Do you know someone who has never fully recovered from a serious loss in life? Or a traumatic experience? And in your own day to day life, do you sometimes experience self-doubts, negative thoughts, unreasonable fears, upsets or irrational behaviour?
The painful experiences of our past clearly have an effect upon our present behaviour. But to what degree and why?
What causes the mind to depart from rational thought or behaviour?
That is the subject of Dianetics.
Every moment of your life, your mind is recording everything that is happening to you. Every sight, every sound, every taste, smell, pain, emotion, touch – everything.
These recordings form what is called the “time track”: a consecutive recording of all the experiences accumulated throughout your existence. Your mind uses this information to make decisions and solve problems relating to your survival. The better its decisions, the better you survive.
Most of this data is stored in your Analytical Mind, that part of your mind that thinks, remembers and calculates. But some of your experiences are not recording in those analytical memory banks.
It is a discovery of Dianetics that all of your painful experiences are stored in a previously unknown part of the mind. It is called the Reactive Mind and it throws those experiences back at you in an irrational attempt to get you to avoid the same painful thing from happening to you again.
Here is a simple and common example:
At some point, you’ve probably gotten sick from eating tainted food. Later in life, if you see or smell or possibly even think about that particular food again, you start to feel a little nauseas.
Now, you know that, logically, the mere sight or smell or thought of a food can’t physically make your body ill because you haven’t actually eaten it again and yet you’re experiencing the same sick feeling you had before.
This is your Reactive Mind making you re-experience the same perceptions it recorded in that earlier incident in a crude attempt to protect you from what it believes is a dangerous situation.
It reacts solely on a stimulus-response basis and below your awareness.
The painful experiences hidden in your Reactive Mind are the cause of your fears, insecurities, negative thoughts, unwanted emotions and irrational behaviour.
You have been accumulating these deeply buried experiences throughout your existence. In fact, the most damaging among them occurred before you were born.
What would life be like if the pain you’ve experienced no longer affected your abilities, emotions and behaviour?
You would think and behave rationally, making the best possible decisions relating to your survival. You would be able to use your imagination and creativity to the fullest. You would be confident, more intelligent and productive, and happier. You would be yourself: free to enjoy life and reach your full potential. In short, your mind would be clear. That is the goal of Dianetics.
People achieve this state every day. And so can you.