TIME, SPACE, ENERGY and LIFE have a single denominator in common. As an analogy it could be considered that TIME, SPACE, ENERGY and LIFE began at some point of origin and were commanded to continue to some nearly infinite destination. They were told nothing but WHAT to do. They obey a single order and that order is “SURVIVE!”
THE DYNAMIC PRINCIPLE OF EXISTENCE IS SURVIVAL The goal of life can be considered to be infinite survival. Man, as a life form, can be demonstrated to obey in all his actions and purposes the one command: “SURVIVE!”
It is not a new thought that Man is surviving. It is a new thought that Man is motivated only by survival.
That his single goal is survival does not mean that he is the optimum survival mechanism which life has attained or will develop. The goal of the dinosaur was also survival and the dinosaur isn’t extant any more.
Obedience to this command, “SURVIVE!” does not mean that every attempt to obey is uniformly successful. Changing environment, mutation, and many other things militate against any one organism attaining infallible survival techniques or form.
Life forms change and die as new life forms develop just as surely as one life organism, lacking immortality in itself, creates other life organisms, then dies as itself. An excellent method, should one wish to cause life to survive over a very long period, would be to establish means by which it could assume many forms, and death itself would be necessary in order to facilitate the survival of the life force itself, since only death and decay could clear away older forms when new changes in the environment necessitated new forms. Life, as a force, existing over a nearly infinite period, would need a cyclic aspect in its unit organisms and forms.
What would be the optimum survival characteristics of various life forms? They would have to have various fundamental characteristics, differing from one species to the next just as one environment differs from the next.
This is important, since it has been but poorly considered in the past that a set of survival characteristics in one species would not be survival characteristics in another.
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The methods of survival can be summed under the headings of food, protection (defensive and offensive) and procreation. There are no existing life forms which lack solutions to these problems. Every life form errs one way or another, by holding a characteristic too long or developing characteristics which may lead to its extinction. But the developments which bring about successfulness of form are far more striking than their errors.
The naturalist and biologist are continually resolving the characteristics of this or that life form by discovering that need rather than whim govern such developments. The hinges of the clam shell, the awesome face on the wing of the butterfly, have survival value.
Once survival was isolated as the only dynamic of a life form which would explain all its activities, it was necessary to study further the action of survival. In order to establish nomenclature in dianetics which would not be too complex for the purpose, words normally considered as adjectives or verbs have occasionally been pressed into service as nouns. This has been done on the valid principle that existing terminology, meaning so many different things, could not be used by dianetics without making it necessary to explain away an old meaning to bring forth a new. To remove the step of explaining the old meaning and saying then that one doesn’t mean that, thus entangling our communications inextricably, and to obviate the ancient custom of compounding ponderous and thundering syllables from the Greek and Roman tongues, this principle and some others have been adopted for nomenclature. Dynamic is here used as a noun and will so continue to be used throughout this volume. Somatic, perceptic and some others will be noted, defined when used. It was discovered that when one considered pain and pleasure, he had at hand all the necessary ingredients with which to formulate the action life takes in its effort to survive.
As will be seen in the accompanying graph, a spectrum of life has been conceived to span from the zero of death or extinction toward the infinity of potential immortality. This spectrum was considered to contain an infinity of lines, extending ladderlike toward the potential of immortality. Each line as the ladder mounted was spaced a little wider than the last, in a geometric progression.
The thrust of survival is away from death and toward immortality. The ultimate pain could be conceived as existing just before death and the ultimate pleasure could be conceived as immortality.
Immortality could be said to have an attractive type of force and death a repelling force in the consideration of the unit organism or the species. But as survival rises higher and higher toward immortality wider and wider spaces are encountered until the gaps are finitely impossible to bridge. The urge is away from death, which has a repelling force, and toward immortality, which has an attracting force; the attracting force is pleasure, the repelling force is pain.
For the individual, the length of the arrow could be considered to be at a high potential within the fourth zone. Here the survival potential would be excellent and the individual would enjoy existence.
From left to right could be graphed the years.
The urge toward pleasure is dynamic. Pleasure is the reward; and the seeking of the reward -- survival goals -- would be a pleasurable act. And to ensure that survival is accomplished under the mandate, SURVIVE!, it seems to have been provided that reduction from a high potential would bring pain.
Pain is provided to repel the individual from death, pleasure is provided to call him toward optimum life. The search for and the attainment of pleasure is not less valid in survival than the avoidance of pain. In fact, on some observed evidence, pleasure seems to have a much greater value in the cosmic scheme than pain.
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Now it would be well to define what is meant by pleasure, aside from its connection with immortality. The dictionary states that pleasure is “gratification; agreeable emotions, mental or physical; transient enjoyment; opposed to pain.” Pleasure can be found in so many things and activities that a catalogue of all the things and activities Man has, does and may consider pleasurable alone could round out the definition.
