THE ANATOMY OF CIRCUITRY

A lecture given on 25 November 1950

Force versus Reason

I want to give you a definition of all circuitry. Circuitry consists of "you" phrases. They are phrases addressed from an exterior "I" to the person as "you," such as "I have to tell you," "I have to control you," and so forth. "You’ve got to control yourself" is still someone else addressing the "I." That is the form of the phrase. And these "you" phrases, which are circuits and become circuits, are invariably received from persons who seek to nullify the independence of the judgment of others.

How well that fits some parents! They wonder why the child has such a tough time in life. The child says, "I think I’ll go out and play."

"No, you can’t go out and play." (There isn’t any reason why he can’t go out and play.)

"I think I’ll have something to eat."

"No, you don’t want anything to eat."

He says, "I’m hungry."

And he is told, "Why, you’re not hungry. You just ate."

Persons who seek to nullify the independence of the judgment of others are people from whom circuitry is gained. All circuitry is to some degree control circuitry, but there is that specific species called control circuitry.

This does not mean just that these people are trying to control others. That is a secondary method of control. There are other methods of controlling. For instance, Matilda has found out long since that she is not able to control Oscar physically by throwing him on his back and kicking his teeth down his throat when he does things that she does not like. So she tries to order him around to some degree, and finds out that that doesn’t work either and that she gets a bad reaction. Then she takes the next possible step— she nullifies him. She cuts him down enough so that she or anybody else can control him, and she does this very simply by cutting off his affinity, communication and reality. She says, "You’re wrong, you don’t know anything, nobody likes you," and invalidates him completely. And if she works on him hard enough, eventually, sure enough, he doesn’t amount to anything anymore, and she is then able to triumph in her dire danger.

The only trouble with Matilda is that normally she wasn’t in danger. She doesn’t get into danger until she has sought by this means to cut somebody else down in an attempt to overcome him. And if she cuts him down enough, all of a sudden one day he will have a resurgence, and there she will be, lying out in the woodpile with an ax in her skull, because these efforts to control and cut down and nullify somebody else are all repercussive. They interact.

In fact, any government which harms the head of any individual within its borders is doomed. It has started at that moment its dwindling spiral. It may be around for a couple of hundred years, but it is done for, because the interplay has already been started: government, harm, control, and so forth. It has been unjust and has actually injured an individual irresponsibly. The first time a government does that, it has started a dwindling spiral that will wind up in the rubble and dust which was the end of Rome, Babylon, Chaldea and all the other dead civilizations, and which will be the fate of this one too.

For instance, the government kills a man. It says, "Well, we’ll get no more trouble from this fellow. We will get rid of him." That’s very simple, and they kill him. Only that fellow is not dead; he had friends. Furthermore, the people who killed him as part of the government are themselves suddenly convinced that this government is dangerous— it can kill people. Although they seemed to have enjoyed killing the person, they become a little more protective themselves. The individuality, then, starts to pick up beyond where it ought to be. So instead of being individual, they become aberratively separate, which is different than individualism.

Individualism would be doing what "I" wants to do. Aberrated individualism would be doing what one did because of the reactions caused by others— in other words, reactive thought.

This chain is very easily started and is rather hard to interrupt, but it can be and has been interrupted in the past. For instance, the British sailors mutinied in the early nineteenth century. They simply decided that they were not going to put up with it any longer, and that things were going to be a lot better. They did not kill anybody to do it. There was a very smart man in charge of that mutiny. It was very much of a white mutiny. They just quit. No ships sailed, they were very polite and courteous to their officers, they were courteous to all the shore officials and they conducted themselves with decorum. The British government observed this and tried to make trouble but was unable to, so it collapsed and surrendered in the face of this, and the British navy became more habitable. Flogging through the fleet, the types of rations and so on all got changed because all of a sudden there was a group which was not using violence and which refused to.

That one doesn’t use violence is part of the philosophy of many civilizations and cults. But that has a limitation on it. Someone who says "Well, the thing to do if they want to hurt you is to just lie down and let them walk on you" has missed the point. What one does is face force with reason and refuse to partake of the force but continue to give out reason. If one does this he is using far more horsepower than the force has got. And actually it is a tremendous kickback against the force.

