What is the Mind?
A
man is composed of three parts: A body,
a mind and the individual himself - the
spiritual being or thetan (from the Greek
letter theta, the traditional symbol for
thought for life).
The mind directs the individual in the efforts of survival and bases its operations upon the information that it receives or records. The mind records data using what are called mental image pictures.
Such pictures are actually three-dimensional, containing colour, sound and smell, as well as other perceptions. They also include the conclusions or speculations of the individual. Mental image pictures are continuously made by the mind, moment by moment. One can, for instance, examine the picture of what he had for breakfast this morning by recalling breakfast; and similarly recover a picture of an event which occurred last week by recalling it; or even recall something which happened a much longer time ago.
Mental image pictures are actually composed of energy. They have mass, they exist in space, and they follow some very, very definite routines of behaviour, the most interesting of which is the fact that they appear when somebody thinks of something. If a person thinks of a certain dog, he gets a picture of that dog.
The mind uses these pictures to make decisions that promote survival.
The
Reactive Mind
L. Ron Hubbard discovered that the mind has two very distinct parts. One of these - that part which one consciously uses and is aware of - is called the analytical mind. It is the portion of the mind which thinks, observes data, remembers it and resolves problems. It has standard memory banks which contain mental image pictures, and uses the data in these banks to make decisions that promote survival. However, two things appear to be - but are not - recorded in the standard banks: painful emotion and physical pain. In moments of intense pain, the action of the analytical mind is suspended and the second part of the mind, the reactive mind, takes over.
When a person is "unconscious", the reactive mind exactly records all the perceptions of that incident, including what happens or is said around the person. It also records all pain and stores this mental image picture in its own banks, unavailable to the individual conscious recall and not under his direct control. Though it may appear that a person knocked out in an accident is unconscious and unaware of happenings around him, his reactive mind is actually industriously recording everything for future use.
The problem with the reactive mind is that it "thinks" in identities, one thing identical to another. The equation is A=A=A=A=A. Every single perception equals every other perception.
The reactive mind is not an aid to a person's survival for the excellent reason that though it is sturdy enough to hold up during pain and "unconsciousness," it is not very intelligent. It attempts to "prevent a person from getting himself into danger", by enforcing engram content, it can cause unevaluated, unknowing and unwanted fears, emotions, pains and psychosomatic illnesses that one would be much better off without.
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The effects of drugs can include:
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Why do people take drugs?
1. One originally turns to drugs for a reason—some physical suffering or hopelessness. The problem is thus essentially spiritual.
2. The user was suffering and drugs became the solution for unwanted feelings or conditions.
3. Perceptions and mental recordings of experience while on drugs, are inaccurate, to say the least—a combination of memory, imagination and the actual event of the time. Consequently the user’s memory of past experience is tangled up with present time experience.
Drug use, even medical or recreational usage, tends to foster a severe disassociation from reality. The user is also routinely out of communication or out of touch, and otherwise all but dysfunctional. Then, too, and with some emphasis, L. Ron Hubbard found that drug users were not wholly "tracking" with the real time events and were not perceiving what others perceive; for having sought escape from a seemingly unbearable present, he finds himself fixed in an illusory past.
4. In essence, then, the mental pictures are scrambled in his mind to one degree or another. Thus, his memory and his ability to think are both seriously impaired.
Quite in addition to what drugs wreak in purely physical terms, the user retains a consecutive record of all drug experience in the form of mental image pictures. These pictures are literally three dimensional recordings of perceptual experience including emotions, speculations and conclusions. Although frequently beyond volitional control, the recording of the drug experience contains actual energy or mental charge, and may exert considerable influence upon intellectual capacity, behavior and bodily functions. Moreover—and this is unique to the drug case—the user retains mental image pictures of hallucinatory experience—some of it quite gruesome and impacting upon the thinking in ways that are both insidious and horrifying.
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"I
have even established that there
is such a thing as a drug personality.
It is artificial and is created
by drugs. Drugs can apparently
change the attitude of a person
from his original personality to
one secretly harboring hostilities
and hatred he does not permit to
show on the surface. While this
may not hold true in all cases,
it does establish a link between
drugs and increasing difficulties
with crime, production and the
modern breakdown of social and
industrial culture. " |
Long Term Personality change
Let us say an individual took LSD one day while at a fairground with some friends, and the day's experiences included feeling nauseated and dizzy, getting into an argument with a friend, feeling an emotion of sadness, and later feeling very tired. He would have mental image pictures of that entire incident.
At a later time if this person's environment were to contain enough similarities to the elements in the past incident, he may experience a reactivation of that incident. As a result he could feel nauseated, dizzy, sad and very tired - all for no apparent reason. This is known as restimulation: the reactivation of a past memory due to similar circumstances in the present approximating circumstances of the past.
When a person uses a drug such as marijuana, peyote, opium, morphine or heroin, mental image pictures of past times can "turn on" or restimulate below the individual's conscious awareness, causing him to perceive something different than what is actually going on.
Thus, right there before your eyes, apparently in the same room as you are, doing the same things, the drug-taker is really only partially there and partially in some past events.
He seems to be there. Really he isn't "tracking" fully with present time.
What is going on to a rational observation is not what is going on to him.
Thus, he does not understand statements made by another but tries to fit them into his composite reality, meaning a reality made up of different components. In order to fit them in, he has to alter them.
