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        In the intricate interaction between the brain and the mind, as a consequence of recent research, much is known about the brain but, as yet, little is known about the working mind. Collier has drawn many conclusions. “Mentality” he defines as the “product of interaction between brain and mind.” It is an interpretation by the mind of brain performance. Therefore, mentality is the part of the mind structured by conscious brain activity and life experiences. However, mentality and mind are not synonymous. “Mentosis” is the reflection of neuralosis on the mind to produce chronic mental illness and chronic anxiety. This is the concern of Pleneurethics. But first, some background is needed.
        Collier, being an original thinker and concerned with application rather than dialectic, avoided the raging complex debate over the mind. Collier, without awareness, sided with Spinoza’s monism and thereby against Descartes’ dualism. However, Spinoza’s God became Collier’s Absolute. Treatment, not tautology, is Collier’s focus.
        Collier perceived mentality as that part of the mind tissue that is structured through the mind’s interpretation of brain performance, modified subsequently by desire and belief.
        In the early stages of life, brain activity in the portion of the brain destined to communicate eventually with the conscious mind remains on a submental level. This continues until the conscious part of the mind learns to identify specific brain signals and to assign meaning to them. Thus, in the early stages of life, the brain and mind are separated, not because of a void, but because the mind has not yet learned to interpret or transliterate the signals from the brain. In short, the mentality is not sufficiently developed to expedite a meaningful interchange between the brain and the mind.
        What a person sees, hears, tastes, smells, or learns is never of an unconscious nature. By the very act of knowing with the mind that the
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brain is transmitting a sensation to the mind, the sensation automatically becomes a conscious perception even though a person does not attach a mental meaning to it. Consequently, all things inscribed on the mentality of the mind remain there, even though the passing of the years with the piling of one experience on another, along with the false cues, may contribute to forgetfulness.
        Many vague sensations interpreted by the mind as anxiety, apprehension, or even guilt spring from an unconscious or subverbal sector of an individual’s brain, but this does not argue for a subverbal aspect of mind that causes chronic illness. The subverbal sector is the brain under chronic assault, not an unconscious precinct of the mind. The brain may be thought of as being subverbally unconscious, but there is no such thing as an unconscious aspect of the mind. Therefore, the brain distortion or disturbance affects the status of one’s total being, not some maladjustment of a mythical unconscious mind. Equally true, a normal brain experiencing a normal range of tensions from normal life experiences will reflect sensations interpreted by the mind as wellbeing.
        The mind is the pure essence upon which (or within which) brain variation is impressed to create mentality. The mind is also the raw awareness that receives, interrelates, and interprets brain activity to form mentality. Mentality is a product of the interaction of the mind with the brain. Structural alteration of brain tissue, either micro or macro, influences and impresses the mind to produce mentality. Brain structure is altered as it processes stress or responds to actions of the mind or mentality to further process brain tensions. The brain structure is also altered by chemical or mechanical stress. If the brain is permanently damaged by this stress, e.g., by drug abuse, the mentality of the mind will also be irreversibly affected.
        Mentality proliferation commences with the inception of fetal life and ceases at death. It is an ever-expanding mosaic of experience and belief, where habits take root and where character is formed. Once fashioned, mentality often administers inflexible influence on both the brain and the mind. Indeed, once a pattern of mentality has been formed over a period of time, its main beams are nearly indestructible—death of the individual is the only means of abolition.
        Based upon evaluation of life experience, the mind does have the ability to alter mentality, but this ability meets increasing inertia as the
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monument of individual mentality expands with maturation. Mentality, then, is that part of the mind structured by life experiences, as the mind becomes more adept at interpreting various sensations by relating them to other sensations through recall and memory.
        Mentosis produces chronic mental illness and chronic anxiety. How can it be treated? Pleneurethics is not primarily interested in dealing with abstruse, highly ethereal or nebulous psychological problems. Rather, it attempts to remove the pressure and conflict from those common personal problems that are found to be the primary cause of one’s distress. Usually, these are capable of being stated simply, e.g., “I am not a good person because I am stupid, illegitimate, a failure, uneducated, unmarried.” In this area there is plenty of solid productive work to be done and much to be accomplished by the removal of the mental (psychological) pressures created by such common personal problems, but Pleneurethics recognizes the limitations of the verbal or intellectual approach. The trained Pleneurethicist will make whatever intellectual structural modifications are required; however, he will not delay recovery by insisting on some elusive mental approach where its application will be unproductive.
        The mental approach is effective in cases where the person is unable to resolve persistent personal problems, assuming that the cause of the condition is not of a physical nature. As long as this condition exists, a relatively large portion of the intellectual mentality remains entangled, identified, and comingled with these personal problems consuming vital brain energy. This is because the intellectual mentality has a specific functional potential that is derived from the usable mental power available on command. If this mental power is not free and flexible, it cannot be successfully ordered to function as required when contingencies arise.
        Ideally, the intellect will use its brainpower to function on each problem situation that arises. If the problem is solved, the intellect resumes its resting posture with its full potential centralized in a mental capability reservoir. On many occasions the individual does not return as much mental power to the mental energy reservoir as was originally withdrawn. This happens when the individual refused to make a decision on an important matter and continued to fret over it for days, weeks, and even years. The greater the amount of mental power remaining permanently attached to old, unresolved conflicts,
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the less there will be available for instantaneous use to meet the needs of new demands.