Force is borrowed from life’s contact with the material universe. Life then gets confused in these turbulences and says, "The thing to do is to apply force to reason or force to life, and then naturally these people— these things— will all go off someplace and lie down and behave." Then when thought sees something which is not reasonable, which is force, kicking back against it to this degree, it says, "Aha! That is the material universe, and we are supposed to conquer that!" and there is tremendous boil- up of turbulence, instead of facing the force with reason.

Force has this Achilles’ heel— it can be conquered, but it has to be conquered by reason. One uses the fundamental, then, that life has always used to conquer the material universe. From the tiniest step forward to the most complex step, such as the building of New York City, life has been doing this to the material universe: It learns a law of the material universe and then turns that law around so that another part of the material universe is brought in under its aegis. Then it takes another section of laws and turns those around, and so on. In this way it is learning the basic rules and axioms of the material universe, what its laws are and how it functions. And the more life learns, the more it just keeps turning the material universe around on itself.

For instance, an engineer goes down to build a big dam across a river. He builds something to conduit the river and soon he is using the river to build a dam to block the river. Unless he does that, he does not get a dam built. And that is the way life works.

From the moment thought first contacted the first chemical and virus and started to make the first cell, it was conquering that little law. It didn’t have to know much, but it knew a little, and it turned that against the material universe more and more. And it has come to the point where we are now going at such a geometric progression that people talk about the ease with which we could blow up the planet. They haven’t yet gotten up to the point, though, of realizing that they need the planet!

But as thought does this, pain comes in on it occasionally, and there are turbulence areas where thought gets thoroughly mixed up with the material universe.

The laws of force, then, get mistaken for the laws of thought, and the two of them go into a turbulence. As soon as that turbulence (engrams and aberrations) gets big enough, life just has to back out, because it is no longer reasonable enough to take the material universe and start turning it back on itself. It is at this moment that the material universe starts winning.

What happens between two people, two children, two parents, two nations and so forth, is that they have borrowed, because of these aberrations and their turbulences, physical pain. Physical pain is caused by contact with the material universe with too much force. This pain has gotten turbulent, and so the laws of the material universe, which are those of force, interaction and reaction, get turned against thought. And every time they do, thought reacts against them as a natural reaction.

When thought sees force, thought’s natural reaction is to say "Pick it up and conquer it." If you get a human being convinced that he no longer has any right to attack force with reason, he will go into apathy. He quits. He is dead, and thought might be said to have retreated from him. Thought says, "We don’t want this person any longer. He can’t conquer any more MEST. We’re through with him." He is practically dead, and that is the aspect of apathy: no life.

Therefore, making a child obey by applying force and nothing but force would inevitably wind up into the fact that the child either goes into a complete state of apathy or he turns around and conquers. Blind obedience in the face of force is something of which man had better be extremely afraid, because it is the stuff that wipes him out.

Circuits, then, are the material universe forces which have channeled themselves through a human being or society via aberration into another human being. We are talking about the laws of force; one human being has mistakenly considered another human being as a thing of force— MEST— and is trying to control it or force his own conclusions on it, without permitting the other person to be an individual with individual judgment. He is not permitting this person to be himself, to be a responsible, judging bit of little theta or thought, but is trying to interrupt that process.

That is why circuits are so thoroughly bad. "You have to do what I tell you" says "You do not have the right to use your own thoughts and judgment about this."

When that phrase is given just like that in the analytical world, without any basic reactive thought about it, people merely say this person is crazy. So he is.

But when we have this same thing lying in an area of turbulence, surrounded by pain, and out of the pain reaches this force that hits the individual, the reactive mind is activated to a point where it, being much closer and much more a part of the material universe, can say to the analytical mind from an unseen and hidden place "You’ve got to do what I tell you," and there is something there that is MEST controlling the individual. That is why these things are bad. They enter and all of a sudden the person starts to split up into other identities, and so on. Circuitry can be expressed like this:

"I" is flanked by two circuits, one on the left side and one on the right. These are either control circuits or just plain circuits. They are pieces of the analyzer roped off, and each one says, "I’m going to tell you what to do." "I," in the center, has a tough time kicking back against all of this. And as the circuits grow and get charged, they take in more and more analyzer and more and more of the individual, with "I" getting less and less.

