& Tonight's lecture is "An Analysis of Memory and Human Abberation. Second night's lecture. Memory is relationship. In other words, the person's ability to handle himself in present time.

As you know, processing has taken a very definite shift of emphasis in the past months. It has done this to a large degree on the basis of, well let me be very frank with you, metering. How much of this stuff has to be handed out? How much does an individual have to know in order to make a good, clean job of processing? How much does a person have to know to know something about this subject called knowledge?

As you know, this science grows out of knowledge itself. Epistemology. A nice technical word. At the same time, it means a great deal. Epistemology was one of the big question-mark subjects of the field of philosophy. It was the least known and the least integrated subject in philosophy. And yet epistemology embraces even philosophy itself, so you can see it was a big subject. Very little was known about it.

At the time of address to these problems, actually very little was known about the human mind. Compared to what we know about the human mind now - about the same ratio as what an aborigine, suddenly snatched out of the wilderness of Australia, would know about a new Cadillac carburetion system compared to what a youngster knows about his hot rod. In short, with this subject we have done a considerable jump for man on the field of the human mind.

It should be apparent to you immediately - as one of the first and foremost points of epistemology, knowledge - that the computer of, the retainer of and the vessel which holds knowledge is the human mind, and the thing which uses knowledge is the human body.

It was all very well for somebody like Kant - great fellow Kant (no wonder he couldn't, with a name like that) to say, "Well, in the whole subject of the human race, anything that's worth knowing transcends human experience, and therefore can never be contacted by man." He was really in apathy.

It was 165 years ago that Immanuel Kant, nicknamed the Great Chinaman of Kijnigsberg, made this astounding fatuosity. And he stopped the investigation of knowledge at that point 165 years ago by attempting to lay down a code which had as its first principle that knowledge is beyond the realm of human experience and therefore can never be contacted by a human mind. He went on from there with the most terrifically resounding phrases, sounding brass and the tinkling of the temple bell, and stopped the forward progress of thought with sentences which have to be read with a piece of cardboard: You take the piece of cardboard and you close out the two center adverbial clauses; then you take another piece of cardboard and you knock out about four participial phrases, and you find out what it says by the time you have put the verb on the front part where it belongs.

It sounded awfully good - like one of Hitler's speeches! But when taken all apart, the whole philosophy fell down to a terrific simplicity: Man is moral out of an innate morality which is completely selfless and altruistic - and for which he gets bounteously paid. He writes book one that man's morality was completely altruistic and inherent and innate and so forth, and then wrote in his second book the reasons why it had to be and why man got paid for it, and how a person had better have this innate thing, because he would get paid for it if he had it.

I hope the last three paragraphs make good sense to you! Really, there is no sense in them beyond this one point: 165 years ago, out of the terrific altitude of the university at Kijnigsberg, a philosopher pretended to lay down the rules of human behavior by saying that nobody could understand them. And he laid them down with so much force, so much thunder, that ever afterwards people stayed in a state of apathy about it.

Science, through those 165 years, began to kill a dragon called superstition. Whether the scientist knows it or not, that is his goal: the death of superstition and the birth of knowledge - the birth of data!

No matter how moldy and moth-eaten are the gray tweed suits of the individuals practicing science in universities, no matter how humble these fellows seem to be, these scientists are wild-eyed zealots. They are killing the dragon superstition.

We used to have a subject known as natural philosophy. Some of the early Greeks worked with it and made some nice observations, but they did very little experimentation. Aristotelian material came up through the Dark Ages, purveyed by the churches, as a contribution; it was picked up by a fellow by the name of Francis Bacon and picked up again by a fellow by the name of Newton, and all of a sudden there was a group of men in the world who had as their sole goal and mission the death of unknowns, the death of superstition.

These boys are wild-eyed; they don't even know what they are tackling, most of them. And yet tell one of them "This is not within the realms of mathematics; this is not within the embrace of human understanding," and although he has stood before many classes, and although he is a cowed little man in front of the faculty, this fellow will start frothing.

His concept of existence is simply on this basis: "It's knowable. We can find out! I can figure it out here on a mathematical pad. I can do it on my slide rule. It's knowable! There's a reason why cats, kings, coal heavers and cockroaches behave as they do, act as they do. There are certain natural laws."

