Analytical Mind (500828)
Date: 28 August 1950
Speaker: L. Ron Hubbard
I was going to read this paper on the analytical mind, I don’t see any particular reason to, I think rather than that, I will have the thing run off—that and Educational Dianetics. This is not a finished paper. This is just two monographs. Tomorrow we will take up Educational Dianetics.
With any course people have the idea that nothing is there but the reactive mind and engrams.
Particularly if this game has been played and this game is one of the most vicious and destructive games in the world: you’re walking along with some fellow, and he says, “You know, I don’t know how it is going to come out.” And the other fellow says “Aha, that’s an engram, who said that?” And it gets down to a point where people are using Dianetics in order to maintain altitude. And I tip you off, any time this has been played on you unnecessarily and out of therapy, that it is strictly an altitude mechanism, it’s a “My pop can lick your pop” computation. Anybody who plays that mechanism is faithfully and basically insecure. They’re skunks! So that’s a game to be left alone.
Furthermore, if you want to argue with somebody who—let’s say husband and wife. 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 believe me, those teams have a high mortality rate, maybe not mortality of husband or wife but certainly mortality of the team. And that’s because an argument takes place, such as one I listened to yesterday. These two people (they’re not down here at the school) they’re out—Burbank or Santa Barbara or someplace. And the husband in the case says, “You know, I—I feel sometimes that I—I just feel sometimes that things, things just aren’t right, that’s all. You know, I—I try to figure out these things . . .” The wife says (said antagonistically) “Well, no reason you feel—no wonder you feel that way, you have an engram that says that.” “Well, engrams or no engrams I—I—I just feel that things aren’t right.” And she says, “Well, I know you have an engram that says that because I ran it out of you.” Well the first thing you know, 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.
This poor guy had been put into a little tailor-made hell whereby anything he had now as an opinion which did not agree with hers was automatically out of an engram. If he’d been a little faster on the draw, he would have said, “Well, all right, so you ran it out of me, so I don’t have that engram anymore. I still think things aren’t right.” Now you can take a preclear lying on the couch all unsuspecting and you can do some very terrible 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 said, “Who said that?” And he says, “But I need 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 be theoretically—I don’t think it ever has been and I don’t think it ever will be—I think this could be kept up, though, by enough people against one individual to make “I” dive out of sight. Because we are telling “I” each time, “You see, you don’t have any real existence. You see, you weren’t an individual at all. You were just a collection of images that you picked up in the world. There is no ‘I’; there is no valence of ‘I.’” That was why I jumped so hard—I saw the young lady who gave me the note cringe when I went into this the other day (I’m very sorry; I hope her morale is up today) when I jumped so hard on this basis of “There is no personal valence. That the valence is, after all, just a composite of other people’s valences.” As long as “I” is definitely “I,” and when the engrams and the valences are weeded out of the case, now we’ve got more “I”; we’ve got more person; we’ve got more individual.
But, hammer, hammer, hammer against the person to the effect that “I” never said anything would achieve practically the same thing as saying, “You’re no good, you don’t amount to anything/’ And if we said this continually to the person—we say this continually to a child, we say, “Well nah, I don’t know, you have no power of decision, and after all, you haven’t got any willpower anyway. Why can’t you learn to pick things up? You never seem to learn anything.” Yakety-yakety-yakety-yakety-yaky we finally produce a normal person. (laughter) It’s a process of making “I” dive out of sight, and what is the ultimate in making “I” dive out of sight? The psychotic.
