A machine always functions in a predetermined way. You can predict exactly what a machine will do if you have sufficient knowledge of it. A machine cannot go beyond the limitations of its design. It can stop, or run inefficiently, but it cannot of itself change the pattern of its function.
Trees and plants have different appearances but they all use the same mechanical process and their performance can be predicted. We can predict that they will absorb sustenance through a root system, form branches and produce leaves, flowers or fruit.
The cow-machine will give milk if it is fed and if mated will produce young in a certain time. It will run away from an outside cause of pain and attack you if you threaten its young. The dog-machine, or the elephant-machine, will function similarly, with slight variations. The water-machine, the lightmachine, the sound-machine, the sun-machine, the moon-machine, the earth-machine: the performance of every machine can be predicted, according to our knowledge of it.
Man is a machine whose direction can easily be predicted. He (she) will always devote his life to the desire for money, power and prestige. If he possesses any of these things and then loses them he is unhappy. And if he thinks he is going to lose any of them he worries. Whenever his desires are fulfilled he is happy, but only while he is thinking about or experiencing the fulfilment. Otherwise he is discontent and restless because of the non-fulfilment of other desires.
Predictably, like all animal and insect machines, he (and especially she) will protect the young even to death, imagining that man’s love is above that of all the other animal and insect machines (which do the same thing, without the act of will that man says motivates him). The man-machine always gives preference to his own young over another’s, and says that’s natural, not understanding that what is natural is mechanical.
The man-machine imagines he possesses dignity. He goes to the most undignified lengths to prove it, being unable to understand that what possesses dignity does not need to prove it, and cannot lose it.
The man-machine will crucify any conscious man who tries to help him; and convert his wisdom into an empty, mechanical dogma that suits his own understanding. He will espouse a code of ethical behaviour based on the teaching of a man who was not a machine, and observe none of it — because a machine cannot change its function or understand what is true.
The man-machine fears death because a machine cannot see beyond its own destruction. He will also mourn the death of others; but only those to whom he is attached — as though their death were some unexpected event in life.
The man-machine imagines attachment to be love; and is baffled by the exhortation: 'Love one another.' The young, being made into machines by example and training, ask 'How can everyone love one another?' — for they have seen that no one does it, and know it to be impossible in themselves. But they will go on being mechanised by the imaginative answers and excuses of their elders.
Mechanical man is the composite image projected by life as it shines like a brilliant white light through three separate 'screens'.
The first screen is different for every individual. It is composed of the individual's experience of facts and impressions formed since birth. As every individual life is different, so the total experience of every individual is different and keeps changing with the accumulation of new impressions.
The second screen is not individual and nothing about it changes. It is the desire for power, a mechanical motivator designed to maintain man's activity through the desire for possessions and everything that goes with power.
The third screen changes every moment and consists of all things, states and possibilities existing in creation. It's moment-to-moment movement provides the interaction called 'time'.
The light passing through the screens blends the image of the individual with the mechanical desire for power and the endless opportunity to indulge it; every experience, impression and the fact is converted into an expression of insatiable desire.
One of the greatest steps in self-discovery is to see that you are a machine.
Only the few who have real knowledge will admit to being machines. If you tell most people that they are a machine and that nearly everything, if not everything, they do is a mechanical reaction to influences outside their control they will probably say you are mad...