For example, a drug user may be sure he is helping one repair a floor that needs fixing, but in fact he is hindering the actual operation in progress which consists of cleaning the floor. So when he "helps one" mop the floor, a request to "give me the mop" has to be reinterpreted as "hand me the hammer." But the mop handle is longer than a hammer handle so the bucket gets upset.
This can be slight, wherein the person is seen to make occasional mistakes. It can be as serious as total insanity where the events apparent to him are completely different than those apparent to anyone else. And it can be all grades in between.
It is not that he doesn't know what is going on. It is that he perceives something else going on instead of the present sequence of events.
Thus, others appear to him to be stupid or unreasonable or insane. As they don't agree in their actions and orders with what he plainly sees, "they" aren't sensible. Example: A group is moving furniture. To all but one they are simply moving furniture. This one perceives himself to be "moving geometric shapes into a cloud." Thus, this one "makes mistakes." As the group doesn't see inside him and only sees another like themselves, they can't figure out why he "balls things up so."
Such persons as drug-takers and the insane are thus slightly or wholly on an apparently different time track of "present time" events.
A drug may be taken to drive a person out of an unbearable present time or out of consciousness altogether.
In some persons they do not afterwards return wholly to present time.
The drug-taker and the insane alike have not recovered present time, to a greater or lesser degree. Thus they think they are running on a different time track than they are.
These are the underlying facts in odd human behavior.
As what is going on according to the perception and subjective reality of such a person is varied in greater or lesser degree from the objective reality of others, such a person disturbs the environment and disrupts the smooth running of any group - from family to business to nation.
We have all known such a person, so it is not uncommon in the current civilization. The sudden remark which makes no sense, totally out of context with what is being spoken about; the blank stare when given an order or remark - behind these lies a whole imaginary world which is jarred by our attempts to get something done in present time.
The repercussions of drugs then, go far beyond their immediate effects and often influence many others besides the user. The consequences can be very harmful. This is true not only of illegal street drugs but also of medical drugs that are supposed to help people.
ne has a choice between being dead with drugs or
being alive without them. Drugs rob life of the
sensations and joys which are the only reasons
for living anyhow. - L. Ron Hubbard
The Reason Behind The Drug Problem
People have used drugs for as long as they have tried to ease pain and avoid problems. Since the early 1960s, however, drugs have been in very widespread use. Before that time they were rare. A worldwide spread of drugs occurred during that decade, and a large percentage of people became drug-takers.
By drugs (to mention a few) are meant tranquillizers, opium, cocaine, marijuana, peyote, amphetamines and the psychiatrist's gifts to man, LSD and angel dust, which are the worst. Any medical drugs are included. Drugs are drugs. There are thousands of trade names and slang terms for these drugs. Alcohol is also classified as a drug.
Drugs are supposed to do wonderful things but all they really do is ruin the person.
Drug problems do not end when a person stops taking drugs. The accumulated effects of drug-taking can leave one severely impaired, both physically and mentally. Even someone off drugs for years still has "blank periods." Drugs can injure a person's ability to concentrate, to work, to learn - in short, they can shatter a life.
Yet though the dangers and liabilities of drugs are blatantly obvious and increasingly well documented, people continue to take them.
Why?
When a person is depressed or in pain, and where he finds no physical relief from treatment, he will eventually discover for himself that drugs remove his symptoms.
This is also true for pains which are "psychosomatic." The term "psychosomatic" means the mind making the body ill or illnesses caused through the mind. "Psycho" refers to "mind" and "soma" refers to "body."
In almost all cases of psychosomatic pain, illness or discomfort the person has sought some cure for the upset.
When he at last finds that only drugs give him relief, he will surrender to them and become dependent upon them, often to the point of addiction.
Years before, had there been any other way out, most people would have taken it. But when they are told there is no cure, that their pains are "imaginary," life tends to become insupportable. They then can become chronic drug-takers and are in danger of addiction.
The time required to make an addict varies, of course. The complaint itself may only be "sadness" or "weariness." The ability to face life, in any case, is reduced.
Any substance that brings relief or makes life less a burden physically or mentally will then be welcome.
In an unsettled and insecure environment, psychosomatic illness is very widespread.
So before any government strikes too heavily at spreading
drug use, it should recognize that it is a symptom
of failed psychotherapy. The social scientist, the
psychologist and psychiatrist and health ministers
have failed to handle spreading psychosomatic illness.
It is too easy to blame the drug problem on "social unrest" or the "pace of modern society."
The hard, solid fact is that until now there has been no effective psychotherapy in broad practice. The result is drug-dependent population.
Drug users have been found to have begun taking drugs because of physical suffering or hopelessness.
The user, driven by pain and environmental hopelessness, continues to take drugs. Though he doesn't want to be an addict, he doesn't feel that there is any other way out.
However, with proper treatment, drug dependency can be fully handled.
As soon as he can feel healthier and more competent mentally and physically without drugs than he does on drug, a person ceases to require drugs.
Drugs addiction has been shrugged off by psychiatry as "unimportant" and the social problem of drug-taking has received no attention from psychiatrists - rather the contrary, since they themselves introduced and popularised LSD. And many of them are pushers.
Government agencies have failed markedly to halt the increase in drug-taking and there has been no real or widespread cure.
The liability of the drug user, even after he has ceased to use drugs, is that he "goes blank" at unexpected times, has periods of irresponsibility and tends to sicken easily.