And what do we mean by pain? The dictionary states: “physical or mental suffering; penalty.”
These two definitions, in passing, are demonstrative of an intuitive type of thought which runs through the language. Once one has a thing which leads to the resolution of hitherto unsolved problems, even the dictionaries are found to have “always known it.”
If we wished to make this graph for a life-form cycle, it would be identical except that the value of the years would be increased to measure eons. For there is no difference, it seems, except magnitude, in the scope of the individual and the scope of the species. This inference could be drawn even without such remarkable evidence as the fact that a human being, growing from zygote to adult, evolutes through all the forms which the whole species is supposed to have evolved through.
Now there is more in this graph than has been remarked as yet. The physical and mental state of the individual varies from hour to hour, day to day, year to year. Therefore the level of survival would form either a daily curve or the curve of a life on a measure of hourly or yearly position in the zones. And there would be two curves made possible by this, the physical curve and the mental curve. When we get toward the back of the book the relationships between these two curves will be found vital and it will also be seen that, ordinarily, a sag in the mental curve will precede a sag in the physical curve.
The zones, then, can apply to two things: the physical being and the mental being.
Therefore these four zones can be called zones of the states of being. If a person is happy mentally, the survival level can be placed in Zone 4. If the person is extremely ill physically, he might be plotted, on estimation of his illness, in Zone 1 or close to death.
Very unprecise but nevertheless descriptive names have been assigned to these zones.
Zone 3 is one of general happiness and well-being. Zone 2 is a level of b
earable existence.
Zone 1 is one of anger. Zone 0 is the zone of apathy. These zones can be used as a tone scale by which a state of mind can be graded. Just above death, which is 0, would be the lowest mental apathy or lowest level of physical life, 0.1. A Tone 1, where the body is fighting physical pain or illness or where the being is fighting in anger, could be graded from 1.0, which would be resentment or hostility, through Tone 1.5, which would be a screaming rage, to a 1.9 which would be merely a quarrelsome inclination. From Tone 2.0 to Tone 3.0 there would be an increasing interest in existence, and so forth.
It so happens that the state of physical being or mental being does not long remain static. Therefore, there are various fluctuations. In the course of a single day an aberree may run from 0.5 to 3.5, up and down, as a mental being. An accident or illness could cause a similar fluctuation in a day.
These are, then, figures which can be assigned to four things: the mental state on an acute basis and the mental state on a general, average basis, and the physical being on an acute basis and the physical being on a general basis. In dianetics we do not much employ the physical tone scale. The mental tone scale, however, is of vast and vital importance!
These values of happiness, bearable existence, anger and apathy are not arbitrary values. They are deduced from observation of the behavior of emotional states. A clear is usually found varying around Tone 4, plus or minus in an average day. He is a general Tone 4, which is one of the inherent conditions of being clear. A norm in current society, at a wild guess, is probably around a general Tone 2.8.
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In this descriptive graph, which is two-dimensional, the vital data for the solution of the problem of the life dynamic are workably combined. The horizontal lines are in terms of geometric progression beginning with the zero line immediately above death. There are ten lines for each zone and each zone denotes a mental or physical state of being, as noted.
Geometric progression, so used, leaves ever increasing spaces between the lines. The width of this space is the survival potential existing at the moment the top point of the survival dynamic arrow is within that space. The further away from death the top point of the survival dynamic arrow is, the better chance the individual has of survival. Geometric progression reaches up toward the impossible of infinity and cannot, of course, reach infinity. The organism is surviving through time from left to right. Survival optimum -- immortality -- lies in terms of time to the right. Potential only is measured vertically.
The survival dynamic actually resides within the organism as inherited from the species. The organism is part of the species as a railroad tie might be said to be part of a railroad as seen by an observer on a train, the observer being always in Now -- although this analogy is not perhaps the best.
Within itself the organism possesses a repulsive force toward pain sources. The source of the pain is not a driving force any more than the thorn bush which tears the hand was a driving force; the organism repulses the potential pain of a thorn.
At the same time the organism has at work a force which attracts it to the sources of pleasure. Pleasure does not magnetize the organism into drawing near. It is the organism which possesses the attraction force.
It is inherent.
The repulsion of pain sources adds to the attraction for pleasure sources to operate as a combined thrust away from death and toward immortality. The thrust away from death is no more powerful than the thrust toward immortality. In other words, in terms of the survival dynamic, pleasure has as much validity as pain.
It should not be read here that survival is always a matter of keeping an eye on the future. Contemplation of pleasure, pure enjoyment, contemplation of past pleasures, all combine into harmonies which, while they operate automatically as a rise toward the survival potential, by their action within the organism physically, do not demand the future as an active portion of the mental computation in such contemplation.
A pleasure which reacts to injure the body physically, as in the case of debauchery, discovers at work a ratio between the physical effect (which is depressed toward pain) and the mental effect of experienced pleasure. There is a consequent lowering of the survival dynamic.
