AFFINITY, REALITY, COMMUNICATION

A lecture given on 16 August 1950

An Eternal Triangle

This lecture concerns a triangle— not the eternal triangle of movie fame, but nevertheless an eternal triangle in Dianetics. With this triangle you are going to be able to resolve cases which hitherto resisted your adroit efforts. It is something with which you can do some magic, and when you get results with this, they will look quite sudden.

This goes hand in glove with straight memory processing and straight memory diagnosis. These three items have back of them a something, a theta, which we have not yet identified. When we do, we will know a lot more than we do now.

You will hear quite a bit about straight memory diagnosis, but I want you to tie this up with what you learn about straight memory because it is very valuable.

You are supposed to be able to perform miracles. I am trying to fix you up so that you can perform miracles, and so that you will know every time what to ask and when to ask it, because if one wants to learn something of the universe, he first has to ask a question. If he forms that question a little bit wrong, he is not going to get the answer; but if he forms it right, he already has 90 percent of his answer right there.

That is a peculiar thing about the universe in general. It is extremely communicative to the expert interrogator.

To start out with, I want to call a few things to your attention concerning affinity, reality and communication. So far as the floor under you is concerned, or the lamp, or your body, or the cars outside, there is really nothing there. Perhaps there is some space, but if you took all of the energy, all of

the solid mass of particles with the space out from between them and lumped them together, you probably wouldn’t be able to see them with the finest electronic microscope in the world.

In addition, it has been postulated that the whole universe if so condensed would probably sit on the head of a pin as far as actual matter is concerned. In other words, we are dealing with a great complexity of nothing. It is composed of energy, motion, space and time, but when we get the actual particle of mass and boil it down, in spite of the fact that it runs around in a cyclotron, it is something extremely small.

Now, let’s take up energy. This is ultimately some sort of a motion, but a lot of theories could be postulated on this. Actually, if you had a big tuning fork and if you could vibrate it at the right rate of speed, you would get matter. But the physicist, when all of his entities of time, space and energy are boiled down, doesn’t have anything left, so he is dealing with nothing.

Time is composed of the consecutive moments of "now." We can get that far with that definition. We all know what "now" is. If you look back a moment, that’s a "now," only that’s a "then" now, and these moments continue to stack along. It isn’t some sort of a flow that is going through space. We don’t know what it is.

If we want to be very academic, we could probably find some highly learned definitions of time, but they would all boil down to this fact of consecutive moments of "now." That’s fine, only we can never grab on to "now," so there isn’t any time.

Obviously time flees by. It is a situation that is very interesting mathematically, and we would be quite lost without it, but as far as anybody has been able to understand it, it doesn’t exist. There isn’t any long stream of something traveling on a linear path that we can cut a chunk out of and say "Yep, that’s a piece of time," and put it back again.

Now let’s take space. Of course, space without any energy is empty. Therefore, space is empty. For instance, you could say a can is empty, but it is a can. That’s because it has sides. But space doesn’t have sides, so it is emptiness surrounded by emptiness, which by any law of physics means there’s nothing there. So, there is no space.

Now let’s take life. There is an energy called life, which probably splits and goes into thought.

Further down, there is form. But the thoughts control the form in some way. If this life has to do with thought (which takes chemicals that we have just proven don’t exist) and moves in, we get forms which if condensed have nothing in them because they are time and space. In other words, they are thought, nothing you can have any dimensions of. And that puts life energy pretty much in the same fold.

There is some kind of a motion going on. But motion postulates time and has to have time to exist, and we have just proven that we don’t have any time, so we have just blown up that theory.

It is all very puzzling, because right back of any one of the things I have mentioned is an apparent nothing.

However, we all know there is reality. How do we know this? Actually we don’t know if there is reality. But we do know this, that you and I agree there is a reality. We are in agreement on the subject that something exists. So, we have a large number of minds which agree on reality. We agree that when we touch a desk and lift it up, we get a little pull on reality which we call an arm, which goes on to a reality which is called a floor. Actually, there are none of these things. We have just proven they don’t exist.

Therefore, you and I have agreed that these things happen, and this has been the old saw of philosophers since time immemorial, that on the whole idea of perception reality depends.

We agree there is a table. We can’t be completely certain that there is a table for you and I to agree on, but we do know that we have agreed there is one. So we say, "Fine, there’s a table," and here, then, is something we have come into agreement about, which is reality.

