Do you make decisions based on logic or emotion?

You’ve heard the phrase “Let cooler heads prevail.” It’s a universally accepted notion that people make better decisions when they are calm and collected, rather than stressed, angry, bitter, apathetic, terrorized, or just plain “riled up.”

Dianetics (which means “through thought or through mind”) is the subject about how the mind can take over sometimes and cause one to be more emotional rather than analytical or logical. The result is usually a rash decision, bad feelings, stupidity, or even violence.

The accumulated pain in a person’s past, whether it be emotional pain or physical pain (the mind calculates both as non-survival for the organism), has a way of getting stirred up at times, causing anxiety, depression, negative thinking, insecurity and other similar and unwanted mental and physical conditions. The book Dianetics: Modern Science of Mental Health by L. Ron Hubbard explains in detail how this occurs.

Here are some examples:

Joe gets in an auto accident while making a left turn at an intersection. He incurs injuries and a lot of car damage. Later, when Joe comes to that or similar intersection again, he decides to take the long way instead of the more efficient left turn option. He’s nervous about that intersection. His decision is ruled by a past painful moment (emotional) and he will probably experience an unpleasant physical reaction, such as accelerated heart beat, sweating, anxiousness, etc. He may even experience some pains in his body where he was injured during the accident.

Another example. A young child gets seriously ill and has to go to the hospital. Treatment is painful and scary, and he’s pretty sure he doesn’t like doctors now. As he grows up, he’s healthy and has never had cause to see a doctor for many years. One day as an adult, he experiences a strong pain in his side. Even though he normally avoids doctors, he knows he needs to go anyway, as logic would dictate. Even though he’s nervous, he goes and gets checked out. Turns out he has appendicitis, which gets handled and which could have killed him if not attended to right away. Logic led him to make the right decision even though he was nervous and frightened (emotional) about it. Here’s an example where logic and analytical thinking was greater than his emotional state. This individual had a greater endowment of basic beingness and analytical power than his reactive content, at least in that situation.

One more example. A woman has had a long-term relationship with a man. They have a painful breakup, which causes her to feel sad and depressed. She now has a hard time getting interested in another relationship. She’s distrustful and wary, causing her potential relationships (if any) to fizzle out before thet even get started. She backs out or causes friction so she won’t be back in the position of being dumped again, and thereby reexperience all that pain. The result is no husband or family, which had been a major goal in her life. Her decisions are backed by emotion, not logic. Instead of realizing that the first relationship was peculiar to that man and that his cheating on her was just that guy and not every guy, she unwittingly fell into the mental trap that “every guy was a cheater.” This is not logical thinking, and her emotional thinking led her to make decisions that were antipathetic to her goals – marriage and family.

Dianetics explains very clearly how exactly the reactive mind is able to take over one’s thinking and even physical reactions. When the reactive mind is in play, the result is always negative: stress, anxiety, depression, stupidity, physical pains and even illness.

The discoveries of Dianetics not only shows how this occurs, but what can be done about it. Man has now evolved physically and intellectually to the point where the mind can be understood. And it’s not drugs or electric shock that handles it. Those outdated methods actually perpetuate the unwanted conditions and then mask them at the same time!

Get and read Diantetics: Modern Science of Mental Health by L. Ron Hubbard. Find out how your mind really works and what YOU can do about it. Get ready for increased IQ, greater happiness, faster thinking, alertness and aliveness!