Affinity Reality Communication (500816)
Date: 16 August 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
This morning, I am going to talk to you about a triangle. This is not the eternal triangle of movie fame, but it is nevertheless an eternal triangle in Dianetics.
With this triangle, you are going to be able to resolve cases which hitherto resisted your adroit efforts.
What I am telling you this morning is something with which you can do some magic. This is the miracle cure. When you get results with this, they will look quite sudden.
This goes hand in glove with straight memory processing and straight memory diagnosis. Now, these three items which you see before you, gave a very interesting background. Back of these three items there is a something—a theta, which we have not yet identified. When we identify it, probably we will know a lot more than we do now. But until that time, we know that we have three items here which are apparently disrelated, which actually are intimately related. If you recognize the fact that these things interrelate, you are going to achieve swifter results with your auditing.
You will hear quite a bit about straight memory diagnosis and processing. That’s because you, as professional auditors, are expected to do tricks. It takes practice, because you will have to run a few cases before you can get the complete knack of it. We are going to talk about this very extensively tomorrow.
Now, I merely want to put this in the computer, so that you tie this up with what you learn about straight memory. Also, all that you will know about Dianetics—this all ties in, but this is very valuable to you.
You are supposed to be able to perform miracles. I am trying to fix you up so that you can perform miracles. You know this: you know what to head for in a case—period. You know what you want to collide with, and you can sometimes make cases behave very beautifully all of a sudden that have been very resistive.
Some poor auditor out in the sticks someplace, he comes in and he says, “Gee, I just can’t seem to do anything with this case. We keep working and working on it.” We check over his technique, and it looks pretty good. We look the case over and you say, “Yak-yak,” and the preclear says, “Well, yes.” And you say, “Yak-yak-yak,” and he says, “Ha-ha, yes.” There you are.
Now, what I am trying to tell you this morning is the target and the substance to put in there, and the blank I was making with “yak-yak,” I am going to fix it up so you will know every time what to ask and when to ask it. Because that is the trick. It’s what you ask.
That trick is interesting, because if one wants to learn something of the universe, he has first to ask a question, and 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. If formulated right, he has achieved part of the answer. He asks the right question, he is going to get an answer.
That’s a peculiar thing about the universe in general. It is so communicative to the expert interrogator. We could call this lecture coming up tomorrow “The Expert Interrogator” because that is all going to be on straight line diagnosis.
Well, to start out with affinity, reality and communication, I want to call a few things to your attention which you might not have noticed before. So far as this floor is concerned, this lamp, your body, that truck that just slammed its door, there’s nothing there really. There’s perhaps some space, but if you took all of the energy, all of the particles, the solid mass particles with the space out from between them and so on, and you took those and lumped them all together, you probably couldn’t see them with the finest electronic microscope in the world.
In addition, it’s 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. I am sorry if that brings any one of you away from the feeling that it’s solid reality, because it’s not solid reality. It’s composed of energy, motion, space and time. And when we get the actual particle out of it, in spite of the fact that it runs around in cyclotrons and that sort of thing, and when we begin to boil it down, it’s something awfully small.
Now, that’s as far as mass is concerned. Take the MEST universe. I look solid, you look solid. But actually you will notice it’s just the result of having discovered some basic laws.
Now, we have taken up energy. And that’s energy, as far as I can understand. It’s a motion. Ultimately, it’s some sort of motion. But a lot of theories could be postulated on this.
Actually, if you figure it out, if you had a big tuning fork and if you could vibrate it at the right rate of speed, you would get matter. Very interesting concepts thrown around here all the time.
The only thing is the dignity of formula. They have a very good time with these things. Actually, the physicist, when all of his entities of time, of space and energy are boiled down he doesn’t have anything left, so he is dealing with nothing.
Now, take time, just to follow in through that. Time is consecutive moments of now. We can get up that definition. We can get that far with that definition. That’s consecutive moments of now. Well, we all know what “now” is, actually. If you look back a moment, that’s a now, only that’s a then now.
Now, just when I said that there was—now went by, but you have got another now with you now. And as these moments are stacking along—but it isn’t some sort of a flow that’s going through space. Lord knows what it is.
If we want to be very, very academic, we could probably find some highly learned definitions of time, but they would all boil down to this fact: consecutive moments of now. That’s fine, only we can never grab onto now. There isn’t any time.
Well obviously, all the time flees by. It’s some sort of a situation that is very, 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.
Now, I am stretching this thing out to reductio ad absurdum, but there really isn’t any good reason. There isn’t anything that we can call time. There isn’t any long stream of something going through on a linear path that we can cut off and take a chunk of and say, “Yep, that’s a piece of time,” and put it back on again. That can’t be done.
Now, we get space. Of course, space without any energy is empty. That’s true, isn’t it? Well, therefore, space is empty. Well, anything that’s empty—you would say a can is empty, but it is a can. That’s because it has sides. But space doesn’t have sides, so it’s emptiness surrounded by emptiness, which by any law of physics means there’s nothing there. So, there is no space.