Now, your idea of reality and my idea of reality check pretty well. This might come about through natural selection in this fashion. A man walks in the door and says, "Hey, there are 29 black cats up on the stage. Look at them." We look up on the stage and we don’t see any cats. He is insane. So, we take that man and we carefully put him away in a sanitarium and he doesn’t have much chance to procreate and carry on that line.

Actually, he might be the one that is right. But he has stepped outside of an agreed reality. After all, there has been a long line of building here. We read all about reality in books (and the books are real). And that people do so- and- so, we are pretty well agreed, but we naturally reject a person who doesn’t agree. So majority rule is not only a law of democracy, it seems to be a law about reality.

Then someone else walks in the door and there are 29 black cats up on the stage. We can all see them but he says, "There are no cats up there." Well, he too is crazy. So, we take him out and we put him in a sanitarium someplace and knock out this strange illusion. He has disagreed. It is a fact that what we call a rational human being is someone who is rational against the background of his current environment.

Let’s take the young sailor who gets boisterously drunk in port. He is always being picked up by the shore patrol and brought back aboard ship in a drunken condition, having beaten up some shore patrolmen, and it is recommended that he receive a summary court martial.

Then we take another young man. He walks aboard ship after having been to training school. He has beautiful grades and is a good, fine, sterling young character. He has a beautiful record. So, we take that record and we say, "Here we have a veritable jewel of a sailor," and we nurture him carefully and put his record in the front of the file drawer complete with a gold star.

Of those two, the one who had the good record is normal against the environment of shore life. He is a rational human being.

Now, we go to sea and all of a sudden an enemy submarine appears and everybody goes to general quarters, but the pointer of the gun fails to arrive. That was this fellow with the beautiful gold star. He has gone to a safe place. He has crawled into the No. 1 magazine and is sitting on a pile of high explosive shells, very frightened about the whole thing, and cannot be coaxed out of it or gotten back on that gun pointer’s ledge.

But the fellow who was drunk in port looks at the empty gun pointer’s ledge cover, gets aboard it, and shoots the dickens out of the submarine. We find we have here a one- man band as far as the ship is concerned. He can steer, he can use signal flags, he can shoot, he is interested, alert, never gets seasick, and is rational against his environment.

Now we have to take his record out from underneath and put it up on top, and we take the record with the gold star and hide it so people won’t find out that we have that man on board.

One has to decide what the environment is and what a person’s concept of reality is before one can decide whether or not he has an overall rationality.

Using Dianetics, you clear somebody and he has an overall rationality. He is pretty good in comparison to his environment. Of course, he can get into an environment where he lacks data. For instance, he is living up the Bongo River, dwelling under the illusion that he has heard of people eating certain fruits. So, he eats a certain fruit and dies. That means he is irrational, but he didn’t know anything about the Bongo River.

So, even if he were clear, there would still be this lack of data. He would have to know something about the world in which he was living in order to live in it. This is not far from our field at all.

We are talking here about reality. Reality is a matter of agreement. A person agrees well with his environment; he says, "This is reality," and checks past data against his present observations. There is the famous line in the play Peter Pan when Peter comes forward on the stage and says, "Please believe in fairies so Tinker Bell won’t die." I wonder what would happen if somebody stopped believing in reality?

It seems to be a sort of faith, because actually there is no time, space, thought or energy, there is nothing behind this.

So, how do we contact reality? We have about 26 channels of communication which tell us about reality.

I touch the surface of the table in front of me, and four senses immediately start working. There is the sense of position, then there is joint position relative to the body, the tactile of a wood surface, and the temperature, which helps tell me that I am touching something besides air. I am informed along these channels of communication, and having past data on it I can now compare it with my past data and discover that I have something here which is made out of wood and is called a table.

I look at it and I am in communication with it by sight. And then I knock on it and say, "Hm- hm, sounds like a table," and I am in communication with it by sound. Quite in addition to that, I could hit my hand on the corner and say, "I am in communication with it by pain too." There is a reality there. But, I am receiving it along specific channels of communication.

These channels are coming in and centering around a monitor setup which is telling me that I am perceiving something. But I haven’t anything else but those channels of communication, and although telepathy and other such things would still be channels of communication, they would be a different method of receiving something.

