One is the nature of postulated reality and knowledge structures which we call for short beliefs. The next is the adamant commitment to resistance which, once established within a system of beliefs, does so much to perpetuate it beyond its useful term. The third is the complex combinations of belief and resistance which, like multitudes of layers making a solid mountain of soap bubbles, makes up the cross-section of life we can describe as a sanity quotient for any organism or section of an organism.
Beliefs are forged in the very heart of the living, conscious will, at the quick of awareness itself, where the fullness of 'I' in its highest sense operates in complete command of what is, what was, and what shall be. This is the heart of You before the Naming of You, what you were before you created Self, the center of the endless torrents and vortexes of considerations which make up your experience. This is the hot spot, where it all happens.
In this central forge of the conscious will, a reality is brought to Be by simply willing it to be. In that instant of Creation As Is, without alteration or second thoughts, the purest, simplest experience is of exactly what is willed to be. It is a process without true time measures in it, but from the ordinary view of human life it is what you might call instantaneous.
This process, viewed from the ordinary continuum of human efforts, has a frequency so high as to be invisible. But it is the source of the endless fountain of thought, consideration, change, desire and resistance that makes up the paisley days of the human mind.
A belief created at this truth spot becomes a reality, generating the exact experience it names. If that were all there was to it, we would be superfree beings of light, dallying with pure power. But the second instant is more familiar than the instantaneous pure creation of a belief. That is the instant in which the belief thus created is cross-created with all other beliefs and resistances in the system of beliefs of which it is a member. This can alter or completely nullify its effect.
Someone who has believed their way into a protracted illness will thus often take losses if they attempt to lightly think the thought 'I am well' with the hope of experiencing complete wellness. This is because they have a system of beliefs created at many different levels of creative energy, layered with resistances and decision not to be responsible for those beliefs, not to feel their existence or see what they contain. These decisions add up to a sum experience wwhich is at odds with the concept just created (e.g., 'I am well'). Some of the counter-creates are creations of others, others' thoughts and expectations, and 'juniorness' to them.
A belief creates a field of experience, a zone in which each perceptic shows the reality called for. Any kind of knowing or not-knowing is scripted by the dynamic generation of beliefs, or postulated knowledge structures.
A complex of not-knowing, desiring, and resisting these generated perceptions adds up to the structure we call the mind, memory, the past, and our current situation.
A person trying to believe simulataneously that he is a wicked profiteer and that he has a heart of gold will find himself perceiving the kind of blackness which surrounds most minds beyond their ordinary small-scale concerns. Similarly, blankness and confusion or blackness and emptiness are typical of the net effect of structures based on 'I cause all' combined with structures based on 'I can't take this/face this/take responsibility for this.'
The broad power stream of 'I Know' becomes fragmented, silted, turbulent, impeded and ultimately frozen by the devil within, whose name is 'I don't want to know about it'.
Resistance is the general name for a variety of efforts to withdraw from a creation. The names of resistance are legion. In fact they form a graded scale from the closest and purest form to the most complex and compound. This is a scale of postulated energies or intentions.
To Not Know
To Not Know About
To Not Look
To Not Feel
To Not Experience (Emotion)
To Not Experience Effort
To Not Think
To Not Symbolize
To Not Consume/Digest
To Not Generate Genetically/Sexually
To Not Experience Mystery
To Experience Hopeless Nothing
These levels of intent bring about occlusion, conclusive ignorance, persistency of affect, psychosomatic disorders, a love of lawyers and doctors, and the use of mind-altering drugs of all sorts, including alcohol. They are the intentions which provide endurance and inescapability to the physical frame of space-time, which blot out imagination and suffocate souls. In their compound form they take on the appearance of syndromes which heartlessly, automatically seem to drain the life from a man or woman emotionally and physically.
In fact these syndromes are compounds of Will. This is not an idea which will meet with instant popularity, understandably. The full power of the creative fountainhead of every being is invested, layer upon layer, in these efforts at resistance. Threaten them and you threaten the world as it is known to be.
Dastardly, no matter how truthful, this is a communication that will not be remembered or highly revered by anyone wholly enslaved and contained in the dark whirlwind of resistance. The exceptions will be those capable of experiencing without dramatization of resistance, of following a pure trail of consciousness wherever it leads without stalling out at altitude.
