us of that ubiquitous “all-seeing eye” of the ancient Egyptian god, “Horus,” that made him so knowledgeable of everything his believers did, or didn’t do. Nothing his believers could do, or not do, could escape his continual watching. His “all-seeing eye” is depicted at the top of the pyramid on the front of a dollar bill. Children can believe that an omniscient Santa Claus, like Horus, “sees everything,” and can take a very personal interest in what they communicate to him, even though millions of other children feel the same way, at the very same time. They can write him in great detail what they think would make them very happy with the expectation that they will receive this if they have been doing what they should be doing, and not doing what they shouldn’t be doing. Because Santa is a deity, with the human form of an old man, one doesn’t ask questions that might threaten the belief in him. For instance, one doesn’t ask what really makes his sleigh go when his reindeers’ feet aren’t touching the ground, and one doesn’t ask how an obese old man gets down a narrow chimney and past its iron damper, or how he gets back up the chimney. If he apparently can get up and down a chimney with no difficulty, one doesn’t ask why he doesn’t just go through the locked front door. One doesn’t ask that if Santa is eating cookies and drinking hot chocolate in millions of children’s homes on Christmas Eve, whether one should leave the bathroom light on for him. One doesn’t ask what Santa looked like as a little boy, or if he got any spankings or “time outs” from misbehaving. One doesn’t ask who his mother and father were, or what his DNA is. One would never ask if he gets a yearly prostate exam and a colonoscopy, every five years, because of the age he apparently is. One shouldn’t ask anything that threatens a belief in a deity. No one would want to believe Santa doesn’t exist and that he is only a highly valued creation of the unmet basic emotional need that’s of immense emotional benefit to children. It is the desire to meet what is unmet of our basic emotional need in a never-ending way that is the basis for our socially acceptable delusions that, like children believing in Santa, we might value above all else. We can conclude from this that having a delusion is not at all indicative of being mentally ill!
Predicate-equating is more prevalent than what we might realize. For instance, we can suspect some preceding unconscious predicate-equating in much of what we communicate to others. Taxonomists often show evidence of some previous unconscious “schizophrenia-like” thinking in scientifically naming plants and animals, which then aids people in communicating with each other about those plants and animals. As an example, the New England sand fiddler crab, whose common name derives from predicate-equating a “fiddle,” with its fiddle-shaped claw in front of it, must have reminded the taxonomist that named it, not of a “fiddle” but, instead, a “boxer” holding his arm defensively in front of him, for its scientific name is “Uca pugilator.” Unconscious predicate-equating might have preceded that taxonomist’s conscious reminding. What the unconscious commonly shared predicates were for naming an Indian “Crazy Horse,” or “Sitting Bull,” or naming a bulky WW2 life jacket a “Mae West,” and after the war, a “Dolly Parton,” is rather obvious. “Being sweet” is the predicate you might unconsciously utilize in calling your loved one, “Honey.” Honey is sweet. Your loved one is sweet. “Being sweet” is the predicate that then makes honey, identical with your loved one, so that you refer to your loved one as “Honey.” They are made identical with unconscious “schizophrenic-like,” predicate-equating. You’re unconsciously utilizing predicate-equating, in talking to a friend, if you refer to your disliked neighbor as a “bad apple,” or a “pain in the ass.”
It might be some unconscious predicate-equating that allows us to make a conscious comparison. Someone must have unconsciously equated the lace of Queen Ann, which we can call “entity A,” with the blossom of a certain plant, which we can call “entity B.” With this unconscious equating, someone in the past made “A” the same as “B” when the predicate might have been “having lace.” This unconscious equating is an example of “part-to-part” equating, because the lace of Queen Ann is only one part of Queen Ann, and the lace-like blossom is only one part of the plant. The wildflower is commonly called, “Queen Ann’s Lace.” With our conscious thinking, we know that this plant’s blossom isn’t the lace of Queen Ann. But it’s unconscious predicate-equating that might have made the connection between the two. Similarly, a flower known to the ancient Romans, whose tiny yellow petal of its blossom must have been unconsciously predicate-equated with a tooth of a lion that they had seen in an amphitheater. “Dens” is tooth in Latin, and “leo” is lion. The genitive case of “leo” is “leonis” meaning “of the lion.” The predicate might have been “long and sharp-pointed.” Part of the plant was equated with part of a lion when they shared that same predicate. The Romans named this little plant “dens leonis,” or “tooth of the lion,” which hundreds of years later in France became “dent de lion.” We know the flower as a “dandelion.” Anyone consciously seeing a similarity between two entities, may have earlier unconsciously predicate-equated those entities in their unconscious mind. As another example, the ancient Greeks noted that a certain beautiful flower as always having a root with two distinct bulges that with some unconscious predicate-equating must have reminded them of two testicles, because what they then called this flower was “testicle” in Greek. “Orkhis” is “testicle” in Greek. (The surgical removal of a testicle today is called an “orchidectomy.”) They may have unconsciously predicate-equated the two bulges on the roots of this flower, which is just part of the flower, with the testicles of a male human, which is only part of a human. We call this flower “an orchid.”
This same type of unconscious “part-to-part” predicate-equating might have been involved with wildflowers with common names like “dog-tooth violet,” “Dutchman’s britches,” “shepherd’s purse,” “mouse ear,” “snakehead,” “lady slipper,” “buttercup,” and “ox-eye daisy,” just to name a few. We can easily discern the unconscious predicate-equating that might have taken place behind the common animal names such as the “horseshoe crab,” “hammerhead shark,” “swordfish,” “fox squirrel,” “snowshoe rabbit,” “garter snake,” “cardinal,” and “tape worm.” A small lizard of the Central and South American rain forests that appears to rapidly walk on the surface of water, when frightened, is called the “Jesus Christ lizard,” where “walks on water” is the equating predicate. How illogical predicate-equating can be, which can make it as having no bounds, is evident in calling a flat-topped mushroom a “toadstool,” when toads don’t ever sit on stools! The unconscious predicate-equating should now be obvious to us in the commonly described medical conditions of “buffalo hump,” “saddle nose,” “water hammer pulse,” “pill roller tremor,” and “St Vitus dance.” Psychiatry itself might be guilty of the same type of unconscious thinking it has accused schizophrenics of only having, as evidenced by the “Oral stage,” the “Anal stage,” and the “Oedipus complex.” Our seeing any similarity in two different entities may have been preceded by unconscious “part”-oriented predicate-equating.
“Part-to-part” predicate-equating makes predicate-equating far more widespread than we might initially realize. For instance, unconscious “part-to-part” predicate-equating may be involved whenever we engage in any extended talking with a listener. With predicate-equating, we can unconsciously meet some of what is unmet of our basic emotional need if we unconsciously perceive a very small part, which we can call entity “A,” within our listener that can meet our basic emotional need as we talk to that listener about anything. That small entity “A” that we might unconsciously perceive in our listener as we talk to that listener, can become the same as an entity “B,” or only a part of entity “B,” from our past, if they both are unconsciously perceived as sharing the same predicate “meets my basic emotional need.” With that commonly shared predicate, entity “A” becomes identical with entity “B,” or part of entity “B.” We could also unconsciously equate that small part we perceive in our listener with other things, people, experiences, and situations, or only parts of those, that might have also met our basic emotional need in our past. That equating process enhances the degree to which we can meet what might be unmet of our basic emotional need from that small unconsciously perceived part of our listener. On an unconscious level, a perceived part of