Now, we will take thought. First, let’s take life. We can actually say that life ran off along this line. Here’s an energy called life. That’s very interesting. There’s probably an energy of some sort and it breaks down this way. It splits, and it goes into thought. And down here, this is form. But the thoughts control the form in some sort of a way. If this life has to do with thought which takes chemicals (which we have just proven don’t exist) and moves in, and we get forms—which if condensed have nothing in them because its time, space—in other words, thought: nothing you can have any dimensions of. And that life energy is pretty much in the same fold.
There’s an energy, some kind of a motion going on. Motion postulates a time, though, and we have just shown you that we don’t have any time. So, motion actually has to have time to exist, so that blew up that theory It’s all very puzzling. But right back one step, back of any one of the things I have mentioned, is an apparent nothing. But we all know there is reality, don’t we? How do we know there is any reality? Well actually, we don’t. 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 here which agree on reality.
We agree that when we touch this desk, lift it up like this, 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.
All right, therefore, you and I have agreed that these things happen. And how do we know that they don’t happen? Actually, this has been the old saw of philosophers since time immemorial, that on the business—the whole idea of perceptics, reality depends.
We have agreed there’s a reality. We agree there is a table here. We don’t know that there is a table here for you and I to agree on. We can’t be certain of that completely, but we do know that we have agreed there’s a table here. So we all say, “Fine, there’s a table.” Well, that’s fine. And here, then, is something we have come into agreement about which is reality.
Now, your idea of reality, my idea of reality, they check pretty well. This might come about through natural selection, in this fashion. A man walks in the door back there and he says, “Hey, there are twenty-nine black cats up on the stage. Look at them.” And you all look up on the stage, and you don’t see any cats. He is nuts. So we take that man, 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’s right. But he has stepped outside of an agreed reality. Now just why he stepped outside, we can explain to a large degree, because after all, there has been a long line of building here. We read it in books and so on, all about reality, and the book is real, and that we are real, and that people do so-and-so, and we are pretty well agreed. But we naturally reject a person who doesn’t agree. So a majority rules, as not only a law of democracy, it seems to be a law about reality. We have another fellow who walks in the door back there, and there are twenty-nine black cats up here. We can see them all and—standing here, talking about those black cats. And he says, “There’s no cats up there.” Well, he is nuts. So, we take him out and we put him in a sanitarium someplace, or enter him in processing immediately, and knock out this strange illusion.
Now, he has disagreed. Now, it’s a strange fact that a person is rational against the background of his current environment. That means a current environment—he is rational against the background of his current environment. That’s what we call a rational human being. We have in the past carelessly assigned this to a normal human being. He is quite variable on the subject.
Let’s take the young fellow who gets more boisterously drunk in port. Oh, he is always being picked up by the shore patrol, being brought back aboard ship in a drunken condition, having beaten up two shore patrolmen, and they recommended that he receive a summary court-martial. And they are ready to sit around and look at him, saying, “You go on shore, spend your money, get drunk and generally raise hell. Why?” And then we take another young man. He walks aboard ship, and he has training school, beautiful grades—a good, fine, sterling young character. Well, he is a fine fellow. Look at his record, 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 we put his record right there in the file drawer with a gold star.
Well, of those two, the one who had the good record is normal against the environment of shore life. He is normal—period. He is rational. He is a rational human being. So we go to sea. And then, say a war is going on, and all of a sudden an enemy submarine or something shows up, and everybody goes to general quarters. And the pointer of the gun fails to show up. That was this fellow with all the beautiful gold stars. He has gone to a safe place. He crawled down in the number 1 magazine drum and he is sitting down there on a pile of high explosive shells, and he is very frightened about the whole thing. We can’t coax him out of it and get him back on that gun pointer’s ledge. But the fellow who’s drunk all the time, he looks at the empty gun pointers ledge cover and he gets aboard the thing. And he shoots the dickens all out of the submarine. And 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, courteous, never gets seasick. What a guy. He is rational against his environment.
True, we have to take this record out from underneath—the one we’ve had hidden and put it up here. And we take this record with the gold star and we kind of hide it, so people won’t find out that we have this guy. We have to decide what the environment is and what a person’s concept of reality is, before we can decide whether or not he has an overall rationality.
Dianetics, you clear somebody, he has an overall rationality. He is pretty good in comparison to his environment. Of course, he can get into an environment where he is completely out of data. For instance, he is living up the Bongo River, and he is dwelling under the illusion that he’s heard of people eating certain fruits. So, he eats a certain fruit and he dies. That means he is unrational, but he didn’t know anything about the Bongo River.
So, even if he were Clear, there would still be this little quantity there of data. He would still have to know something about the world in which he was living in order to live in it. This is not far from your field at all.
