Below is the introductory section taken from Bobby Matherne’s web pages on “Doyletics” the would-be science he named after Doyle Henderson.
Doyletic’s focus is the processes of learned behaviour – and a self-help therapy called “speed tracing” to unlearn perceived problems – with little effort spent on defining the objects of our attention. These objects are referred to as “doyles” – and any definition is only implicit in the descriptions below. (I’ve cut and paste the whole section because the linked web-site is old-tech frame-based and doesn’t resolve to specific pages.)
I first referenced Bobby Matherne back in 2004 and 2005. Now beware, there is a whole Steiner / Anthroposophy connection and links to my interests in Owen Barfield (Saving the Appearances, etc), Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art, etc.) and US pragmatists William James, Henry David Thoreau etc. Any “mainstream” scientist will find much of this hype and quackery if taken as being prescriptive and objective scientific knowledge – I’m not here to have that argument – but will simply reinforce the focus on processes rather than objective “facts”.
The reason I’m capturing and discussing this here in January 2019 is because of a string of recurring themes are converging:
(a) I’m doing a review of Russell’s Metaphysics and untangling where idealism, (and US pragmatism) and Russell’s rejection of it, fails to fit with my “pan-proto-psychism” or “dual-aspect-monism” – and “Saving the Appearances” leaps out at me.
(b) Arguments against a focus on (fetishisation of, apparently objective) facts are rife again in the worlds of fake-news and alt-facts – missing wider subjective human processing aspects of real (political and ethical) life.
(c) The error in (b) is neatly summed-up by the quote from Albert Hoffenstein’s 1933 Landscape poetic quatrain, much quoted by Matherne:
“Little by little we subtract,
Faith and fallacy from fact,
The illusory from the true,
And starve upon the residue.”
Which is itself so reminiscent of Wordsworth’s “We Murder to Dissect” and the romantics railing against formalisation in the uptake of the likes of Kant, which leads us back to (a) Russell and the US pragmatists via Hegel. It’s a vanishingly small world.
Anyway – paraphrasing from Matherne’s summary (below) I find:
A “doyle” is the embodiment in a “physical body state” of an intuitively known (emotionally felt) understanding that influences future understandings and actions. (Whether, as Henderson and Matherne suggest, that earlier learning is confined to the limbic brain in child development between the ages of 2 months and 5 years, is highly suspect, probably objectively wrong in multiple ways, but irrelevant to the process. Remember the focus is on processes not facts.)
A DOYLE is a MEME by any other name and, after Dennett, memetics continues the evolution of our knowledge, understanding (and behaviour) throughout the lives of all levels of our individual and social minds. (Earlier stuff engrained more deeply in the subconscious may of course always be more problematic to change than more recent and consciously learned material and behaviour, but whilst the nature of the physical embodiment may vary, the processes are the same at the information level.)
The whole cut & paste section follows for further dissection 🙂
Introduction to The Science of Doyletics
Bobby Matherne – Introduction to Doyletics
It is a rare thing when anyone makes a cosmological discovery — a discovery about the structure and evolution of the universe — but that is what Doyle Philip Henderson did. He discovered something which is true for every human being in the world, whether you live in Mumbai or Miami, Melbourne or Moscow: human feelings and emotions are artefacts of human maturation. There are no basic emotions common to everyone. That this seems to be the case is a result of local uniformities in culture, customs, and family rearing which expose each child to events which create what is thought to be the basic set of emotions: reverence, sadness, joy, anger, blushing, excitement, arousal, awe, irritability, moodiness, etc. How these childhood events before the age of five years old are stored and recapitulated later over a lifetime was Doyle Henderson’s basic discovery and led to his pioneering of a method to erase one’s unwanted feelings and emotions. The nascent science of doyletics was founded on these basic principles and the speed trace which resulted provides anyone a simple memory technique to remove unwanted bodily states or doyles within a minute or so.
History of Doyle Henderson and His Work
Doyle was very fearful as a young boy growing up in Southern California. He was scared, but he did things anyway. When other boys climbed high trees, Doyle would be trembling, his heart beating very fast in fear of what they were doing, but he would climb the same trees anyway, even higher than the other boys. He was never too scared to do something — he did them anyway. But always he wondered, “Why am I trembling with my heart racing, and not the other boys?” During World War II he wanted to join the Army like his older brother had done years earlier. He kept flunking his physical because his heart rate was off the charts. Only after his earnest pleading did the doctor wisely allow him to run up and down some steps. With his heart rate in the normal range for someone who had been exercising, he passed his physical. So he joined the Army — he went to war in spite of his overwhelming fears. After he came home, he even learned to fly and owned an airplane for a long time.