        Even if the reservoir of capability for mental activity is fully charged, there is a strict limit on the size of the field over which this capacity can be spread. One can either attempt to spread the conscious attention thinly over a wide field of subjects or in-depth over a narrow field. However, a person cannot be conscious of everything and anything at the same time. This principle can be applied similarly to the distribution of energy between the intellectual consciousness and the infraconscious (that part of the brain’s activity that presides over the operation of the visceral and vascular body segments).
        At times, nearly all of a person’s capacity for conscious awareness is preempted for emergency use by the infraconsciousness. This is because the person has only indirect control over it. Consequently, when one eats excessive quantities of nearly indigestible food or drinks excessive amounts of alcoholic beverages, a substantial portion of the total capacity for awareness is commandeered by the infraconsciousness to metabolize these substances. Under these circumstances, the intellectual and supraconsciousness will not have the vital capacity for proper operation. The individual will appear, in varying degrees, to be in a state of intellectual and/or ethical torpor. There are also many individuals who are so frustrated and dissatisfied with their lives that they deliberately overindulge to reduce their intellectual sensitivity. An excess of food or drink serves their purpose. It dulls their perception of the distasteful occurrences in their lives and even helps them to sleep by reducing their intellectual acuity.
        In Pleneurethics people endeavor to temper the effect of eternal circumstances so that they do not exert control over their intellectual reserves. Instead, they expect their intellectual posture to control the intellectual reactions to these circumstances. A person should not attempt to have a great variety of relatively uncontrollable, unintegrated desires, all of which disrupt and weaken the intellectual mentality. Rather, a person should attempt to integrate his intellectual structure so that it cannot be splintered and diffused under the hectic assault of modern life. Because good desires vary from person to person, it is impractical to try to list them. One cannot reduce the many good desires to the one good desire that will integrate the intellectual structures of all people. A person can, however, offer a tentative sample,
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such as: The desire to assist all others as much as possible without doing violence to one’s own being; the desire to find the truth of all matters coming into one’s purview; the desire to think and act in accordance with those truths; and the desire to act on the basis of ethical principles (for example, Kant’s Categorical Imperative) and not on some arbitrary, personal expediency or emotional caprice. All should assume responsibility for themselves and for their proper development.
        The purpose of an integrated, positive belief structure is to ensure that the intellectual mentality is properly deployed in a poised posture for flexible equilibrium. The intellect is then free to perceive any external circumstances, not hindered by sophisticated preconceptions; free to entertain the elements of these circumstances passively during a period of formulation; free to formulate a plan of action or inaction to deal effectively with these circumstances; free to execute the plan; and, most importantly, free to return undisturbed and undisrupted to its central, poised position. Structured in this manner, the intellectual mentality will not become permanently disordered or dislocated by any external, traumatic episode.
        Pleneurethics recognizes a form of natural law that heretofore has not been discussed. It is called personal law. Personal law provides the enduring basis for civil and social law. It may not, however, be perfectly reflected in codes, real or implied. Personal law springs from the depths of the individual. It is based on the survival requirements of the physical body, the mentality, and the ethical structure. On occasion, personal law may rise on high and, rightly or wrongly, contest every other law unto death. It is the role of the Pleneurethicist to assist the individual in exerting a strong measure of prudence in the establishment of a personal, self-adopted, intellectual structure by developing a reasonable, realistic, and efficient intellectual set of personal laws which are harmonious with the worth as it actually exists.
        As has been seen already, various desires provide the structure of a person’s intellectual mentality. The durability of each desire is based upon the strength of conviction of the desire and the relative position of the particular desire in the configuration of the structural intellectual mentality. In Pleneurethics people attempt to control specific desires by rearranging their location in the structural configuration of the array of desires by attacking the nature of desire itself and by modifying
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the strength or quality of the conviction which supports the desire.
        The strength and quality of intellectual desire can be animal-like, sophisticated, or godlike. The animal type of desire is akin to that of the infrallect, waxing and waning with biological need. It is based on the selfish expectation of self-preservation at any cost. Desires of this type are strongest when the appetite is sharp, and they diminish when satiation occurs. Due to this pattern, desires generated by the infrallect are entirely egocentric and oriented to the present.
        The sophisticated type of desire is also egocentric, but it is provident in that it arranges to store things for future use even though many of these things may never be consumed. Desires generated by the intellect waft with the situation and the circumstances, frequently recognizing the legal rights of others but rarely the ethical rights of others.
        The desire that is godlike in its strength and quality is inspired by the ultrallect. The strength and power of the godlike desire is that it will bend and flex with circumstances, but it is never broken or defeated because it is based on the rock of eternal ethics.
        Pleneurethics recognizes the strengths and qualities of all three classes of intellectual desires. It does not endeavor to stamp out arbitrarily or capriciously all but the godlike desires inspired by the ultrallect. To do so would be unrealistic. Just because the infrallect is animal-like and motivated by supreme selfishness for the necessities of physical survival, one cannot assert that it is less important than the intellect or the ultrallect in promoting the survival of the total human organism. What a person must do is to learn control and to direct these desires properly so that he may eventually realize his true potential.