By this time, many a dianetic preclear is becoming convinced that most of his life he has been running strictly on engrams. By no means; the analytical mind is very definitely in there pitching And these are the ways of its workings:
In studying the present text and releases of Dianetics one is liable to the error of believing that Dianetics concerns itself mainly with the reactive mind, that collection of “unconsciousnesses” which bedevil and plague mankind.
The mind, however, is important only to the degree that it can observe, pose, resolve and execute problems. In that the reactive mind is no more capable of actually resolving a problem of magnitude than a prefrontal lobotomy is capable of restoring sanity, it can be seen that the analytical mind is the truly important entity.
Dianetic processing relieves the human being of all mental aberration and psychosomatic illness.
Once one has been “cleared” by dianetic processes — which is to say, once his aberrations and psychosomatic illnesses are vanquished — he operates exclusively on his analytical mind and somatic mind. Therefore a study and knowledge of these is vital if one is to achieve maximal efficiency after he has attained optimum potential. Further, the matter is of intense importance to the dianetic preclear because he is prone, wandering through the idiocies of his reactive mind during sessions of therapy, to believe that he has had only his reactive mind in operation all his life — there is so very much contained in it.
To bring about an understanding of the analytical mind and to dispel illusions about the “force” of the reactive mind, a division of Dianetics called “Analytical Dianetics” is delineated herein.
Analytical Dianetics covers all activity of the analytical mind in determining behavior, solving problems and directing the body through the somatic mind. Included in Analytical Dianetics is a subscience, “Educational Dianetics” in which the processes of learning are covered, academic and nonacademic. But here we treat only the character and performance of the analytical mind itself.
The first fact of interest about the analytical mind is that it is a very solid and practical citizen and is yet capable of the most fantastic imaginative flights. It is a highly variable article in that it can play any part, can act the buffoon or the sage, can treat any subject, from the buying of all-day suckers to the creation of the world, with aplomb. In truth it is insufferably cocky in its abilities and performances and, what is more surprising, it has every reason to be. A cleared analytical mind treats only with data it can weigh or wishes to weigh or evaluate. It runs so closely to the Doctrine of the True Datum in all its actions that, in a society where self-effacing is the mode, it must install a self-effacing mechanism. But it would know that the mechanism was of its own creation and could shuck it off at will. In a cultural pattern, as in the Southern States, which holds a woman should be beautiful but not brilliant, the analytical mind can install a mechanism of apparent stupidity to be fashionable and then, having installed it, can go right on being brilliantly stupid without for a moment believing it is stupid.
Chameleonesque to an extreme, the analytical mind, behind every mechanism it creates for itself, is yet entirely true to itself. It knows when it is imagining and can fly to high heights of imagination and then convince itself, for the necessary illusion, that the high flight is true. But it doesn’t then treat that flight, in its basic computations, as a true flight.
The analytical mind, for instance, can do a much finer job of putting on an insane show than can the reactive mind. The analytical mind can install in itself, and kick out when no longer needed, enough weirdities to convince any psychiatrist of its utter madness. And puckishly it may, on a whim, do so. But not once during that show would the analytical mind be other than utterly and superbly sane.
In short, the analytical mind can set up, within itself, on its own demand, “demon circuits” and “demon computers” which will then give forth any variety of fantasy, wildness or farce.
But there is a vast difference between the analytical mind setting up fantastic and “irrational” circuits and the reactive mind commanding those circuits to be set up. For, short of dianetic therapy, the reactive mind is stet, and the circuit is permanent and “unalterable.” When the reactive mind shoves forth an engram commanding an insane action, that series of commands is obeyed implicitly, for if the body does not obey them, then pain is inflicted by the reactive mind.
This should clarify the role of the analytical mind. It is the action direction and thought center and the only action and thought center. It contains as an inherent necessity to thought every mechanism of insanity, aberration and psychosomatic illness.
This fact, not understood, brought about an alarming misconception in past superstitions about the mind. It is believed that because a mind was capable of acting insane or producing illness that it was the mind which produced insanity and illness.
There is a wild and wide difference between capability and cause. And if you suppose for a moment that this difference is not important, witness the fact that considerably in excess of ten thousand luckless human beings have had their brains torn to bits by psychiatrists who, against the advices of the better colleagues, practice such idiocies as the prefrontal lobotomy, transorbital leukotomy, topectomy and other neat quick methods of killing the mentality and spirit. And witness the fact that hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Americans alone have been victimized by electroshock, insulin shock and other substitutes for the clubs and whips of old Bedlam merely because a capability was misconstrued to be a causative.