We also have language. Language can be voiced and printed by agreement. We have agreed that these blots on this nonexistent paper (which we all know exists) mean things which communicate when we introduce audio. It describes all the perceptics and describes things which we observe. But it is still perceptic communication and there is no communication outside of those channels, even if we add in telepathy and intuition.

So I know this table is here because of these perceptic channels, and you know you are here by your kinesthetic sense, tactile, and weight sense. The whole thing compares and you get a picture of location. And so we have communication.

Communication informs us of reality. We haven’t any other contact with reality. Our perceptics all do a pretty good job of communicating; however, again natural selection would be at work here. A man who is blind has less chance of carrying on, procreating, raising children and so on. We have a tendency to sort out people who have a failure along the communication channels. We also have a tendency to select out people who communicate better along these perceptic lines, because they have a better chance of survival. For instance, a person who doesn’t have good perceptics won’t know a black leopard is in front of him. He might say, "Purr- r, purr- r, nice kitty," which would be a failure of selection. That piece of data was communicated to us, even on the genetic line, by some form.

We translate these things, bind them all up and say, "This is reality." But there is no way for me to climb into your head and look out, and there is no way for you to climb into my head and look out. So, let’s say we are all agreed that something is green. It might actually be registering as purple to one of us, but he calls purple green. There is no precise way of checking it up, but we agree that this is the way things are.

Now, two things can happen to an individual’s communication. Reality communicates with him, let’s say, along the line of sight. And as long as he continues to receive sights about certain things, and people agree with him that these are correct and his sight is all right, he is doing a medium line of communication. He is doing a variable optimum, you might say, of communication.

But now we can actually install an engram in him, or a shadow of one, by telling him that in the future any time he looks in a certain corner he is going to see 29 black cats. That is an "over." Or we can tell him that he can’t see anything in that corner, it will be a complete blank; and we have an "under." He isn’t seeing as much as is there.

Nearly everybody sees with varied ability. Some people are seeing with great precision; some people are seeing well; some people are seeing blurred images; some people have thick glasses on and they are not getting all they could get out of sight.

The same with sound. There are people with extended hearing to whom a voice may sound very loud, and there are other people with shut- down hearing, and still others that have a dub-in so that they will add a word here and there to what is being said, and actually think that they hear it.

Those are variables along one or two channels. Every single channel of perception adds up to communication. But every single channel can be over or under on the subject of what it receives. It can receive too much or too little. And the number of times that it hits the average in between are very rare.

This means that a person who is perceiving too well or too little is that much out of touch with reality. He has that much less contact with reality, and reality to him is that much less real.

The person who has non- sonic sometimes has a very tough time trying to convince himself that he is actually hearing engrams or getting impressions through. The person who has sonic, listening to the words in the engram and getting pains and so on, is really convinced. That is real.

Of course, there are people who get dub- in. You take a person back to an early life. He will go back and find an early life that is far more real to him than anything he has perceived since conception. His dub is perfect, but that is not reality. That is an aberrated reality. So reality can be quite varied.

We are looking in a human being for the real "real" and we find it by rehabilitating his communication and increasing his reality, or vice versa. If someone has in his engram bank "It’s not real, it isn’t happening to me," that will cut down his sense of reality. It will also automatically cut down his sense of communication, his perceptics. These things are interdependent.

What we mean by affinity is that cohesive force which holds together the universe, not so much the force which blows it apart, but the force which holds it together.

The destructive forces of the world are very dramatic. We look back on the past and find that people who led armies to war have their names engraved on tombstones and are in all the history books. But man overlooks the important and looks upon the dramatic. The people who really belong in those history books are the people who brought man out of the mire, like Voltaire. Lots of people don’t know about Voltaire, yet millions know about Bonaparte. Destructive force is so easy to perceive.

Take the Bikini atom bomb. "Oh," we say, "isn’t science wonderful. Look at that thing!"

But what holds the universe together?

I have asked myself that question because it is obviously a nothingness of space existing in a nothingness of time. It doesn’t have any actual reality but there is some cohesive force holding it together. And maybe that is all the force we have in the universe. Maybe when that is reversed we get atom bombs.

Man living with man can feel affinity. He lives in a community of men. They called it in the past "love." Love is a very sloppy word. Love is something they use to sell movies with. It is a much overused and misunderstood word. When we use the word affinity, we can include both brands of love without any slightest hesitation.