Now in this one lecture here we’re talking about the two extremes. We talked in the first period about the psychotic who has no “I” or whose “I” is so very, very weak that he is unable to monitor the bank or his own actions. The “slot” was still there; you can get attention units back into it again and it will start monitoring. But the thing is rather logarithmic. Units start to disappear out of “I” because of engrams (engrams get restimulated) and more and more and more disappear and sometimes it can go on an accelerated basis. That is to say, just a little bit can go with a big impact on one end of the chalk of life and then we finally develop it up to a point where a whole lot goes with a tiny, little impact. You see, so that “I’s” sudden dive out of sight may result from somebody saying, “You can’t have another drink.” Whereas the first way it was sent out of sight was when Papa and Mama decided when he was five years of age that he should be killed and tied him up and started to burn him with red-hot irons, and—I ran across one, one time. This was a psychotic; that was the first incident—the first key-in was a key-in on a chain of AAs. And he wouldn’t mind after that; as a matter of fact, they couldn’t get him to concentrate really very well so he could never quite tell what they were saying. So the next thing they did to him was tie him down on red-hot bedsprings. Anyway, he still went through life and got up to college and so on and with impacts of this sort in his background, and 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. See she couldn’t attract his attention enough after that to say that she was only fooling. And they packed him off to the local spinbin.
Now that’s the progression. It’s a logarithmic progression; it takes an awful lot to start it and practically nothing to precipitate it.
Now when we have picked up and restored to “I” all of the attention units which are available anywhere, when these are restored to “I” and “I” now flourishes as much as “I” can flourish—optimum, that’s optimum for the individual—we have a state of where the analytical mind is the entire boss of the situation.
We can still put things in the reactive mind. We can still 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 can do to this thing, I don’t think there is anything we could do to this person, short of killing him, that would make him go crazy One wants to know how stable is a Clear, Well, he’s—how stable is the human body? You could shoot him in half with grapeshot, there is no automatic armor plate put on him. No more education has been put in his bank, so he could make some considerable errors. He could have been raised in a society like Boston which is very repressive, (laughter) Lots of things could have happened on an educational level with this person, but this is still the individual.
Now, to unstabilize the person so as to drive him into highly irrational acts: very, very hard—nah, its impossible. This doesn’t say that he won’t get capricious someday and just be irrational for the hell of it. That’s what’s so unpredictable about these people, I’m not going to talk to you so much about Clears as I am the analytical mind. The first time anybody inspects an analytical mind is the first time he inspects a Clear, Now you can tell what is analytical about this person and what’s reactive because we have removed the reaction. Now, we know now what we can do with the analytical mind, what it’s capable of, what is personality, what’s education, what’s this and what’s that. There we can resolve these problems. We can’t resolve these problems until the reactive mind has been spilled.
Now once upon a time, somebody brought up the fact that everybody would have engrams. This is not necessarily true. You could raise a child, theoretically, so that from conception forwards 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. And there you’d have your real study, because there you would be dealing with nothing but education based on genetic personality, and modified or bettered by nutrition. So you’d have these three things there, and that’s all you’d have.
Whereas anybody that you process at the age of forty and you clear him, you have an education which was received through engrams and his conceptions about this and about that and so forth—he has to reorient them as he goes. But because, let’s say, he had a poverty orientation because of his engrams, like this: the engram’s saying “Oh, you poor kid.” Why, he got up along the line and he decided he would be mostly with poor people and he would study economics, and his purpose, you know, completely warped by the engramic patter. And we’d get him up—we don’t get the most optimum individual we might have gotten had he been worked on with Preventive Dianetics, in other words, if these engrams had been prevented. But we do get the scope and capability of the analytical mind and the personality as 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 neuroses as far as the components are concerned. That’s the first thing we learned.
We find out we get a more complex personality when the engrams are out than we had when they were in. Because engrams are like held-down sevens; they monotone. They never do anything but monotone even if they’re very complex in their computations. They say, “You can’t believe it, you can’t believe anything you hear,” therefore we get down in the bank and this person has heard an awful lot of things in his life and he couldn’t believe them. It’s monotone. In other words, you can get out of an aberree a much more predictable reaction once you have associated with him for a short time than you can out of a Clear, much more. Because it is nonsurvival to be predictable and don’t think that a Clear doesn’t take advantage of that. So we have the problem then of the . . .
Female voice: Excuse me. You said it’s nonsurvival to be. . .? . . . predictable. Very.