For instance, an automobile is capable of killing a dozen people in a matter of seconds, by hurtling at high speed into a group waiting at a street corner. Now the automobile is a finely built mechanism, highly responsive, capable of smooth, swift action — a mechanism of immense value to the entire civilization. We can, of course, prevent killing people at street corners by smashing automobile engines with dynamite, by cutting them up with oxyacetylene torches, or welding them solid with electric arcs. Unquestionably the automobile is the unit capable of killing the waiting pedestrians— but the cause of the catastrophe is the moron directing the action of the fine, responsive mechanism.
Destroying the capability of the machine will, of course, prevent the moron from displaying his lethal activities; he, alone, has no such capabilities. But it will also prevent that machine from ever being of any further use to society, and a lethally inclined moron is certainly of no use to anyone, including himself.
To make the analogue dianetically more accurate, our automobile should be in the control of the murderous moron because his highly intelligent, competent brother has been knocked unconscious, giving the moron a chance to seize control.
Because the separation between automobile and driver is self-evident, there is less tendency-although the tendency still exists — to blame automobiles for the ensuing
destruction. But because there is no visible, easily seen separation between the incredibly capable analytical mind, and the moron driver of the engram bank, it has appeared that the analytical mind was at fault.
The automobile is big, easily accessible, and can quickly and easily be put out of action. Eliminating the capability is easy. The fault lies in the moron driver — but they’re much harder to deal with. The result has been a tendency to take the quick, easy path; when a psychotic individual does not respond easily and satisfactorily to the psychiatrist’s efforts, there is a tendency to attack the capability for action, because it has not been recognized that the moron driver — the engram bank — was the cause.
Those psychiatrists who have insisted on prefrontal lobotomies, and the rest of that class of neurosurgical operations, have never claimed that these operations cured insanity. Fortunately, the top psychiatrists of the nation have strongly resisted, and strongly questioned the propriety of using those techniques; even before Dianetics was available, the best and most thoughtful men in the field were strongly opposed to neurosurgery of the mind-destroying order.
The psychiatrists who did perform prefrontal lobotomies defended the operation primarily on the basis that it “makes the patient more tractable.” That it, in other words, leaves the insanity intact, but removes the capability of the individual to such an extent that he can no longer annoy the attendants so much. In our automobile analogy, it doesn’t take the murderous moron out from behind the wheel, but it renders the automobile incapable of operation.
The unfortunate individual on whom such surgery is practiced, of course, remains as insane as ever: his mind is still tortured by the delusions, the demon circuits, the terrible hates and overwhelming fears that originally made him psychotic. But where, before, he retained sufficient analytical mind power to at least attempt to fight against those horrors, his defensive mechanism has been destroyed. Now the sum total of the agonies and terrors of all his years are free to overwhelm him. In such state, quite naturally, he is indeed tractable. Where before the operation the violent psychotic was at least trying to fight back against that inner world of engrams, he is now incapable of resistance; he has succumbed to them completely and become satisfyingly tractable.
Attacking the capability of resistance, the capability of action, which lies solely in the analytical mind, does not in any way attack the cause. There is a special nerve group in the body which has the function of body temperature control. One can imagine a nerve-cutting operation which would make it possible to cut this control mechanism out of circuit. If a patient showing a high fever during a malaria attack were so operated on, no doubt his fever would abate quickly. The capability of producing high body temperature has been removed; the cause of the fever — the malarial parasites-are now free to multiply without the hindrance of that mechanism of resistance.
It is overwhelmingly important to distinguish sharply between the mechanism of action and the mechanism of causation. The analytical mind, and only the analytical mind, is capable of bringing about action. Since it is an immensely capable and complex mechanism, it is fairly large, and quite accessible; so far as is now known, it appears to have its organic seat in the prefrontal lobes. The structure of the analytical mind, and of the reactive mind, remains unknown at this moment. This much is known: slicing up the prefrontal lobes does not in any way weaken the engram bank or the reactive mind; it simply eliminates the analytical mind’s power of resistance.
Hence it is of vital importance to understand the character and role of the analytical mind. Between the time this is written and the time it is published, approximately one hundred and ten thousand American men and women, fathers, mothers, children, veterans who gave all they had to our society, will be permanently damaged, made permanently insane or killed by those methods which seek to crush insanity by ripping to pieces the only portion of the mind which is capable of rationality.
