Somewhere along the way we were all coated with a thick film that we call by our personal names. Whenever this film is touched by something external, it is trained to react in a very specific way. Reactions of attraction, repulsion and indifference are all programmed into it, and so the film will tighten, loosen or remain unmoved as it encounters phenomenon of every possible kind. It identifies and adapts a response to anything and everything, one step at a time, building so to speak a library of conditions that it can anticipate from that moment forth, and thereby live more assuredly in a calm state of security.

Yet these learned conditions and our reactions to them are often utterly subjective, arbitrary and in many cases harmful. They are not responses of a conscious and intentional kind, but rather reactions of the mechanical sort and variety. That is, we behave onto the outside world as a machine reacts to buttons that are simply pressed. Creatures that are conscious and intelligent, on the other hand, pave their daily lives with spontaneous adaptations to ever-changing circumstances, striding through situations with as much artistic intuition as they do mental calculations.

A man who is programmed like a machine cannot hope to live in such a fine, subtle and organic way. He is doomed to repeat the same mistakes, or miss the same opportunities, ad infinitum, for his nerves beg to be appeased in a similar fashion at every next moment. These films are designed to be defensive, opposing external influences that arrive from the outside like white blood cells attack intruding organisms in our bodies. The nature of a child and the manner of an adult are in great disparity, one to the other, due fully to the sheer absence of this film in the one, and it’s total state of dominance in the other.