Every moment of your life, your mind is recording everything that’s 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 record 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 recorded into 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’s 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.
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 life 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.
Your analytical mind thinks rationally. It compares things and sees the differences between them.
For example, if you were asked to organize 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.
