1. A program, P0 can be created.
All of this is in the province of the mind, and we are talking about a program that you (I0) suddenly created, or which appeared.
2. Once created, P0 can be stored.
P0 can be memorized.
3. Once stored, P0 can be repeated.
Until you have it in storage, you can’t repeat it. Everything in your mind has to go back into memory and then be recalled in order to be repeated.
4. Repeated a sufficient number of times, P0 can be strengthened/31 weakened.
Here we are talking about strengthening versus weakening. P0 can go either way. In other words if you repeat the program, you can inhibit or excite it—strengthen or weaken it.
5. As P0 gains strength, it can pass the threshold of use.
This is a distinction that most people don’t make when they talk about programming. Your internalized program in i.r. has to be strong enough for you to be able to use it, or it to use you, automatically. Therefore, the strength with which it is operating inside must have passed a certain threshold so that you can use it.
6. Once at use—threshold, P0 can be activated.
Activation does not mean playback, it means that the program takes over, operates and does its thing and you don’t have to do anything about it. It’s already stored and consciously available to you in all its detail. P0 now uses I0 for reliving.
7. Activation of P0 is started by internal reality agents or external reality agents.
In other words you can start one yourself or you can have somebody else start one that’s already in you. Call your attention to your sexual programs, for example.
What is the difference between a stored program and when it’s a usable program? When it’s a stored program it’s in a latent state, undeveloped, but the image is there. You know about latent images on photographic film. You click the shutter, expose the film to the image. There is no seeable image on the film, but you can take that film to the darkroom and develop it and the image comes up. A similar process takes place with the activation of a program. It’s stored in a latent form, take it out and raise the strength of the thing until it appears and starts operating. It’s more like developing a movie than a still; a movie with a soundtrack, a feeling and doing track. These programs can run your feeling and doing and thinking and so on. It’s not restricted to visual images.
My experience is that when I have programs that are not usable, they are either ones that I cannot activate, in other words, I don’t know what the key is to turn them on, and they just happen sometimes, or they are unable to be sustained. Let’s go through this and we’ll show you some of the difficulty.
8. Most of P0 is unconscious: only its name and address need to be recalled for use.
Just the minimum amount of information is needed: you know the name of the program; the name now represents the program to you, so that the name has meaning. In a sense the meaning is the program itself, activated, being used. That’s the meaning of the name.
The address is the association chain you have to go through to activate it. So you need the name of the program and the associative chain that leads you to the location of the program. The name is the call, the recall is naming it again, to use G. Spencer Brown’s terminology. 32 The initial storage is the crossing in his terminology. An activation here is recrossing. The initial crossing is the initial storage process, the recrossing is the activation.
9. P0 can become an internal reality agent.
P0 takes on a life of its own and it can activate itself when the conditions are proper. You begin to get into this area where you think it’s “spontaneous” because you’re not the activator, you didn’t call the name and give the address, it just appeared. So that’s the first situation. The spontaneous appearance of the program means that it has enough energy above the use threshold so it can enter your consciousness “as if an alien entity.”
10. P0 can create an external reality agent.
Artists know this one. It can also create an e.r. agent in someone else by being transferred to him/her, being activated enough and being fed back to you.
11. P0 can program an external reality agent.
In other words it may have elements in it that allow you to program somebody else for something else. Or another kind of e.r. agent, other than artistic, is people in general, but also it’s animals, children, carpentry, anything that’s outside, where you are creating something that’s now feeding–back to you. If you have an e.r. agent who has programmatic capabilities, the program can do the programming.
12. P0 can have any thinkable, feelable or actionable content.
13. P0 can identify with P1 , P2 and so forth to P sub n.
In other words, some programs are chameleons and they apparently change their name and address as if they are another program. Until you investigate P2 you may not recognize it as your old friend P0, with a cover story. A lot of psychoanalysis is based on this. It’s a matter of taking the cover stories off the P1 and P2 and recognizing older P0 behind them.
14. P0 can increase, remain the same, or decrease in the following parametric regions: its contained energy, its capability or strength; its power and its reinforcement.
I am not going to explain reinforcement yet because it will explain itself as we go further.
15. Until reinforced positively (+) or negatively (–), or plus/minus (+/–), or both (±), neutral reinforcement, no P0 is important.
