shape all the time, and that he is liable to explode any minute if he doesn’t control himself, all depending on the commands with which it is set up.

In addition to this, you ask the person to get rid of a "control yourself" mechanism, and because it is so obvious in the society that a person has to control himself, he thinks that picking up the "control yourself" mechanism would be picking up and erasing "I’s" ability to control the organism. Whereas this thing is a parasite. It is not "I" controlling the organism. It is a false "I" erected in the circuits, and it actually can get sonic.

There was one, "You will remember all this in present time, come up to present time." A hypnotist had evidently installed a circuit, and he had put it in artfully on a sympathetic basis so that there was an engram sitting there constantly which had a full circuit set up telling the person what to do, because of course present time is progressive, so the engram came right on along with it.

That is a demon set up on the thought plane and the only thing that makes it possible for this to go into action is the ability of the analytical mind, even though the perceptics kick the record in and the record starts playing on a cellular level.

There is the fact that the analytical mind, using conscious and unconscious circuits, isn’t paying any attention to but can regulate at need such conditions as heartbeat, rhythm, fluid flows in the body, and voluntary and involuntary muscles. The thing is all rigged up to regulate the body.

But all this is postulated and is discovered to be under analytical control since you can take an individual and reach those controls and interfere with them simply by talking to them specifically on command. It is a very strange thing that you can practically stop a man’s heart just by talking to him. But you have to do it on a clear with his consent and after he has practiced until he can do it.

For instance, have you ever seen a child learn how to wiggle his ears? It takes a while to find the right muscles. The same thing with the analytical mind and fluid flow. One can reach into the mind and say, "Your heart will now beat slowly," to a person in a hypnotized amnesia trance, for example, "Your heart will now beat slowly, your heart will beat slower and slower. Your heart is beating slower and slower," and by doing so kick down his heartbeat rate a degree. Furthermore, you can stroke his arm and say, "All the blood is flowing out of your arm now," and finally get a person whose hand is white, bloodless and cold.

The limiting of blood flow in various parts of the body is not an unusual experiment. It is very well known to hypnotists. The Hindu fakir can slit a vein in his wrist and make it bleed. He has got autocontrol over it. He simply says, "Bleed," and it bleeds; "Don’t bleed," and it stops bleeding.

About 1928 when this principle was not known in the United States there were a couple of Hindu fakirs who went to Johns Hopkins and practically drove everybody crazy there. Then a few American hypnotists said, "Whoa, well now, wait a minute. I should be able to do that to myself," so they did.

The analytical mind can control fluid flow. It has to learn how, as in childhood it has to learn vocabulary, it has to learn all sorts of things; but we are treating it now as a mind which has observed and learned (like a child learning how to wiggle its ears) in order to control something like the thyroid or the pituitary.

But it should be able to, because a hypnotist working on a subject by handling solely the lower strata of the analytical mind can do tricks with the glandular system.

Of course, he does it in rather weird ways. He says, "It’s very hot in here," or, "You feel very energetic. You’re getting very energetic." I don’t know how he is kicking in the thyroid or what the circuits would be to do so, but the person can then feel very energetic.

Or the hypnotist says, "Now you’re very sleepy, very tired," and other regulator mechanisms go in in terms of cellular control. It would actually make a Wurlitzer look simple. There are a great many cellular controls, growth controls and so on in the analytical mind, if one thinks of the number of parts of the pituitary and the number of glands.

As a crude example of this, you can take a person who is hypnotized and say, "Your nose will now begin to run, and it will run a great deal for half an hour. But at 10: 31 it will cease to run." You wake the person up and his nose starts running, not with a slight dampness, it will run a torrent. He will fill up handkerchief after handkerchief with nasal mucus. Not a very lovely thought but it is interesting to watch.

But at exactly 10: 31 it stops just like that!

The engram has a high priority. The cells say, "Ah, this is survival itself. Yes, sir! We’ve really got a mechanism here that works splendidly! It had always worked, so there is no reason why it won’t keep right on working. After all, we’ve always been Republicans, why not just go on being Republicans," that being the general gist of its logic.

If it has got a phrase in the engram which says, "Your nose is running. It keeps on running all the time. Why don’t you hold it?" this poor man will go around for 30 years with his nose running— that’s chronic sinusitis.

But it wouldn’t have any pain content with it unless it matched up with an engram which had as one of its pain perceptics irritation of the mucus membrane of the nose.

Such an engram would lie dormant just so long. One day it gets kicked in. Perhaps its verbal content has to do with the husband leaving the wife. He already has one holder in chronic restimulation since childhood, "Your nose runs all the time, hold it."

Then, the mucus membrane, irritated in this engram, restimulates some other engram. So now there are two engrams acting on the nose, after which, let’s say, there’s another phrase in an engram, "It is running, therefore it must be infected," and this person will have started to get in bad shape.

