ANALYTICAL MIND

A lecture given on 28 August 1950

The Boss of the Situation

It is about time to discuss the analytical mind. Right about the mid stage of any course, students have the idea that there is nothing but the reactive mind and engrams, particularly if the game has been played where someone says, "You know, I don’t know how it is going to come out."

And the other person says, "Aha, that’s an engram, who said that?"

I tip you off that any time this has been pulled on you unnecessarily and out of therapy, it is strictly an altitude mechanism, a my- pop- can- lick- yourpop computation, and anybody who plays that mechanism is faithfully and basically insecure. They are skunks! That is one of the most vicious and destructive games in the world, and it is a game to be left alone.

Husbands and wives don’t seem to be able to leave this one alone sometimes. It’s the primal cause of the demise of husband- wife teams, and those teams have a high mortality rate, maybe not of the husband or wife, but certainly as an auditing team.

An argument takes place, such as one I listened to yesterday. The husband in the case said, "You know, I feel sometimes that things just aren’t right, that’s all. You know, I try to figure out these things—"

The wife cuts in, "Well, no wonder you feel that way; you have an engram that says that."

"Well, engrams or no engrams, I just feel that things aren’t right."

"I know you have an engram that says that because I ran it out of you."

Immediately the black pall of noncamaraderie descended on the area and there was a great deal of tension, many bourbons were drunk with a vicious swish of the wrist, and when they got home, I hope he told her what he thought of her. This poor man had been put into a little tailor- made hell whereby anything he had now as an opinion which did not agree with her was automatically out of an engram. If he had been a little faster on the draw he would have said, "Well, all right, you ran it out of me, so I don’t have that engram anymore; I still think things aren’t right."

You could take a preclear lying on the couch all unsuspecting and do some bad things to him, such as he starts to tell you, "Gee, I would like to come up to present time for a smoke," and you could say, "Who said that?"

And he could say, "But I mean a smoke."

"Who was insistent in your family?" In other words, hammer, hammer, hammer, and at last the preclear gets into the unstabilized position of believing that everything that is said by him was said by somebody else.

True enough, somebody used the English language before he got there, but it happens that the analytical mind is capable of formulating its own remarks. This could theoretically be kept up by enough people against one individual to make "I" dive out of sight, because we are telling "I" each time, "You don’t have any real existence. You aren’t an individual at all, you are just a collection of images that you picked up in the world. There is no ‘I’; there is no personal valence."

That is why I jump so hard on this.

"I" is definitely "I," and when the engrams and valences are weeded out of the case we have got more "I"; we have got more person— more individual. But, hammer against the person to the effect that "I" never said anything and you could achieve practically the same thing as saying "You’re no good, you don’t amount to anything," or (as we say continually to children) "You have no power of decision, and after all, you haven’t got any will power anyway. Why can’t you learn to pick things up? You never seem to learn anything," and so forth, and the product will be what this current society knows as a normal person.

It is a process of making "I" dive out of sight, the ultimate of which is the psychotic who has no "I," or whose "I" is so weak that he is unable to monitor the bank or his own actions. Fortunately the slot is still there; you can drop attention units back into it again and it will start monitoring.

Units start to disappear out of "I" because of engrams getting restimulated, and it goes on an accelerated basis whereby "I" suddenly dives out of sight as a result of somebody making an innocent remark; whereas the first way "I" was sent out of sight was when Papa and Mama decided when he was 5 years of age that he should be killed, and tied him up and started to burn him with red- hot irons.

I ran across a psychotic where that was the first key- in on a chain of AAs. I couldn’t get him to concentrate very well, so he could never quite tell what they were saying, but they did tie him down on red- hot bedsprings! Nevertheless he went through life and got up to college despite impacts of this sort in his background, but finally his girl said to him one night, "I don’t like you," and he went crazy. She wasn’t even going to leave him, but she couldn’t attract his attention enough after that to say that she was only fooling, so they packed him off to the local asylum.

It is a logarithmic progression; it takes a tremendous amount to start it and practically nothing to precipitate it.

When we have picked up and restored to "I" all of the attention units which are available, "I" now flourishes at optimum for the individual and we have a state where the analytical mind is the entire boss of the situation.

We could still put things in the reactive mind. We could hit this person over the head and say "Abracadabra," and then put him in reverie and pick up "Abracadabra," but there is practically nothing we could do to this person short of killing him that would make him go crazy.