You know it's a strange observation, that that nation and that society is the most prosperous which knows the most about the material universe and uses the least superstition. That nation which uses superstition as its modus operandi in tackling the world - "let's go out and propitiate the gods. Let's all lie down and be walked on. Let's make sure no black cats walk across this path. Let's make sure that when we pass under a tree bearing mistletoe, we go ptoch! because if you don't, oohhh!" - doesn't prosper.

Now, maybe somebody in Kijnigsberg could be fooled. Transportation has gotten better since the days of Immanuel Kant: I took a look.

I found nations meshed with superstition. China! I have seen, in China, men working as beasts of burden, with the cold, bitter winds of the Gobi coming down and tearing through their thin, lice-strewn garments while they wore a rope over their shoulders and pulled a stone boat. And at home they had the household gods. When they walked down the street - no longer pulling that stone boat - you would see one of them occasionally duck sideways in a doorway and come out by another doorway. Why did he do that? So the devils wouldn't catch up with him, because "everyone knows" that a devil must travel in a straight line and as soon as a person makes a crooked line the devil can't follow him.

I have seen Chinese junks cut across the bows of big U.S. freighters just so the devils would be cut off and wouldn't be able to follow them. The junk goes under the bows, and if it is just the fourth mate who happens to be on the bridge and he doesn't bother to bring the engines back to stop, there is a dull crunch and four, six, sixteen Chinamen are suddenly in the Huang-po which never gives up its living or dead. That is superstition at work.

I have been down in the jungles of Haiti. There is hardly a town in Haiti where you cannot hear, during the night, the throb of voodoo drums. Those people are barefoot and they starve, and their little children run around with sand fleas eating into their skin. They have what is known as "rice stomachs. They die off by the thousands, of dysentery, malaria and so on. They sleep in huts where, if you lay down, you would probably be a very sick person indeed. It is not pleasant to have cockroaches walk over you all night. This is superstition reigning!

And here in the United States, where the god has suddenly become "We can know, we can know," you can go to almost any city and open the water tap and take a drink of water - fill a glass and drink that water - with perfect confidence. You are not going to get sick; no gods are going to afflict you. That is because there are some engineers who happen to know about bacteria, who put sand traps in, and who test that water for bacteria.

You can go down and eat in a restaurant without any fear whatsoever that tomorrow you will be dying of Asiatic cholera. And that isn't because we don't have it in this country, since there was an epidemic in that most untropical city of Chicago of this tropical thing called Asiatic cholera not very many years ago. The bug got loose and there we were.

That is a world without superstition, a world with knowledge, where the attitude of the thinking men is "We can know, we can find out." And this society, per unit individual, does not walk down the street in ragged clothes with the winds of Michigan blowing through his every bone, and he is not pulling a stone boat as a beast of burden. There is a big difference.

Maybe some of you who haven't seen this sort of thing aren't as impressed by it as you might be. But during the last seventy-five years, something new has been born upon this earth, and it's the philosophy of "we can know."

In Dianetics we study the background logic of knowing. It just happens, incidentally, that the human mind gets embraced in "What is knowledge?" The human mind gets embraced by this merely be'cause it is the vessel and the computer of knowledge. So, if you want to turn out better abilities to think, if you want to turn out better processes of thought, if you want to raise the level of health and so forth, you treat the human mind. But it is incidental.

Those of you who are deep students of this subject are studying on an echelon where, had you demonstrated a phenomenon or two, philosophers of the past would have looked at you with considerable awe. People would have said, "My God! Witches, devils. Burn him at the stake!"

You could take the oldest, crudest, worst technique we have and make an effective thrust into a primitive society which would leave people somewhat staggered.

& Tonight I'm not going to talk to you about an old moth-eaten technique.

I am going to tell you about brand-new, shiny techniques which are visible all around the horizon, and it won't take very long to tell you about them.

It is true that in any subject the more one knows of the subject itself, the more he can extrapolate or figure out from a few data. That is what is happening in Dianetics at this time.

As far as processing itself is concerned, we have

& to the sum of, I think 209 axioms that embrace epistemology pretty well. There has merely been an improvement on earlier material with that. The material in the Axioms is not new; the codification of it and sudden presentation to you of the Axioms all together in a pile is rather new.

