Scientology A New Slant on Life 1965 Chapter 26

← Back to Scientology: A New Slant on Life

The Human Mind

It is common to think of the human mind as something which just happened in the last generation or so. The mind itself is actually as old as the organism. And according to earlier guesses and proofs established by this new science, the organism, the body, is rather old. It goes back to the first moment of Life’s appearance on Earth.

First, there was a physical universe which happened, we know not how. And then, with the cooling planets, there appeared in the seas a speck of living matter. That speck became eventually the complicated but still microscopic monocell. And then, as the eons passed, it became vegetable matter. And then it became jellyfish. And then it became a mollusk and made its transition into crustacea. Life evolved into more and more complex forms, the Tarsius, the sloth, the anthropoid, and finally Man. There were many intermediate steps.

A very materialistic Man, seeing only the material universe, becomes confused and vague about all this. He tries to say that living organisms are simply so much clay, wholly a part of the material universe. He tries to say that after all it is only the “unending stream of protoplasm”, generation to generation by sex that is important. The very unthinking Man is likely to make many mistakes, not only about the human mind, but the human body.

We discover now that the science of life, like physics, is a study of static’s and motion. We find that Life itself, the living part of Life, has no comparable entity in the physical universe. It isn’t just another energy or just an accident. Life is a static which yet has the power of controlling, animating, mobilizing, organizing and destroying matter, energy and space and possibly even time.

Life is a CAUSE which acts upon the physical universe as an EFFECT. There is overwhelming evidence to support this now. In the physical universe there is no true static. Every apparent static has been discovered to contain motion. But the static of Life is evidently a true static.

Life began with pure CAUSE evidently. With the first photon it engaged in handling motion. And by handling motion ever afterwards, accumulated the experience and effort contained in a body. Life is a static, the physical universe is motion. The effect upon motion of CAUSE produced the combination which we see as the unity of a live organism. Thought is not motion in space and time. Thought is a static containing an image of motion.

Thus, one can say, with its first impingement upon motion, the first thought about the physical universe began. This static, without volume, wave length, space or time, yet records motion and its effects in space and time.

This is, of course, analogy. But it is a peculiar analogy, in that it sweepingly resolves the problems of mind and physical structure.

A mind, then, is not a brain. A brain and the nervous system are simply conduits for physical universe vibrations. The brain and nerve trunks are much like a switchboard system. And there is a point in the system where the vibrations change into records.

An organism is motivated by continuing, timeless, spaceless, motionless CAUSE. This cause mirrors or takes impressions of motion. These impressions we call “memories” or more accurately, facsimiles.

A facsimile is a simple word meaning a picture of a thing, a copy of a thing, not the thing itself. Thus, to save confusion and keep this point before us, we say that the perceptions of the body are “stored” as facsimiles.

Sights, sounds, tastes, and all the other perceptions of the body store as facsimiles of the moment the impression was received. The actual energy of the impression is not stored. It is not stored, if only because there is insufficient molecular structure in the body to store these energies as such. Physical universe energy is evidently too gross for such storage. Further, although the cells perish, the memories go on, existing, evidently, forever.

A facsimile of yesterday’s hurt toe can be brought back today with the full force of the impact. Everything which occurs around the body, whether it is asleep or awake, is recorded as a facsimile and is stored.

There are facsimiles of anything and everything the body has ever perceived—seen, heard, felt, smelled, tasted, experienced—from the first moment of existence. There are pleasure facsimiles and bored facsimiles, facsimiles of sudden death and quick success, facsimiles of quiet decay and gradual struggle.

Memory usually means recalling data of recent times; thus we use the word “facsimile”, for while it is the whole of which memory is a part, the word “memory” does not embrace all that has been discovered.

One should have a very good idea of what a facsimile is. It is a recording of the motions and situations of the physical universe plus the conclusions of the mind based on earlier facsimiles.

One sees a dog chase a cat. Long after dog and cat are gone one can recall that a dog chased a cat. While the action was taking place one saw the scene, one heard the sounds, one might even smell the dog or cat. As one watched, his own heart was beating, the saline content of his blood was at such and such a point, the weight of one’s body and the position of one’s joints, the feel of one’s clothing, the touch of the air upon the skin, all these things were recorded in full as well. The total of all this would be a unit facsimile.

Now one could simply recall the fact that one had seen a dog chase a cat. That would be remembering. Or one could concentrate on the matter and, if he was in good mental condition, could again see the dog and the cat, could hear them, could feel the air on his skin, the position of his joints, the weight of his clothing. He could partially or wholly regain the experience. That is to say, he could partially or wholly bring to his consciousness the “memory”, the unit facsimile of a dog chasing a cat.

