I don't even want to cut down that branch,
I mean, that other thing unless we can move it somewhere,
but we are going to cut that branch down, you know, I...
Jacque and Roxanne appear to be resting up
and recovering from about 7 months of lecturing abroad.
Sorry to the people in Canada for the last few lectures that had to be canceled.
Also, anybody out there that is able to do transcribing
for some of the talks if you could contact me,
we'd be very grateful for that, if you could send me an email.
This talk, Jacque gave August 12, 2010,
and I'll be uploading it over the next few days in parts.
We are talking about investigating the nature of human behavior.
I think that what might help,
is if you go back in time and take some primitive people.
When I say primitive, I mean like outlying districts,
headhunters of the Amazon.
If you open a watch and show them the back mechanism,
they can't say how complex, how beautifully machined [it is].
They can't do that, you understand why? Anybody got a problem with that?
- Hold on, this video is not on.
It's on 'camera'. - Yes, press record.
- Yes, I thought you had done that. Sorry, yes, okay, go ahead Jacque.
- You've got to listen to every word because
they can't do it.
Now, if a psychologist wants to know how the brain works,
(say a neurologist) what he does is have you move your fingers,
and [he] picks up what area of the brain is active. Do you understand?
Then thinking, solving problems,
so they can map out what area becomes active.
That's all they can do.
They can't tell you whether it's right, wrong, good or bad.
They can map out areas of the brain by hitting your knee and getting,
picking up electrical signals from different parts of the brain.
You can map out the brain, but that doesn't tell you how the brain works.
Do you understand that up to now? Okay.
There are many people who try to study the mind.
You can't study the mind.
It's like taking primitive technology,
way back a hundred years ago,
giving them a transistor, saying 'what is it?'
They can't say what it is. They don't know what a transistor is.
They don't know what a capacitor is.
They don't know what a vacuum tube is.
All they can do is cut it. Now if you bring a chemist in,
he can tell you what comprises a transistor:
certain amount of magnesium, silicone, you know what I mean?
But he can't tell you what it is. Is that real clear?
Studying the brain does not tell you anything about it.
You have to study the brain's reaction in relation to the environment.
The brain is a responding mechanism.
When you shine a bright light in the eye it responds.
You can say this is how much of a response,
how little a response, but you can't tell what it is.
Studying the brain gives you nothing,
unless you study it in relationship to the environment.
A bird with wings can't fly where there is no air,
and will stop flying if you can put an oxygen mask on the bird,
and he will flap his wings and he won't get off the ground.
He won't even try to fly after a while.
Only with air there will he move.
Do you understand?
Now if you beat down one wing with more pressure,
you turn the wing into the wind, and beat down, he will bank.
A bird does not know how to fly instinctively.
He beats his wings different ways, and if it gets him
where he wants to go, by turning down, he moves forward.
If he turns it this way he stops in midair, if he's a hummingbird.
So, the bird responds.
To study the bird, you have to study the environment the bird lives in.
Do you understand that? There's no way you can dissect the brain
and say "This is what the man is like",
except in context of the environment.
Is that real clear?
If I want to study human behavior, what I'm really studying
is the reactions of human beings in a given environment.
I can't study human behavior. I can study their reactions.
When something is hot, they move away from it.
When it's cold, they might move toward it. It all depends.
If a man goes down to a river and sees a fish,
and if he reaches for it, he usually can't get it.
If he hits it with a club, it's faster than his hand reaction,
he might catch fish that way, clubbing them.
So what you can do, is you can't ...
The primitive brain doesn't look any different.
If you have a billion associations with ' boo-boo'
(a bunch of metaphysical stuff) billions of associations,
they are calming
because you believe somebody that gave you those associations
to know what they're talking about.
You don't even have to know what they're talking about.
If the chief says something, it's so.
If the king says something, it's so.
If a politician says something, it's so.
Right now they are concerned with foreclosures on banks.
They're concerned with giving the banks money,
and the banks didn't use that money for the purpose intended.
So, they have words like 'fraud'.
You can't do anything that way. You have to take in the whole picture
and ask "What is it that you want?"
"What kind of world do you want?"
I have drawings of different cities.
Those cities have an end goal. They are not just cities.
The goal of those cities
is to make things relevant to people that they respond to.
There's no other way.
Now, people that live in the city,
have many different reactions to the city:
"It's my home." "My grandfather was born there." "[It's] my favorite city."
but they really don't understand what a city is, what it serves.
They use words like 'shelter'. Home is a shelter,
but when you wear a diving suit and you go underwater,
that's a closed environment: 'shelter' for underwater living.
If a man goes out into space, he brings with him
the air in his suit,
and in that suit, he has all types of equipment
he may need on that mission.