The processes as they relate to a human being are figured out from the Axioms, and you can figure out a lot more processes than now exist. This is like the difference between inventing a mathematics and using the mathematics to solve a particular problem. With the mathematics of the 209 axioms, we are now actually resolving the problems as they relate to one peculiar, particular, little, tiny sphere: How can the human mind think better? The overall subject can tell you how to live better and improve interpersonal relations; it tells you how to put together a nation or two and it tells you a lot of things that are interesting, such as how to draw a picture that will always win the prize.

But the fact of a change of emphasis in processing itself doesn't change the overall subject at all. You have seen, recently, quite a few changes - improvements. Each one of them is a higher-echelon button. I have now a higher button than any I have given you before.

Before you can know about this button, you should take a quick glance at this subject and find out what we are trying to do. What are we trying to do?

What is a human memory? How do you get one, and what do you do with it? Human memory is a very simple thing. You have upwards of a hundred channels of perception of you and your environment. There is sight, sound, hearing, tactile, saline content, joint position, magnetic orientation - all sorts of them. There is a long list. They all operate simultaneously and they record straight on through - unless, of course, the mechanism by which the sense channel reaches the switchboard is itself cut by some psychiatrist.

The unit observer, by sight, sees the physical universe; he hears it by sound; he can feel it manually; he feels the temperature of the physical universe and so forth. All these things come in on physical-universe waves. For instance, sight comes in on the wavelengths of light; they are very easy to handle. Sound comes in on the wavelengths of sound - force waves traveling through the air.

Now, what is a memory? It would be a unit recording by a unit observer. Here's a unit observer, and here is that one recording. That recording, by the way, can be moving. Let's take a unit recording, the period of five minutes or something like that (it can be a time-factor recording): for five minutes he records everything that is going on - all motion and everything else in the physical universe.

That is the recording of a memory. But what does he do with this memory after it is recorded?

There is where everybody has really broken down in the past. Right there is superstition - devils, demons and things that go boomp in the night.

& Lord knows what happens.

The scientist comes along and advances the imponderable and says, "It's recorded in a cell. The cells record it." No, they don't. In the first place, there isn't a wavelength small enough to record it in a thing as small as the cell. And the next thing is that these cells perpetually die and are replaced - even the protein molecules of a neuron. The psychiatrist (being relatively uneducated) and the scientist (being part of an old superstition) say, "The neuron is born with the human being and lasts until he dies, so therefore it never changes."

You can take a Ford car and by the time you drive it twenty years, I guarantee there won't be many of the original parts left on it. But you could say it is the same Ford car. That is what is true with one of these neurons - in other words, a human nerve cell.

The human nerve cell is made up of organic chemical compounds, and these chemical compounds consist of protein molecules and all sorts of things. They are in a definite order in a neuron. A neuron is actually a living being within a living being, which is of course true of anything in a human being. The human being is composed of these colonies of living beings. One neuron replaces itself chemically many times. You could say it is the same neuron, just like you could say, "Yes, that's the same Ford car," but everything in it has been replaced.

There have been some fancy theories. Not one of them has ever accounted for anything. We look at the phenomena of the mind and we discover something very strange: we discover that the human being is activated by something which does not have wavelength or position in space and time. I won't go ahead with proving this; that is another subject. That something we have called theta. It is a unit - a unit infinity.

It actually makes a facsimile. It takes a picture and stores a picture. We just get around this problem of memory by saying, "Let's take it functionally. Let's not try to be so darned superstitious that we believe man was made out of clay and always will be clay." We look around and see what kind of a mechanism it would really take to do this and then test the mechanism and find out if that is the mechanism. We test it and we find out this thing does answer all the conditions necessary to human memory; therefore it must be somewhere close to the truth.

So, what happens here? The individual takes a physical recording and then it translates into a theta recording. It records in something of infinity depth, breadth and so forth. This is, as far as we can tell at this time, life source. You can go back and you can look at your memories, and by reexamining your memories you don't change the physical universe any.

& Well, this is, as far as we can tell at this time, life force.

Recording is done, then, in the physical universe and is all of a sudden recorded on material which is imperishable. That recording, done in theta, contains sound, tactile, hearing and all the rest of it. If you don't believe this, you can return an individual to these recordings and he can find them again, hear them again and so forth; it is very interesting.

If you were to conduct this examination amongst children you would be astonished: most of them have this facility to a very large extent. They are not taking things out of the cells; they are taking things out of a nothing which is infinity - which is, by the way, mathematically quite precise.