We are talking here about reality. Reality to one person, reality to another person, is a matter of agreement. A person agrees well with his environment, he says, “This is reality,” and so forth. He gets well into his environment, checks data with the past against his present observations. And here is another fellow of the Bongo River. His sense of reality is pretty bad because he doesn’t have any data. So there is something to do here with data. That’s sad, to enter into the past like this all of a sudden, but we have all agreed that there is a reality. We don’t question that too seriously.
You remember Peter Pan, when he comes forward on the stage and he says, “Please believe in fairies so Tinker Bell won’t die.” I wonder what would happen if somebody stopped believing in reality.
That’s very strange, because it seems to be a sort of faith, because actually there is no time, space, thought, energy. There’s nothing behind this.
All right, here’s reality then, but how do we contact reality? We have about twenty-six channels of communication which tell us about reality. We went into this somewhat yesterday.
I touch this surface here, and I feel around on this thing, and I can tell what sensation—actually, three senses are working here right now. First, the sense of position—four senses—five senses: joint position; relative position to the body; the tactile, which is a wood surface; the temperature, which helps tell me that I am touching something besides air, completely aside from the tactile and—oh, I don’t know, I can go into it here—there’s a long series of them here—to tell you about these things.
I am told, in other words, along these channels of communication that here is something, and having past data on something, I can now compare it with my past data and discover that we have a something here which is called a table made out of wood.
Now I look at it, and look it over, and the past data tells me that this compares with this. And I look at it and I am in communication with it by sight, seeing the thing. And then I do this, and I say, “Mm-hm, sounds like a table,” and I am in communication with it by sound. And quite in addition to that, I could hit my hand on the corner and say, “I am in communication with it by pain too, as far as that is concerned.” There’s a reality there. But I am receiving it along specific channels of communication.
These channels of communication are coming in. They’re centering around some units, a monitor setup, and it’s telling me that I am observing something, I am perceiving something. But I haven’t anything else but those channels of communication. Mind you, telepathy and other such things would still be channels of communication. It’s a different method of receiving something.
Now we have language. Language is voice and it can be printed by agreement. We have agreed that these blots on this nonexistent paper (which we all know exists) mean things which when we put in audio across, communicate. We have that method of communication, which is an all-out sort of communication. It describes all the perceptics, sort of up along the line, describes things which we observe. But it’s still perceptic communication, and there is no communication outside of those communication channels, even if we add in telepathy and intuition and so forth. Those things are still communication channels. So I know this table is here and I know you are sitting there because of these perceptic channels, and you know I am standing here because of those same perceptic channels. We are in communication in a number of ways. Aside from the meaning of my word, we are in communication by sound, sight, and you know you are here by the way you are checked up here; your kinesthetic sense, tactile, your weight sense—you are sitting in chairs.
In other words, the whole thing compares up, 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 than by lines of communication. And we have agreed that there is a reality. So our perceptics all do a pretty good job of communicating. However, again, natural selection would here be at work.
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 channel given a period of a few thousand years.
We have a tendency to select up people who communicate better along these perceptic lines, because they have a better chance of survival. A person who doesn’t have good perceptics, he won’t know it’s a black leopard. He might say, “Purr-r, purr-r, nice kitty.” Now that would be a failure of selection. That piece of data was communicated to us, even on the genetic line, by some form.
We do retranslations of this and we bind them all up. We say, “This is reality.” But of course, there’s no way for me to climb in your head and look out, and there’s no way for you to climb in my head and look out. So we are all agreed that this is green. But it might be actually registering as purple to one of us. But he calls purple green. You see, that could go on pretty far. There’s no precise way of checking it up, but we agree that this is the way things are. So actually, when one starts to think about this very long he has a tendency to become rather unstable about the whole business. But we needn’t worry about the instability. It’s too easy to unstabilize a person by doing things with communication.
Now, two things can happen to an individual’s communication. He can communicate with reality. Reality communicates with him, let’s say, along the line of sight. And as long as he continues to receive sights through about certain things, and people agree with him that these are the things and he is doing all right, 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 up here on this corner of the stage, he is going to see twenty-nine black cats. He is communicating too well here. That’s an “over.” Now, we can actually install this “over” in him, or we can tell him that he can’t see anything on the stage. It will be a complete blank; and we have an “under.” He isn’t seeing as much as is there.
Now, nearly everybody is seeing up here this morning with varied ability. Some people are seeing with great precision, some people are seeing it very nice, some people are seeing it very blurred, some people have thick glasses on—which we hope we can get rid of for you—and they are looking up here and it probably doesn’t look too good. They’re not getting all they could get out of sight.
The same with sound and so forth. These would be cut down, and there are people with extended hearing to whom my voice may sound very, very loud, and there are other people with shut-down hearing and so on, and there are still other people that have a dub-in so that they will add a word here and there to what I am saying and actually think that they hear it.