The reasons these methods continue can be listed as follows:
The last is the joker which victimizes the psychiatrist. When a doctor departs from past methods he is potentially guilty of malpractice. A method is admissible in practice mainly because it has been used, not because it has worked. In such a way the first doctors who used penicillin were technically guilty of malpractice and had penicillin failed to work and harmed the patient, these doctors could have been disfranchised as practitioners by both the State and their professional society. All this neurosurgery and shock, without ever having done good, was not malpractice because it came to the United States, one is told, with Authoritative recognition. Once here and practiced it becomes standard practice. A departure from it is now malpractice and would be “malpractice” if such methods cured every patient to which they were applied.
Psychiatry, by attaching itself to the medical profession, became liable to the codes of the medical profession. In medicine these codes have been found useful and necessary and are based on custom, the only creator of law. In psychiatry there was, actually, no method which was custom-created. Freud was so thoroughly shunned by neurologists of his day and medicine ever since, that only his great literary skill brought his work as far as it has come. Freudianism was not extremely dangerous and had some points on the right track. But technically, Freudian procedures were for years malpractice in neurology.
All these practices came about from an error on the part of investigators of the mind. Because the computer was forced to use data thrust upon it from an unseen source, the psychotherapist thought he saw that the computer itself was in error. His thoughtless solution, then, was to blame the computer.
For the analytical mind and, during “unconsciousness,” the somatic are the only minds which can manifest the mandates of the reactive mind. The reactive mind cannot manifest those commands. It can slam them against the underside of the analytical mind while it is “awake” and pervert the ability of the analytical mind. If there were no analytical mind, no manifestation would take place. Thus, prefrontals change the effect of insanity. Thus, electric shocks et al, by damaging the analytical mind, inhibit the display of the aberration. For the aberration can only be displayed via the computer and its switchboards.
Now there has been another misconception regarding the analytical mind. It has been believed that it was a composite of insanities. Indeed, the personality itself has been maligned by being called a compound of neuroses, compulsions and repressions erected upon an animalistic base. Very accurate and thoroughly checked dianetic observation proves that the personality is an inherent factor in all its strong aspects and that individualism is built into the genes as certainly as fingerprints.
This personality is muted and its individualism weakened by commands emanating from the reactive mind and forced upon the analytical mind.
The very thought mechanisms of the analytical mind are the only things which make the manifestation possible.
Thus we have “demon circuits” — like bypass and filter circuits added to a radio— which the analytical mind, operating free of the reactive mind, builds up or takes down at will. These are never aberrative when so constructed by the analytical mind. They are vital to the action of thought itself. The playwright sits back and “hears” and “sees” his various characters moving through the action of the play. He is computing them. But to do so and make them vivid, he sets up a series of “demon circuits,” one for each actor. So long as he is writing, his computers — imagination computer — furnish the dialogue and action and plot which moves these characters about on the stage of the “mind’s eye.” A cleared playwright or one who has full sonic and visio imagination, actually sees and hears his characters acting and talking in a most natural way inside his analytical mind. Writing the play is a highly natural action.
A caveman, studying out the best way to kill a saber-toothed tiger, “wrote” himself a play. He imagined the tiger, he imagined himself, he imagined the scenery. Out of imagination — building up the accuracy with past experience and data received
from other hunters-he went through the entire action. In doing so he was also calling in his somatic mind and giving it instructions without any effort on his part. Then he went and killed the tiger. If he had no very good imagination, the tiger killed him. No problem of life of any magnitude can be worked out without these mechanisms of imagination.
But let us suppose that our playwright has engrams, reactive mind commands, which tell him all women are evil. He could, on purely analytical basis, dub in this datum if his plot seemed to need it. But if he has an engram about it his playwrighting is sorely limited because he can only plot in terms of the engram whenever his plot skirts that portion of the play. Thus all his women are evil and all his men think women are evil. And he has lost facility and variety. For without this engram, he has a choice about it. With it he has no choice. And in just that fashion he is limited in his plotting.
One novelist who was given dianetic processing had long since failed and was working in a menial position, miserably unhappy. He had had only one plot. That plot hadn’t fitted the public concepts too well in the first place. And that plot was contained verbatim in his reactive mind. When the analytical mind tried to think of a plot it could only rework this old one. Further, its intelligence and imagination were inhibited by the engram. So he wrote tremulously and with considerable effort. When the engram was lifted — a complete story by Ouida called “Under Two Flags” read to the mother when she was recovering from an injury which had also injured the child — this novelist stopped being fixated on stories of such an artificial character, his people came to life on his pages and he was not merely rehabilitated, he was able to become what he inherently was, an excellent novelist. Now he could write, if he liked, stories patterned on “Under Two Flags,” or yams of the “Confession” type, or tales so modernistic even he couldn’t understand them. His analytical mind now had full, not reactively limited, scope.