Averaging out, the future possibility of strain because of the act, added to the state of being at the moment the debauchery was experienced, again depresses the survival dynamic. Because of this, various kinds of debauchery have been in indifferent odor with Man throughout his history. This is the equation of “immoral pleasures.” And any action which has brought about survival suppression or which can bring it about, when pursued as a pleasure, has been denounced at some time or another in Man’s history. Immorality is originally hung as a label upon some act or class of actions because they depress the level of the survival dynamic.
Future enforcement of moral stigma may depend largely upon prejudice and aberration and there is, consequently, a continuous quarrel over what is moral and what is immoral.
Because certain things practiced as pleasures are actually pains -- and how easy it will be to trace out why when you’ve finished this volume -- and because of the moral equation as above, pleasure itself, in any aberrated society can become decried. A certain kind of thinking, of which more later, permits poor differentiation between one object and another. Confusing a dishonest politician with all politicians would be an example of this. In ancient times the Roman was fond of his pleasures and some of the things he called pleasure were a trifle strenuous on other species such as Christians. When the Christian overthrew the pagan state, 25
the ancient order of Rome was in a villain’s role. Anything, therefore, which was Roman was villainous. This went to such remarkable lengths that the Roman love of bathing made bathing so immoral that Europe went unwashed for some fifteen hundred years. The Roman had become a pain source so general that everything Roman was evil and it stayed evil long after Roman paganism perished. Immorality, in such a fashion, tends to become an involved subject. In this case it became so involved that pleasure itself was stigmatized.
When half the survival potential is struck from the list of lawful things, there is a considerable reduction in survival indeed. Considering this graph on a racial scale, the reduction of survival potential by one-half would forecast that direful things lay in wait for the race.
Actually, because Man is after all Man, no set of laws, however enforced, can completely wipe away the attraction of pleasure. But in this case enough was removed and banned to occasion precisely what happened: the Dark Ages and the recession of society.
Society brightened only in those periods such as the Renaissance, in which pleasure became less unlawful.
When a race or an individual drops into the second zone, as marked on the chart, and the general tone ranges from the first zone barely into the third, a condition of insanity ensues.
Insanity is irrationality. It is also a state in which non-survival has been so closely approached continually that the race or the organism engages in all manner of wild solutions.
In further interpretation of this descriptic graph there is the matter of the survival suppressor. This, it will be seen, is a thrust downward out of potential immortality at the race or organism represented as the survival dynamic. The survival suppressor is the combined and variable threats to the survival of the race or organism. These threats come from other species, from time, from other energies. These are also engaged in the contest of survival to potential immortality in terms of their own species or identities. Thus there is a conflict involved. Every other form of life or energy could be plotted in a descriptic as the survival dynamic. If we were to use a duck’s survival dynamic in a descriptic graph, we would see the duck seeking a high survival level and Man would be a part of the duck’s suppressor.
The balance and nature of things do not permit the infinity of the goal of immortality to be reached. In fluctuating balance and in almost unlimited complexity, life and energies ebb and flood, out of the nebulous, into forms and,
through decay, into the nebulous once more.*
Many equations could be drawn concerning this, but it is outside the sphere of our present interest.
In terms of the zones of the descriptic it is of relative concern what the extent of the force of the suppressor is against the survival dynamic. The dynamic is inherent in individuals, groups and races, evolved to resist the suppressor through the eons. In the case of Man, he carries with him another level of offensive and defensive techniques, his cultures. His primary technology of survival is mental activity governing physical action in the sentient echelon. But every life form has its own technology, formed to resolve the problems of food, protection and procreation. The degree of workability of the technology any life form develops (armor or brains, fleetness of foot or deceptive form) is a direct index of the survival potential, the relative immortality, of that form. There have been vast upsets in the past; Man, when he developed into the world’s most dangerous animal (he can and does kill or enslave any life form, doesn’t he?) overloaded the suppressor on many other life forms and they dwindled in number or vanished.
A great climatic change, such as the one which packed so many mammoths in Siberian ice, may overload the suppressor on a life form. A long drought in the American southwest in not too ancient times wiped out the better part of an Indian civilization.
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A cataclysm such as an explosion of the core of the Earth, if that were possible, or the atom bomb or the sudden cessation of burning on the Sun would wipe out all life forms on Earth.
And a life form can even overload the suppressor on itself. A dinosaur destroys all his food and so destroys the dinosaur. A bubonic plague bacillus attacks its hosts with such thorough appetite that the whole generation of pasteurella pestis vanishes. Such things are not intended by the suicide to be suicide; the life form has run up against an equation which has an unknown variable, and the unknown variable unfortunately contained enough value to overload the suppressor. This is the “didn’t know the gun was loaded” equation.
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health Page 5