Now, those are variables along one or two channels. Now, every single channel of perceptic—the whole thing adding up to communication. But every single channel can be over or under on the subject of what it receives. It can receive too much, it can receive too little. And the number of times that it really hits this average in here, those are very scarce, those are very rare.
Well, what does this have to do with this?
It means simply that a person who is perceiving too well or too little is that much out of touch with reality. He has, therefore, that much less contact with reality, and reality to him is that much less real. Something has happened here so that when we do something to this, our perception of this reality changes. So that reality—a lot of you have been working on reality, on people who have a very low sense of reality—that low sense of reality can be on this line. You see, a person who has nonsonic, for instance, sometimes has a very tough time trying to convince himself that he is actually hearing these engrams, getting these impressions through, and he thinks that’s what it is. And a person who has sonic and he is listening to the thing, yak-yak-yak. Furthermore, he is getting pains and so on—in other words, a real convincer, that’s real.
Of course, there are people who get a super-dub on the thing. You take a person back sometimes to what you will call an early life—a dub—he will go back, and he will find an early life that is far more real to him than anything that he has perceived since conception. His dub is perfect, but that’s not reality. That’s an aberrated reality. So this reality can be quite varied, can’t it?
We are looking then, in a human being, for the real “real” and we find it by rehabilitating this. We can actually rehabilitate this and increase this or vice versa. One way or the other.
In other words, someone has in his engram bank “It’s not real, it isn’t happening to me.” That will cut down his sense of reality, automatically cut down his sense of communication, his perceptics. These things are interdependent, aren’t they? All right.
Let’s take the third one. 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 we 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.4 He brought man out of the dark. Lots of people don’t know about Voltaire, but millions of people know about Bonaparte. This destructive force is easy to look at, so easy to perceive.
The Bikini atom bomb. “Oh, fine,” we say. “Boy, that’s really something. Isn’t science wonderful? Look at that thing.” What the hell holds it together?
Now, I have walked around and asked myself that question, because it’s obviously a nothingness of space existing in a nothingness of time, but it doesn’t have any actual reality. But there’s some cohesive force holding it together. And maybe that’s all the force we have in the universe. Maybe when that is reversed and we get the atom bombs, maybe that is a reversal of the whole force.
Now, man living with man can feel that 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 affinity, we can include in both brands of love, without any slightest hesitation. Because one’s affinity with the past, that is to say, his contact with his own past, his cohesiveness with his own past, his consecutiveness with his own past, that’s an affinity with the past.
He has also an affinity with the future, quite incidentally. People have children, that’s in the future. He has got an affinity with the future in his children. He is trying to achieve affinity with the future. That’s sex. We will pass over that one lightly. This is all very hard to talk about, since it’s so full of nothingness. So we have this force, and we possibly can have it this way, that the only actually existing force in the universe might be affinity. I say might be. Certainly it’s some sort of an—well, that is love. Well, some people call it love, some people call it cohesion. We are calling it affinity. It all amounts to more or less the same thing. And a fellow walks out one morning—let me give you a very crude example of this—he walks out on a beautiful morning. The sun is shining, the birds are singing—as they always seem to do when one wants to get poetic. He looks over the day and he sees this pretty rock there, “Oh, it’s wonderful.” Incidentally, his sense of reality is very high. He loves things. So he walks over and is just about to pick up this something down by the rock, and he stumbles and he skins his knuckles on the rock, and he says, “Damn it!” He is out of affinity with that rock right then. In other words, we have broken a moment of affinity. We have 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—these things, however you want to figure it, one breaks rapport with them gradually down through the years.
Well, a fellow falls off the stage, to some degree breaks affinity with the stage; and he goes out and he 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.
In other words, all these little accidents actually are adding up. He has to know this, because life in its ebb and flow and commingling as an energy, flowing and commingling, colliding and so on—that’s the way they seem to get along. Conversion, reconversion, that’s the way it is.
Well, finally, he gets to be a normal person. Every one of these affinity breaks, by the way, seem to come along the channel of pain, physical pain, initially. And physical pain, that means, “I am not in affinity with that, and 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.
If you want to know how very great affinity could be, now, he’s broken affinity with all those words, because they’re contained in engrams, and the engrams contain pain. That’s all identification. A = A = A = A.
Therefore, the word “to be” is pain on the hand. That’s part of the identification. So he’s broken affinity with the word “to be.” He’s broken affinity with thought, he’s broken affinity with objects, and so on. But he starts out initially with a good, broad affinity with the whole world, the universe.
Ever see a puppy dog? Comes up, everybody’s friend, pants, wags his tail. Somebody kicks him, somebody starves him; gradually he gets to be the dour old dog, the normal dog.
Actually, this line of affinity, this force of affinity, is an intensely interesting thing. It is so intimately locked up with living that it might even be life. It might be a lot of things but certainly we do know that when it is broken all the way down, a person is dead. He is not in affinity with anything then, he is dead. That is a reductio complete way down at the bottom. Broken affinity with existence, dead. So 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.
