When I told you the story of that last Japanese soldier found on that small Pacific island thirty years after the war ended, I theorized that it was his culture that produced his dedication and patriotism.

       Many others think it was his stupidity and peasant temperament, which had never known anything better, that enabled him to persevere and carry out his mission despite enormous obstacles.

       All right, then. I never met the soldier so anyone's guess has as much merit as mine.

       But what about someone who was at the pinnacle of a respected profession, living a good life with wife and children, in a spacious house with servants, in an area where culture abounded?

       What if such an individual was suddenly thrust into an environment even worse than that which the last Japanese soldier endured, subjected to unspeakable horrors day in and day out, more hungry than the soldier, much less freedom, more bereft of possessions and dignity as well?

       What if his wife and children were murdered, and almost everyone else around him died?

       What if he also ended up a survivor, aided a little by luck, abetted to some extent by his wits?

       Both stories are true. There is a certain similarity in the experiences of the Japanese soldier and this well-educated man. Both were able to somehow transcend their day-to-day realities without going insane. Both obviously used certain mental techniques to sustain their existence, perhaps unconsciously, perhaps consciously.

       The difference is that the soldier, presumably of limited intelligence, could not dissect the mental processes that made for survival and give voice and meaning to a life filled with all manner of suffering. The other man, now considered to be one of the most influential psychiatrists in the world, could and did determine the reasons and the rationale.

       The man's name is Victor Frankl and the classic he wrote is called "Man's Search for Meaning", in which he gives a harrowing account of his life in a German concentration camp during the holocaust. He survived Auschwitz, and thus lived to analyze the episodes and write about them.

       Everyone there was preoccupied with survival every minute of every day. Once, about to succumb to the misery of the moment, a picture popped into his head and gave him the courage to go on living.

       It was the face of his wife, her beauty and love. That was the start. He would summon up visions of her in all kinds of prior settings. His former life experiences intensified within as each day's horrors grew worse.

       Although tangible possessions can be taken away, he said, nobody can remove internal visions. In core lore terms, his Experience Index was available to sustain him through his suffering.

       Salvation, says Frankl, lies in love and through love. That is what the memory of his wife and incidents in his former life brought forth. He seems to have worked, in what we now refer to as submode fashion, on each experience to enhance its effect. He traveled back along his past and found strength from all the incidents he recalled.

       Then he made another discovery. It was necessary to create a future as well, to provide a smidgen of hope that he would somehow survive. A future that would make the present more tolerable. One that gave him something to look forward to. A vision that could not be stripped away, since he controlled his attitude and his outlook.

        As he described the incident, he had terrible sores on his feet from the forced marches to the worksite ten kilometers away in shoes that were torn. The winds were fierce and he was shivering from the cold. He was weak from hunger.

       Totally depressed, totally obsessed with the cumulative weight of petty problems that had become paramount for survival, he sensed that his end was near. How to forestall it?

       He suddenly saw himself standing on a platform in a well-lit, warm, and pleasant lecture hall, looking out at an audience sitting in comfortable, upholstered seats, captivated by his speech on the psychology of life in a concentration camp.

       He had risen above the moment. His present situation had become objective, seen and described from the lectern viewpoint.

       In core lore and NLP terms, he had dissociated from an experience that he had been an integral part of. He now  was describing the scene and watching himself objectively.

       In addition, Frankl was future pacing the seminar scene, placing it on the line that represented his future. That gave him something to look forward to, provided a degree of hope that overcame, to some extent, the indignities of the moment.

       In much the same fashion, but not understanding it, I suspect that the Japanese soldier, during lulls in his vigil, kept searching his memory bank for sustaining past experiences, and that he also found hope by imagining what it would be like after the war was over for him and he returned home. He would have had to do something like that to find a reason to go on living.

       If the experiences of the past and the constructed images placed in his future worked under such adverse conditions for Victor Frankl, and presumably for that last Japanese soldier, just think of how effective it could be for you where food, shelter, and clothing are not major survival concerns.