How stable is a clear? How stable is the human body? You could still shoot him in half with grapeshot, there is no automatic armor plate put on him and no more education has been put in his bank, so he could make considerable errors. He could have been raised in a very repressive society, lots of things could have happened on an educational level with this person, but this is still the individual, and to unstabilize the person so as to drive him into highly irrational acts is very hard, well- nigh impossible. This doesn’t mean that he won’t get capricious someday and just be irrational for the fun of it.

This is not so much a lecture about clears as the analytical mind. The first time anybody inspects an analytical mind is the first time he inspects a clear. He can now tell what is analytical about this person and what is reactive because the reaction has been removed; so he knows what he can do with the analytical mind, what it is capable of, what is personality, what is education, what is this and what is that. He can resolve these problems, but he can’t resolve them until the reactive mind has been spilled.

Once upon a time, somebody brought up the fact that everybody has engrams; this is not necessarily true. You could raise a child, theoretically, so that from conception forward through birth and early childhood the number of engrams it received would be almost zero. If one could succeed in doing this, he would have something very remarkable. There you would have your real study, because you would be dealing with nothing but education based on genetic personality and modified or bettered by nutrition; whereas anybody that you process and clear at the age of 40 gives you an education which was received through engrams, and his conceptions about this and that have to be reoriented as he goes along.

Let’s say he had a poverty orientation because of his engrams, such as an engram saying "Oh, you poor kid." As he goes up along the line, he may decide he will be mostly with poor people and he will study economics. His purpose could be completely warped by the engramic patter. Once cleared, we don’t get the most optimum individual we might have gotten had these engrams been prevented in the first place. The scope and capability of the analytical mind and personality are a factor. We find out immediately a very shocking thing and that is that the analytical mind and the personality have nothing whatsoever to do with neurosis as far as the components are concerned.

We find out that we get a more complex personality when the engrams are erased than we had when they were in, because engrams are like helddown sevens; they monotone, they never do anything but monotone, even if they are very complex in their computations. They say, "You can’t believe anything you hear," and when we get down in the bank we find that this person has heard a lot of things in his life and couldn’t believe them. It is monotone. You can get a much more predictable reaction out of an aberree once you have associated with him for a short time than you can out of a clear because it is nonsurvival to be predictable, and don’t think that a clear doesn’t take advantage of that!

The first American destroyer sunk in the war with a loss of a couple of hundred lives made the horrible mistake of following a prearranged zig- zag plan. Destroyers, by orders, were supposed to work more or less as follows: "Right 15 degrees rudder. Ease her. Meet her. Steady as you go. Left 20 degrees rudder," any time it came into the officer of the deck’s head, and then occasionally he would pass it over to the quartermaster and say, "You run a few." This made the course of a destroyer which was hunting for submarines very unpredictable; it was turning numbers of degrees and coming to new courses without a prearranged plan. One got randomity of such a nature that a submarine seeking to plot the course of a torpedo to sink that destroyer found it impossible, and so that destroyer went on afloat.

In the case of the Reuben James, the officer of the deck got tired of this and against orders he hung up a schedule of zig- zags which were to be repeated every 15 minutes, not even every 12 minutes or 13 l/ 2 minutes, and a German submarine lay out nearby and watched this process for about half an hour, and then, whoom! no more Reuben James !

If we can say in a poker game that Bill always and invariably when he gets two aces twitches his left eye to look as if he is doubtful about the whole thing, Bill loses his money. Even saber- toothed tigers get the idea that they are hunted normally from the top of a rock and may be expected to be there first the next time we go up there to hunt them.

Therefore, predictability is strictly nonsurvival and you won’t find a clear being predictable. We have got to remember, however, that the best solution is one which takes into account all four dynamics, and the analytical mind works on this optimum solution whenever it can.

Time can become a limiting factor, so that as many as three of these dynamics can be discarded in favor of the fourth, because of a limiting of time. For example, it may be so important to make love to a young lady that one gets hanged for it tomorrow. Or it may be so important to save all these children in this orphanage that the rest of it blows up. Of course, you can’t hit it on that magnitude without also picking up dynamics three and four and negating one.

People can drop, then, the fourth dynamic of mankind, they can drop the third of groups, the second of sex, or number one, leaving the other three and still solve the problem. That takes place when there is a time factor, somebody is being rushed by something— too little time. A solution is as good as you have time to solve it. This doesn’t mean it’s as good as the time it takes to think it up. Many people make the mistake of thinking that a solution that took five hours to think up is automatically better than one that only took an hour.

There is a sheep psychology line being handed out today about "Everybody has got to be well adjusted."

If, in a welfare state, everybody has got to be cared for and everybody adjusted and everybody seems to be valuable, we assume that the equation being worked is "five morons equal one genius." But one genius may be worth a hundred thousand morons the way it actually works out.