All right. Affinity, then, is the thing which one has but hasn’t any channel of perceiving anything, except by communication. He can think all right 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, with tomorrow. And every time those little affinity breaks are in there, it reduces down communication here, and from conception forward, he is getting these break-offs of affinity. He is also getting an interruption of communication.
Little Johnny walks in and he says, “Mama, I was . . .” “Go away, don’t bother me. I’m busy.” Well, that’s not much of a break of affinity, but based on a whole stack of engrams, that’s fairly good. So its pushing aside breaks affinity. The only way she could push him aside was to communicate, and to break off communications. Chop communications at this point—that’s 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. So, that’s not the real world. When this gets interrupted, this gets interrupted, and this gets interrupted. I am going to show you a lot more about that, but that is the general setup.
Now, one cannot have communication interrupted without a break with this. Naturally, just a straight interruption of communication results in an interruption to this, too.
Interrupt communication, what are you interrupting communication with? It’s between you and reality. Therefore, things aren’t at that point; the reality is down.
This is the same way. One is in complete affinity when he is in complete communication with what he perceives to be a complete reality. Now, that will be a 100 percent triangle. The number of these 100 percent triangles that exist and the moments in which they can exist are very short or practically nonexistent.
So, when a person’s sense of reality is reduced, the only way it could be reduced and so on, 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 communication, which if interrupted would interrupt reality, which would automatically interrupt affinity. So, we have there, there, there. We hit this one, we can’t help but hit both the other corners. We hit that one, we can’t help but hit these two.
We are working on a—the term triangle. There’s something just back of these things and I am almost scared to look because it’s practically the back end of the problem.
These things are tied in very closely, very intimately, and when you are treating people, you will find out that when you want to rehabilitate reality, rehabilitate affinity, or if you are working on this business of the sonic and you want to rehabilitate sonic a little bit, rehabilitate this or rehabilitate that. You see?
In other words, the fellow may be cut off here. We can hit here, or even here—any place where you have an interruption of reality, communication, affinity—any place. Any place that’s interrupted, we can help to mend it by hitting it with any one of these three things. In other words, we want to turn up sonic, we hit sonic with reality and affinity, we get sonic. We hit communication here.
Well, let’s say the person’s sense of reality is very poor. We put him in communication with reality and things are more real to him. Also, this will pick up as soon as things become more real. Now this explains a great deal.
If you see this, if you understand it, you can use it. It’s 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. Of course, you can’t interrupt any of these things without interrupting the other two, but they don’t interrupt equally because they’re not attacked specifically.
We want to rehabilitate this, rehabilitate that, maybe. We can’t rehabilitate this, rehabilitate that. In other words, pick these things up. These are what you are looking for in the case, then, and what you are trying to do with the case in the final end product so as 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, have a reality as complete and exhaustive as possible, and with maximal affinity for reality. When you do that, you are going to have a very happy and efficient man, a very happy and efficient person.
Of course, there are mechanical limitations on communication and so on. These things, they get down no matter how slightly, and there are still baddies in the world, so we can’t rehabilitate this completely because good sense tells us that we might have to do something that is not quite out of brotherly love. And this item down here has never been really thoroughly defined or agreed upon in print, exactly what it is. But we have, nevertheless, in full, and we will get this triangle when we have cleaned up an engram bank.
Now we can tackle it, any one of its corners, and get the other two.
Now, somebody here wanted to know: “Experimental psychology has recorded a number of ways in which apparent reality—subjectively judged stimuli—systematically vary from objective reality in terms of a stimulus background plus the organism’s residual background, i.e., past experience. How do we explain this?” Well, I am not trying to make fun of experimental psychology—I am using their rattrap. There are certain limitations, yes. There are some of them systematic. For instance, the eye seems to have a shutter speed of about—I don’t know what it is. I tested it one time. I think it was about 1/30th of a second, just from having stood up with a camera and clicking the shutter. Well, maybe my eye speed was 1/30th of a second, so it probably varies.
You see a car go by, whoosh. And here’s an interesting experiment to demonstrate that. We will take this little device here, and we will rotate it. Now, you see how we can still watch it here, and the second that I really start to spin it, it becomes a cylinder of sorts. You see?
In other words, there is a lag of time and so forth. These are not important, and these are not really what cause the objective reality and subjective reality to differ. The main trouble is engramic, and then you know because it’s not then a varied thing—you see how that would be? We would have a fair constant in the thing. Then we could know the actual defects, the actual organic defects, so that we could measure something on a meter. And we could measure something here and we would say, “Well, the nerve flow, perceptic flow—something or other—is a little bit slow.” Something like that, but that would be the only difference between objective and subjective reality.
Objective reality and subjective reality come awfully close to being the same thing, except when we introduce illusion.
All right. Let’s talk again about this. The gentleman during the break said he would like to see me put an “I” here, right in the center. That’s a very good suggestion. I won’t do it, though, for this reason.