But the analytical mind had been the thing which wrote even those stories like “Under Two Flags” when he was aberrated. The ability was completely and entirely within only his analytical mind.
The caveman trying to imagine the plot for his killing a saber-toothed tiger might have been possessed of an engram to the effect that tigers always and only jumped to the right. He could have observed on scores of occasions that tigers also jumped to the left but, if the engram had been very strong, he would have gone right on “believing” that tigers jumped only to the right. So his plot about killing the tiger would have contained an untrue datum. And the moment he put it into action he might have been victimized or killed because of that stet datum.
But the analytical mind was the thing which did all the imagining about the tiger, which built up the whole attack and which put the plot into action.
In other words whatever is dictated by an engram only inhibits analytical action. And whatever a person can do in an aberrated state he can do far better when he has no further aberrations.
Now let us take an insane person whose insanity consists of the fact that he says everything which is said to him like an echo and who does every physical action he sees the person he is watching do.
His engrams tell him that he has to do this. They do not make it possible for him to do it. They only command.
The engrams are impinging against that ability of an analytical mind to mimic.
A bulk of the learning done in a lifetime is through mimicry. A three-months-old baby will lie in its crib and do an excellent job of mimicking the mouth actions of the mother. The mother may be trying to make the baby say a word. The baby moves its facial muscles, coos between tries, gurgles, crows, tries to get control of those vocal cords. But it mimics the facial action of the mother. That baby is learning.
A parent may believe that a child learns to use a napkin, knife and fork merely because he is told that if he doesn’t use them properly he will be spanked. By test, this inhibits the natural learning, putting an artificial command under the natural ability to mimic. The common result of this is to cause the child to revolt. If the child is permitted to observe, without coaching or coaxing, adults eating with knives and forks and using napkins, the child, unless badly aberrated, will, by test, struggle and fumble to mimic. And it will come up at last with manners. Better manners than those forced upon it, providing the parents themselves know how to use table silver and napkins properly. When the child, like those trained in the pre-dianetic school of only-being-a-child-is-important-don’t-inhibit-the-little-thing-for-the-whole-family-revolves-aroundit-you-little-fool, has lost any urge to be a grown-up, he avoids mimicry of grown-ups and mimics children. But he mimics.
An enormous amount of knowledge goes straight into the analytical mind through mimicry. A little girl, for instance, who is raised with a dog is liable to mimic the dog and, like a recent case, get down on all fours and scratch the door to be let in.
Men mimic selectively when they are unaberrated, unselectively when they are aberrated. In the case of the insane person who echoes vocally and muscularly any person before him, the mimic mechanisms of the analytical mind have been impinged on so heavily by engrams that unselectivity is the rule in the extreme. But the analytical mind is being forced from under to use its mechanisms. And the mechanisms are those of the analytical mind. Take out the engrams causing it — something like: “You have to do everything and say everything you see and hear” — and the mimic mechanisms of the analytical mind correct instantly and rational mimicry results.
As in the case of the playwright and caveman, the “demon circuits” which talk and act on the stage or growl and prowl in the jungle are both natural mechanisms of the analytical mind. The reactive mind, however, by engrams, can force “demon circuits” into action so that the analyzer has no control over them. Then you get a case with voices mysteriously talking to him or a case which “thinks” in words instead of conclusions. All audible or subaudible “stream of consciousness,” whereby something in the head is articulating thought, is caused by reactive mind engrams. But it remains that the only reason the engram can bring such a circuit into play is because the analytical mind natively contains circuits which can come into play. You can wreck these circuits with shock or surgery as a baby can ruin a radio by taking a hammer to its works, but the circuit belongs to the analytical mind and is only forced into aberrative action by an engram which, no matter the wreckage, is still very much there but has no mind to act upon.
The analytical mind has many other powers. It can control the various fluid flows and growths of the body, apparently, since any clear can do startling things with his heartbeat, breathing, endocrine balance and other things if he wishes to take the trouble. The reactive mind pushes an engram against the analytical mind and forcefully throws the mechanisms out of action and also, in most cases, out of the control area of the analytical mind — and here we have psychosomatic illness, chronic overaction or underaction of glands, secretions and other fluids and overgrowth or undergrowth of the body itself. The hebephrenic schizophrenic is noted for the smallness of his adrenals. He is psychotic and he is psychotic because he has engrams. Give him the fluid or hormone he is not adequately manufacturing and you may or may not get some reaction in his body — for the engrams may inhibit the fluid from being used even when it is injected. Deintensify the engrams and you observe the adrenals grow to normal size, if the person is young enough, or the body use injected fluid given to correct the imbalance if the person is well past middle age. Tear up the analytical mind of this hebephrenic schizophrenic with electroshock or, even more criminal, rip him up with brain surgery and thus reduce his analytical mind and three things may happen: 1. not enough analyzer may be left to do anything about his adrenals, so they remain the same and he remains insane; 2. not enough analyzer may be left to control the gland growth and so the glands grow without restraint; or 3. the analyzer responsible for the control may not be touched and the patient may have little change in his condition.