The first destroyer that was sunk in the war with a loss of a couple of hundred American lives made the horrible mistake of following a prearranged zigzag plan. Destroyers by orders are supposed to work more or less like this: “The right fifteen degrees rudder. Ease her. Meet her. Steady as you go. What’s your course? Left twenty degrees rudder,” any time it comes into the officer of the deck’s head. And then occasionally he’ll pass it over to the quartermaster and say, “You run a few.” This makes the course of a destroyer which is hunting for submarines very unpredictable; it is turning numbers of degrees and coming to new courses without a prearranged plan.
Male voice: To prevent a torpedo.
Sure, so you get randomity of such a nature that a submarine seeking to plot the course of a torpedo to sink that destroyer finds it impossible or nearly impossible, and so the destroyer goes on afloat.
In the case, I think it was the Reuben James, the officer of the deck got tired of this and against orders he hung up—at least the way the story came to me, I never saw the official report—he hung up a schedule of zigzags. And it was to be repeated every fifteen minutes, not even every twelve minutes or thirteen and a half minutes. It was to be repeated every fifteen minutes. And a German sub lay out there and watched this process for about a half an hour and then boom!—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 a little bit like he was doubtful about the whole thing, if we know that, this poor guy loses his money.
If we’re hunting saber-toothed tigers, 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 jump off them.
Now therefore, predictability is strictly nonsurvival and you won’t find a Clear being predictable. Now, we’ve got to remember however that the best course of action, the best solution is one which takes into account all four dynamics. The Clear works on this optimum solution, 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; any three of these dynamics can be discarded in favor of the fourth, because of time limiting. In other words, it may be so important to make love to this young lady that one gets hanged tomorrow. You get the idea? Or it may be so important to save all these children in this orphan asylum that the rest of it blows up. But of course you can’t hit it on that magnitude without also picking up 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, leave the other three up and still solve the problem. But that only 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 it takes to think it up. People made a mistake on that one. They think that a solution that took five hours to think up is automatically better than a one hour think-up. Also the US government is working on the basis—and all this sheep psychology stuff that’s being handed out today about “Everybody has got to be well-adjusted.” [At this point there is a gap in the original recording.] When we look this thing over, we find out immediately that we have the psychiatrist’s work on—after the US government says that five moronsful make a genius. That’s correct, if you figure it out, on a welfare state. If everybody’s got to be cared for and everybody adjusted and everybody seems to be valuable, we automatically assume that the equation that they are working is “Five morons equal one genius.” We can’t escape that. They seem to, for a long time. One genius may be worth a hundred thousand morons the way it actually works out. So all of these solutions are complex. There are lots and lots and lots of factors, factors, factors, and the analytical mind is at its best when it’s running simultaneously equations from left and right. Its solutions, of course, are because it had good data.
The most able analytical mind—you could test its ability by finding out how little data they needed to arrive at a proper solution. It defies the mathematician because he says, “Here we have twenty-five simultaneous equations. Therefore there must be twenty-five variable factors, so that we can work out these twenty-five simultaneous equations.” And the analytical minds will run up a very good solution by having only three. It has probably twenty-five equations and twenty-five variables and it only has three constants in the whole thing. And it will work up what is something of a workable solution. It’s a fantastic calculator. It’s just as good as it can reach out and sample this and this and this and so forth, and suddenly weld them all together and say, “The solution’s this.” The Germans finally worked out several mathematics which attempted to do this, by sampling a problem to arrive at its solution—at its probable solution. Sampling. In other words take a little portion of it and find how that portion works, and then apply a little portion and find out how that problem works. The analytical mind will work from nothing but from sample. It does nothing but sampling and gets some fantastically wonderful results from its full sampling.
It’s absolutely impossible for anybody to know all the factors he had in a human equation and yet people manage to live relatively all their lives as aberrees, so their analytical minds computing ability is very great. We don’t know how great it is, normally. This is to say, if we took a whole strata of minds in the society and we cleared all of them, that problem must still be resolved.
How able is the average analytical mind which has been cleared? We don’t know that.
Male voice: Could you explain a little more about what you mean by “sampling” ?