We got, then, a memory. When a man takes a recording, he has a potential memory. He can remember it. How does he remember it? Back in the days of superstition they would have had you believe that man was a stimulus-response mechanism: the environment stimulated something, he replied.

I am afraid this was the wish of the people who ruled men, not the truth. The wish was that "if we hold up a red flag, the populace jumps two paces to the right. We hold up a blue flag, the populace jumps two paces to the left. When we say 'Hup,' they say 'Hup.' " How easy it is to rule a country, to rule a science, to rule a university student, if you have taught him that he is a stimulus-response mechanism. You have taught him that he is MEST. You have taught him that he is the material universe. You have actually taught him he doesn't have self-determinism and he doesn't have a soul. It is very easy!

If I were in the most malicious, vicious frame of mind imaginable, I could not invent a better slave-control mechanism than the psychologists' stimulus-response reply to the material universe. Superstition is what it is because it is not founded in anything but a cursory observation that people do react to the environment. They even went so far as to say, "Does a man's glandular monitoring of fear turn on because he runs, or does he get afraid and then run, or does he run and then get afraid?" - all the time postulating that this is just a little machine. "All we do is push a couple of buttons and he sits down, works from nine till five and votes the right ticket." Only men aren't well when they are like that; they are sick! And they are sick in exact ratio to the amount of stimulus-response they give to an environment. The more they respond to the stimulus of an environ, the sicker they are, and that is an exact ratio. It is precise.

You show me an individual who responds automatically to his environment and I will show you a sick man. Of course, today he is the "normal" man. They have all been taught this.

They have been taught that there is such a thing as "stream of consciousness." That is wonderful. You have one thought and another thought is going to follow it inevitably, and they keep following each other, just like that, through a man's lifetime; he can't do anything about it. That is not true, except in a person who is pretty badly aberrated.

It happens to be that an individual, being reasonable, does align data and align the field of address. He aligns the data he is handling, and this makes it seem as though there is a relationship or association amongst his data. Actually there is differentiation. The second that he gets association in his data, the second he begins to automatically associate one datum with another datum, mark him off the chart. He is going out through the bottom.

& Stimulus Response!

The tone scale is just an arbitrary scale of human behavior - 20.0,' 4.0, 0.0. These are the emotional responses of an individual. At the bottom he is dead; he doesn't have any response. Up at tone 4.0 he is pretty happy and cheerful; he is still responding to the environment considerably. Up higher than that, he chooses the environment to respond to him - a complete reversal .

TBD

But up at the very top, at 40.0, is cause without action. You have to come down the tone scale quite a ways before you get action, although the person is static cause up at the top. Maybe this is a desirable state and maybe it its not. I tested it out and I found that an individual tends to chill when he starts going into this state. That would be natural, too, because infinity - or minus 270 degrees centigrade - is awfully cold. A person who starts to go into this state is trying to take his body along with him, and of course his body is in motion and motion doesn't exist in that bracket, so he gets cold.

It is very interesting that you could set a person down and teach him to be very still, very quiet and very relaxed, and the more quiet and the more relaxed he became, if you really got him to a point where he was starting into the static of 40.0, the colder he would get. Sometimes you might have to work on him for a day or two to get him speeded up again. It is a very interesting state of being.

Down at the lower static an individual sort of goes out through the bottom, goes into apathy and death, and he is dead.

This tone scale ought to look like a circle, with the statics of 40.0 and 0.0 both the same point. There are just different routes of getting to these statics. One of them is by dying and the other one is by becoming a saint. And the saint is just about as badly off as a dead man. A person down in apathy, or a person down in grief or something like that demonstrates about the same physiological condition as a saint does.

By the way, I have known a few saints. They were wonderful people, when you could get them into motion to talk - very serene. But in order to be healthy and well, you have to be down in the middle bracket of motion. There, you are self-determining the environment, you have experience, your body is in good shape, you can even do things about your own body which are quite remarkable.

The point is that as you start to drift down toward death, you get into these automatic response mechanisms. Way down at 2.0 you start to get into anger and so forth where your survival is badly threatened, and you try to destroy. Then you become afraid, and then you decide you have lost it all anyway. Then you become apathetic and they call up the local undertaker. People seldom do that for themselves; they leave it up to other people even to bury them, which I think is remarkable.

