Imprinting as an aspect of programming

One of the main aspects of socio-cultural programming is what is called “imprinting.” Human beings are born with certain basic behavior patterns built in their DNA. Just as a flower will follow a certain series of steps from the emergence of the seedling to the stage of producing a flower, human beings also develop certain characteristics only at certain times in their growth process. These sequences are something over which we have no control.

Konrad Lorenz illustrated this principle with his famous ducks. Ducks (and humans) are “programmed” at a certain time in their lives to “accept a mother” figure. If the proper mother figure is not there at that moment of “imprinting,” whoever or whatever IS there will be the “mother image” in the mind of the duck. That is to say, when the appropriate (or inappropriate) object of need is presented to the duck at the correct time in its development, the object is labeled “mother” somewhere in the brain, and this label is next to impossible to erase.

Experiments were conducted with ducks which demonstrated that there is a critical age in hours at which a duckling is most responsive to “obtaining and labeling” a mother.

Similar studies were done with monkeys. These studies demonstrated that if a monkey has not received motherly stimulation before he is a certain number of weeks old, he will grow up to be cold, aloof, and unfriendly to his own offspring. The curious thing about the monkey experiments were that the sense of touch was more important than the feeding. A fuzzy surrogate with no milk was preferred over a wire surrogate with milk. This demonstrates a high level need for touching and caressing. It also suggests the “mode” of this imprint – sensory. Kinesthetic.

Evidence that there is a critical period for the “mother imprint” in the higher animals was emphasized in the monkey experiments. In one instance, the experimenter was not prepared for the arrival of a new baby monkey and had to create a makeshift “surrogate mother” using a ball for the head. This was provided to the baby, while the experimenter worked on a better model with a face. But, it was too late. The baby monkey had already bonded to the faceless mother and turned the face of the new model around so that it was blank. A mother with a face was simply not acceptable because the imprint had already been made.

Joseph Chilton Pearce writes:

Occasionally we hear of people found chained in attics and such places from infancy. Their world view is either scanty or different for they are always feeble minded at best. In 1951 a child was found in an Irish chicken-house, having somehow survived there with the chickens, since infancy. The ten-year old’s long hair was matted with filth; he ate at the chicken trough; roosted with the flock; his fingernails had grown, fittingly, to semicircular claws; he made chicken-like noises, not surprisingly; he had no speech and showed no promise of learning any in the time he survived his rescue.

Forty years ago there was interest in two feral children found in India. They had apparently been raised by wolves. They were taken from an actual wolf den along with some cubs, the older wolves scattering or being killed. One of the children, Kamala they called her, survived for nine years. Only with difficulty was she taught table manners and such niceties as walking on the hind legs. Nevertheless she exhibited a growing awareness of the reward system of her new group, and displayed a strong drive toward such orientation. As with the chicken-child, however, she had missed the formative period of human infant development, and there was no easy or complete going back to retrace the steps. Kamala had formed according to the pattern eliciting response around her during her mirroring [imprinting] period. For her first two years of captivity – or rescue – she howled faithfully at ten, twelve, and three at night, as all Indian wolves do. She would also, in spite of precautions, manage to get at the chickens, rip them apart alive and eat them raw. Only when the new social reward system grew strong enough to outweigh the earlier rewards did she abandon her early training. [The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, 1971]

We are all Kamala. We are all divine children raised by wolves.

But how can this be?

We are all programmed. Our programs are written in the circuits of our brains by those around us in our formative years, just as their programs were written during their formative years, and so on back into the mists of time. Each generation just adding a few more lines of code.

It is our ideas that shape our children. We provide what we may consider to be the ideal environment for the child, but our own programming determines what we may consider to be the “proper environment.” Once we have provided the environment, we then want our children to like it, to approve of it, to agree with us that it is “right.” And our ideas come from our culture. And our culture is created by… what? A Control System?

There is considerable evidence that “agreement” is also “in the genes.” There seems to be a genetic drive toward communion with others, for speech and preferences and disposition. As newly born human beings, it seems we come into the world with intent to be in agreement with others. But the details of how we go about being “agreeable” is related to the imprints we receive at the various stages of childhood development.

Everyone carries in their genes, it seems, deep archetypes that are very much like a database program just waiting for someone to input data. The thing is, this database is only open to input for a limited period of time, and whatever data is entered during that time determines how all other data will be evaluated forever after. It will produce over and over again the same response to any set of stimuli that have one or more items that have been organized by the database. Anything that is not found in the database is “discarded.” If the database is not utilized and no data is entered during the period of “readiness,” or imprinting, that possibility goes dormant and diminishes.

The higher thinking functions, laid over the deep level archetype database, can be viewed as a kind of software that is linked to the database, and must constantly check with it in order to operate. You could think of it as a word processing program with a fixed dictionary and set of templates, and you can only write in it according to the templates, and you can only use the words that are in the already fixed dictionary. Since our brains are genetically designed to accept imprint conditioning on its circuits at certain crucial points in neurological development, these critical periods are known as times of Imprint Vulnerability. The imprint establishes the limits or parameters within which all subsequent conditioning and learning will occur. Each successive imprint further complicates the matter, especially if some of these programs are not compatible with others.

Different schools of thought describe these circuits as “stages of development.” Some of the earliest work in these concepts has passed into our culture to such an extent that they have become slang terms such as “Oh, he’s just anal-rententive,” with very little actual understanding of what is meant by such expressions.