After the war Doyle became a pioneer in digital electronic instrumentation. He built the first digital timer ever used at Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah (USA) to time car speeds. He obtained a degree in electronics and went to work for Berkeley Instruments where he continued to design instruments. Later he went to work on such state-of-the-art projects as the SNARK intercontinental missile, which was an unmanned airplane guided by celestial navigation capable of delivering a nuclear weapon payload over 6,000 miles away within a quarter of a mile accuracy, an incredible feat for the technology of the time.
Always in the back of his mind he was wondering, “Why am I so fearful?” One day an insight popped up in his head which was destined to change the course of his life and millions of others: “An emotion is a recapitulated event from one’s childhood.” His work in digital instrumentation had taught him one can make records of earlier events, such as during calibration time, and recall those events to compare to some current reading. What if our brain worked that way? What if we stored those bodily states we call variously feelings and emotions from events which happened to us before some early age and thereafter simply recalled them given some appropriate trigger or signal? “That,” he thought triumphantly, “would explain my fearful trembling!”
The chase was on. Doyle began studying everything he could find about emotions, psychology, psychotherapy and soon he began to see that nothing in his insight was contradicted by what he read. This emboldened him to begin attempting to locate the original event during which he stored the fear and trembling bodily states. Using a combination of hypnosis and age regression, he was able to locate the original event and thereafter he experienced no more trembling and rapid heart rate.
He began to assist others, even opening a clinic locally in which they took in the hopeless cases from a nearby drug rehabilitation clinic — those that the clinic had been unable to help. He would begin by having them systematically relax all the muscles in their body, then place their minds at an earlier age. Eventually he would lead them to locate and then to cycle around the original event. When done, the bodily states which led to their aberration and addiction would have dissipated. Doyle claimed that he had converted alcoholics into social drinkers. One of the clinic doctors felt threatened and had the police shut down Doyle’s competing clinic. At that time Doyle was still working as an aeronautical engineer and doing this community work on his own time. His procedure worked. It was free. They shut him down because they claimed he was practicing medicine without a license. He was only helping people learn how to use a memory technique, but the doctor only saw a competing clinic and wanted it shut down.
Out of these years of clinical experience came an important experiential discovery which is a basic tenet of doyletics: the Memory Transition Age. Doyle discovered that if he helped someone trace and they went back before five year old to the original event, the onerous bodily states never returned, but if they only went back as far as say, seven, the bodily states would return at some later date. Those people, for whom the bodily states returned, he would take through the memory procedure again and this time take them to an earlier age. By keeping track of the ages at which people got permanent removal of the bodily states, he homed in on the age of five years old. Each time he took people below five, their bodily states never returned. Thus, five years old became a benchmark year for his memory procedure and is known in doyletics as the Memory Transition Age (MTA).
One day a man came in who had a bad back and could not lie down as was the usual procedure during the systematic relaxation leading up to the procedure. He allowed the man to sit up with his eyes closed and the procedure worked. Months later, a gentleman who was deaf came to him. Doyle taught himself American Sign Language in order to communicate with the man and the procedure worked as well. Doyle now knew it was possible to do a memory procedure with one’s eyes open and sitting up. Then a lady wrote him who lived alone and wished to use his procedure. Doyle wrote a software program so that the lady could do the procedure sitting up in front of her computer. He called the software PANACEA! — the name expressed his enthusiasm for his discovery as a universal anodyne for relieving people of the world of unwanted fear, anger, grief, distress, depression, etc.
Doyle couldn’t help people remove the things which triggered their fear, anger, grief, distress, depression, but he could help them remove the bodily states which the events around them as adults were triggering. Those bodily states were rising up in them from their childhood, he found, exactly as the trembling and fast-heart rate of his own childhood. These states, which had lasted so long into his adult life, had now been completely erased. In fact, they had been extirpated which means they had been “pulled out by their roots” — roots which he knew extended to before five years old in childhood. By using his memory trace procedure, other people could, in the privacy of their homes, remove their own onerous bodily states permanently.
Founding the Science of Doyletics
At the point when I first met Doyle Henderson, he was about 75 years old, living in the mountains above Los Angeles in a mountain cabin, retired, and selling his software package to people around the world. I met him on a Joseph Newman Energy Machine List and asked him about his email address panacea@bigbear.net and he told me about his software. I found it hard to believe and he agreed to send me a copy to try out. It worked spectacularly for me on the first attempt, but I skipped a few of the steps and discovered that I could do subsequent traces without the software. Apparently one did not need to cycle around the original event, but simply go back before the original event in order for it to be effective. With Doyle’s permission, I began doing seminars for 15 or so people and leading them in a trace during the course of the seminar. Many of them did successful traces during the short demonstration. They bought copies of Doyle’s software to take home with them.
