chapter 3 (save power, download the pdf file for your ebook reader)
An experiment that can be repeated at very little expense, even by a few psychology students, and seems to be open to only one interpretation: that the mind is composed of a sensitivity to others (including other species) plus an aspect separate from this sensitivity which is offended by overt manifestations of this sensitive aspect.
There are three emotional responses which are easy to induce in a person with very little planning and cooperation: panic, fear or embarrassment. These experiments require no actual inhumane treatment of the subject as is the case of “Little Albert”, where stress was repeatedly induced and the social services of our time might have something to say about it. We have the best observable effect using panic, making the subject jump like a rocketing pheasant, because there is no testimony of the subject required to tell if he has the feeling. Children are more inclined to be truthful, which makes them better subjects for the other two feelings, or feelings requiring more elaborate preparations.
When we use a dog and its owner we often get the scolding effect. People ordinarily hesitate to scold another person’s dog, even if they themselves do own dogs. When using subjects who don’t know the dogs, we have first introduced them and made sure they trust the dogs.
The Dog Experiment: A volunteer who hasn’t been taking our course, has no notion of its tenants, is exposed to a loud enough noise coming from outside his peripheral vision to make him jump like a rocketing pheasant, and is then driven to a place over four times more distant from the noise than the distance the noise was audible to the human ear (four times further is approximately how far canine ears can hear something), and once there he is given a cocktail-glass full of water to carry to a meeting with his own dog. When he approaches the dog he jumps and spills most of the water. He then scolds the dog and makes an angry face.
We repeat this with the same subject and the same dog over and over, and each time the subject finds the dog at fault.
We switch tactics from panic to embarrassment, wetting the subjects pants by pouring water in his lap while he’s sitting in the car, and then making him walk a distance in public. He admits to the embarrassment while we are escorting him through the crowd. We take him to the dog, having no way to test for this emotion on hand, and again he scolds the dog. We did this twice with the same result, the third time he refused to leave the car with his lap wet.
The conscious is a mind-set. In this case the mind-set is leading to the action: scold the dog. What is the mind-set? We asked the subject of these experiments to explain what had happened. He says that there is an instinct in man that still gets nervous around tame predators, but that his own dog should show its master enough respect that this instinct isn’t aroused.
We provided the subject with an alternate explanation: that the dog finds out how he has felt in the recent past, and when it finds out this same feeling recurs in the person, with the cooperation of the person’s mind. It is essential to the dog’s discovery that the feeling recurs, because it lives in the present and needs the real thing right then and there. It is a matter of relationship working, rather than of the individual working, towards an understanding, and we unconsciously cooperate just as we would have before our species learned language.
The subject refutes the explanation, and when tested he fails to repeat the explanation we have supplied, or even to hint at having heard it and read it. This he does three times, coming up with the same old explanation of his own in different wordings, such as: “Sometimes a dog-owner forgets he is in control of the dog and has to reassert his status.”
The conscious is very certain that it has a grip on the nature of reality, and in this certainty it can’t allow that conscious is a subjugation of everything it contains as memory, knowledge and experience. The conscious is a tamed mind, and it in return tames everything it encounters. There are no wild emotions in its ken. It has put a tether on emotions, making them a personal property of the thought-process, and nothing will allow the conscious to release them. The conscious is bound to its explanations, its synthetic limitations of what is possible.
Consider a lie. Is it possible it is a lie when we have believed it? A lie never substitutes for a more complex person, just for a more admirable one, according to some custom. A soldier who kills many, for example, may be more admirable than a soldier who kills none, by one custom, and less admirable by another. So a soldier may lie about his kills, at one time exaggerating his kills and at another time denying them. But this number only works to supply a story, and no story has ever supplied us with a more profound human being. Even the best Buddha stories and Jesus stories only give us comic book characters, and not more profoundly complex men. And we are all far more complex than the images our lies arouse in the listener; we are actually profoundly complex. We are so complex our own conscious activity can’t get close to ourselves, hence an unconsciousand (and a subconscious, the subconscious being something we can’t find even if our attention is directed to its activities; which is presumed to be a static state, but we may find that untrue, that the more of the unconscious we expose the closer the mind gets to the subconscious).
We are obviously trying here to associate, on the one hand, how the owner of the dog explained his reaction to the dog’s discovery of his emotions; and on the other hand, what lies are in general. A lie can only be believed if we use a simple version of our minds, which makes a simple version of everything as the context of the lies. There is no mere belief in the lie. The world has to fit the lie. The conscious itself can not exist if the world and the lie do not complement each other.
Let’s be certain we are looking at this phenomenon. Someone lies to you, and you believe the lie. Why do you, when this image of the person is so simple? Because the world in the memory is equally simple! The memory is a repository of lies. When someone lies to you he is being normal, and you add this to all the experience of normality. Only children and schizophrenics are not normal, not fit to collect as social prospects in memory.
Things collect in the memory because the mind can’t get over them at the moment, and we taint this function by adding facts to it, confusing its function, so that this situation remains static: we never intend to get over what’s collecting in the memory because there is something factual in it as well. Any completely understood event becomes a forgotten past, operating as intelligence spontaneously rather than by reasserting itself as the past. The memory is comparative when there is an observer of it, which facts suggest there must be, while the mind itself (not including memory under an observer’s control) is moving towards the presently undiscovered and has no place for the past to assert itself as recollection by will.
The owner of this dog has no way of knowing that he is as mistaken when he reports what he assumes to be true about his relationship with the dog’s natural sensibilities as when he is lying, that his truths and his lies are built from the same unreliable structural materials: experience which can be observed at will. He knows he is telling the truth, which means he knows his lies resemble the truth in every detail. There is no way for him to find out that his truth is a defamation of reality. And hence no way for him to know how far off the mark his lies are, how little they resemble reality.
The mind of the dog and the mind of the person become one mind as they meet. Neither is an individual. Mind has no individuality, which is what love means. If we love others we don’t need to not-be-them, and love is the evolving state. If the dog is asking a question the person is asking the question also; it is not one asking and the other telling. That is what makes it an infallible or naturally occurring question, a question that is worth asking because it will be answered. Not a wasted effort to find out, not trial and error inquiry. The dog asks the question as a hobbyist-predator, a predator by nature who never needs to hunt, and the person admits that the dog has a predator-question and is entitled to it. The person agrees that people have to be purged of the inferior specimens by someone with a thirst for blood and wants to be put to “the question”. In the mind it is better to be killed than to go on being inferior, so it is agreeable that there are killers. Killer and browser meet and it is what they are there to be doing, to put “the question”.
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