We are applying a label if we do that, without knowing what we mean by the label. Now, certainly there would be an “I” and when I find out what an “I” is, and what “I” is, a little better, then I will put an “I” here. And then, if I ever find out, I will let you know.
People wanted to know how this related 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 this full line, but when he starts to break off with this, he is told certain things are nonsurvival, as far as he is concerned. So the second he breaks off a little bit of affinity, you see, he interrupts some of this. It necessarily has to break some of it off in order to survive, according to his data. “Rattlesnakes are dangerous, don’t love rattlesnakes.” There he is breaking some of his affinity on an analytical level. If one went around saying, “Oh well, all rattlesnakes are good,” well, who knows?
Actually, if one went around with complete affinity turned on, would rattlesnakes actually bite him? Well, we can tackle this thing from all sides.
As a matter of fact, we could confuse almost anybody at this. But you would see, then, how survival enters into this thing because he has to survive, he starts breaking down according to the life plan and so on. These things start to click out. But of course, it’s nonsurvival for these things to click out, 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 more and more becomes super-self-centered, that is to say, he keeps bumping into stones and being bitten by rattlesnakes and all sorts of things, he again comes to the conclusion that in order to exist he has got to exist as an entity, a unit entity in himself, that he is not one in his brotherhood with the universe.
Incidentally, that’s his first mistake, because a man can understand just about along that level 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, 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, and for a person to just say, “Oh, well, everything in the world is for me, you see. The truck is for me, too.” Crush! That’s not smart because there you have an energy line proceeding—the truck energy line and the person’s energy pool as himself, these things come in conflict, and as much as possible we try to keep them out of conflict.
Most of this super-belief in affinity is engramic—that is a person who throws it all out. But if it works—let’s say it wasn’t engramic, let’s say perhaps it really existed—a person would have an enormously powerful control. Which side of it would we go?
If we go on one side, we would 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 he realizes he has greater and greater affinity with the world at large, if he uses it also very rationally—that he is in affinity with the world at large—then energy here and energy there are more or less the same. And he begins to understand how this affinity worked. He would step out here and there’s immortality over there. So you see how that would work—either side.
Of course, I have gone further into the philosophic line of this thing than I care to, and I want to show you what makes up emotion. I think you’d like to know.
Now, if you do know what emotion is by this definition, I am not going to tell you all there is to emotion. I can’t. I don’t know myself. But I can tell you enough about emotion as it has been studied so that you can handle it better than you have been handling it. And following along this line, here we have an arrow, let’s say a vector of thrust. The force here is the force—I hate to call the two words together because it’s apparently not force, but it is a force of affinity. Let’s call it that.
Here’s your force of affinity going forward. Now it’s A plus. Affinity plus. That’s plus A affinity. It’s a certain type of affinity. I probably ought to write it this way: not A-plus, but plus-A. That’s plus-A affinity.
That’s man in affinity with individuals, other individuals, with himself, with the world at large and so forth. That’s a little puppy who says, “Well, puff, puff, puff, beautiful world.” There goes A-plus, goes on, very forceful, but something suddenly hits this on one side, and we get this part of the arrow suddenly converted. In other words, this material seems to be convertible.
We can explain this. There’s the impact of energy. Now we reverse its quality—it’s the same energy, and we reverse its quality.
Now, up here, we have all the things which we call pleasant emotion. Actually, they’re all the same thing. It’s a joy of life, the feeling of beauty, pleasure and so on. That’s the same thing. That’s an affinity.
That’s an emotion, the emotion of pleasure, if you want to call it emotion. There it is. That is affinity. We know that force exists. We start cutting this up in one part of a person’s life and it automatically cuts down in another part of the person’s life. And we take a person who has been very badly shocked by life, and a lock—a painful emotion has been given him. And he, all of a sudden, has difficulty experiencing pleasure. We are dealing with the same quality of the thing. It’s not perhaps—may not even be the same entity, but we can treat it that way. We can understand it better if we do. This is also, at a heightened moment, affinity with the future, sex. That’s the same emotion.
It would come up along the line, but there is the problem of intensity and of mental definition. But not really a difference of experience.
This, then, is this force of affinity. But when affinity is suddenly— when you have something against it, blocked, it converts into, at the extreme, grief of loss. That’s an extreme reversal of charge—loss of an ally, somebody very important to one’s reality and one’s identity. And it suddenly—the world closes in a little bit. Communication comes off. Reality goes off.
You take an emotional blow off sometime, you just watch how reality and communication come back. They will always come back partway. They may not come back all the way, but they’re locked in together. So that is always the trick of a philosopher, showing you that several things you thought were different were all the same and vice versa. That’s the way you learn things.
All right. A grief, then, would be way down, if we are grading this thing—this diagram is separate, of course. A grief would be clear down here. That is the reversal charge, actually. It drives down the length of this arrowhead.