A few bacteria come in. The way the reactive mind has got to set this thing up now is to keep that bacteria alive, because this approximates the conditions of "survival."

The way to "survive" in this case is to have a running, irritated nose which is infected— a combination of three engrams. That is a psychosomatic illness in its mildest form.

In a somewhat worse form, there was a beautiful young lady who had been on crutches ever since she was a very small child, about 3 years of age, and got polio. Papa was an ally. But Papa’s standard phrase was "I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it. The tension is a great deal, I can’t stand it." From one month up to the moment she left home he said this continually. Everything Papa said was law, so now she is on crutches.

The polio, of course, also latched on to the engram in the bank which contained actual leg injury prenatally. The fetus is very easy to injure in the legs. A blow in the abdomen, like running into a table or something of the sort, will cause a fetus’s legs to cave in. After all, the fetus’s knees are clear up under the chin, and sometimes they can poke it so hard that the knees of the fetus will go through or break the fetus’s jaw. There are a lot of repair facilities which fix it up, but the engram is there.

Then at two and a half years of age something gets restimulated, there are some bugs in the neighborhood and these things latch on, and suddenly she has got some kind of an infection. Then somebody says, "Well, she’ll probably be crippled, she’ll never be able to walk again, even if she does pull through this."

She is sent to an isolation home, and there hears the words "Poor thing, she’s trapped," a nice holder. And then Papa’s first remark when she comes home half- starved with malnutrition is "Look, her legs are like pipe stems. I can’t stand it," which immediately keys in everything else on the track, and we have chronic poliomyelitis.

This is on the somatic level, because there is the reverse side to an engram. If the analytical mind and the body obey the commands of the engram, that engram won’t inflict the pain which is tied in with it. The body is supposed to obey one way or the other.

But supposing these commands are very contradictory and one says, "I can’t stand it." Alone, that is a very hard command to obey, it also contains pain in the legs, but now Mama replies in the engram, "You’ve got to stand it."

There is a contradictory proposition. So, whichever way she turned she got the pain. "I can’t stand it. Got to stand it, " the circuit said. She had to go one way or the other, so she got pain.

Some positive experiments have been done on animals. They take a cat and ring a bell and hit the cat. Now they hit the cat and ring the bell, and hit the cat and ring the bell, hit the cat and ring the bell, hit the cat and ring the bell.

Then they let the cat go and ring the bell and the cat takes off! They bring the cat back and hit him and ring the bell, and hit him and ring the bell, and hit him and ring the bell, and then they let him go, and the cat takes off again.

Now they bring him back and don’t let him eat for a couple of days. Then they set out a great big plate of sardines. That’s survival— pleasure. The cat is hungry and he gets a nice big whiff of the sardines and then they ring the bell.

The cat is now confused! He is hung up on maybe. He is not right, he’s not wrong, he’s maybe. But he’s right on one and wrong on the other, what is he going to do? So he eats the sardines but he doesn’t enjoy them very much, and that is what is known as anxiety.

This is basically the way all engrams work.

An auditor has to be able to derive the mechanics of engrams. The engram can’t spell, it can’t think, so one has to set up a circuit which outrageously puns and thinks literally on everything. If the record playing says, "He rode a horse," it isn’t spelled. The attention unit from the analytical mind would just as soon interpret this on the basis of "He rowed a horse," because that’s what it says!

To the pilot, the phrase "He’s no earthly good" doesn’t mean "I don’t think he’ll really succeed in anything," which is what it was supposed to mean. It says he can’t do anything on the ground, "He’s no earthly good."

When it gets to crutches and walking and so forth, the engram computes "I can’t stand it" to mean "I can’t stand up," or "My legs are tired," or something of the sort. It doesn’t mean "I’m unable to bear this." In such a way all these engrams command.

The English language has at best very poor communication symbols. They have never been worked out. Similarly, the French and German languages say one thing and mean another.

In Germany, for instance, if we wonder how someone like Hitler could suddenly take the nation over, it is very simple. All one would have to do is fix it up so that everybody would obey authority. In Germany when one says, "He’s a good boy," one is actually saying, "He’s an obedient boy." The tone says, "We approve of you," but the literal meaning of the word says, "You’re an obedient boy." So approval means obedience, obedience means approval. That’s pleasure, that’s survival. So it is built in on a tough, rock- bottom proposition, into the national culture of Germany.

In France, a headache, mat d e tete, literally translated becomes "I have an evil in my head." The word "evil," man is very homonymic. Now, we wonder why the French sometimes worry about religion. A language which says one thing and means literally quite another is a very unsafe language to have around.