By the way, down in the South I was talking to an old lady, and she was very, very proud: She had decided that she was going to live a couple more years. And the reason she had to live a couple more years was that she was going to have one of the biggest funerals that they had had down there in a long time! She had a tombstone bought and her plot bought and everything; she was all set. She was going to have a coffin with silver handles - silver- plated, anyway. She had a very progressive, healthy attitude. I don't think she is dead. I think twenty years from now I will go back to Savannah and I will find that the undertaker is still taking payments off her.

Anyway, this tone scale is a scale of motion. It runs from no motion to optimum motion and down to no motion again. But it is also a scale of self-determinism, in that it just keeps on going up in the activity, the amount of self-determinism available. That evidently goes all the way up toward the top, although I wouldn't guarantee that. I haven't been dead recently, so I haven't found out.

As you go on up the line, a person's self-determinism increases. But what changes is the emphasis of his self-determinism, its shift with regard to the environment. In the range from 4.0 to 20.0 it is directed very actively against the environment - that is to say, the material universe, the living organisms around it. An individual is on a full-out attack on life.

But as he gets up above 20.0 he neglects more and more the physical universe, takes on less and less motion and takes on less and less activity, until finally he just sits down, taking on no activity at all.

At the top he is being self-determined in its uttermost, widest, furthest sense. He actually becomes capable of self-determining on enormously broad spheres. He can determine terrific things, but he doesn't want to - which is the hooker.

As we go down the tone scale we find out an individual's ability to control the environment decreases. The ability to control the environment decreases down to about 3.5,' and at this point starts turning around to where it is much more the control of the individual by his environment. He is more and more controlled by the environment until he gets down to about 2.0, and in the bracket from there to here [R&D says 0.12] is stimulus-response. This is the environment controlling the individual to some degree. Something happens in the environment and the individual acts, evidently, without his present-time self-determinism intervening. In other words, he responds automatically. Automatic response sets in. Somebody drops a teacup and he says, "Damn! " There isn't any observable interval of thought in there. He is just a puppet.

When he gets down below 2.0, he and the environment are practically the same thing. As the environment goes, so does he go. Whatever happens in the environment, he reacts to it - no reason at all. The quality of a person's reason at this level is fantastically bad. Very bad. The speed at which he can operate, think, react and so forth is very slow.

It is so common in this society for a person to be running that slow that the person who runs a little bit faster is looked at as abnormal. And why not? The speed of the people who are out driving cars on the street is very, very poor. You are driving cars on the road with people whose reaction time is half a second, three quarters of a second, a second, two seconds. Think of what this means. How far does a car travel going sixty miles an hour in this space of time, going one and two and three [counting at about one number per second - Ed.]?

3.5, the tone scale level of strong interest. 2 0.1, the tone scale level of deepest apathy.

How far does that car travel? A long way! And we have a society of people driving cars at that speed with that reaction time. Everybody else is driving at that speed. so they drive at that speed. That is about all the reason there is to it. But they can't control a car at that speed.

A sixth of a second, in terms of reaction time, is considered to be very good. There is a test for this: You take a dollar bill and let somebody hold it up vertically above your hand, and you hold your fingers apart just below the lower edge of the bill. Then have him drop that dollar bill and try to close your fingers on it the moment he lets go. To catch the upper edge of it is somewhere around a sixth of a second. If you can catch that bill, you have a fifth to a sixth of a second reaction; if you catch the middle of it, you have about an eighth of a second reaction; and if you catch the bottom of it, you have about a tenth of a second reaction - and do you know that you are traveling too slow the whole time? None of those reaction speeds are fast enough to throw a jet plane around with. Yet the boys running these jet planes, most of them, run a sixth or an eighth of a second, something like that.

The specific numbers I am using with regard to reaction time are based upon certain researches, by the way, which I do not trust, so don't take those numbers literally. It is just the theory I am giving you.

& I don't trust these figures. They were done by Cornell I think.

Anyway, down the tone scale in these lower bands, a person is so thoroughly responsive to the material universe that he responds 100 percent! The material universe says this and he responds with that. How dull. These people are pretty easy to control, by the way. The hypnotic band is down at about 0.5 to 1.0. He does a revolt at about 1.0 or 1.1 and he won't be hypnotized, but that is because he is in somebody else's rapport. Somebody else has already done it to him.

Actually, until you get well above 2.0 you don't have a well human being. The person is so consistently driven by psychosomatic illnesses - which he thinks are pains, odds and ends, illnesses of various descriptions - that he is in pretty bad shape in general.