One does not have to be drugged or hypnotized or have faith in order to do this. People do variations of this recall and suppose that “everybody does it”. The person with a good memory is only a person who can regain his facsimiles easily. A little child in school learns, today, by repetition. It isn’t necessary. If he gets good grades it is usually because he simply brings back “to mind”, which is to say, to his awareness, the facsimile of the page of text on which he is being examined.

As one goes through life, he records twenty-four hours a day, asleep and awake, in pain, under anesthetic, happy or sad. These facsimiles are usually recorded with all perceptics, which is to say, with every sense channel. In the person who has a missing sense channel, such as deafness, that portion of the facsimile is missing.

A full facsimile is a sort of three-dimensional color picture with sound and smell and all other perceptions plus the conclusions or speculations of the individual.

It was once, many years ago, noticed by a student of the mind that children had this faculty of seeing and hearing in memory what they had actually seen and heard. And it was noted that the ability did not last. No further study was made of the matter and indeed, so obscure were these studies that I did not know about them during the early stages of my own work.

We know a great deal about these facsimiles now—why they are not easily recovered by most people when they grow up, how they change, how the imagination can begin to remanufacture them, as in hallucination or dreaming.

Briefly, a person is as aberrated as he is unable to handle his facsimiles. He is as sane as he can handle his facsimiles. He is as ill as he is unable to handle his facsimiles. He is as well as he can handle them.

That portion of the science of Scientology which is devoted to the rehabilitation of the mind and body deals with the phenomena of handling these facsimiles.

A person ought to be able to pick up and inspect and lay aside at will any facsimile he has. It is not a goal of this new science to restore full recall perception; it is the goal to rehabilitate the ability of a person to handle his facsimiles.

When a person CANNOT handle his facsimiles, he can pull them into present time and discover himself unable to get rid of them again.

What is psychosomatic illness? Demonstrably, it is the pain contained in a past experience or the physical malfunction of a past experience. The facsimile of that experience gets into present time and stays with the person until a shock drops it out of sight again or until it is processed out by this new science. A shock or necessity, however, permits it to come back.

Grief, sorrow, worry, anxiety and any other emotional condition is simply one or more of these facsimiles. A circumstance of death, let us say, causes one to grieve. Then one has a facsimile containing grief. Something causes the individual to bring that facsimile into present time. He is unaware of it, is not inspecting it, but it acts against him nevertheless. Thus he is grieving in present time and does not know why. The reason is the old facsimile. The proof that it is the reason lies in Scientology processing. The instant the facsimile is discharged of its painful emotion, the individual recovers. This is processing in one of its phases.

The human mind is only a phase of the continuing mind. The first spark of life which began animating matter upon Earth began recording facsimiles. And it recorded from there on out. It is interesting that the entire file is available to any mind. In previous investigations I occasionally found facsimiles, which were not hallucination or imagination, which seemed to go back much earlier than the present life of the individual. Having by then the tool of effort processing, it was possible to “turn on” a facsimile with all perceptics at will and so it was possible to examine the earliest periods possible. The genetic blueprint was thus discovered and I was startled to have laid bare, accessible to any future investigator, the facsimiles of the evolutionary line. Many Auditors have since accomplished the same results and thus the biologist and anthropologist come into possession of a mine of fascinating data.

There are those who know nothing of the mind and yet who get amply paid for it who will talk wisely about illusion and delusion. There happen to be exact and precise laws to delusion. An imaginary incident follows certain patterns. An actual incident is entirely unmistakable. There is a standard behavior in a facsimile of an actual experience: It behaves in a certain way; the individual gets the efforts and perceptions with clarity and the content of the incident expands and remains fairly constant on several recountings. An imaginary incident contracts in content ordinarily and the individual seeks to keep up his interest then by embroidering it. Further, it has no constant efforts in it. Those who cannot take time to establish the actuality of facsimiles before becoming wise about “delusion” are themselves possibly quite delusory people.

The human mind, as the present mind of Man, differs not at all from the most elementary of minds, that of the monocell, except in the complexity of brain appendage. The human being is using facsimiles to evaluate experience and form conclusions and future plans on how to survive in the best possible manner or how to die and start over again.

The human mind is capable of very complex combinations of facsimiles. Further, it can originate facsimiles on the basis of old facsimiles. Nothing goes wrong with the mind except its abilities to handle facsimiles. Occasionally a mind becomes incapable of using a facsimile as past experience and begins to use it in present time continually as an apology for failure. Then we have aberration and psychosomatic illness. A memory of pain contains pain and can become present time pain. A memory of emotion contains emotion and can become present time emotion.