Mirrors of the Mind: How Environment Shapes the Spiral Within
Standing in the Eye of the Spiral: Navigating Life's Twists with GT
Mirrors of the Mind: How Environment Shapes the Spiral Within
WARM UP. Good greetings to all the readers joining me today near and far. Apologies if you have been on the lookout for the latest entry since yesterday. My aim is to release each new blog at least on Sunday, occasionally plans change. This is the second week in a row for me to release it a day later than expected and that is motivating me to create an announcement via one of my social pages to alert readers to potential changes to the release dates. This weekend I was across the state getting in some much needed family time. Though it tends to feel like too short of time, when you love being around your family there generally isn’t enough time. I realize I am one of very few people in the world that tends to “get along” with my entire family. It was nice to get out of my home environment for a time and visit the other side of the coast line. While the environment was clearly different for me, it is distinctly different from what their family experienced coming from Michigan.
Often I am in a position to educate people on how their environment tends to drive their behavior, and vice versa. When I discuss this matter I have to have them consider both their internal environment as well as their external. The internal comes from the mental schema, nutrition, light, and water, generally. The external comes from all things in the environment, be it from the air, sounds, radiation, or human relating, generally. Scientists such as Dr. Robert Sapolsky and Jacques Fresco have spoken and written at length about how the environment determines outcomes of behavior. Both of them being behavioral biologists as well as in Fresco’s part of being an engineer, the environment was of incredible interest to both of their studies. Fresco said "Human behavior is subject to the same laws as any other natural phenomenon. Our customs, behaviors, and values are byproducts of our culture. No one is born with greed, prejudice, bigotry, patriotism, and hatred; these are all learned behavior patterns. If the environment is unaltered, similar behavior will reoccur." And clearly just because he said it, doesn’t it make it true. If you are of a mature mind you would ask “well, is it true?” Now if you go further into exploration of your own behaviors, customs, or values that you have, you may find that they are all reflections of your culture indeed.
When I recall many of my past behaviors, values, and customs it has me reflect back on my middle school years. I don’t recall many of those years as being positively productive to my well being in the future. I also have to think that it has something to do with being in public schooling in a low to upper middle income household school district. Going to school with what seemed to be a very high percentage of impoverished kids, a lot of impoverished behavior permeated the hallways and classrooms. This likely made it really difficult to concentrate on learning or being a teacher trying to teach. Middle school was when I would get comfortable with emergency evacuations, or hearing about expulsions and suspensions from students bringing a knife or gun to school. I recall regularly seeing graffiti gang symbols in random school announcement boards, books or inside lockers. G’s up, hoe’s (Bloods) down. See, it’s still with me! No, don’t get things misunderstood, I did not belong to a gang. Bloods and Crypts, red vs blue. That must have leaked over from hip hop music? The impoverished behavior didn’t just permeate the hallways and classrooms, it clearly motivated my behaviors and decisions to some degree. Like the time I thought it would be cool to own a BB gun that clearly resembled a 9mm handgun. As I recall it, it was definitely one of those style BB guns that have kids “mistakenly” being shot and killed by police officers. It’s unfortunate that anyone has had to lose their lives over a misidentification in that manner.
COOLDOWN. Writing that just sent me into a stream of “idealist” thoughts and “optimism.” I’ll spare you the “this could be so much better if…” A discussion I had with several people today was that they don’t know what they can do to change society. Recently I saw someone say online “There's only one thing humans believe in. It's called power concentration. All the shit they talk about is just a distraction from the actual intent. If you have the power, the people mirror your sentiments. Doesn't matter how based or unhinged they are. This is law.” -Naudi Aguilar. While it’s an extreme statement, it speaks to why many people in the commons and therefore not in power, feel like they can’t do anything to change society. Take a moment and reflect on your own behaviors, your very own thoughts right now. How many of your recent thoughts, speech or actions were free from mirroring a sentiment of society completely? To be free from your greater culture system it seems your only option would be to build your own within the system, and build it in such a way it makes the other system obsolete. So even in building out a new cultural system, there still wouldn’t likely be an action free from the influences of culture completely. Or could there be such an action?
Take Care,
G$