Understanding the Reactive Mind and Its Irrational Behavior

The reactive mind irrationally links past pain to current experiences, hindering logical decision-making.

### The Flaws of the Reactive Mind: Understanding Irrational Behavior and Decision-Making
* 🧠 The analytical mind is likened to a **perfect computer that never makes mistakes**, crucial for survival, but it relies on **accurate data to function properly**.
* 💔 When pain is experienced, the analytical mind shuts down, and the reactive mind takes over, recording experiences in a **less rational manner** known as **engrams**.
* 📽 Engrams capture all perceptions during painful moments, including **sights, sounds, and sensations**, creating a **complete record of the experience**.
* 🍳 An example illustrates how a past experience, such as **getting sick from eating tainted food**, can lead the reactive mind to **irrationally associate all similar situations with that pain**.
* 🔄 The reactive mind cannot differentiate between past and present, leading to **generalized fears**, such as believing **all eggs will cause illness** because of one bad experience.
* 🎺 This irrationality extends to associations formed during painful experiences, where unrelated stimuli, like the **sound of a tuba**, can trigger **nausea** due to past engram connections.
* ⚠ While this reactive behavior served as a **survival mechanism** in lower life forms, it has become **less useful in humans**, often **suppressing rather than aiding survival efforts**.
* 🔍 The reactive mind operates on a **stimulus-response basis**, creating **wild errors** that can hinder **personal growth and decision-making**.

There's an old saying that to err is human, but in fact, that's not true because the part of your mind that analyzes information to make decisions and solve problems is actually incapable of error. Think of your analytical mind as a computing machine, but it's not just any computer, it's a perfect computer. It never makes a mistake. Your very survival depends upon it always being right, but its solutions are only as good as the data that it computes with. When the reactive mind enters hidden irrational information into your calculations, you compute or react in an irrational or

aberrated manner. The word aberration means a departure from rational thought or behavior. Basically, it means to err, to make mistakes. Your analytical mind doesn't know its calculations are being corrupted by this irrational data. In fact, it doesn't even know the data exists.

That's because during those moments in your lives that contain some degree of pain, your analytical mind shuts down in an effort to protect itself, like any sensitive machine would. At that point, your reactive mind immediately takes over and starts recording. This is a cruder, more rugged part of the mind

constructed to withstand the shock of pain, but these incidents aren't memories as we think of them. The experience is recorded in the reactive mind are called engrams. They're like movies, except they contain all your perceptions: sight, sound, smell, taste, and sensation, including everything people are saying around you.

During the incident, engrams are complete recordings down to the last accurate detail of every perception present in a moment of pain and unconsciousness. The pain can be physical pain, like when you're injured, or emotional pain, like the shock you get when you experience a

Loss of consciousness could be total, such as when you're knocked out from an accident or when you have anesthesia. Or it could be times when your awareness is dulled, such as when you're sick, injured, or when your body is poisoned, such as with alcohol or drugs.

Now let's take another look at the example of getting sick from eating tainted food, which acts as a poison to your body. It's an engram. When you later find yourself in a situation that is in some way similar to an engram stored in your

reactive mind, your reactive mind tries to get you to avoid the same painful thing from happening to you again, but it does so in a very crude, irrational way. That's because your reactive mind doesn't think the same way your analytical mind does. Your analytical

mind thinks rationally. It compares things and sees the differences between them. For example, if you were asked to organize these blocks by shape and color, your analytical mind would have no problem. That's because it sees the differences between them. It thinks in differences. This is analytical thought.

Now you know analytically that an egg you eat today is obviously not the same exact egg that made you sick when you ate it three years ago. That's rational thinking. But the reactive mind is so crude it can't differentiate between things. If asked to organize these blocks, they

would think every block is identical to every other block. It thinks anything is equal to anything else. This is called reactive thought. To the reactive mind, if a bad egg once made you very ill, all eggs you eat after that will also make you ill. This is because to the reactive

mind they're all identical it can't tell the difference between the two eggs or between now and then but this goes even further to the reactive mind any piece of information in a specific engram is identical to every other piece of information in the same experience for instance let's say

someone was playing the tuba while you were sick from eating an egg to your reactive mind every egg is identified with every other egg and all eggs are identified with the feeling of being sick to your stomach and feeling sick to your stomach is identified with the

sound of a tuba so later in life if you hear a tuba playing you could start to feel nauseous your analytical mind will rationalize that you feel sick for some other reason this is called justified thought the excuses you make to explain irrational behavior but in fact your

reactive mind acting below your level of awareness is turning on the same pain from the original engram to stupidly warn you to stay away from that tuba because it's identified tubas with getting sick to your stomach in Dianetics this reactive type of thinking

is referred to as anything equals anything equals anything or a equals a equals a for short in lower levels of life this reactive behavior is a survival activity of a sort when a fish is injured his reactive mind records all the perceptions regarding the injury and whenever these later

appear in his environment his mind will make him run away but in a human being this survival mechanism has long outlived its usefulness but it's still there what if it's not merely an egg that you're being irrationally warned against what if it's someone you know

or something you do or something you want to achieve, your reactive mind operates solely on a stimulus-response basis. It's attempting to aid your survival, but it's wild errors are actually just suppressing your efforts to survive.

3-How The Mind Thinks-Using Dianetics: The Modern Science Of Mental Health

Captain Joe

The analytical mind is a perfect computer, incapable of error, but its accuracy depends on the data it receives.

The reactive mind introduces irrational information, leading to errors or aberrations.

During painful experiences, the analytical mind shuts down, and the reactive mind takes over, recording engrams.

Engrams are complete recordings of perceptions during moments of pain and unconsciousness.

Loss of consciousness can be total or partial, occurring during injury, illness, or substance use.

The reactive mind attempts to prevent painful experiences through crude, irrational responses.

The analytical mind differentiates between things, while the reactive mind sees everything as identical.

The reactive mind connects unrelated elements within an engram, leading to irrational associations.

Justified thought is the rationalization of irrational behavior driven by the reactive mind.

Consequences and Implications of Reactive Thinking

In humans, the reactive mind's survival mechanism is outdated but still active.

Irrational warnings from the reactive mind can extend to people, actions, or goals.

The reactive mind's stimulus-response actions hinder survival efforts.