The Trap Of Mentality

An ancient wise man (20th Century) wrote wisely that "the map is not the territory". This was applied to the symbols of semantic systems in the fancy subject of semiotics, the study of portable meanings.

But it needs to be applied to a more fundamental layer of abstraction, the generation of "mentality" or systems of thinking.
Systems of thinking consist of complex arrays of pictures and Representations of states of existence (or unexistence) in some universe.

If you need an example, just watch yourself doing an algebra problem and notice where you keep those rules of division, or watch yourself make up a shopping list while you study the larder and think about your family's quirky appetites.
Systems of thinking (as distinguished from thought itself) are collections of recreatable images of how things are combined with new postulated impressions of how they might be. Some folks add in impressions of how certain others think, such as a little generator that dictates what Mom would say about this.
The reason this becomes a trap is that these systems becomes substitutes for perception. This is a handy mechanism, since it lets us put these trivial issues such as life on automatic and go off and smell the daisies in some septic tank of apathetic resignation somewhere.

To add a bit to how this works, consider that all these impressions of how things are or might be are figured in awareness as objects of impression, such as images to look at or emotional waves to feel, or thoughts to look at and think. Whatever their content, whatever they tell us about the universe, they are created forms. They are generated by our own authorship in the first instance, no matter how automatic they may seem to become over time. They are born in the hot forge of our own attention, doing what it does best -- making things to perceive, and then perceiving them. We use attention to animate or reanimate them in order to pose and resolve real or imagined problems. That's how we remember how to change a tire or ride a bicycle even though we haven't use the skill in fifteen years.

But we sometimes fail to notice that they are representations. We take the content of them at face value; for example, we get stuck in believing we feel a certain way because we are looking at a picture which has such feelings in it. Because some of these representations are closely related to our decisions to be a certain way or feel a certain way, it seems logical to assume they are who we are, the makeup of our identities. This is a lethal error because at that point, we associate so closely with them that they become neatly invisible, just as the eyeballs become invisible to their owner.

From this we can deduce two crucial rules to remember, and if we keep them in mind (how? By making a picture of them!) we can bail out of the mentality trap, which often leads in endless figure-eight loops back and forth like a little go-cart track in a grungy back lot of existence, lined with rubber-tire wards and supposed-to's to keep us well contained.

Crucial Rule Number One: Content is Not Structure. What a thought contains can be infinitely various, but it will still behave according to rules which govern the nature of thought structures. Be not so led by content that you fail to notice structure, the nature of the construct itself.

Crucial Rule Number Two: Ground is Not Figure, Nor Figure, Ground. The forms we dance to are erected on the ground of a deeper nature, the full scale of which has not been explored, which is the infinite awareness which is Thou. Upon this ground, we build the mazes of amazing mentality. Return to ground, becoming one again with your own power of perception in full, and the figures dance to nothingness. Otherwise, you can be bemused by the very constraining conviction that ground is the same as figure, and in consequence find yourself endlessly figuring. Figure, figure figure. Let yourself know when you tire of it, and see Rules One and Two.

# # #