A person’s contact with his own past, his cohesiveness with his own past, his consecutiveness with his own past, is an affinity with the past. He also has an affinity with the future through his children. He is trying to achieve affinity with the future— that’s sex.

Possibly the only existing force in the universe is affinity. Some people call it love, some people call it cohesion. We are calling it affinity.

Let me give you a very crude example of this. Someone walks out on a beautiful morning. The sun is shining, the birds are singing. He looks over the day and sees a pretty rock, and his sense of reality is very high. He loves things. So, he walks over and is just about to pick up this rock when he stumbles and skins his knuckles on the rock and says, "Damn it!" Immediately he is out of affinity with that rock. He has broken an actual force of affinity.

The hard objects of the world, the elements, those insensate things that make up time, space and energy which have not the characteristic of life, are the things one breaks rapport with gradually down through the years.

Someone falling off a stage to some degree breaks affinity with the stage. He goes out and walks into a curbstone and he breaks affinity with concrete. A little baby has pulled boiling water over his head, so he breaks affinity with boiling water. All these accidents add up. Life in its ebb and flow and commingling as an energy collides. That is the way it seems to get along, by conversion and reconversion.

Finally he gets to be a "normal" person. Every one of these affinity breaks seems to come along the channel of physical pain, initially. And physical pain means "I am not in affinity with that." Actually the human being who has received the standard number of engrams in the prenatal bank has broken affinity with practically every word in the English language.

Now, he has broken affinity with all those words because they are contained in engrams, and the engrams contain pain. That is all identification. A= A =A =A.

Therefore, the words to be may be a pain on the hand. That’s part of the identification. So he has broken affinity with the words to be. He has broken affinity with thought, he has broken affinity with objects and so on, although he started out initially with a good, broad affinity with the whole universe.

The puppy comes in as everybody’s friend, panting and wagging his tail. Somebody kicks him; somebody starves him. Gradually he gets to be the dour old "normal" dog.

This force of affinity is so intimately locked up with living that it might even be life. Certainly we know that when it is broken all the way down, a person is dead. He is not in affinity with anything, he is dead. That is reductio complete, way down at the bottom— broken affinity with existence, dead. As one begins to break off with affinity and the world hurts him one way or another, he breaks off little pieces. Those are little pieces of death, until he gets all the way down to death.

Affinity then is the thing which one has but hasn’t any channel of perceiving, except by communication. He can think about this thing, but his thoughts are fairly well based upon what he has perceived, what he can recall, how he compares today with yesterday and with tomorrow. But every time those little affinity breaks are in there they reduce communication, and they occur from conception forward.

Little Johnny walks in and says, "Mama, I was "

"Go away, don’t bother me. I’m busy."

That may not be much of a break of affinity, but based on a whole stack of engrams, it is fairly big. The only way she could push him aside was to chop communication at this point, and that is hard on affinity. This isn’t the real world as far as he is concerned. Mamas are supposed to be nice and listen to you and do things for you. One cannot have communication interrupted without a break with reality, and naturally an interruption of communication results in an interruption of affinity too.

One is in complete affinity when he is in complete communication with what he perceives to be a complete reality. That would be a 100 percent triangle and the moments in which they can exist are very short, or practically nonexistent.

The only way a person’s sense of reality can be reduced and is reduced is by an interruption or by a magnification of communication. And that could only really be done by a breaking of affinity, which could only result in an interruption of reality, which would result in an interruption of communication, which would interrupt reality, which would automatically interrupt affinity. We hit one, we can’t help but hit the other two.

We are working with a triangle. There is something just back of these things that I am almost scared to look at because it is practically the back end of the problem.

These things are tied in very intimately, and when you are treating people, you will find out that when you want to rehabilitate reality or affinity, you can rehabilitate one of the other two points and achieve it that way.

For instance, if you want to turn on sonic you could hit it with reality and affinity, and you will get sonic. Or, let’s say the person’s sense of reality is very poor. We put him in communication with reality and things will be more real to him.

If you understand this you can use it. It is of very great benefit to you because it means that you have two points of attack on any one problem which is broken down on the third one. The final product of what you are trying to do with the case is to bring these things up as close to 100 percent as you possibly can. You want to put the person into complete communication with reality, to have a reality as complete and exhaustive as possible with maximal affinity for reality, and when you do that, you are going to have a very happy and efficient person.