All right. I will give you a sample of a sampling. We want to know whether or not this bridge—it’s feasible to build this bridge. I always like to build bridges. I had a course in one once and I built a couple and I found it fascinating because bridges are very complex. Fascinating. We have the problem: Are we going to build this bridge and how much will it cost and 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 subject of this bridge, we take the number of man-hours and the structure of steel, just take a guess at it. We say the price of structural steel, of man-hours for this sort of a job is so-and-so. Well, let’s see. We say that prices are much higher than they were in 1903. We built a bridge back in 1903, half as big now. Prices are twice as much. Therefore the labor costs are going to—you get the idea. It’s just possibly jackleg.
The engineer is standing there looking at this thing. Structural steel is way up, good structural steel is hard to get. This span is one and one quarter mile long, which is a long span, and the last time they built one of these things—Galloping Gerry up in Tacoma, Washington, across the Tacoma Narrows—it folded up. The normal price per foot of bridges in Yugoslavia is so-and-so—and all of a sudden, he looks at the thing and says, “I don’t want the contract.” He had made the decision and he hadn’t really figured anything out. He’s just figured out one —it’s a tough job and steel is up and so-and-so. That’s possibly just a sample job. He comes up with the problem that he doesn’t want to build this bridge. And then somebody comes along who does it very precisely, you know, gets big adding machines and computers going on the subject and they have all sorts of mathematicians standing around, and somebody comes down from Republic Steel and they get surveyors looking across there and they get people who are expert on a caisson and they figure and they figure and they figure, and it takes them two years to figure it out, and they find out it’s not feasible to build this bridge.
Now then, that would be the full-dress solution and there is your sample solution. We just sample the factors. We find out how many difficulties there are. We add it up and all of a sudden realize there’s a sort of a factor of safety there and that this bridge goes beyond any safety factor we put in it and—and there it is.
Now, I am giving a broad—the analytical mind does this all the time and practically never solves things any other way. Comparative data. It does very ably the job of how red is a red bicycle? It measures these things. It weighs things without any real consideration. It’s working on algebra: yes greater than no, no greater than yes. It takes a fact and it says, “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.” And it says, “Well yes, some people are standing up.” Well, it hasn’t counted the number of people sitting down or standing up. It just knows what the proportion is. I figure that out as a proportional equation. It figures out the most remarkable things like 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 stoplights. And “Do I have to get gas?” and “What did the wife say I had to bring home for supper?” And if you put these things full on a real big calculator, it would really buzz. Because so many factors are just too many. There’s time being juggled there and so it arrives at what appears to be very loose solutions, and it makes the whole world of them. It doesn’t deal with “two plus two equals four.” It can deal with that but ordinarily its solution, “two plus two equals four,” is too slow. After all, the normal problem solved by the mind is resolved in milliseconds.
Now, this may take a long time in an aberree to filter through. In the Clear it doesn’t. The action is a positive reaction. It actually—what I think we are dealing with, when we get these answers, we are just dealing with the analytical mind rather than by relay. I have thought of that for some time because you get up to the point where the person’s analyzer is pretty free. You can ask him for some pretty doggone complex solutions and he will give you answers rapidly. Of course, he can’t give you answers out of his educated sphere—and that’s what many people mistake about spheres.
He can’t give you answers out of his educated spheres. If he is educated to faster arithmetic, for instance, he will give you faster arithmetic. But maybe he had an engram all his life about arithmetic. Then, he never paid much attention to it. Then he would chew pencils still. It doesn’t take him very long to learn arithmetic now He can reorient all of his arithmetic now, and he can figure pretty good. But he will have to do that.
Now, you can’t take a Zulu islander, for instance, clear him and then automatically have him servicing and driving a steam locomotive. Now there is a reductio ad absurdum.
Now, all we want is a clear analyzer. We want an analyzer that doesn’t have an engram in it to the effect that “All apples that fall are green and give one a stomachache.” Start to work out a problem and it has to do all of a sudden with apples, and he said, “Well, the apples, after all, let’s leave the apples out. We won’t sell any apples in this store.” And that’s funny; the guy will say, “You have to sell apples. All right, I will sell some apples.” And you would find out, the first thing you know, he will be selling rotten apples or he will be forgetting to call up for delivery of apples and all sorts of blocks here on the subject of apples. He is protecting himself against apples. So, that’s really nothing against which to protect oneself.