Actually, the analytical mind has many parts and many abilities. It contains the individualism, the personality, the ambition, the persistence in life, the vigor of action, the observing and computing and imagining abilities, and, not the least, “I” itself. Other abilities and functional actions are also seated in the analytical mind, many more than can be accurately known at this writing, for ESP in particular is evidenced largely and is disturbed by anything which inhibits the analytical mind, a matter now under research in Dianetics.
There are many methods the analytical mind has to protect itself even against the reactive mind. Possibly in another hundred thousand years, given that his personal and cultural aberrations had not destroyed Man entirely, the analytical mind would have more fully evolved protective mechanisms. The trend it has been taking, however, has not been toward the self-clearing of the reactive mind. This is probably a problem somewhat like the newly commissioned ship commander who, though victimized by an unruly crew, yet, by naval orders, cannot rid himself of their mutinous presence. His recourse is toward self-protection in the interest of greater ability to command and safeguard his ship. It may be that in studying his crew he finds a method of making the recalcitrants null and void without hurting the manning of his ship. Evolutionarily, the analytical mind is going in the direction of self-protection and higher authority. The second method, voiding the power of the mutineers without hurting the crew, is the sudden interjection of Dianetics which deintensifies engrams without hurting the ship but, on the contrary, increasing the ability of the ship as a whole by getting all the crew to work with enthusiasm and cheerfulness toward the goal the captain appoints.
The basic, unaberrated analytical mind — and every person apparently has such a stratum of rationality — has in all cases so far processed by the testing group of Dianetics, two hundred seventy-nine, demonstrated a remarkable co-operation. “The mind knows how the mind works.” There have been cases so thoroughly swamped that this co-operative flicker was barely discernible and could be put to rout by engrams, but even these, as soon as some of the reactive burden was deintensified, began to manifest greater and greater co-operation in processing.
The analytical mind, then, can be said to be in agreement with dianetic processes and, indeed, dianetic processes were evolved by paralleling analytical mind action. The reactive mind is directly opposed to Dianetics. Whatever impedes the auditor in putting a patient through therapy has impeded the patient’s own analytical mind. The equation that the analytical minds of the auditor and preclear have greater power than the reactive mind of the preclear is the principal thing that makes therapy possible. The analytical mind of any patient is striving mightily against any burden in the reactive bank even when the reactive bank is so in evidence — as in a psychotic— that it composes all the patient’s thoughts and actions and even makes him initially resist therapy. A person is aberrated because his own analytical mind, alone, cannot cope, save in artificially or naturally raised necessity, with his reactive burden.
Engrams and the reactive mind derange and aberrate the ability and body of the patient only through the abilities of the analytical mind. The reactive mind can only push and shove against the analytical mind to make action possible.
The analytical mind “remembers” by returning some of its attention units to past moments either on a fast network conceptually or upon the central time track itself. The reactive mind, armed with pain, shoves into those networks and makes some of this returning impossible. Thereby the analytical mind is said to “have forgotten” but the truth is, the data is right there but blocked. The reactive mind makes it difficult to remember something, for actual pain would be felt by the body if that thing were remembered. In dianetic processes this matter is cared for and the analytical mind can get by and deintensify these moments of pain which are the whips of the reactive mind.
The cells, as staunch conservatives, idiotically believe, it seems, that anything which was painful will always be dangerous, and they inhibit not only a repetition of the action in the exterior world of now but they inhibit a re-experiencing of a painful action in the interior world of then. Actually the analytical mind, by accurate computation and recall and with far, far more accuracy, contains a mechanism which inhibits repeating an action once painful. It computes even faster than the reactive
mind reacts, once the analytical mind has concluded, for instance, that putting a hand on the stove gets the hand burned. It is as if Man has evolve a highly competent captain in the analytical mind but the crew, uneducated and silly, still will not trust him, even though he is fantastically trustworthy and far more able to prevent disaster and gather benefits for the crew than the crew could.