What does this have to do with what a memory is? It has a great deal to do with it.

Here a person has stored and recorded a theta facsimile. That is a very fancy name. Facsimile simply means "something similar to." I'm trying to impress with you that these memories are not the actual thing. These memories are pictures of the actual thing.

Now, down in the lower tone levels, a person records and the universe around him is handling his facsimiles. You get the idea? This is stimulus-response. He sees a black cat and it's bad luck so he wrecks his car. This is just automatic. No thought is involved in it at all.

Somebody says "alligator," and this automatically brings him a memory of alligators or restimulates him in some way. The odd part of it is that the physical-effort facsimiles are the easiest to restimulate in an individual. We say a word to the person and he gets the facsimile immediately.

1.0, the tone scale level of fear.

Up higher, he is operating a little bit better on self-determinism, just a shade better, so that he can select that facsimile. You say "alligator" to him and he can select the facsimile of whether he was at the alligator farm or whether it was an alligator suitcase or whether alligators are something that you chase away with Bromo Seltzer. In other words, he has some choice over the theta facsimiles. But when he gets a tough one - when the universe gets tough for him - the tough facsimiles are stimulus-response.

All I am trying to demonstrate is that down in the lowest bands every memory is handled by the material universe - every one! He sees something in the material universe and he gets the identical memory to it - back and forth. Language is identical to him: all symbols equal all language equal everything. It is a horrible mess. That is automatic response.

But here in the band above 2.0, only the painful ones - the physical-effort ones and so forth - provoke a response.

Now, what is a unit memory? An individual goes out, he sits down in an automobile, he drives off down the road and a "normal" is driving along the other side of the road, so of course he gets hit. He bumps his head on the steering wheel and the bill for repairs is $162, which he has to pay. He goes into court - which is always awfully stimulus-response and so forth - and he has to pay the other driver's damages, too. All this is very painful. It is a package called "Automobile Wreck 16."

He hit his head and that is part of the memory. There is nothing strange about this memory just because he got hit in the head in it; he has recorded it all.

He goes down the road and he passes by an automobile that has been hit. This is a standard American wreck: blood all over the road, bodies littered in the ditch, police cars there, people arguing, sirens going all over the place, broken glass all around - the automobile manufacturer can sell another car. So this fellow looks at this and he drives on down the road; he gets down the road a mile or he gets down the road till the next day, and the first thing you know, he gets a headache. He says, "How could I possibly have a headache? I don't know how I could have a headache. I'm sane. I'm normal. I know what it was! I had fish for dinner last night; I must be allergic to it. That's what it is." That is just about the process of thought that goes on about these memories.

The truth of the matter is that he saw the wreck, the wreck was enough of a punch in the environment to call up to this individual his unit memory of having had a wreck, and part of that unit memory was a headache, so he gets it all back automatically. There is the environment controlling the individual to the extent of bringing up these unit memories.

Let's take somebody else, and this individual is pretty self-determined. But it so happens at one time he was the only survivor of an eighteen-passenger airplane crash. Bodies were littered over the mountainside - standard newspaper story - and he watched several people die in agony, he had a broken leg and his back was pretty well broken. It took them days to get to him and he was finally borne down a mountainside on donkey back. This is, in other words, a unit experience - but a really rough one! Then a close relative gets in an airplane crash, and he gets a backache. He goes to the doctor and the doctor says it is arthritis. There is the unit memory called in.

So, the unit memory moves in on him. What does he do about it? Nothing, because he doesn't even "know" that it is there.

There are ways to handle these unit memories. You can do all sorts of things to them. They are a whole package. You can run out all the perceptions, all the pain, all the physical effort, the weight, everything else - you can run the whole thing. An auditor can take this package, give it to the individual and let him run all the way through it and reexperience it.

What is happening is a very simple thing. You have a theta facsimile which is just, more or less, a light engraving of an incident which nevertheless contains pain and all the rest of it. That is a unit memory. The second that that thing is run into the vibration level of present time - which can be fairly calm sometimes - and it is run over thoroughly, it is just as though present time, with its actuality and reality, were an eraser erasing the traces off the engraving. There is nothing to this. You bring the old theta facsimile up and it just doesn't match present time - you run it through a few times and bong - it washes up. The only unfortunate part about it is that people have thousands of them. So that is too long a process.