At the same time, on another engram, why, he might be perfectly willing to buy protection from some “detective agency,” and thinks he’d better not go and see the police and so on. I mean, he can be forced. He can be predicted. He can be push-buttoned. A Clear, he will figure it out. It doesn’t say, however, in view of the complexity of life, that the Clear’s solutions are always correct. They are as correct as he had data. Nobody’s solutions are more correct than that.
You will 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, because it forces upon us absolutes. We have all around us absolutes, absolutes, absolutes in the language. But they don’t exist in reality. There isn’t an absolute in reality that I have ever discovered and I probably never will discover one. All right. Even the statement I just made is not an absolute.
Now, the analytical mind possesses—as I have mentioned to you before—the ability to mimic. When this ability is free of command mimics, which are valences, it is also free of command of duplications of operations. Now, if you don’t think that is a complex something, go look at it sometime.
This fellow has learned to fix electric light cords by watching Papa, and he had an engram that said he had to do it just like Papa. Only Papa always did it wrong. Now, we get this fellow in industry and we have him fixing up electric light cords. Then he manages to bungle every fifteenth cord because he is still stringing back at the mimicry pattern which he first learned, because it’s reinforced with an engram. Now, we pick up the engram that he has to be like Papa and do what Papa does, and immediately all those skills that he observed in Papa become flexible. And he suddenly can revise all of his actions along in this line and pick other models.
The trouble with engrams is that they 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, puts them into the somatic mind, which is to say, the automatic response bank—like driving a car; people don’t think when they drive cars, this is a learned training pattern—and puts them into this bank and uses them, and if it’s found all of a sudden that there’s a better way of doing it, the analyzer just cancels on this old pattern (although it can still do it this way) and puts in the new pattern and now, no conflict.
Now, aberrated behavior is unalterable behavior. So, it has been trying to go up against an alterable behavior pattern with loss, with punishment, with anything, and “anything” has not been making much progress.
Somebody said once in China that the willow which learns to bend with the wind lives so much longer than the oak. You will find that such truisms and so on 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 he is completely unable to alter any of his behavior under any circumstances, he is psychotic. And there again is another definition of a psychotic. He can’t alter his behavior under altered circumstances.
If you find 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 having a great deal of trouble adjusting herself to this young man after marriage, that case is pretty loopy. There are engrams there which make her incapable of altering. So, given a freed analyzer, she would find it very, very easy to alter her behavior and reactions. Very easy.
So, I want to show you the analytical mind by contrast. Now, all of your thinking, all of the thinking, even when that thinking comes from an analytical demon, all of the initiated actions are done through the analyzer. It is the capability of the analytical mind alone which makes the engram able to react against the body. The analytical mind takes care of the endocrine system of the body. You can set up a series of tests that will demonstrate this very easily, ably.
The analyzer, for instance, can lay down a learned training pattern and regulate the heartbeat. It can stop blood flow. By handling its own mechanisms, even though it may go through the route of hypnotism, it is still the analytical mind, and the mind area which is accomplishing these things. Do you understand clearly? The analytical mind can even set itself up to a stet characteristic along certain lines, or fix it the other way.
This comes now into the field of habit. What is a habit, and what is a learned training pattern? You will find these two things are very interestingly similar as you observe them in a human being. A habit is a held-down seven. It is dictated by an engram. It said, “You must smoke.” It says, “I have to have a cigarette.” It says, “I just can’t leave women alone.” Habits. Now, there’s your habit. Most habits are unalterable. Somebody tries to knock off cigarettes and somebody finally limits him enough and leads him along, exterior influence, he may be led up to the point where he can overcome the engram of smoking cigarettes. But the chances are not too good. He becomes very unhappy about it. If you will notice, all your cigarette ads 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 sorts of data there are handed out but that data depends on engrams to be effective.