Of course, there are mechanical limitations on communication and there are still bad hats in the world, so we can’t rehabilitate affinity completely because good sense tells us that we might have to do something that is not quite out of brotherly love. Nevertheless, we will get this triangle when we have cleaned up an engram bank, and by tackling any one of its corners, we can raise the other two.

Somebody wrote in saying, "Experimental psychology has recorded a number of ways in which apparent reality— subjectively judged stimuli— systematically varies from objective reality, in terms of a stimulus background plus the organism’s residual background, i. e., past experience. How do you explain this?"

I am not trying to make fun of experimental psychology, but it has its limitations. For instance, I tested the shutter speed of the eye one time. I think it was about one- thirtieth of a second. I did this by standing up with a camera and clicking the shutter. Maybe my particular eye speed was onethirtieth of a second, so it probably varies.

Another interesting experiment would be to take a device and rotate it. At first we can still watch it, but the instant that we really start to spin it, it becomes a cylinder of sorts. In other words, there is a lag of time. This is not important and is not really what causes objective reality and subjective reality to differ. The main trouble is engramic. That is a fair constant. Then we should know the actual organic defects so that we could measure something on a meter and say "Well, the nerve flow is a little bit slow." But that would be the only difference between objective and subjective reality.

Objective reality and subjective reality come very close to being the same thing, except when we introduce illusion.

People want to know how this relates to survival. I don’t think you have to stretch your wits very far to see immediately that a person survives as he can; he survives. And his optimum survival is in full affinity. But when he is told certain things are nonsurvival, he starts to break off a little bit of affinity. In order to survive, according to his data, it is necessary to do this.

Rattlesnakes are dangerous. There he is breaking some of his affinity on an analytical level. If one went around with complete affinity turned on, saying "All rattlesnakes are good," who knows, would rattlesnakes actually bite him? We could confuse almost anybody about this.

Survival enters into this because he has to survive. In order to survive a person starts breaking down according to the life plan and things start to click out. But, of course, that is nonsurvival and man is presented with the problem of tabulating as best he can, with a minimum of dislocation of these three things. And his dislocation is always, actually, minimal when it comes down to an analysis of the situation.

So, as he becomes more and more self- centered, that is to say, he keeps bumping into stones and being bitten by rattlesnakes, he again comes to the conclusion that in order to exist he has got to exist as a unit entity in himself, and that he is not one in his brotherhood with the universe. That is his first mistake, because his ultimate understanding seems to be an understanding of his brotherhood with the universe, and by being insularized we eventually achieve along the scale a misanthrope, the paranoiac.

Perhaps you can take a person analytically and face him with a world so dreadful that he would figure everything in that world was against him. But if he adjudicated that and he didn’t have any engrams, he would be right. That would be on the analytical level. But for a person to say "Oh, well, everything in the world is for me. That truck is for me too," crush! is not smart because there you have the truck energy line and the person’s energy pool (as himself in conflict, and as much as possible we try to keep them out of conflict.

Most of this superbelief in affinity is engramic. But let’s say it really existed— a person would have an enormously powerful control. Which side of it does one go? If he goes on one side, he will be protective. If one becomes protective, he retreats into a singularity— no brotherhood, no universe. Eventually the extended line on that is death.

On the other side, if he comes forward and realizes he has greater and greater affinity with the world at large, and if he uses it very rationally, he begins to understand how this affinity works.

Now I want to show you what makes up emotion. I don’t know all there is to know about emotion, but following along this line, we have a vector of thrust. Use of the word force is incorrect because it is apparently not force, it is a force of affinity, so we will use that label.

So, the force of affinity goes forward as A- plus. Affinity plus. Written as plus- A affinity— a certain type of affinity. That is man in affinity with other individuals and with himself and the world at large. That is the little puppy who says "Puff, puff, puff, beautiful world." But something suddenly hits this on one side and we get some part of the force of affinity suddenly converted (this material seems to be convertible).

It can be explained this way. There is the impact of energy. Now the quality of the affinity is reversed— it’s the same energy with its quality reversed.

High on the scale we have all the things which we call pleasant emotion. Actually, they are all the same thing. It is the joy of life, the feeling of beauty, pleasure, and so on. That’s an affinity, the emotion of pleasure, if you want to call it emotion. We know that force exists. But, start cutting this up in one part of a person’s life and it automatically cuts down in another part. Take a person who has been very badly shocked by life and a painful emotion has been given him. He all of a sudden has difficulty experiencing pleasure. We are dealing with the same quality of thing. It may not be the same entity, but we can treat it that way and we will understand it better if we do. This is also, at a heightened moment, affinity with the future— sex.

