Self Analysis 1951 List 4

← Self-Analysis (1951)

List 4

Standard Processing

One can consider that the missions of the energy of Life, or at least one of them, is the creation, conservation, maintenance, acquisition, destruction, change, occupation, grouping and dispersal of matter, energy, space and time, which are the component factors of the material universe.

So long as an individual maintains his own belief in his ability to handle the physical universe and organisms about him and to control them if necessary or to work in harmony with them, and to make himself competent over and among the physical universe of his environment, he remains healthy, stable and balanced and cheerful. It is only after he discovers his inabilities in handling organisms, matter, energy, space and time, and when these things have been sharply painful to him, that he begins to decline physically, become less competent mentally, and to fail in life. These questions are aimed toward the rehabilitation of his ability to handle organisms and the physical universe.

It was a pre-dianetic error that an individual was healthy so long as he was adjusted to his environment. Nothing could be less workable than this “adaptive” postulate and had anyone cared to compare it with actuality he would have discovered that the success of man depends upon his ability to master and change his environment. Man succeeds because he adjusts his environment to him, not by adjusting himself to the environment. The “adjusted” postulate is indeed a viciously dangerous one, since it seeks to indoctrinate the individual into the belief that he must be a slave to his environment. The philosophy is dangerous because the people so indoctrinated can be enslaved in that last of all graveyards, a welfare state. However, this postulate is very handy in case one wishes to subjugate or nullify human beings for his own ends. The effort in the direction of adjusting men to their environment by giving them “social training”, by punishing them if they are bad, and by otherwise attempting to subdue and break them, has filled the society’s prisons and insane asylums to the bursting point. Had anyone cared to look at the real universe he would have found this to be true: No living organism can be broken by force into an adjusted state and still remain able and amiable. Any horse trainer, for instance, knows that the horse must not be pushed or broken into submission if one wishes to retain his abilities, but, as they used to say in the army, mules were far more expensive than men, and perhaps it was not in the interest of pre-dianetic thought to preserve men in a happy state. However, one should not be too harsh on these previous schools of thought since they had no knowledge of the natural laws of thought and in the absence of these, criminals can only be punished and not cured and the insane can only be driven down into the last dregs of tractability. The nearer to death, according to those schools of thought, the better, as witness electric shock “therapy” and brain surgery—those efforts on the part of the mental medical men to as closely approximate euthanasia as possible without crossing the border into the legal fact of death. These past schools have now been taken under the wing of Dianetics, which embraces all fields of thought, and are being re-educated. It is found that they quickly desert the punishment- drive “therapies” as soon as they completely understand that they are not necessary, now that the natural laws of thought and behaviour are known. One cannot, however, wholly repress a shudder at the fate of the hundreds of thousands of human guinea pigs whose lives and persons were ruined by the euthanistic methods employed in the dark ages of unreason.

Your health depends almost entirely upon your confidence in your ability to handle the physical universe about you and to change and adjust your environment so that you can survive in it. It is actually an illusion that you cannot ably handle your environment, an illusion implanted by aberrated people in the past, during moments when you were unconscious and could not defend yourself or when you were small and were directed and misdirected and given pain and sorrow and upset, and had no way to effect your right to handle yourself in your environment.

On Lake Tanganyika the natives have a very interesting way of catching fish. There on the Equator the sun shines straight down through the clear water. The natives take blocks of wood and string them along a long rope. They stretch this rope between two canoes and with these abreast begin to paddle toward the shoal water. By the time they have reached the shoals, schools of fish are piled and crowded into the rocks and onto the beach. The blocks of wood on the rope made shadows which went all the way down to the bottom of the lake and the fish, seeing the approach of these shadows and the apparent solid bars which they formed in the water, swam fearfully away from them and so were caught.

A man can be driven and harassed and worked upon by aberrated people about him until he too conceives shadows to be reality. Should he simply reach out toward them, he would discover how thin and penetratable they are. His usual course, however, is to retreat from them and at last find himself in the shadows of bad health, broken dreams and an utter disownment of himself and the physical universe.