Now, one can change anything which is not a habit. Now, the learned pattern is something one learns by observation. He 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. And finally, he works up a learned training pattern which is monitored.
Now, the learned training pattern 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. It’s restimulated and it goes into action. This is not true of a learned training pattern. There has to be analytical consent for that learned training pattern to go into action.
Now, the person may be driving down the street, never seeing a stoplight, never paying any attention to what he is doing, but he is doing a fine job of driving all the time. There’s an attention unit sitting there, right there, watching what he is doing, and in communication with the other attention units, so that in case of an emergency it goes click! bang! and in come fifty attention units to take care of the situation. In extreme emergency, practically all there are. Wham! They come right in to the learned training pattern center, in the somatic mind. They come in quick. Sometimes they come in so quick and are there such a brief time that a person gets minimal recording. So somebody learns the house is on fire, rushes up five flights of stairs, picks up two ninety-pound kids under each arm, balances the player piano on his chin and runs down five flights. He isn’t operating on the engram. It’s just— bang! Everything comes in. That’s what we call the necessity level. The necessity level—an attention unit can send out a high SOS that it can pull out attention units even in the bank. That’s why a man should have every now and then a nice, high emotional crisis.
That’s right. There ought to be a period of necessity there. You ought to come within an ace of getting killed quite regularly, every ten days, because here, into the center would be pulled, by this high emergency priority, automatically, attention units—and not all of them would get back to the engrams again.
This is how you get a catatonic to suddenly jump up, by walking up and 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. And we will 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. Now, he doesn’t relapse into being a catatonic schiz immediately.
Now, an analyzer also has this characteristic. It doesn’t have monitor units sitting on the computation circuits. In other words, it’s closed loop computation. The computation is being said more or less automatically from the standard banks into the computing units, and is being forwarded through. It’s just flowing. Closed loop. It has attention units in it, yes, but it doesn’t have monitor units.
There’s a difference between an attention unit, just as such, and a monitor unit. The monitor unit says, “You go, you do.” And the attention unit says, “Here it is, this is the situation.” You see? The difference between the two types of units.
So, when we have the analyzer running at optimum, we are in a condition of continual necessity. The same thing happens—and this accounts for the tremendous alertness which you can get out of people when they have had their engrams laid carefully in the grave. You have got a continual necessity level action if you want it.
Now, most of this necessity level action will wander off into other channels and start exploring things because the mind does two things. It avoids pain—past, present and future—and figures out ways and means to do so about pain in the future, and it seeks pleasure. Then it’s far more valid in its operation when it’s seeking pleasure. It will go through a lot of pain to get a little pleasure. So, you will find that a person who has a large number of units there, they’re figuring on ways and means to have a good time. Additionally, the mind will start amusing itself, and it will pose problems just as a problem, just in case it might ever need the solution sometime, then will pose some of the darnedest problems. You will get answers coming up on things that never possibly can happen. And it isn’t a delusion. It’s just that there are too many idle units. They go on, make up problems to solve problems. This is one of the things which imagination does.
Now, if a person can’t immediately find pleasure, he is liable to take imagination and synthesize some, and knock that together. That is what minds are doing continually. Even severely aberrated minds still don’t knock off this level of action.
Now, the mind is very, very self-determined, but no one in the world can be self-determined except with a frame of limitations. One cannot be self-determined to the point of evaporating into a fine gas and arriving as high as Valhalla tomorrow. One can’t do that. So, he has the limitation of gravity operating on him. Until somebody gets very clever and solves gravity, I am afraid nobody is going to float off the ground, not right away quick, not in front of your eyes. And the reason why one would have to have a hundred dollars to perform the Indian rope trick—a little matter of gravity.
So, the analytical mind—just to sum it up rapidly here—possesses its own monitors. It’s self-determined, but it is not self-determined outside of the imposed limits of the universe, society and one’s friends. Or, even one’s self-tutored ideas of honor and so forth are all very, very interesting.