This, then, is the force of affinity. But when affinity is suddenly blocked, it converts into grief of loss. That is an extreme reversal of charge— loss of an ally, somebody very important to one’s reality and one’s identity. And suddenly the world closes in a little bit. Communication decreases and so does reality.

Take off an emotional blow sometime, and watch how reality and communication return. They may not come back all the way, but they are locked in together. Grief, then, if we were grading this, would be way down. It is the reversal charge, and drives down the force of affinity.

Let’s say the person has x units of affinity in him natively and he converts y units of it; he now has x minus y units left. Now, let’s hit him with more grief, more loss, and reduce his survival further. Now, let’s reduce it further still. Of course, if it ever gets clear under, he is dead, and that may very well be what death is.

Here we have, then, the grief charge accumulating. It is driving these units down. Now if we want this unit to go back up again, we have to reconvert it, and we reconvert it by taking the person back and removing the grief. We now call this a grief engram rather than painful emotion, as the word emotion is very confusing to some people.

There is a big monitoring switchboard of the body that by various means handles such things as blood circulation and endocrine flow. This can be tested. You can by hypnosis turn on or off any of these flows. A test on this is to take a gentleman who is unable to absorb his testosterone, the male sex hormone. Then go into his case and pick up the blocks on his second dynamic, release his second dynamic and shoot him with testosterone again, and now a very little bit of it is tremendously effective.

What did we do? We didn’t touch his glands. We took out an engram and the switchboard started operating again. By hypnosis, the rate of blood, urine, thyroid and so forth can be effective again. So we have this engram setup in the system, and when a person is clear, he is still using but not so much being used by the endocrine system. Previously he was bypassing a rational use of it. For instance, he had irrational reasons why he had to become afraid and so on.

It so happens that adrenaline is very useful. Shoot someone with adrenaline and ask him to run a hundred yards, and he can do pretty well.

Experimental physiologists and endocrinologists in general have done a lot of experimentation, but there is evidently a sort of "nobody knows much about this." You can read lots of books on it, but in going through them you will find out that what is known is actually very slight.

There seem to be a number of meters in the body that biochemically release an electrical charge into the blood stream which produces some sort of an action. Now, of course, in an emergency you have got a short- term effort. It’s almost as good as the remark of Karl Marx’s that the capitalist is one who would commit suicide for the sake of a profit. That is reductio ad absurdum. The body is apparently committing suicide for the sake of a profit when it slams a great deal of, let’s say, adrenaline into the system. There is danger. It pumps in adrenaline. But the way the system is rigged up is that the aftereffect is probably going to be worse than the immediate effect of the danger from which we are trying to escape. It can even kill a person. An alarm reaction system of the body sets up a type of reaction through the body in which, according to some early papers by a doctor, the by- product did the killing. The test animals would die of fright. It was the by- product of being injected with too much adrenaline. The lag was about two or three hours after the initial injection. All of a sudden the curve would go down, and they would die. So, something was having to balance the equation.

Is it better to have enough adrenaline to go zsstt for a short time? Evidently the biochemical system is not yet infallible. It is not as good as evolution may some day work out.

We check the endocrine response on different people by asking the question "What is terror? How do you feel when you are terrified?"

"Just like everybody else. I get flutterings in my stomach."

And you ask someone else who replies, "Just like everybody else, the hair crawls on the back of my neck."

"What happens to your stomach?"

"Why, nothing happens to my stomach. I am talking about being terrified."

This is a problem for semanticists, because we are talking about the endocrine system and the alarm system of the body. We are talking about reactivation of the engram which has the word terror in it. We are talking about affinity.

Someone says, "You know, I don’t like Joe. You can never get a reasonable response out of him. You can only get an emotional response." In other words, emotion is being equated with irrationality. They had better find another word for irrationality, because I have never found a great deal of affinity in a person without emotion present. So an emotional person has to be a reasonable person. Where we talk about A- plus emotion he has to be reasonable, because if it’s engramic, such as those "I am having fun"

engrams, it will be on the basis of some psychotic running around tearing people’s clothes off them and screaming "I am having fun. I am having fun."