The person has oh, let’s say X units of vector worth of affinity in him natively and he converts Y units of it, certain number of units, so he’s got X minus Y. That’s the number of units he has got left: A plus.
Now let’s hit with more grief, more loss. Reduce his survival more, and this goes down here, lower. Now let’s reduce it further. It goes down here. Of course, if it ever got clear under, he is dead, and that may very well be what death is.
All right, here we have here, then, your grief charge accumulating. It’s driving these units down. Now if we want this unit to go back up again, we have to reconvert it. We can reconvert it by taking the person back and wiping out the grief. We are calling that, these days, a grief engram, rather than painful emotion. The word emotion is very confusing to some people. It shouldn’t be.
Now here then, we release this. We release some part of this, why, we get this up to here. Now we release more painful emotion, the energy units can convert back up again. Now we release some more, it will go back up even farther. Conversion one, conversion two.
All right. What are the other emotions? Fear, terror. What are those? Now you must know that there is an engram balance in the system.
There is a big monitoring switchboard of the body. It’s a terrific thing that is handling, well, blood flow, fluid flow, endocrine flow, by various means. You can test whether or not the analytical mind can control such things. Actually, you can take, by hypnosis, and turn off every or any of these flows, if you want to.
One of the tests on this is a gentleman who is unable to absorb his testosterone, the male sex hormone. Then we go into his case and we pick up the blocks on his second dynamic and we release his second dynamic, and we shoot him with testosterone and now, a very little bit of it is tremendously effective.
What did we do? We didn’t touch his gland. We took out an engram. And we see the switchboard is operating again. By hypnosis, the rate of blood, urine—actually thyroid, and of the endocrine and so forth, these things can be effective again. So we have this engram set up in the system, and when a person is Clear, he is still using, but not so much being used by—because the “being used by” was bypassing a rational use of it. He got irrational reasons why he had to become afraid, for instance, and so on. But when he is Clear, he is using his endocrine system for various things. And it so happens that adrenaline is very useful. You shoot someone with adrenaline and ask him to run a hundred yards, and he can do pretty well. And there are various other things we can do.
Experimental physiologists, endocrinologists in general, have done a lot of experimentation. The body was set up with all these meters. There’s evidently a sort of “nobody knows much about this.” By the way, you can read lots of books on it, but you sort through them and find out exactly what is known. It’s very slight. But there seems to be a pituitary—a number of meters here. You might say this one theory—it’s as good as any.
Here are the meters, and the meters here trigger glands elsewhere, and biochemically release into the bloodstream and release an electrical charge into the body and produce some sort of an action. Now, of course, on an emergency you have got a short-term effort there, of course. It’s almost as good as that short-term remark of Karl Marx’s, when he said that the capitalist is one who would commit suicide for the sake of a profit. This is reductio ad absurdum.
The body is apparently committing suicide for the sake of a profit when it slams in a great deal of, let’s say, adrenaline into the system. In goes the adrenaline. It pumps in adrenaline. There’s danger. Here’s a good example right here. Is the aftereffect of adrenaline—the way the system is rigged up—is the aftereffect going to be worse than the immediate effect of the danger from which we are trying to escape?
When asked to balance that equation and arrive at a decision, actually, it can be so much worse it can kill a person. An alarm reaction system of the body sets up a type of reaction through the body which, according to some early papers of an expert on this line, the byproduct did the killing.
Actually, animals would die of fright. It was the byproduct of being injected with too much adrenaline; and the lag was about two or three hours, something like that, after the initial injection. And all of a sudden, the curve would go down and they would die. So there was something having to balance the equation.
Is it better to have enough adrenaline to go zisstt for a short time? Evidently, the biochemical system is not an infallible system. Not as good as it may be someday worked out by evolution.
Now, we get an endocrine response and if we check up on most people, when we say the word terror, what is terror? How do you feel when you are terrified? “Just like everybody else. I get flutterings in my stomach.” And you ask another chap. “Just like everybody else, and 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.” And you have a number of people coming to you and explaining what they mean by emotion.
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.
They say, “You know, I don’t like Joe. You never get a reasonable response out of him. You get an emotional response.” In other words, emotion is a stupidity. But irrationality equals emotion, and yet it’s used in the English language.
What does that have to do with this? Actually, you can probably find some way to tie it together. I think they 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. Whereas we talk about A plus emotion, he has to be reasonable, because if its engramic, even those—“I am having fun.” It will be on the basis of some psychotic’s screaming around and tearing people’s clothes off them and so forth. “I am having fun. I am having fun.” Whatever his emotional response is, God only knows. But there we have it. Everybody says, “That’s emotion.” Actually, the emotion with which one can contact the beauties of existence exists only in company with reason, and the second we start to reconvert this thing and bring it down to grief, we have the reverse of it. We have irrationality.