Eventually it looks like this:

A psychotic is one whose "I" has taken up residence within one of these circuits and has become a false "I." There is the computational psychotic.

"I" is no longer in the center but has moved over into the middle of a circuit which says "You’ve got to do what I tell you."

Just in the normal course of human affairs, a person, by shifting valence, becomes the "I" in different circuits.

For instance, take a person who is normally very subdued. He has circuits inside his reactive mind that are saying "You’ve got to do what I tell you," which then go ahead and tell him what to do. These are residues from old engrams left by Mama and Papa and so forth. They are laid in as parts of actual engrams. One day he says mildly to somebody, "I want you to get me a glass of water."

And the person says, "Sorry, I’m busy."

He gets a restimulation on this and suddenly his analyzer shuts down in the area of his own "I," he moves over into a circuit and is temporarily not himself— he is temporarily insane. He rages, "You’ve got to do what I tell you!" There is the circuitry passing along.

A schizophrenic is someone who is supercharged by secondary engrams up to a point where he is mainly circuitry with precious little left of "I." Therefore "I" is never in control. His personality starts changing because the circuitry "I" s are laid in by other personalities than his own. He has been usurped by other people.

Thought is trying to conquer MEST. In the process of aberration, thought, in attempting that conquest, gets human beings confused with MEST, tries to control them, and ends up by doing so. But this control is resident in a live mind. Being resident there, it plays havoc, because the thought lines and harmonics are disrupted and this person is trying to apply force. That is the normal picture of a schizophrenic.

Someone caught someplace on the track dramatizes other personalities, moving from valence to valence. These are circuits, false "I" s laid down into the mind as sleepers, and are part of an engram. One day they become terrifically restimulated; a secondary engram is laid on top of them, they charge up and then they take over and submerge "I." To restore "I" requires a release of that secondary engram to take the charge out of the circuits and allow "I" to come back up again.

Many psychotics cease to be psychotics at the first grief charge that is blown, and many psychotics are all ready to bleed charge Take them down the track and they are so supercharged that they just start exploding in all directions. On the points where they were psychotic their aberrative pattern does not alter, but it deintensifies and they are no longer psychotic along this aberrative pattern because "I" is able to take over some control of its own. "I" is supposed to be in control of the organism, and whatever upsets the control of "I" upsets the whole being.

The person who was responsible for the circuitry in the preclear was a person who denied others independence of decision as to himself, groups, the future generation and mankind. Every time an effort was made to upset that judgment was a lock on an engram. And each time an effort is made to upset one’s right to be oneself or to communicate with oneself, along any of the four dynamics, may become a lock on engrams.

Now, all circuitry is control circuitry to some degree, but some of these circuits are very specific. They are laid in by a terrifically dominating person. Circuitry can also be laid in by a very sympathetic person: "Well, you had better take it easy. You had better not work too hard. Now, you know how you are, dear, you’re not very strong." Get that inside of an engram and it becomes highly persuasive. That is actually a tertiary effort to control somebody.

So there are degrees of bombast with which this is done. However, that only affects the false emotion on the engram, not the effectiveness of it, which can be extremely high if the engram gets charged up. For example, there is this pleasant little lady who says solicitously "Control yourself, dear. Don’t cry. After all, we know it’s all for the best." Get one of those circuits charged up and an auditor has a very hard time locating it. That type of circuit would result in a super controlled individual who is very quiet, who never cries, never emotes, never bombast’s, and who walks through life a very model of propriety: "Oh, Father was a nice man. He never raised his voice, he never got angry"— of course, nobody liked him very much either. "However, Mama went completely to pieces. She was put into an insane asylum. Mama was crazy."

