Part of the Casswiki article series Cassiopaean Experiment, Fourth Way and Psychology
The term reaction machine is sometimes used to describe man’s mechanical nature. This applies to common man in general but especially to the organic portal or Pre-Adamic man and even more to the psychopath.
The idea is that man simply responds to stimuli and learns via a feedback system coupled with some innate preferences such as desire for food and sex. The behaviorist school of psychology starts from the assumption that man always is and can be no more than a reaction machine. Although the premises are simple, the behaviors can be highly complicated and guided by much abstract thinking.
People have a tendency to project their own internal landscape on others. Thus they are liable to incorrectly assume that the inner life of others resembles their own. Likewise, people may consider their own activity as unique or inspired when it is only a composite of reactions.
Man being a reaction machine applies to all the lower centers. This is most obvious in the moving and instinctive center, where actual physical reflexes, and learned physical reactions and habits belong. The emotional center version of this is expressed as categorical value judgements of like and not like, right and wrong, as blanket denial of the unpleasant – and as automatic aggression and in general any range of quick, unthinking reactions that most often are simply taken for granted and not further analyzed by the rest of the mind. The intellectual center version of reaction machine behavior is expressed in ‘formatory thinking’: black and white thinking without adequate awareness of context, simple rote repetition of facts, or automatic thought-associations proceeding without understanding.
Boris Mouravieff compares man to a juke box with a number of records. Once a record has stopped playing, another record is brought in via association. The basic records are formed at an early age and later only new variations of the same are added. The records also come in several types, as they may be physical, emotional or intellectual in their emphasis: the mechanicity involves all these functions, although one or another may be more expressed with a specific individual.
The reaction machine can have symbolic representations for all physical/emotional/intellectual contents of the human experience. However, such symbolic representation Is not the same thing as the experience. Distinguishing the mimicry of the experience from the experience itself is very difficult from the outside.
Thinking in terms of evolution, we could say that the organic portal mimics and steals from the individually souled in order to get the form, even if without the content. Mimicking the form may later prepare a space for the content itself. However, the mimicry-based being is not choosing the content and thus is subject to the prevailing winds of the psychic climate, which may tend to either service to others or service to self. At a subsequent level, the student of the Fourth Way can be said to prepare a space for the soul to manifest by ‘fusing a real I.’ Thus the development from reaction machine to conscious being may be incremental over a lifetime. However, according to the Fourth Way, the embryonic soul in potential must be present from birth for the process to go beyond mimicking form.
Specially in the case of psychopaths, the effects of their reaction machines on a souled individual may involve causing great confusion. The souled individual will typically invent excuses and fill in the gaps in the psychopath’s behavior in order to avoid facing the reality of facing a qualitatively different, alien life form. People may take even a very poor simulation of ethics or conscience for the real thing, because facing its complete absence in another is too unpleasant or scary. It may also happen that people be attracted to psychopathic ‘reaction machines’ because these can reflect the people’s expectations without being encumbered by any fundamentally own nature, at least for a time. However, such mimicry is generally predatory, working as a camouflage mechanism for unscrupulous intentions.