This is an ability often sought and achieved in the fields of meditation and prayer: to be with and look at any form, any force, any fear, and continue to be and perceive without reaction, perhaps the highest ability religious insight can offer. Whether the religion is one of teachers, priests, shamans, monks, television hosts, psychologists or boy-scout leaders is immaterial.
When they succeed, they free. When they do not, they form cults. This involves generating yet another layer of belief and resistance on top of the compounded dung-heap within which each member is already struggling and expiring.
The Sanity Quotient is a measure of the dynamics of any segment of a belief system.
A biologist can scrape a single cell, examine within it a single mitochondria, and examine whether the correct proton transmigration is occurring through its membrane wall. This in turn informs him in some degree of other things about the mitochondria, such as whether it is contributing to the creation of ADTP. This in turn informs him somewhat about the cell as a whole, the tissue within which the cells sits, the organ of which that tissue is part, the system which that organ serves and the individual human being form whom it comes. It could conceivably tell the biologist something about the ecological system in which that human being survives, perhaps something about his family life or genetic inheritance, and so on. The biologist could go on and excise more cells for inspection, look over the whole organ, or examine the interplay between it and its system, that system and the individual, the individual and his surrounding ecosystem, and so on.
In a similar vein the degree of communication, caused action and responsible perception occurring within a belief system can inform us as to the relation that segment may be having on larger scale syndromes, zones of activity and interactions between the individual and others, and so on.
An individual person, running a body under a name on planet Earth, is part of a system of beliefs. The composite realities of our kind, which make up our actual history, are likewise part of a system of beliefs. The beliefs which monitor how a family operates, what the family agrees is important, what they agree they can and cannot do, what communications they allow or forbid, is likewise a segment of a system of beliefs. A company similarly builds and promotes systems of belief aimed at various goals: generating commerce, improving profits, preserving the comfort of its owners or executives, or even possibly destroying these things, depending on who promotes which belief.
Within any segment of beliefs one can assess a quality measurement which reflects the degree of caused motion toward survival which that segment is engaged in.
Caused motion toward survival, for example, in a family, shows up in affection, honest and lively communication, a creative attitude toward realities which can be brought about, and so on. Within the family, a smaller segment of beliefs might be those around a younger daughter, who may have some differences within her sphere. For example she may be more honest than her parents, more communicative, or less productive. The sanity quotient of her own individual sphere would be slightly different than the sanity quotient of the family as a whole. A sane family in a psychotic culture would have difficulty keeping its communication level, its causation level, up to a viable point; for example, the many loving and accomplished families who were broken on the psychosis of German politics before WW II, or destroyed by the battles of kings throughout English history, or crushed by the American Western expansion or the Japanese invasions following Pearl Harbor.
Conversely, an individual or a family with a high sanity quotient can raise the sanity quotient of a group or country or civilization. Raoul Wallenberg, Albert Schweitzer, Einstein, and possibly Whitehead come to mind from recent times. Anyone who knows my mother-in-law will recognize the sort: brightening the corner where she is, she tackles everything with a dedication to professional results, clear communication, and making this turn for the better no matter what she is doing. High sanity quotient.
There are essentially three component facets that make up the sanity quotient. One is the degree of tolerance versus the degree of resistance for being who and where one is, for the things and people around one. The second is the degree to which one is or is not in communication with the environment and the people in it, by which is meant exchanging and understanding viewpoints. The third is the accuracy and depth of perception of reality, seeing exactly what is, dealing with real factors, correct analysis of situations.
Thus a loving space cadet who merely sits and glows may have a lower sanity quotient than a grumpy mother of three who knows how to communicate, understands what needs to be done, and is exerting herself getting it done.
A group of people, as a whole, which communicates openly and freely within itself will have a higher sanity quotient than the same group if their lines of communication are restricted, assuming in both cases that the communication is relevant and understandable.
In individuals, families, groups and species as a whole, the sanity quotient is reflected in the quality and volume of communication that occurs, the degree of positive tolerance of experience, and the accuracy of reality-perception.
These factors rise and fall with each other, essentially because they are three key factors of belief-structure experience. This interdependency is not difficult to fathom. Whether you are labeling the tolerance of space in a person, or the freedom with which he sends and receives communication, or the accuracy and speed and depth of his understanding which agreements hold sway in which context, you are still labeling the source-fire of the individual being, the different faces of his many-faceted life-energy.