If you give him a book, a novel to take out into space,
it's dead weight. It doesn't serve anything.
If you give him an emergency book of what to do
when oxygen stops or something goes wrong, that's something;
but a book about how Seminole Indians treat fish
would have no use in space.
Our society is loaded with 'how Seminole Indians treat fish'.
There's lots of superfluous information,
superfluous to the needs of people.
Must everything be scientific? If it is not, it's less valid.
Is there a place for non-scientific?
By non-scientific, do you mean speculative notions,
or scientific is "I don't know. Let's try to find out."?
Does it mean you'll find out? Not necessarily.
You will find out if you have the appropriate needs.
So, you can't ask "What is the brain?" or "How does it work?"
except in context of a situation.
I think there's some animals that respond to largeness.
A bear when he stands up, he doesn't try to impress you
with his size when he stands up.
He stands up, and if you react, he just stands up again.
It's not "I'm going stand up so I'll look bigger,
so I'll scare the guy." A bear doesn't think that way.
The neurologist that wants to study human behavior
is brought up to believe in free will to start with,
so he's already jammed. He's already hurt
because he can't look at anything objectively; there's no such thing.
He can only write down "When a man sees lava,
if he sticks his finger in it, it burns; he stays away from it."
He can only do that. Now the chemist wants to know what lava is.
He says "There's so much magnesium, so much melted rock",
but he still puts a label on it. He calls it ‘lava’,
and that means a word used, assigned to something.
If a person misbehaves or behaves very badly,
or behavior unrelated to the situation,
like I've seen a kid run over by a car,
and the mother says "He can't be dead. He must be alive. He can't be dead";
meaning the situation is unacceptable.
She is responding more on a feeling tone, rather than relevant.
Sometimes if you like somebody, and they die immediately, you say
"He can't be dead. He was just having a bowl of oatmeal."
So, you can't do that. You can only say
"I didn't expect that" or "Highly improbable,
I thought it was, anyway."
You can only talk about your relationship [to things].
If you meet with a person and, say,
(I'm going to exaggerate here)
they have a thousand neural associations, you know, in the brain.
Then you meet a person with forty thousand associations.
When you talk, there is more response,
less response with less associations. Do you understand that?
If a person is very simple,
he says "God wanted it that way. That's why it's that way."
That doesn't tell you a damn thing, except that person's reaction.
Using reason with them does not work
unless you equip them with the tools of reason.
There are no tools of reason except specific tools of reason:
how to fly a kite, how to build a wheel.
That's specific reason,
but general reasoning can not be imparted to people,
particularly if they like things the way they are,
meaning if their reactions are very simple.
The reason most people behave badly or poorly
is because they understand simple things.
A person once said to me
"When I ask you a question, I never get an answer. I get a lecture,"
because there are no answers.
If a guy says "Why does my brother get angry all the time?"
"Because he gets angry, that's why!' Well, that doesn't tell you anything.
You've got to remember if a person is that simple,
you don't have the time to fill in all that detail, unless they say
"I'd like to know step by step, what made my brother get angry",
and that's good because it shows some kind of inquiry,
even if they learn the words and don't know what it means.
Now you have to prove to them
that most language is based upon primitive reactions;
like if lightning occurs,
a primitive person might think that nature is angry,
or God is angry, or the god of lightning is angry; whatever they do.
If they are at that level, you don't want it,
but if you take native children away from their parents,
you can bring them 'up' to the modern world.
No matter how primitive a person is, if you take their babies,
you can make them scientific, chemists, anything;
but taking an adult
is jamming their whole associative system.
If you bring a primitive person to an airport,
he does not look at the airplane in terms of the wings and the struts
and the landing gear and wonder at all those components.
He can't do that. He can look and grin
just like you look at a tree when you're not into plant anatomy.
You can't see the tree.
An anatomist sees more of the tree, a plant physiologist, than you do;
or you may see clearer than he does, but he knows what to look for:
like whether it's the rings of the tree that tell him how old the tree is,
or the width of the rings whether there was a drought
or flood at that time.
He has learned to read, or she, has learned to read nature.
When I say there is no such thing as human nature,
there's human reactions to the environment.
Some are relevant. Some are completely irrelevant.
Knowing the difference, the guy says
"Why did you beat the hell out of your kid?"
He is way off the subject,
and the guy might say "My kid didn't listen to me".
That isn't the answer. It's the whole story. You know what I mean?
So [with] normal people (normal meaning 'having simpler reactions'),
you can't discuss human nature with them
because they have a fixed notion already of what human nature is:
some inborn propensities or characteristics
that are passed on generation after generation,
and if behavior were fixed, we'd still be living in caves.
cont'd...
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