This is a very important statement. In other words, you have latent programs, literally hundreds of thousands of latent programs, undeveloped sitting around inside somewhere. Until one of those receives either a positive or negative or neutral charge it’s not activated. In fact, it’s very difficult to store P0 without some kind of reinforcement. So the fact that no P0 is important until reinforced is a very important point; you can read a program in somebody’s book and it’ll go by like nothing at all and until you exert some effort and give it positive or negative or neutral energy, it’s not going to go anywhere. It’s just going to sit there as an “outside latent program” in the e.r. or i.r. If you want to get it inside as a latent program, you have to cross the reinforcement barrier. There is an impedance to storing programs. It’s a higher barrier in some people than in others. The old concept of suggestibility comes in here. Some people will take on any program; in other words, they are highly suggestible, which can be a downer or upper. I would rather say they have a talent for taking on programs.
16. P0 ’s position on the priority list (the priority list itself is a program) is a function of the amount of reinforcement on P0 .
In other words, that which you considered to be the most important is that which has most reinforcement attached to it.
You can see there is a lot of slop here in these definitions, because the latent program that was stored with a lot of energy is one that can come out very easily at a low activation threshold, because it already has energy stored on it, associated with it, in the unconscious latency that it’s sitting in.
You have to learn what your own priority list is. Your priority list is not something you arbitrarily sit down, construct and assign programs to; you have to find out what the structure of it is by investigating it; usually you’ll get some shockers when you find this out. What you thought consciously to be the most important thing turns out not to be, it’s something else.
Remember No. 13: P0 can identify with P1 , P2 , Pn and so on. So the names that are in your priority list have to be investigated. They may be just cover stories, so you’ll have two priority levels. One of them is the true priority the way they actually operate. Somebody watching you from the outside who is objective and knows you well can lay out your priority list as it seems to operate in the outside world. You can compare that with your own aware priority list. As you know in any dyad, i.e., coupled relationship, there are some shockers to be found. (Toni every so often brings up cases in which I suddenly realize that I have arbitrarily defined some things as unimportant, but I act as if they are important, and vice versa.)
17. Any P0 may be reinforced, positively (+), negatively (–), negative/positive (–/+), or positive–negative (+/–) and neutral (±) and so forth.
You can take any program and make it important by overvaluing it in the positive sense or by decrying it, denigrating it in the negative sense. This makes it automatically important. Or in the neutral sense in dispassionate, objective thinking.
18. Each program, P0 , may control/be controlled.
This means that every program is in feedback relationship to every other program. On one side if you look at it, it’s being controlled by a whole set of other programs, and then if you look at the other side of it, the output side, you’ll see it’s controlling other programs.
19. All P0’s in a given biocomputer (B.C.) are in the B.C.’s P0–network of P0’s, connected/disconnected.
Connected programs versus disconnected programs we’ll take up in a minute.
20. The B.C. P0–network includes programs that do connection and disconnection of other programs and also deal with connected and disconnected programs.
We probably should put an “as if” in front of “connected and disconnected” because in reality all programs are connected. One may play the game “I am going to disconnect (P0)n ‘the nth P0’ from all other programs and I’m going to isolate it and allow it to program others or be programmed by others.” This is called “repression” and as Freud knew and showed many years ago, that act of repression, “disconnection,” does anything but disconnect it; all it does is disconnect it from you and your conscious use of it. It remains connected and remains active and reinforced and continues to operate, in spite of your denial of its existence.
21. A P0 connected/disconnected can become conscious.
That is, separate from activation. Activation does not necessarily imply consciousness and that’s important. Consciousness and activation are two separate parameters. In other words, programs can be activated and be operating and you are not aware of them. Thank God this is true, otherwise we’d have to think out every step we take in any P0.
22. A conscious P0 can become unconscious and remain connected/ disconnected.
No. 23 summarizes the above.
23. Connection/disconnection, identification/disidentification, conscious /unconscious, control/controlled, creation/destruction and so forth are each independent variables, independent parameters, are free/slaved of one another.
That’s a mouthful; study it carefully.
24. Any degree of independence/dependence can be a property of P0 .
That’s a definition of its relationship to you and to any other P0 .
25. Once stored after negative reinforcement, P0 is “as if necessary for survival” in its area (its area of influence, in other words).
This is a statement straight from childhood. The baby sticks its finger in the candle flame, screams with pain and from that point on he has a negative reinforcement on whatever he selects of the experience. He may select candles in general, flames in general, heat in general, light in general, persons present, whatever. His little biocomputer (after the powerful negative reinforcement) makes some aspect of the area of that particular program necessary for survival. You are never sure what the program is because the child can’t tell you, you have to deduce this later from its behavior.