Solutions are complex. There are lots and lots of factors. The analytical mind is at its best when running an equation simultaneously from left and right. Its good solutions reflect good data.

The analytical mind’s ability could be tested by finding out how little data it needed to arrive at a proper solution. It defies the mathematician who says "Here we have 25 simultaneous equations. Therefore there must be 25 variable factors." The analytical mind with 25 equations and 25 variables but only 3 constants will develop a workable solution. It is just as good a calculator as it can reach out and sample this and this and this and suddenly weld them all together and say, "The solution is this."

The Germans worked out several mathematics which attempted to sample a problem to arrive at its probable solution. Sampling is working with just a portion of the problem and finding how that portion works; then applying the portion to find out how the whole problem works. The analytical mind will work from nothing but the sample.

People manage to live relatively well all their lives as aberrees, so their analytical mind’s computing ability is very great.

I will give you an example of sampling. An engineer wants to know whether or not it is feasible to build a bridge. He has the problems: Are we going to build this bridge? How much will it cost? How much work do we have to do? How long will it stand? So, instead of going in and figuring out all the payroll which will be paid on the building of this bridge, he takes a guess at the price of structural steel and of man- hours for this sort of a job. He says it is so- and- so. "Well, let’s see, prices are much higher than they were in 1903." (He built a bridge back in 1903, half as big as this.) "Prices are twice as much. Therefore, the labor costs are going to . . ." The engineer is standing there looking at this job. "Structural steel is way up, good structural steel is hard to get. This span is one and one- quarter miles long, which is a long span. The last time they built one of these things, ‘Galloping Gerty’ across the Tacoma Narrows, it folded up. The normal price per foot of bridges in Yugoslavia is so- and- so . . ." All of a sudden, he looks up and says, "I don’t want the contract." He made the decision and hadn’t really figured anything out. But he came up with the solution that he doesn’t want to build this bridge.

Others come along who do it very precisely. They get big computers going on the subject. Mathematicians are standing around, steelmen, surveyors and experts on caissons. They figure and figure. It takes them two years to figure it out and they find out it is not feasible to build this bridge.

That would be the full- dress solution. The other is a sample solution, just sampling the factors, finding how many difficulties there are, adding them up and all of a sudden realizing there is a sort of a factor of safety there, and that this bridge goes beyond that factor.

The analytical mind does this all the time, and practically never solves things any other way than by comparative data. It computes very ably the job of how red is a red bicycle. It measures and weighs things without any real consideration. It is working algebraically: yes greater than no, no greater than yes. It asks, "Are the people stacked up in the back of the room?" And it says, "There’s a lot of people sitting down but there are some people standing up. Well, yes, some people are stacked in back." It hasn’t counted the number of people sitting down or standing up. It just knows what the proportion is. Its equations are proportional.

It figures out the most remarkable things, such as how to drive down Wilshire Boulevard and pass all these cars and keep a watch on the car in front and behind and watch the stop lights, and "Do I have to get gas?" and "What did the wife say I had to bring home for supper?" If you gave these things to a big calculator, it would really buzz because so many factors are just too many. Time is being juggled there, so the analytical mind arrives at what appear to be very loose solutions and out of these it makes the whole world.

It doesn’t deal with two plus two equals four. Not that it can’t, but ordinarily that computation is too slow. After all, the normal problem solved by the mind takes only milliseconds. It may take a long time in an aberree to filter through, in the clear it doesn’t. The action is a positive. reaction; we are dealing with the analytical mind rather than by relay. Where the person’s analyzer is pretty free, you can ask for complex solutions and he will give you answers rapidly. Of course, he can’t give you answers outside of his educated sphere. If he is educated to faster arithmetic, for instance, he will give you faster arithmetic. But suppose he had an engram all his life about arithmetic and he never paid it much attention, then he would still chew pencils. It doesn’t take him long to reorient all of his arithmetic now, but he will have to do that. You can’t take a Zulu islander, clear him and then automatically have him servicing and driving a steam locomotive. All we want is a clear analyzer, an analyzer that doesn’t have an engram in it to the effect that "All apples that fall are green and give one a stomach ache," causing all sorts of blocks on the subject of apples designed to protect the person against them. Apples are really nothing against which to protect oneself. This man can be forced. He can be predicted. He can be pushbuttoned. A clear would analyze instead of react. In view of the complexity of life, however, it can’t be said that the clear’s solutions are always correct. They are as correct as he has data. Nobody’s solutions are more correct than that.