Anything the crew, as we might consider the cells, think should be enforced is enforced only through the computers and switchboards of the analytical mind. Thus came about the entire misconception that the personality was built up of neuroses.
It could be said with accuracy that the personality is the analytical mind individualities, and physical characteristics. And it could be said that neuroses could not manifest without an analytical mind to subvert. And it could be said that the personality plus the neuroses of a human being make up his manifested personality. And it could be said that no neurosis could manifest without usurping the circuits and abilities of the analytical mind and cutting down its power. And it could further be stated that a neurosis is without any characteristics or power unless it has an analytical mind upon which to impinge itself.
Clearing away the aberrations intensifies all the strong points of the analytical mind and deintensifies all the weak points of the aberrated personality and such clearing intensifies the individuality and the personality.
One of the prime operating mechanisms of the analytical mind is that it attacks resistance to the greatest good of the greatest number involved in any problem. It may be very clever in its attacks for it also preserves the organism, progeny, the group and Mankind of which, remember, the organism is a part and which would be weakened by the loss of the organism itself. Give the analytical mind a target it cannot subdue by reason and it begins to direct attack in other ways. It works, in other words, against obstacles. When there are no obstacles it amuses and enjoys itself by inventing obstacles. But its activity is metered by the problems it observes or poses to itself and is regulated by rationality-not stimulus-response which is the characteristic of the reactive mind.
It uses five methods of handling problems—it attacks them, avoids them, falls back from them, succumbs to them or neglects them. The problem is often of great magnitude and may not be subdued. But the analytical mind-not the reactive mind—has a gauge of necessity level. It builds up force against a problem usually above and beyond the force necessary to overcome the problem. Because it is a perfect computer, modified only by the validity of or lack of data, the analytical mind, in a cleared state, can work up an enormously high necessity level. It does not do this on a stimulus-response basis either for it can rig up an artificial necessity level against a real problem, can generate an actual necessity level against an imaginary problem or can generate an artificial necessity level against an imaginary problem, artificial and actual here being used to identify pretended resurgence or uncomputed resurgence.
In the aberrated mind this necessity level can also be raised artificially or actually. But it is always the necessity level of the analytical mind. When an engram is restimulated on a stimulus-response basis, the necessity mechanism of the analytical mind can be usurped to make the organism prone to the most outrageously impossible actions, actions like maniacal murder or carrying pianos singlehanded from a burning building while the baby is still inside. Evolution has been working on separating this necessity level mechanism from the reactive mind control evidently. For artificial and actual necessity levels can be raised against the reactive bank itself and can actually make an engram back up or a whole set of engrams which, by stimulus-response, should be in restimulation, drop completely out of sight.
A writer, for example, who had been nearly insane for two years and who had a reactive mind full of engrams against writing, was suddenly confronted with an illness of his wife’s which required two thousand dollars worth of treatments immediately. Promptly, he kicked up his necessity level and turned out one hundred thousand words of short stories and novelettes in twenty days which brought him twenty-five hundred dollars and which were pronounced as some of the best work he had ever done. His wife became well and he resumed his miserable state of inactivity. As neither he nor anyone else knew, at that time, much about the mechanism of necessity level, his eventual recompense was revilement from all quarters because he was now “understood” to be “lazy” and had demonstrated what he could do if he “just faced reality.”
An engram can take over this necessity level mechanism, just as engrams of various sorts can impinge upon any mechanism of the analytical mind. The most sorrowful examples of this sort can be found amongst the world conquerors in which our rather puerile histories specialize. Wading in blood and piling up “enemy” skulls these social liabilities are generally driven by engrams which dictate that they must conquer.
Now it happens that their necessity level mechanisms and their abilities to compute and especially to act must be very, very high, far above the average. And something else has entered the equation here.
All people have, in degrees varying not only from person to person but from dynamic to dynamic within the individual, their four dynamics of self; sex—the act and care of progeny; group—whether special or civil, city or nation or race; and Mankind. Each is a persistency toward survival in the particular catalogue of the dynamic itself. Thus one can have an enormous force to perpetuate himself as an individual, another can have an enormous force individually to create and raise children. All unaberrated persons have, in some degree of force, according to dianetic findings, each of these four dynamics.
When an individual has engrams—and all do unless they are cleared—these engrams usurp or force against not only such things as imaginative circuits and mimicry but also against the dynamics. As a muddy creek might enter an otherwise clear stream, the engrams may color and choke a dynamic. If that dynamic is powerful and if the engram impinging on it is powerful, the result can be remarkably destructive.