Let's take the next way we can handle these: How does a person get it there? The emotional state of the individual himself is the glue by which he can stick together his life span, and which he uses to glue on to one of these facsimiles and hold it there.

There is one other thing intervening in there: the fact that you can also just take the physical effort out of it. You can just work the physical effort out of it and you will knock it to pieces.

This emotional memory is a very interesting one, though. The individual becomes angry and he then has a tendency to inherit, suddenly, theta facsimiles of anger - unit memories of anger. If he is happy, he tends to pick up unit memories of happiness, and so on. In other words, he picks up the memories in response to his present-time emotion.

There is some truth in the fact that if you just sit there and grin like an idiot for a while - "I'm happy (sniff, sniff) I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy" - all of a sudden you will have a lot of happy memories turn on. You are just supplying the emotional glue; you are artificially bringing up this business about happiness, and you make yourself feel happy. You don't just say "I'm happy," you feel happy. And if you feel happy hard enough, you will remember some happy incidents.

Your emotion of happiness probably compares to how happy you could be, by the way, about the same way apathy compares to anger. There is a big bridge between how happy you can be and how happy you are or have been. You can be a lot happier than you ever have been - that is a cinch.

You can get up into such a state that it is wonderful to behold. I was in it for about six months once. I kept trying to explain it to myself. I said, "Let's see, Karl Menninger' says that euphoria is very bad. I must be in a state of euphoria, extreme happiness. The only trouble with it is that I'm writing about ten thousand words a day, I'm selling everything I write, everybody I meet likes me, I'm getting along fine, I figure everything out. If I walk near a piece of machinery and turn the key on it'll start, even though it's been dead for somebody else for a long time. And everybody is very pleased with this, including me, so this can't be euphoria." In other words, it was so far up the line I just distrusted the devil out of it. And I finally distrusted it enough so it went away!

Anyway, in short, what we have here is a glue that we call "emotion." Emotion is the thought response to motion. This is very simple; you shouldn't make it very complicated.

There is an awareness-of-awareness unit of the mind, the command post, the point right now that tells you to sit where you are and so forth. That is your self-determinism.

Then there is the motor switchboard, the endocrine switchboard and so forth, and that is part of your physical being. "I" is not part of your physical being; it is your theta being. "I" translates its orders to the body by calling for an emotion, and the endocrine system then turns on the motor switchboard. This is very, very easily tested and proven.

By the way, you could take a lot of adrenalin and just start shooting a person full of it, and if he were determined to be inactive, it would be no good. Nothing would happen. He has decided not to be active, and you are shooting him with the stuff that calls for physical action, but it isn't relayed through the endocrine system switchboard and it isn't at the command of "I," so you are not going to get action with it. But a person has to be pretty well up the tone scale before he does that.

You take somebody who is way down the tone scale and shoot him with a little bit of adrenalin and he will immediately get active. That is because he is controlled by the environment. You can thus be the environment.

The individual, then, sends out his orders to this emotional endocrine system and he gets action. Action occurs and it will translate back in emotion and "I" can take it or not take it. It doesn't matter one way or the other.

You get a certain amount of emotional response which is mixed up in this action. That is glue. Think of it as glue. It is the magnetic attraction, you might say, by which you can hold on to these theta facsimiles, these memories. You could run the effort out of them and you wouldn't hold on to them anymore. You could take all the perceptions and all the effort out of them and the whole facsimile would just disappear. You don't have to do that. Or you could take the emotion off it and unglue it. If you can find what emotional band it is on, you can just get the person to run that emotion, and the first thing you know, these things will start to peel off. It is quite remarkable .

Or you could also just run thought. But sometimes the preclear is so aberrated that the thought is all mixed up in the emotion, and you have to run the emotion for a little while before the thought starts coming out of it. This thought is self-determinism. It is the original basic orders and evaluation of "I." "I" says, "Be happy," so the fellow tries to be happy. His body then turns on stuff to be happy.

So, we have self-determinism, and then we have the physical body which is acted upon by self-determinism.

Now, the more an individual comes down this tone scale, the more the environment comes in and short-circuits into action. It doesn't consult "I." The body acts, in other words, without orders from "I." This person is the "normal." This is what is known as conditioning. It is all sorts of things. That is not really conditioning, though; conditioning is a little more technical than that, mostly because it doesn't exist. But this is the environment making the individual dance, the environment being the puppet master.