26. Once stored after positive reinforcement, P0 is necessary for pleasure in its area.
You see this most simply with the phenomena of falling in love, where you have a positive reinforcement of another person and that person becomes, or may become, necessary for your sexual pleasure, just to take a very narrow channel kind of result. This is maybe also true, after your first acid trip. You’ve had a great trip and it’s all positively reinforced—so from that point on you say acid is groovy, it’s a sacrament and you go out and try to sell everybody on the idea of acid trips. You’ve got a lot of positive reinforcement from the chemical contract and it may become necessary for pleasure in that area.
26a. After neutral reinforcement P0 may become necessary for integration in its areas of influence.
27. Strongly reinforced programs tend to repeatedly become activated and used.
After you’ve lost your virginity you tend to go back to sexual intercourse again, or masturbation, or whatever. These are strongly reinforced because they happen to fit into systems that are easily reinforced in the built–in structure of the C.N.S.33
28. A program (P0) can be defined for local use as anything.
Here we have a set of alternates to the use of the term program. A program can be defined for local use as a process/nonprocess, a belief/disbelief. Belief and disbelief are both programmatic and that’s hard to remember. If you disbelieve in occult powers, for example, you are just as much being programmed as if you believe in them. The alternates continue: a thought/nonthought, feeling/nonfeeling, action/nonaction, concept/non–concept, entity/nonentity, zero or infinity, any number including real, imaginary and hyper–numbers, function/system/structure/form/substance, real/unreal, true/untrue, simulation/nonsimulation, as if/as if not, and so forth.
So local custom says a program is any important concept that you want to put in here.
A P0 can be defined in any way that you wish to define it.
You can’t use this P0 until you start it. This is the set of directions for starting itself. In the province of the mind this is just part of the navigation and piloting instructions.
29. Any of the psychoactive chemicals can act as P0.
The first six in this group are very important in the sense that we are making distinctions here that people fail to make usually when they go into the tank. People who have read the Human Biocomputer will come along and say, “Oh boy, that tank really is something,” and they lay a program on the tank. “I am going to go do what John Lilly did in the tank,” so they get into the tank for an hour and they say, “Nothing happened.” Why didn’t anything happen? They thought the tank was an e.r. agent with the program in it and so it was automatically going to be activated. They forgot that they have to create P0 or it has to be created; it has to be stored; that’s where they flunked out on the book, they didn’t store the book. They thought they stored the book, but as my publisher says, you don’t store a book until you have read it five times. Even then you may reject it. You can play back some things but they’re not programs yet because they can’t be activated; so with the repetition, reading the book five times you can strengthen P0 and you can also weaken it. The parts of the book you don’t like you can weaken so you begin to enhance the contrast by strengthening parts and weakening others. As P0 gains strength, parts of it can pass the threshold of use and that’s what people forget, that they haven’t stored it, they haven’t reinforced, and they haven’t activated it to the point where it is useful. A cookbook teaches you how to get all the materials together and combine them in a certain way, but it doesn’t tell you what it is going to taste like, or motivate you to try a recipe.
30. I0 is identical with a P0.
In other words, you (I0) are a program generated in your biocomputer. The i.r. agent known as I0 is also a P0. When I0 is not being a P0 one is in Merrell–Wolff’s state of being of “consciousness without an object.” There are no P0’s left. (See State No. 5, Table 2, Appendix II, Deep Self.)
The physical programs are very important. I think you can pick all kinds of neurophysiological examples of autorhythmic programs. Our walking, running, sitting, standing, speaking, are all automatic programs that we can call upon. These are the tapeloops that we can compose into metaprograms.
(I want to point out to you that each of these statements will not mean anything to you until you’ve got it stored and you can reactivate it. When you do that you will find that each of these statements has a profound effect on your whole biocomputer. It’s like dropping a stone into a pond, the waves that go out from a statement like “P0 can identify with P1, P2 or Pn.” “Any or all of your programs can identify with any or all of your other programs” won’t mean anything to you until you watch it happen.)
The biocomputer itself has a lot more in it than we can conceive. Conscious mind is not capable of holding all of the rest of it in consciousness: there isn’t enough machinery. The efficient way for the machinery to operate is to make 99 percent of it unconscious and keep consciousness for the Self–programming aspects, the experiencing aspects. The illusion of free will is pure white noise, which contains all possible messages: our choice is manufactured “certainty” in the midst of indeterminacy in the long term.