The world conqueror evidently operates with a perverted dynamic. Dynamic Four, Mankind, consists of a thrust toward the greatest good for Mankind. Mankind must win, according to this dynamic, and actions must be taken to further and better and generally advance the survival chances of Mankind. An engram which dictates strongly, for instance, that everybody but Tugaboo Islanders have crazy conceptions might cause a Tugaboo Islander to try to force Tugaboo Island taboos down the throats of everyone in order to save Mankind. But the world conqueror, with an engram overworking, choking and distorting his Mankind dynamic, may have such a strong group dynamic that his actions take no account of the slaughter he effects. He not only must force taboos upon the rest of the world, he can only “save” his group by the most extraordinary means.
The distortion worked upon the Mankind dynamic need not, however, result in world conquering. Any dynamic may be so impinged and unsettled by engrams that some very weird aspects occur. It is very common to find, in an insane asylum, a patient who claims to have a secret which will save all Mankind. This has been considered very bad, pre-dianetically. The same psychiatrist who would hammer a psychotic into believing everything that had happened to him was imaginary—and psychiatry has long been listening and calling “imaginary” actual prenatal engrams just because “Authorities,” with no data and clumsy research, had said such things were imaginary, all the while holding forth about “memories of the womb”—would and does pound hard against any patient who says he wants to “save Mankind.” It is a peculiarity that this is a particularly condemning point, that anybody wants to do anything but be a sheep and very tractably and “well-adjustedly” eat grass.
The patient who is fond of being “God” has an engram impinged solidly against the self dynamic. The one who conducts himself abnormally in matters of sex or children has an engram impinged against the second dynamic. Any of these dynamics and any of their portions can be stopped or colored by engrams. But not one can be speeded up by an engram or rendered more forceful The engram takes the native analytical ability and by entangling it causes aberrated manifestations of the dynamics. Three dynamics cannot be channeled into one channel by an engram and then become three times as strong as a fixed idea.
If anyone has a strong self dynamic perverted by an engram which says “I am God,” then manifests and acts strongly in his imaginary role as “God,” he will, when that engram is cleared, demonstrate about two or three times the personal force on the self dynamic. Only he won’t be “God,” he will become a powerhouse in some group as himself. If, when insane, he was thoroughly and violently certain that he could save Mankind, when the engram causing that is cleared, he may very rationally but with great force actually set about doing something to further Mankind.
So long as the strange belief was held that a man was only a stimulus-response animal and that his entire being was only a collection of aberrations, that his personality was only a matter of distortions of reality, no individuality or desire was safe from question or condemnation. This was a sort of slave psychology which, accidentally or otherwise, sought to block personal individuality and initiative. Under that philosophy one could be condemned, when he said he wanted to do something to further his name beyond his physical death, as an “egomaniac,” whatever that is. When one had confidence in the ability of a group to sweep all before it, he could be called monomanic. When he enjoyed sex, he could be called a satyr. And when he wanted to do something for Mankind he could be labeled a “paranoid,” whatever that is. Because he could thus be assailed and pounded by these nonsensical and precisely indefinable terms, and because engrams could here and there distort these natural desires and make them unnatural, the society was pounded down, man by man, into a herd. Then one could talk of masses. One could defeat individualism. And anyone who desires such a defeat is espousing an action so thoroughly destructive that he must be, and can be shown to be, thoroughly aberrated. For Man is rich only in ratio to the number of individuals whose initiative and individuality will create a better future. Wars can take place only when this sheep neurosis can be brought about, for lions don’t stampede when some aberree shouts “Kill all the Russians,” for Hons aren’t likely to be afraid. But sheep will stampede. And then they will depend upon their individuals to save them. War can only happen where self-determinism is outlawed and the sheep psychology of “adjustment” rules the land.
One who insists upon the tenet that the personality consists only of neuroses, compulsions and repressions is not only rather silly, but is extremely dangerous to those around him. In the first place he has an engram which tells him he will die or something if he “gets rid of it” and so, by reactive computation, reactively “desires” to be aberrated. Or he has a sympathy engram which inclines him toward the “glories of hypochondria.” He may also be subject to that prime sheep-psychology mechanism which favors “adjustment” only because people with wills of their own and force of personality are strong. A man, weak because of his engrams, seeks to keep others weak out of some idiotic hope that thus he will better survive.
The equation, however, does not work that way. The weak are strong only when they are protected by the strong. Only the aberrated weakling believes that a strong man is a cruel one. Only the weak are cruel. Only the afraid are vicious. All experience bears this out. Only the whining theorist who claims that personality is aberration would blind himself to the evidence on every hand that trouble, distress and disaster stem from the aberrated weakling. Take a square look around you and trace back trouble wherever it existed to somebody’s irrational fear of some imagined threat.