Actually, the emotion with which one can contact the beauties of existence exists only in the company of reason, and the instant we start to reconvert this and bring it down to grief, we have the reverse of it. We have irrationality.

People have called engramic dramatizations "emotion."

Let’s look at the tone scaler and see where anger and terror fit in. First there is apathy, ranging on down to death. Right above it is fear paralysis, which is a counterfeit of death, and is a way to survive, too. Coming up the line in dealing with emotion, we get into the lower band, the line of sullen resentment. If we go up the line further we start to get the flamer, the person who gets really angry. Above that is boredom, and then there is pleasure. That is your A factor. As a person goes down from anger toward resentment, he is not very far away from fear, and when he starts into fear he is not very far away from terror. And what is he afraid of? He is afraid of a loss.

So, as this vector begins to be cut down, he is trying to keep from losing. And finally, when he has lost, he gets an emotional bundle— a complete collapse on the thing. But actually, engrams can suspend a person with an artificial command into that dim and hazy realm of being continually terrified. Of course, an engram can also make a person continually hungry, or continually limp. So we could just freeze this thing any place we want with an engram.

One can actually give a person an engram about how happy they are. That is the manic, and the person will actually be experiencing along that line. Of course, he can’t change and you get the horrible vision of a man who can never cry. Even when somebody he loves dies, he can’t feel sorrow. After a while he gets so worried about it that this in itself becomes a complexity.

These things fall in two brackets. There is the aberree with engrams, and then there is the person with minimal engrams or none. When we deal with emotion in a clear, we are getting regular emotion, but in the aberree the engrams can clip in and make any stage permanent on the emotional scale.

Emotion, chemically, seems to be the partner of physical pain. I have never found an emotional engram which did not exist immediately on- top of a physical pain engram, forming a grief engram.

It is as though the physical pain engram dictates a certain way things are to be, and then the grief hits and immediately the grief becomes encysted, whereas in a free individual he would very well experience grief, certainly, but it would be as it was intended to be, a mechanism. He would cry. And crying is the biochemical conversion of the chemistry of pain into tears.

It is often noted that when a person has been able to cry thoroughly at a moment of great grief, the amount of engram that can be picked up is very slight; whereas on a person who is not able to cry, when you eventually contact this incident you almost blow the plaster off the ceiling!

In other words, the engram takes this natural ebb and flow of free feeling and freezes it as grief, fear or a terror of loss. It can freeze it at any place on the scale. But grief would not cause an engram unless a physical pain engram existed to be reactivated and is then used to encyst the grief. Then, we would have heavy grief. The aberration in the society which says "Naughty, naughty. You mustn’t cry," has probably put more people into insane asylums than any other. Is that one of the reasons why the average age of women is higher than the average age of men?

In these last remarks about emotion I have been talking about affinity. You can use the words emotion and atfinity interchangeably, providing you will make a personal pact with me not to use the word emotion when you mean irrational or when you mean something else. "He has great affinity" or "I had a lot of affinity last night" would be the same thing.

Then there is minus- A which is merely converted A. They are also the same thing. Reality and communication are overs and unders in the same way. You have got reality, affinity, communication. When you are dealing with grief engrams, you are dealing with affinity, and when you find some place in the person’s past where Mama has brushed him away or where some ally has told him to go fly his kite, and you can spring that moment and pull off a few attention units, you will get greater reality.

In fact, if you are working on some psychotic and you can get an emotional discharge, you might bring him straight back up to sanity. Some people are so soggy with emotion that it takes a great deal of handling, and you have to keep pulling it off the case. You measure the painful emotion of the grief discharges by Kleenex boxes!

We find a time in the person’s life when he was telling the truth and somebody said "No, you’re lying," because they had some political idea about it, and they made him say "I was lying" when he was really telling the truth. Now they have cut down his affinity and his reality and of course his communication. But we could build it up and find that incident.

The problem of accessibility with a psychotic is a problem that one finds in this triangle. A psychotic can be made accessible by increasing his sense of reality. You could take a catatonic schiz and start shooting over his head with a .45, which would increase his sense of reality, or start lowering him into a well, and if at any moment he said "Pull me out," you would do so. That would certainly pick up his communication and also his reality and inevitably his affinity.

If you are going to reach him, you have got to reach him through one corner of this triangle, and with this knowledge you now have three ways to reach him instead of just one.