Notice I am using "more correct," "less correct," "more accurate," "less accurate," and so on. That is one of the astonishing things about our language which forces absolutes upon us. But there isn’t an absolute in reality that I have ever discovered and I probably never will discover one. Even the statement I just made is not an absolute.

The analytical mind possesses the ability to mimic. When this ability is free of command mimics, which are valences, it is also free of command duplications of operation. For example, a fellow has learned to fix electric light cords by watching Papa, and he has an engram that says he has to do it just like Papa. Only Papa always did it wrong. In industry this man manages to bungle every 15th cord because he is still stringing back to the mimicry pattern which he first learned, because it is reinforced with an engram. But as soon as we pick up the engram that he has to be like Papa and do what Papa does, all those skills that he observed in Papa become flexible and he suddenly can revise all of his actions in this line and pick other models.

Engrams set up the models and say, "This is the model, and that is the way to do it. If you don’t, I’m going to kick your teeth in." Now, that’s no way to mimic.

The analytical mind selects its models, adopts them and puts them into the somatic mind as learned training patterns. If it is found that there is a better way of doing it, the analyzer just cancels out this old pattern (although it can still do it this way) and puts in the new pattern.

Aberrated behavior is unalterable behavior. It was said in China that the willow which learns to bend with the wind lives so much longer than the oak. Such truisms with a very limited use are quite workable. The man who can’t alter his behavior under altered circumstances is in a bad way. As a matter of fact, when completely unable to alter any of his behavior under any circumstances, he is psychotic. That is another definition: A psychotic can’t alter his behavior under altered circumstances.

Consider somebody who as a young girl was raised in a very rich family and was used to the maid bringing her breakfast in bed, and is now having a great deal of trouble adjusting herself to this young man after marriage. Engrams in that case make her incapable of altering. Given a freed analyzer, she would find it very easy to alter her behavior and reactions.

All actions and all of your thinking— even when that thinking comes from an analytical demon— are initiated through the analyzer. The capability of the analytical mind, alone, makes the engram able to react against the body. The analytical mind takes care of the endocrine system of the body. A series of tests will demonstrate this very easily.

The analyzer, for instance, can lay down a learned training pattern and regulate the heartbeat. It can stop blood flow. Even though it may go through the route of hypnotism, it is still the analytical mind accomplishing these things.

The analytical mind can establish or delete a stet characteristic along certain lines. This enters the field of habit. A habit and a learned training pattern are very interestingly similar as you observe them in a human being. A habit is a held- down seven, dictated by an engram. It says, "You must smoke." It says, "I have to have a cigarette." Most habits are unalterable. Somebody tries to knock off cigarettes, and exterior influence may lead to the point where he can overcome the engram of smoking cigarettes, but the chances are not too good. He becomes unhappy about it. Notice how all your cigarette advertisements are stated in engram terms. The really effective ads say, in effect, "I have to smoke. I feel better when I smoke. If I smoke, I will be a beautiful girl. If I smoke, I will be nonchalant." All that data depends on engrams to be effective.

One can change anything which is not a habit. A learned pattern is derived from observation. One learns how to drive a car by looking at somebody driving a car, being told how to drive a car and practicing the driving of a car. Finally, he develops a learned training pattern which is monitored. The habit pattern is not monitored. The person who has a "bad habit" is apt to have that habit cut in at any moment without his consent. When restimulated it goes into action. This is not true of a learned training pattern. There has to be analytical consent for it to activate.

A person can drive down the street never seeing a stop light, never paying any attention to what he is doing, but doing it well because an attention unit is sitting right there, watching what he is doing and in communication with the other attention units. In case of an emergency it goes click! bang! and in come 50 attention units to take care of the situation. In extreme emergency, practically all there are come right in to the learned training pattern center in the somatic mind, wham! Sometimes they come in so quickly and are there such a brief time that a person gets minimal recording. A man learns the house is on fire, rushes up five flights of stairs, picks up two 90- pound kids under each arm, balances the player piano on his chin and runs down five flights. He isn’t operating on engrams.

That’s what we call necessity level, where an attention unit can send out an S O S that pulls out attention units even from the bank. That’s why a man should every now and then have a nice, high emotional crisis. One ought to come within an ace of getting killed regularly, about every ten days, because this high emergency priority automatically pulls attention units into the center and not all of them would get back to the engrams again.

One could get a catatonic schiz to jump up by walking up, carefully cocking a pistol and saying, "Well, the poor guy, he will never be any use to himself or to anybody else. I guess we might as well kill him. Close the door so the shot won’t be heard. We’ll tell everybody he committed suicide."

About that time, he will jump out of bed and say, "No, no!" And this guy hasn’t moved for five years. He doesn’t relapse into being a catatonic schiz immediately.