When personality can be pronounced to be the result of aberration and when individualists can then be silenced and driven into the herd, Man is looking down the barrel of the last gun he will hear.
The analytical mind functions best out at the last possible notch of self-determinism. The unaberrated individual is not only strong but he is also motivated by a uniformly present desire to accomplish the greatest amount of construction for the smallest amount of destruction. Self-determined, he is free to evaluate the situation for himself. Exteriorly determined by his own or social aberrations, he is inclined away from solutions which will be creative of the greatest good; further his own thinking is less acute.
That the analytical mind can be usurped in its abilities by engrams and reduced mechanically in its power by those engrams definitely does not mean that the analytical mind and the ability of Man depends upon neurosis.
As a final proof of such matters, there is the behavior of the so-called “manic.” He seems very strong along one line. He is out to supersell, for instance, anything.
Nervous, driving, energetic, he attacks problems of selling with an attitude which amounts to violence. He cannot keep it up continuously for he becomes depressed. Then, in the general case, his cycle runs from high enthusiasm to deep depression and back to high enthusiasm again. The society is full of such people who pass for, and indeed are, normal to this period. The surface evidence here appears that he is suffering from a neurosis which makes him a supersalesman.
But the periods of high action grow shorter. The periods of depression grow longer. Some call it old age. Some call it getting “burned out.” Some say he needs more recreation. One day his clock, so to speak, runs very thoroughly down.
What happened to this man? What caused it? All cases to hand of this, a numerous number, show it to have been caused by an engram in which he was “fixed.” The engram said he was a wonderful salesman, but it contained physical pain. As he went on living he was “dramatizing” or acting out being a supersalesman. But sometimes he didn’t sell. Every time he didn’t, physical pain forced him to try. But he kept failing because his health was deteriorating. And then one day he didn’t resurge. He just felt the pain. And he wasn’t a supersalesman any more.
Deintensifying that engram in every such case brought about an immediate rebalancing. If the engram had actually made him a supersalesman then he was competent, analytically, to be a supersalesman. And he became a better supersalesman than before!
A sadder case, and an even more unusual one, is where the engram says that a man must be, for instance, a great officer of the army. But the analytical ability was not great enough to make him such. Actually, his analytical ability fitted him to be a very good mason. And so we have the standard sour, rankled misfit who is said to have “ambitions much greater than his ability.” That diagnosis is as false as a lot of other past preconceptions. He had “engrams greater than his ability along the line dictated by the engrams.” Clear away those engrams and a resurgence of analytical power and ability becomes evident, his basic purpose manifests itself and his mind somehow works his past experience into an asset to carry out his basic purpose and, in such a case, we would have a mason amongst masons. And he would not be “adjusted” to being a mason or “resigned” to being a mason, he would be a happy and enthusiastic mason who could adjust to the business of masonry.
And in a reverse case, one man cleared by Dianetics had a manic engram dictating that he should be the strongest bricklayer in the world whereas all his analytical ability summed into a high competence in the field of music. Additionally he had engrams which said he was a clumsy and terrible musician. Cleared, he stopped being a bad and unhappy bricklayer and became a cheerful trumpet player in a name band.
In all such cases, where the analytical mind has any basic dynamic worth mentioning it has been found that one way or another the victim of a manic which sent him in one direction while his basic purpose inclined him in another has been able to gather up, along the way of life, considerable data in the field of his basic purpose. The shift has not been arduous and has never been found to swing into a field where the person had gathered no data.
The analytical mind is strong and should never be undervalued. It is not only strong in the sense that it is incredibly resistant to aberration, but also in the sense that it can rise above and conquer engrams even without therapy. Of course it cannot remain forever above those engrams, for new engrams may at last force it to succumb. But a person undergoing dianetic processing with an eye to greater ability should never be taken in with the statement that all he has ever done or said has been because of engrams. Fully eighty percent of his thinking and his actions were clear analytical decisions. When he begins to find out how many engrams he had and how powerful they were he should not, during the course of therapy, resign himself to a belief that he was never competent to overcome them, for he very definitely was.
The power of the individual and Man is the power of the analytical mind, a tough, rational organism, difficult to aberrate, capable of overcoming aberrations and, when cleared especially, forceful and personable far, far beyond any pre-dianetic knowledge.
Even aberrated or uneducated, Man’s analytical mind has almost completed the conquest of Earth.
[This article first appeared in Astounding Science Fiction magazine, Vol. XLVI, No. 2, October, 1950.]