Mental Frameworks and Society

seas can change a ship
faster than ships can change seas
choose place pace with care

Sometime back my wife and I had a wonderful and enlightening discussion about how our interior spaces are affected by our exterior relationships with other people, and vice versa.

If, for instance, most of the people you surround yourself with are of one particular kind of mental framework (say religion like devout Christians or Atheists, or politics like green liberals or prochoice conservatives, or even dietary lifestyles like veganism or macrobiotics) you’ll be prone to stay in this ‘sea’ because the sea affects you, ‘changes’ your interior mental space and framework to help you make sense of the ‘sea’ around you.

Of course affective ‘change’ does go both ways; the ‘sea’ you’re in and the people around you will inevitably be affected by you and your interior space as well. Interactivity is just one of the fascinating aspects of living life in the biological meaning matrix.

But the curious thing we noticed in our discussion was that if you want to change ‘seas’, change up your religion, politics, creed, etc., even just a little bit, you’re likely to find the ‘sea’, any sea, will usually have the advantage over you. It will have the ability to change and adjust to you faster than you can think, change and adjust to it. Mental frameworks are functioning at their best when the people using them don’t have to think, but the person trying to change seas will have to think because they are trying to change. In this way the predominant mental framework around you, your ‘sea’, is much like water, it’s fluid and when under force (gravity, social pressure) its response (cause and effect) to small scale change is fairly immediate, whereas humans attempting to change will have to think and reflect and then move and act.

While a person can do their best to limit their involvement in the seas around them and their ‘ship’, living life this way can be quite lonely and lack ‘enough’ meaning. I think the best defense against the seas’ advantage (that we thought of) was to simply choose your ‘port’, your goal, with care. And with equal care to choose your ‘sea’, the course, manner and method of getting to your goal, knowing you will be affected by ‘sailing’ it and knowing how difficult it may be to leave it one day.