It seems that, according to research, the “older” brain structures – those necessary for basic survival, such as the brain stem – are imprinted in the earliest stages of development, and that the “newer structures,” such as the mid-brain and cortex develop “superimpositions” upon the more primitive imprints. However, the earlier parts of the brain and their imprints form the foundation for how later imprints are responded to and continue to function after the higher thinking modes are developed.

In other words, if you are traumatized as an infant at a crucial point of Imprint Receptivity, it doesn’t matter if you grow up to be the President of the United States – you will still be ruled by the imprint.

And, of course, we have a classic example in Bill Clinton. It didn’t matter that he was behaving in ways to destroy his marriage and the emotional well-being of a well-loved child; it didn’t matter that his behavior was destructive to the point of practically bringing the entire country to chaos; his inner emotional drives, determined in infancy by his imprinting, ruled his behavior. His Rhodes scholar intellect had nothing to do with it. And, sadly, this is actually exactly how everyone operates in principle, though not necessarily in specific. A lot of men do have the same imprint Bill has; only they aren’t President of the United States. But then, women also have their own variations on this theme.

The first stage, or circuit, is the oral-passive-receptive, and is imprinted by what is perceived to be the mother or first mothering object. It can be conditioned by nourishment or threat, and is mostly concerned with bodily security. Trauma during this phase can cause an unconsciously motivated mechanical retreat from anything threatening to physical safety.

In recent times I have given a lot of thought to this particular circuit because of the matter of circumcision. Having come to the tentative idea that the whole Judeo-Christian monotheistic rant was a major control program, I came face to face with the question: how and why has it worked so well for so many thousands of years? More than that, how was it imposed in the first place?

I puzzled over this for weeks. I thought about several things that Friedrich Nietzsche had said that struck me like thunderbolts of truth once I was able to really step back and look at the matter:

The Jews are the most remarkable nation of world history because, faced with the question of being or not being, they preferred, with a perfectly uncanny conviction, being at any price; the price they had to pay was the radical falsification of all nature, all naturalness, all reality, the entire inner world as well as the outer, They defined themselves counter to all those conditions under which a nation was previously able to live, was permitted to live; they made of themselves an antithesis of natural conditions – they inverted religion, religious worship, morality, history, psychology, one after the other, in an irreparable way into the contradiction of their natural values.

…Christianity has waged a deadly war against the higher type of man. It has put a ban on all his fundamental instincts. It has distilled evil out of these instincts. It makes the strong and efficient man its typical outcast man. It has taken the part of the weak and the low; it has made an ideal out of its antagonism to the very instincts which tend to preserve life and well-being… It has taught men to regard their highest impulses as sinful – as temptations.

…What is Jewish, what is Christian morality? Chance robbed of its innocence; unhappiness polluted with the idea of “sin;” well-being represented as a danger, as a “temptation,” a physiological disorder produced by the canker worm of conscience. [The Anti-Christ, 1888]

But, that’s not to say that Nietzsche was any paragon himself, with his mysogynistic, misanthropic rants! He was, in fact declared insane in 1888.

Revolt against the whole civilized environment in which he was born is the keynote to Nietzsche’s literary career. [Britannica, 11th ed.]

Nevertheless, he had a point about Judaism and Christianity (and any and all other monotheistic, dominator religions.) So, there I was, pondering this and trying to figure out HOW and WHY people could be so completely taken in by this utter nonsense? How can educated members of the human race, in this day and age, with all the resources of knowledge and awareness available to those who have the desire and energy to search for truth, possibly buy into such myths?

It just staggered my mind to think about it.

I went back in my thinking to the whole Jehovah-I AM deal; the Moses story and all that; and went over the details as they are presented in the Bible for clues. And I came up against that most interesting demand of that crafty Lizard, Jehovah/Yahweh: circumcision – on the 8th day, no less.

What better way to ensure a deep, subconscious, distrust of women – not to mention an overwhelming terror at the very mention of the pain and suffering that might ensue from breaking the monotheistic covenant – than whacking a guy’s pee-pee when he is interested only in being warm, cozy, and filling his tummy with warm, sweet milk from mother?!

Whoah! Talk about your basic abyssal cunning there!

by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Excerpted from Chapter 35: The way of the Fool

ONE OF THE MAIN ASPECTS of socio-cultural programming is what is called “imprinting.” Human beings are born with certain basic behavior patterns built in their DNA. Just as a flower will follow a certain series of steps from the emergence of the seedling to the stage of producing a flower, human beings also develop certain characteristics only at certain times in their growth process. These sequences are something over which we have no control.

Konrad Lorenz illustrated this principle with his famous ducks. Ducks (and humans) are “programmed” at a certain time in their lives to “accept a mother” figure. If the proper mother figure is not there at that moment of “imprinting,” whoever or whatever IS there will be the “mother image” in the mind of the duck. That is to say, when the appropriate (or inappropriate) object of need is presented to the duck at the correct time in its development, the object is labeled “mother” somewhere in the brain, and this label is next to impossible to erase.

Experiments were conducted with ducks which demonstrated that there is a critical age in hours at which a duckling is most responsive to “obtaining and labeling” a mother.

Similar studies were done with monkeys. These studies demonstrated that if a monkey has not received motherly stimulation before he is a certain number of weeks old, he will grow up to be cold, aloof, and unfriendly to his own offspring. The curious thing about the monkey experiments were that the sense of touch was more important than the feeding. A fuzzy surrogate with no milk was preferred over a wire surrogate with milk. This demonstrates a high level need for touching and caressing. It also suggests the “mode” of this imprint – sensory. Kinesthetic.