Doyle’s interest was in the functioning of the memory trace procedure, but my interest was in how the structures of the brain could work to make such a procedure effective. I began my study of the literature on emotions in earnest to supplement what I already knew from my studies of brain structure, physiology, neurology, psychology, psychotherapy and other fields. The various books I studied are listed at the end of this webpage with links to my reviews of them: http://www.doyletics.com/doyletic.htm .
Soon an image began to emerge for me that Doyle had made a cosmological discovery which affected every human being and that a science needed to be created for the body of knowledge which will accrue from his discovery. I had already begun using the word “doyles” to refer to the physical body states stored before five years old. This came about because in my first two years of meeting Doyle Henderson we spent several hours a day emailing each other and I insisted on using “physical body states” instead of “feelings” and “emotions” because I had come to see from my early research that if these physical body states comprised the substrate of what people called feelings and emotions. One day after having typed “physical body states” a hundred times or so, I told Doyle I needed a short, one-syllable name to replace “physical body states” and I was going to use his name in lowercase and plural, “doyles”.
That was a fortuitous decision because when I came to found the science which was to embody Doyle’s discovery, the word “doyletics” fit beautifully as a name for the science. The name will forever honor the innovator, Doyle Henderson, who made the original cosmological discovery upon which the science is based. It allowed me to give a simple operational definition of doyletics as the study of doyles, just as genetics is the study of genes. In fact, if genetics can be called the science which studies the acquisition and transmission of physical body traits, then doyletics can be called the science which studies the acquisition and transmission of physical body states. Bodily traits are carried by genes in the genetic structure first generated at conception, and bodily states are carried by doyles stored in the limbic region of the brain during events before five years old. Bodily traits comprise the physical structure of the human body such as eye and hair color, height, facial features, etc., and they are acquired from one’s parents. Bodily states comprise all the doylic events stored between 2 months after conception and five years old, and they are acquired during that time from the events and the people in one’s life: one’s parents, caregivers, relatives and friends. Just as eye color may be acquired genetically from one’s mother, a dislike for sauerkraut can be acquired doylicly from one’s father. The word doyletics is to be treated as the words designating other sciences such as: genetics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc., — it is not capitalized inside a sentence.
Early on in my founding the science of doyletics I sat down with Doyle and Betty Henderson and explained what I was going to do. I wanted to explain how doyletics worked and how people can do a simple memory trace to remove doyles. The three of us could understand that this would likely remove the market for Doyle’s software, and I asked their permission to proceed. Doyle and Betty were unanimous and enthusiastic in approving my plans. With their blessing I formed the website http://www.doyletics.com and began bringing the simple memory trace procedure called the speed trace to the world.
We called it the “speed trace” because a typical trace before then required about 30 minutes to an hour to complete with the progressive relaxation and cycling around the original event (which required returning to a relaxed state after each time). In the beginning my own speed traces took about 10 minutes or so, as I focused on remembering events at each five year time mark in my life as I went down. Soon I discovered that remembering events was not only unnecessary, but it was distracting. It caused some people to get off the track and destroyed the effectiveness of the trace because the doyle they were tracing could be replaced by some other doyle triggered by a memory. Whenever that happens the trace will assuredly fail. Only later did I discover how short a trace can be and still be effective. One day I did a trace in under ten seconds from beginning to end with complete effectiveness. After that experience, I knew that the shorter the trace, the more likely it would be effective. The brevity helps ensure that the doyle being traced will remain active during the whole trace.
If you know about internal combustion automobiles, you knows that you need FUEL and SPARK in order for the engine to run. That can help you to remember the two requirements for a successful trace: HOLD and MARK
HOLD — you hold onto the doyle until you go below five years old (or the doyle is holding onto you)
MARK — you go systematically down your time marks. A time mark is an age that you say during the trace as you go from your current age to below five years old. The selection of which time marks to use are an individual decision: you need to find about seven plus or minus two time marks between your current age and five years old. A simple way is to use increments of 5 if you’re under 35 and 10 if you’re over 35. Thus for a 42-year-old: 42, 40, 35, 30, 25, 20, 15, 10, 5 or for a 68-year-old: 68, 60, 50, 40, 30, 20, 10, 5. For a child under 12, use every year.
Speed Trace Instructions
The instructions for riding a bicycle are simple …. [remainder is the process instructions themselves] …