A bad offender on this is Japanese. Japanese is very homonymic. Two Japanese talking to each other on the street would probably have a very rough time of it unless they could watch each other’s mannerisms and gestures. As long as they can see these things they are perfectly confident of what the other is saying. Because they leave off their articles and pronouns and are generally undifferentiative, the language can be thoroughly misinterpreted.

When talking Japanese, you have to make yourself very clear on the subject of your mannerisms and your gestures. Worse than that, their written language is Chinese! It has been borrowed over, renamed, and then in order to explain how to pronounce it in Japanese they have little symbols up in the corner. One of the reasons they have bad eyesight is probably these microscopic characters which have many lines and strokes to them.

In order to differentiate, they have thousands and thousands of characters which they use because their own language won’t differentiate. We wonder why they went mad and bombed Pearl Harbor when they knew they couldn’t win. That would be a reason. Language has been unsafe in this world for an enormous amount of people who are now pushing up daisies in the various forgotten battlefields of this planet.

If one computed on the basis of "What does this mean?" when handling engrams, one is going to miss bouncers, denyers and other action phrases. The important thing is what does it mean literally?

Take, for example, the phrase "beat it." One looks in vain for a bouncer, or for the attention unit to bounce when it reaches the words "beat it," because "beat it" means to hit it. A bounce might be caused by the word "scram," perhaps, but not "beat it."

Actually, "beat it," which is normally understood to mean "go away," could actually act as a holder, and I have found it as such.

As an auditor runs across various engrams in the bank and listens to them parade in front of him, he will see very readily what is meant by literal translation.

One of the key phrases that one preclear had was "It’s too horrible to be borne." This didn’t mean that it was too much to carry. It meant that it— which was interpreted by the fetus in the bank as itself— was too horrible to be born.

Later, his mother would say to him, "Why were you ever born?" which gave him the idea after a while that he was too horrible, and he went around in a small squirrel cage on this subject. That is the viciousness of engramic puns.

Don’t make a mistake either of believing, when you are going up against demons, that you are going to find something draped in a sheet. It is a piece of the analytical mind. Don’t wonder about it when somebody is explaining to you, on and on and on, why you should never go back into the prenatal area with him until he has cleared up the painful emotion on his case. It is a demon circuit which is running on this single type of computation, "You must do what I tell you. We’ve got to solve the emotional situation," and then, of course, the person adds right after that something like, "You’re too emotional and you mustn’t show your emotions."

So this engram says that the person has got too much emotion, which means he is about ready to explode but he can’t let it explode, and that he has got to control himself in general, but also that he has got to control you, the auditor.

This whole situation can get very complex with some preclears That is why you must never listen to a preclear’s computation. If he tells you what is wrong with him, you agree with him wholeheartedly and send him someplace else! We have Standard Procedure now which, if followed, produces results. When you know your tools and follow what you are supposed to do when you are supposed to do it, you will get results. It may take you quite a while on some people, but you will still get results.

It may be of interest to those interested in General Semantics that the first time these phrases get interpreted in the bank is the one which is liable to be used by the reactive mind.

This is of no great importance to therapy beyond just an observation of how language works. The child is told that something is a nasty word that he must not say. This nasty word is actually contained in an engram which now colors the engram.

Don’t think for a moment that life is lived on a reactive level. The analytical mind is actually quite an emotional organism. The whole being is rather emotional. If he were not, he would not be able to enjoy anything. And if you look around you, you will realize that a great many people are incapable of enjoying what they are doing. They feel the unreality of the existence about them. That is strictly mechanical on the basis of lost attention units, of distraction and so on. But the analytical mind, which is riding along on its own computation, in a cleared state, is very emotional.

Engrams cause the mind to freeze up. It may have engrams in it which say, "You have to be emotional, you have to be happy. Don’t go around being sad. You’ve got to be cheerful. You have got to be well and stay well. You can’t be sick." Now, we try to send such people down the track. They are not happy and cheerful, they are still sick but they say firmly, "I don’t need any treatment." There is also the difficulty of colloquialisms in language. Furthermore, there’s the difficulty of time. In the society we have a current Language, a colloquial change which goes along. I think the society does that to save its own sanity, particularly this society which is young. It really manhandles its language. Then when we get through with slangisms they get exported to England and when they get through with them they send them to Australia. During the war we had Language in Australia which was of the 1925- 26 vintage.

A preclear I was auditing hit a bouncer, around 1908— it was birth— so I started trying to get the bouncer. He couldn’t think of one. Of course, all the time I was testing the thing I was pulling the person down on the engram with phrases adjacent to this bouncer. He would come into the engram which was "a cute little thing," and then bounce. And I finally hit it. It was the words "twenty- three skidoo." That was the nurse giving backchat to the doctor.

So, from generation to generation the colloquialisms get into the engram and then you will find the engrams themselves becoming contagious by dramatization.