A considerable mechanical background of the action and peculiarities of the energy of thought make it possible for these lists to bring about the improved state of being that they do, when properly used; but over and above these mechanical aspects, the simple recognition that there have been times in one’s life when he did control the physical universe as needful, when he was in harmony with organisms about him, validate the reality of his ability.

Caught up by the illusion of words, stressed into obedience when he was a child by physical means, man is subject to his greatest shadow and illusion—language. The words, forcefully spoken, “Come here !” have no actual physical ability to draw the individual to the speaker. Yet he may approach, although he may be afraid to do so. He is impelled in his approach because he has been made to “come here” by physical force so many times in the early period of his life, while the words “come here” were being spoken, that he is trained much like a dog to obey a signal. The physical force which made him approach is lost to view and in its place stands the shadow “come here”; thus, to that degree he loses his self- determinism on the subject of “come here”. As life goes on, he makes the great error of supposing that any and all words have force and importance. With words, those about him plant their shadow cages. They restrict him from doing this; they compel him to do that and almost hour-by-hour and day-by-day he is directed by streams of words which in the ordinary society are not meant to help him but only to restrain him because of the fear of others. This Niagara of language is effective only because it substitutes for periods when he was physically impelled against his wishes to accept things he did not want, to care for things for which he actually had no use or liking, to go where he did not wish to go, and to do what he did not want to do. Language is quite acceptable when understood as a symbol for the act and thing, but the word “ash tray” is no substitute for an ash tray. If you do not believe this, try to put your ashes on the air waves which have just carried the words “ash tray”. Called a “saucer” or an “elephant”, the object intended for ashes serves just as well.

By the trick of language, then, and a magical wholly un- substantial trick it is, men seek to order the lives of men for their own advantage, and men caged about by the shadows observe and believe to their own detriment.

All languages derive from observation of matter, energy, space and time and other organisms in the environment. There is no word which is not derived and which does not have the connotation of the physical universe and other organisms.

Thus, when you answer these questions by recalling incidents which they evoke, be very sure that you do not evoke language incidents but action incidents. You do not want the time when you were told to do something—you want the time when you performed the action. You do not have to connect the language to the action in any way, but you will find as you answer questions on any of these lists that the value of language begins to depreciate considerably and that language strangely enough will become much more useful to you.

Sight, Smell, Touch, Color, Tone, External Motion, Emotion, Loudness. Body Position, Sound, Weight. Personal Motion

Can you recall a time when:

1. You moved an object.
2. An object moved you.
3. You threw an organism up into the air.
4. You walked down stairs.
5. You acquired something you wanted.
6. You created something good.
7. You felt big in a certain space.
8. You were proud to move something heavy.
9. You handled energy well.
10. You built a fire.
11. You lost something you didn’t want.
12. You forced something on somebody.
13. You promoted survival.
14. You pleasantly expended time.
15. You closed in space.
16. You were master of your own time.
17. You opened up a space.
18. You handled a machine well.
19. You stopped a machine.
20. You raised an object.
21. You lowered yourself.
22. You destroyed something you didn’t want.
23. You changed something for the better.
24. An organism you did not like moved away from you.
25. You obtained something you wanted.
26. You maintained a person.
27. You brought somebody you liked close to you.
28. You left a space you didn’t like.
29. You conquered energy.
30. You destroyed a bad organism.
31. You handled fluid well.
32. You brought a number of pleasant objects together.
33. You placed a number of objects into space.
34. You threw unwanted objects away.
35. You dispersed many objects.
36. You tore an unwanted object to pieces.
37. You filled a space.
38. You regulated another’s time.
39. You held an object close that you wanted.
40. You improved an object.
41. You emptied a space you wanted.
42. You went a distance.
43. You let time go.
44. You did what you wanted to do yourself.
45. You won out over an organism.
46. You got out from under domination.
47. You realized you were living your own life.
48. You knew you didn’t have to do it.
49. You escaped from a dangerous space.
50. You entered upon a pleasant time. Sight, Smell, Touch, Color, Tone, External Motion, Emotion, Loudness. Body Position, Sound, Weight. Personal Motion