The body is an implement or an instrument. Just look it over: hands, feet, and so on. It is a carbon-oxygen engine, a very interesting, very complex engine. It is set up to run and it keeps on running. But that engine is acted upon by the self-determinism of the individual or by the environment.

Have you ever worked around anybody who, when you picked up a screwdriver or a tool and tried to do something, came along and said "Let me do it," and took the screwdriver out of your hand? Have you ever run into anybody who would do that?

The backseat driver is doing the same thing. He wants the steering wheel. The car runs down the road and he has a lot of facsimiles that have to do with sudden starts and stops; he puts on the brakes but there are no brakes under his feet, and so forth. But this business of taking the tool away from you is not much different than what happens in this aberrated world when a little child comes into it and he starts to use this instrument called a human body. He gets its coordinations going, he finds out how to use it manually, he tries to train it into being, but somebody is always coming along and taking the tool out of his hands: "No, dear, you do it this way. You've done wrong. You should do something else. Why don't you do this? You've got to learn how to handle yourself."

And after he has had this happen to him eight or nine million times - as he arrives at the age of one year - he is fairly well convinced that he isn't going to handle his own body. He is convinced that he can't!

By the time he gets to be five, six, seven - along in that bracket - he has achieved the astounding illusion that he is his body, that he is his own memory of himself - that he is not himself, in other words, but he is just a physical being. And out of all of this aberration, we get the astounding concentration on human structure, and additionally the terrific concentration on the idea that the soul is somehow unknown, indistinct, off in the blue someplace, and will someday go to heaven or something. That is where we get that idea.

The individual is handled, in other words, by things other than himself so much and so often that he gets to be a stimulus-response mechanism and he is at the point where, when the environment does something, his motor switchboards actually respond to that.

Stimulus-response: Something happens in the environment, he responds - not because he elects to respond, but because the environment has actually established a direct connection to his memory banks. Why does he operate this way? Is there anything physical that makes him operate this way? No, there isn't. All that has suffered has been his ability to handle his facsimiles, not his ability to handle the universe. He can remember being handled, one way and another, and these memories of being handled are called up. He gets to a point, finally, where he no longer is able to handle his own memory.

This package called a "unit memory" was at first at his own beck and call. He could remember it or not remember it. It didn't matter how unconscious he was, it didn't matter how dead he was, it didn't matter how big he was or how small he was or anything else, he could handle this memory. He could say "Now, I want to remember ..." and there it would be, or "Now I don't want to remember it" and it would be gone.

A psychosomatic illness is one of these memory units which has come into present time to such a marked degree and is glued so thoroughly in present time that a person pretends that he hasn't got a memory there at all, that he has a physical illness. Isn't it funny that when you empty the effort or the emotion off one of these memories, the person's psychosomatic illness goes away? In other words, it is pain held in present time. It is a theta facsimile of pain. It isn't the actual energy of pain; there is no energy there. It is a picture of the energy of pain, and it is able to come up into present time. The environment will bring it up into present time, and the person says, "Oh, my migraine. Oh, my migraine." He is actually suffering from having been hit in the side of the head with a hammer by his baby brother, or something of the sort; it doesn't matter what it was. It is a unit memory.

You think of a fellow having a circuit; he has a little voice inside of his head that tells him he is doing wrong. He will go ahead and do it but this voice will say, "I know it's wrong. You'd better not do it."

"Well, I guess I might as well do it anyhow, even though it will be wrong."

"Well, you'll regret it if you do" - standard thinking! This argument that goes on is just Mama or Papa or somebody back along the track, and they have said very often this sort of thing, till there is a whole bank of memories of having been cautioned over and over again about this and about that. Of course, he gets these things in a package and that makes up what we call the eccentricity of some individuals - a polite word for being crazy.

Now, these are just facsimiles! There is no real reason why an individual cannot be in present time, in his own form, completely in control of himself, able to dictate to himself anything he wants, able to appreciate or not appreciate the beauties or pains of the world. There is no reason. Past memory is not necessarily the thing, although it appears to be. And a person can be straightened up by processing past memories. What is really wrong is not the individual's inability to handle the physical universe, not the individual's inability to handle the people around him, not the individual's inherent inability to handle himself, but only the individual's inability to handle his own facsimiles! So these come into present time and he is responding to them and so forth. The environment turns them on or turns them off.

How would you like to live in a house where the switchboard was out in the street and every pedestrian that came by punched a new button?