The auditor finally finds out that the father’s circuitry consisted of phrases like "Suppress yourself," "Don’t cry," "Don’t move," "Don’t have bad manners," and so forth, but it was all done so pleasantly! That is super control, because that seems to say "I’m your friend and that is why I’m telling you this. Now just control yourself. I’ll kill you after a while, but that’s fine! " So don’t always look for the person who is terrifically bombastic.

Very often someone who is dramatizing and being highly irrational says, "You have got to be reasonable!" He himself is being anything but reasonable, but that is just part of the engram content. It’s like someone screaming "You have got to be controlled like I am!" and he’s practically knocking the roof off. These circuits are easy to spot.

"Who was the tumultuous person in your family?"

"Oh," he says, "Pop."

"What did Pop used to say?"

"Oh, he used to really ruin me. He used to come home at night and he’d . . ."

But the difficult one is when the auditor has a super controlled, super circuitry case and he just can’t quite figure out how to get to this case, because he has found five people already who probably laid in the circuits, but even though he got to those circuits and ran out some engrams containing them, the case didn’t improve. And these people in the preclear’s life were obviously bombastic, mean, cussed people that surely would just ruin this person. Eventually the auditor finds out that it was Aunt Tizzy who was always so nice. Every time the person got sick as a child, Aunt Tizzy would come over and say, "Well, it all comes down to this, honey: I love you, and you must take care of yourself. You know you’re not very strong. Now don’t cry." This type of thing sets up a sympathetic vibration.

A sympathetic vibration is what occurs when one tuning fork vibrates with another one in the same pitch. Or if you hold a hat while a symphony orchestra is playing you can feel the vibrations inside the hat. It is vibrating sympathetically because the harmonics hitting it are in the same pitch as this thing will resonate to.

Similarly, when a person says "I am very sympathetic to you," or his mood is expressing this, or he says "I am taking care of you. I will always take care of you. Stay right here," the individual has a tendency to vibrate to it.

That is why a sympathy engram is deadly. Because the circuit is there, given in a moment of delirium, and it is pretending all this time "I am your friend. I’m going to take care of you. All you have to do is stay here and everything will be all right. You just mind your father and mother, and you just mind me, and everything will be all right. I will come back and see you any time, now, that you need me," and so on. And you’ll work and work with this case, trying to find out who in the name of common sense came in and created this identification. "I am your friend" says "We are identical." "I will take care of you" infers "We have some identicalness." "I love you" says "We have affinity." "I talk to you, I pet you on the head"— pleasant, perceptic communication; and "Everything I tell you is the truth" creates false reality. All this boils down to the sympathy ally, and the ally is extremely important.

So, when looking for circuitry, don’t just look for bombast. What you are looking for is the person who interrupts, knowingly or unknowingly, the identity or judgment of another person.

Did you ever hear of a child being spoiled? Children don’t get spoiled with affection or by being given things. You can give the child practically anything and if he hasn’t any big vengeance against the world and you haven’t built him up with a lot of force, he will handle it all right. He won’t break it up, except by accident and his own clumsiness; but it will be actual clumsiness or inability to handle himself. You can just smother him with affection and gifts and you won’t spoil him. But don’t interrupt him. Don’t give him a car and then say "Now, of course, you can go every place but down to your clubhouse and to school in this car. And I think you had better have it oiled and greased every Monday. And I’m giving you this car only on the conditions that..." The person’s independence is then wrecked about the car. And that car will probably wind up against a lamppost, because that type of super control over a child is what brings these destruction angles into play.

A child gets spoiled, then, because somebody else tries to control "I," when "I" is the one who is supposed to control himself. "I" left in his own control will cooperate thoroughly and fully with other people and groups in accordance with how much he understands the needs of the rest of thought and life. But try to control "I," and "I" says, "That’s MEST, which I’m supposed to conquer," and there is where turbulences enter.

Control circuitry is where this effort has been made to enter the mind and the personality of another person, creating identities which will tell him what to do. This is commonly known in armies and in families as "training" a person to have a "social disposition." Give them enough of a social disposition, and I can guarantee that you will find them over in the state mental institution. That’s what has happened to those people; they’ve been given too much social disposition.