eresting omission in all of the training wa& ethical or moral philosophy or theology The Bene Gesscnt was always known publicly as a religious order, a mystic Sister hood which espoused a belief in the supematu ral control of the Great Mother None of the available instructional material (and Imlan seems to have kept all of her texts and manuals for each section's training) even refers to a transcendent force or being In fact, in the Missionana Proiectiva material, religion is described as "the purposeful instruction of the masses ' The texts describe thousands of religio mythic variations on the theme of supreme, non human power, but no evidence indicates that the Sisterhood believed in any power greater than that of its own goal, the Kwisatz Haderach The Great Homed Mother is used more as a mascot man as a deity Historical evidence suggests that this atheistic tendency developed some-tune after the Butlenaji Jihad, but textual evidence, equafly convincing, indicates that toe Sisterhood has never been a religious organization A two-part framing program was pursued simultaneously by a candidate the training of the mind and die training of the body Thus a small child would spend hours learning the man> languages in use in her culture, and later spend more hours sitting rock-still, lowering her body temperature or slowing her heartbeat, moving one muscle at a time as she catalogued the stimulus/response pattern of her body The physical training program, the prana-bmdu school, is perhaps the best way to illustrate the unification of these two primary branches of training The clearest analysis to date of die system & in Reverend Mother Maxius Oaire Beeghler's Prarae and Binda Control for Power She identifies the basic premise of the training as that found m an ancient Terran religion m which the path to the truth was called Sabda and closely resembled what is known to the Bene Gessent as die "Way " Sabda allowed an internal realization of truth which identi fied the knower with art immutable reality The Bene Gessent Way also identifies the knower with reality, but denies immutability Thus the Bene Gessent axiom "The pur pose of argument is to change the nature of truth" The same conditioning procesbes, however, are used to attain both Sabda and the Way The ke> to bulh is mhie\mg harmo ny and tranquihty through establishing balance within the mdi\idual This* balance is achieved through tapai (austere regimens which control and organize the psychic and physical forces of the body and concentrate one's powers) and upauna (Ihe meditation which allows one to go deep within oneself to fmd the link between the internal forces, the point of balance between knowing the body and knowing the mmd) The mental self is trained through nayana-a discipline which controls reasoning Nayana pairs linguistics and logic m order that the individual can distinguish between language and meaning The student is constantly taught that a sentence means more than the mean ing of the individual words, that it includes the physical activity which accompanies the act of speaking The observer, therefore must be able to 'read' and ' register ' the gestalt of the speaker, must be able to understand the linguistic patterns of thought conveyed through, the immediate language, and must be able to synthesize all these channels instantly in order to understand completely what actually is being "said ' Thus, in the process of learning the student must always completely control the internal sources-her own physical, mental, and emo ttonal condition at the time of synthesis- and totallv perceive the external sources- the environment of the speaker, the physical and psychic gestalt of the speaker, the cultural undertones of the language and the actual overtones of the word sets being used In general, this technique of data collection, synthesis, and understanding was perfected after the Butlenan Jihad The aim was to replace thought machines with people who were not only capable of instantaneous logic computations, as were the machines, but who were also able to assimilate sensory and emotional information Through a rational/ intuitive process such people would come to conclusions that were human rather than BENE GESSERIT TRAINING 135 BENE GESSERIT TRAINING mechanistic but objectively detached rather than egotistically biased Specifically, prana (nerve) and bmdu (muscle) training prepared one for the state of concentration needed to understand the reality of a situation (This state of concentra tion is also essential to the Bene Gessent observational skills and martial art techniques) To gam the proper attitude for complete concentration, one must first remove onself, mentally if not physically, from all distractions To do this one uses relaxation techniques which eliminate the distraction from extraneous stimuli At this point in her studies the student also learns how to distinguish primary information from secondary or unessential information-"to see the facts and discard the ghafla' Once one has relaxed and has begun to observe the proper information, one must learn to observe closely and clearly In this state of observation one assimilates pertinent data from the present situation and recalls all pertinent data from memory If possible, the observer next assumes a positive physical posture of relaxation and concentration When the analytical work is being done under private, leisurely conditions, the person relaxes in one of thirty three postures, each appropriate to a specific type of analytical work In public situations, the observer assumes an immediate but unobtrusive ritualistic posture which calls the muscles and tissues into alertness If under great stress or immobilized, one can alter mis posture to accommodate the restraints Next, one begini.