The optimum solution which pulls out—interestingly enough that it would—pulls out for the greatest good for the greatest number with minimum destruction. There was no solution ever arrived on the face of the earth which did not contain within it some destruction. That’s possibly something for you to note. They all have a little bit of destruction in them. If one is going to raise horses, he is automatically against grass. So, grass gets destroyed, although it’s a good solution to raising horses. You see, it’s all a little bit—he says, “I’m going to build a beautiful palace.” But what about the trees? And then he says, “I will build it out of marble.” How about the animal who lived in the marble quarry?
There is no such thing as a 100 percent creative solution, but there are solutions which approach it very, very nearly. And any man who is sentient and rational will approach those solutions as closely as possible on the optimum basis and the optimum basis just happens to be a very good solution.
It is a bad solution, for instance, to solve our social problems by killing off the whole society. Yet I was looking at a pamphlet the other day which said just that. “The only way that socialism will work in this society,” the pamphlet said, “is if the entire human race is to be destroyed.” That man was proposing to take children very, very young, but to kill all adults. Now, this is what is known as an aberrated solution.
Now, the analytical mind—I am going to run this over for a couple of minutes, if I may—the analytical mind has its own personality factors. These are very complex. People are natively good at things, natively poor at things. There are people who do a wonderful job of imagination and a very, very bad job of practical data grouping. It’s just as if the mind, being the one thing which was not closely originated in the society, was the one thing which could evolve undetected. If a man who is suddenly born into this world who has fish scale fur, the tendency of the society is to make it one last man with fish scale fur. If he is born with webbed toes, why, a similar thing happens to him. It’s possibly not a survival characteristic unless one lives in Oregon. And, in such a way, the person with two hearts, he doesn’t need two hearts, and therefore the society and evolution and so forth cuts him out. But there is one thing of which very little has been demanded of man and that is thinking. The society’s been arranged to minimize the amount of thinking the individual must do, because men progressively run more and more accumulated thoughts of their ancestors and such. It’s a very interesting thing for someone to 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 get in and make a world with their own two hands, you would get a high necessity level which would pull attention units out of their engrams and straighten out enormous numbers of social aberrations, and you might get a feeling in this society of the pioneer frontier.
The initial 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. One is careful, always, of leaving some bacon and beans on the shelf and some wood beside the fire. And one is always careful when he leaves the fire to leave some wood there for the next guy. That’s the way one runs. That’s a necessity level, and men are very good, as far as men are concerned. Maybe they’re hell on things they don’t intend to consider men, such as war whoops, but they’re very good.
Now, I just want to punch this up and call to your attention that in Dianetics, when a case is being balanced around, attention units get trapped. They come out again. They come up to present time, but all of this talk, the backfire of “Who said that?” and so on, rather have a tendency to scatter “I,” “I” is looking for other people all the time, while a person is coming up towards a very good relief. After that, from then on, it becomes less and less acute. And about halfway Clear, he is in pretty good shape, and when he is Clear, he doesn’t think about things like that. You couldn’t cave in “I” anyhow.
We have amongst us a character in Dianetics, which up to this moment you may have neglected, I am sure you haven’t neglected it, but perhaps in thinking of your case, you may have noticed that—call it superdramatic or otherwise—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 solemnly, I mean, to think in terms of ridicule about atom bombs. We are fairly comfortable people here in America, I wonder how the Koreans feel. Not that I am saying that we should have stayed out of Korea, I am not saying that, but I am saying that human beings are being killed on Earth today, that over in Russia, I understand, there are quite some several millions in slave camps. There are hundreds of thousands of missing prisoners of war even today who got swallowed up, God knows where. In other words, we have just gone through a cataclysm. We can’t stand very many cataclysms.
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—I am not saying the bogyman is going to get you or anything like that, but I don’t want to see this society cave in. And you don’t want to either. And there is a necessity level here. And when you get to worrying too hard about your own case and so forth, remember there is a much higher plan that we are striking toward. We have organizational problems, personal problems—people are walking in small circles trying to figure out how all this is going to come out. Well, I can tell you, it’s going to come out all right. But it’s not going to come out all right without an awful lot of work and tolerance on the part of all of us.
Thank you.