An analyzer doesn’t have monitor units sitting on the computation circuits. The computation is flowing more or less automatically from the standard banks into the computing units and is being forwarded through. It is closed- loop computation. It has attention units in it, yes, but not monitoring units.

The difference between an attention unit and a monitor unit is that the monitor unit says "You go. You do," and the attention unit says "Here it is. This is the situation."

When the analyzer is running at optimum, we are in a condition of continual necessity. This accounts for the tremendous alertness which you see in people when they have had their engrams laid carefully in the grave. You have got a continual necessity level action if you want it. Most of this necessity level action will wander off into other channels and start exploring things.

The mind does two things: It avoids pain— past, present and future— and it seeks pleasure. The mind is far more valid in its operation when seeking pleasure. It will go through a lot of pain to get a little pleasure. A person who has a large number of units there is figuring on ways and means to have a good time. The mind will start amusing itself, posing problems just in case it might ever need the solution sometime. You will get answers coming up on things that never possibly could happen. It isn’t delusion, it’s just too many idle units which go on making up problems to solve problems. This is one of the things which imagination does. If a person can’t immediately find pleasure, he is liable to take imagination and synthesize some. Even severely aberrated minds don’t knock off this level of action.

The mind is very self- determined, but no one in the world can be self- determined except within a frame of limitations. One cannot be selfdetermined to the point of evaporating into a fine gas and arriving as high as Valhalla tomorrow. The limitation of gravity is operating on him.

So, the analytical mind is not self- determined outside of the imposed limits of the universe, society, one’s friends or even one’s self- tutored ideas of honor.

The optimum solution is for the greatest good for the greatest number with minimum destruction. No solution was ever arrived at on the face of the earth which did not contain within it some destruction. If one is going to raise horses, he is automatically against grass. You say, "I’m going to build a beautiful palace." But what about the trees? "I will build it out of marble." How about the animal who lives in the marble quarry? There is no such thing as a 100 percent creative solution, but there are solutions which approach it very nearly. Any sentient and rational man will approach those solutions as closely as possible on the optimum basis. The optimum basis just happens to be a very good solution.

It is a bad solution, for instance, to solve social problems by killing off the whole society, yet a pamphlet I was looking at said just that: "The only way that socialism will work in this society is if the entire human race is to be destroyed." It was being proposed to take children very, very young, but to kill all adults. This is what is known as an aberrated solution.

The analytical mind has complex personality factors. People are natively good at things, natively poor at others. There are people who do a wonderful job of imagination and a very bad job of practical data grouping. It is as if the mind, being the one thing which was not originated in the society, was the one thing which could evolve undetected. If a man is suddenly born into this world with fish- scale fur, the tendency of the society is to make him the last man with fish- scale fur. If he is born with webbed toes, why, the same thing happens to him. Fish- scale fur is possibly not a survival characteristic except in Oregon. And the person with two hearts doesn’t need both, therefore society and evolution cut him out.

The one thing of which very little has been demanded of man is thinking. Societies even arrange to minimize the amount of thinking the individual must do, because men progressively run more and more on the accumulated thoughts of their ancestors and such. Someone can lay on the ropes and say, "Well, why worry?" That’s why necessity level is so low in society at this present time. If we had been atom- bombed, if men had to pitch in and make a world with their own two hands, you would get a high necessity level which would pull attention units out of engrams and straighten out enormous numbers of social aberrations. You might get a feeling of the pioneer frontier. Frontiers are generally in such a high state of urgency and rush and emergency that no one has any time to be dishonest. One leaves his cabin unlocked and some bacon and beans on the shelf and wood beside the fire. That is a necessity level, where men are very good as far as other men are concerned.

With Dianetics we have something of a new world to build. There is a high necessity level at this time. It is all very well to think in terms of ridicule about atom bombs. Americans are a fairly comfortable people. But human beings are being killed on earth today. In Russia, I understand, there are millions in slave camps. Hundreds of thousands of missing prisoners of war even today are swallowed up, God knows where. We have just gone through a cataclysm. We can’t stand very many cataclysms. Yet people are really unwilling at the present time to stand up and take it and face the fact that there is an emergency. We have amongst ourselves here a weapon which, if spread fast enough and far enough, would help keep this society from caving in. So when you get to worrying too hard about your own case, remember there is a much higher plane that we are striking toward. We have organizational problems and personal problems; people are walking in small circles trying to decipher how all this is going to come out. Well, I can tell you, it’s going to come out all right, but not without an awful lot of work and tolerance on the part of all of us.