Now people have called engramic dramatizations—they say, “Those are emotion.” Let’s get right down to our scale now and show you where anger and terror and the rest of it fit in. You have got it right in the front of your book. Here is your Tone Scale. Here’s apathy, ranging on down to death. Right here is fear paralysis, which is a counterfeit of death, which is a way to survive, too. We come up the line on this, and when we are dealing with emotion, we get into the lower band, the line of sullen resentment. “Oh, God, I wish I could get mad at you.” That sort of thing. And we go up the line here, and we start to get the flamer, the person who is really whoo, whoo. He gets real angry. He gets irritated about here, the lower end of boredom. This is boredom, and this is the range in here. And that’s pleasure. That’s your A vector. You could draw your A vector right up here. But here’s something very important. As he 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’s afraid of a loss. That’s all he is afraid of. Add it up. What is he afraid of? Afraid of grief.
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 there, 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; an engram can also make a person limp continually. So we could just freeze this thing anyplace we want with an engram.
We can actually give a person an engram about how happy they are. There’s your manic, one of your many manics he will actually be experiencing along that line. Of course, he can’t change. There’s no alteration possible. You get the horrible vision of a man who can never cry. 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.
Any one of these things—we have to talk in two terms, we have to talk in two brackets. We talk about the aberree with engrams, we talk about a person with minimal engrams or none, and we have these two now. And when we deal with emotion in a Clear, we are getting this regular emotion, but the engrams can clip in and make any stage permanent on that emotional scale.
Emotion, chemically, seems to be—and I haven’t bought this completely yet, but actually seems to be the partner of physical pain. Because I have never found an emotional engram which did not exist immediately on top of a physical pain engram. A grief engram, then, is formed.
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, gone. That is crying.
It is noted often that when a person has been able to cry thoroughly at a moment of great grief, that the amount of the engrams that you go back and pick up there is very slight. But, a person who is not able to cry because an engram was saying “No,” you go back and you eventually blow this thing, you almost blow the plaster off the ceiling, too.
In other words, the engram takes this natural ebb and flow of free feeling, and it freezes it. It freezes it as grief, fear of loss. It freezes it as a terror of loss, at any place on the scale it can freeze it. But talking about it on the free flow, 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 a bad grief The little aberration in the society which says, “Naughty, naughty. You mustn’t cry,” has probably put more people into insane asylums than any other one that I know, aside from the one . . .
Male voice: Is that one of the reasons why the average age of women is higher than the average age of men?
That’s a nice thought there. Because a little boy has to be a man. To be a man, one doesn’t cry. Okay.
We have now covered this field. You understand these last remarks about emotion? I have been talking about affinity. You can use the words emotion and affinity interchangeably if you want to, providing you will make a personal pact with me to stop using the word emotion when you use irrational or when you mean something else.
We are talking, then, actually about this manifestation of affinity, and you can just drop the word emotion as a word. “He has great affinity. I had a lot of affinity last night.” It would be the same thing all the way along the line. And we have got a minus A which is merely converted A. They’re the same thing, but merely converted.
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 someplace in the person’s past where Mama has brushed him away or where some ally has told him to go fly his kite, then you can spring that moment—all of a sudden, you have pulled off a few attention units and you get greater reality.
Here, we can knock out a grief engram. We pulled this fellow about a third of the way toward sanity right there. I mean, a real big ally—grief.
As a matter of fact, you take some psychotics—now understand, if you’re working on some psychotic, if you can get an emotional discharge, you might bring him right straight back to sanity, right there. Some of them are so heavily—so soggy with emotion that it takes an awful lot of this. You keep pulling it off the case. You measure the painful emotion of the grief discharges by Kleenex boxes.
This interrelation in—we get this one here. We find a time in the person’s life when he was telling the truth and somebody said, “No,” because they had some political idea about it. They said, “No, you’re lying,” and they made him eat it. In others words, afterwards, they made him say, “I was lying,” when he was really telling the truth. Now what they have done to this one over here, and how they have cut that one down and, of course, have cut that one down—but, we could build this up and find that incident or find this one and build this one up.
The problem of accessibility with a psychotic is a problem that one finds in this triangle. A psychotic can be made accessible by increasing one, his sense of reality. You take a catatonic schiz and start shooting over him with a .45, that increases his sense of reality. Or start lowering him into a well and at any moment, why, if he said, “Pull me out. Would you pull me out?” that would certainly pick up his communication and also pick up his reality and inevitably pick up his affinity. And so, if you are going to reach him, you have got to reach him through one corner of this. And by now, you have three ways to reach him. Not just one. And we know precisely how those ways are and precisely how we are going to reach those ways. And if we can pick up this corner, we can get that one; or we can pick up these two and get that one.
Working out of this line, if you have a person who is, for instance, what they call hysterically deaf—a nice test for somebody, just working out, you might say just a straight line educational basis—try to pick up this one and this one and see if you can make him hear. Theoretically, you can do it. I know exactly how this works out. Have you ever tried to talk a Republican into being a Democrat? That’s the same way. But now we know, I hope, more than we knew when we came in and sat down this morning.