Your Mind Is Not You

Today I want to talk about mental agility. We all know that mental agility is important in areas like evaluating your opponents and responding to their threats, but most people aren’t rigorously agile in their thinking.

We patriots want to win. We are few and generally poor. We are opposing the largest governments, the most powerful military, intelligence and police, and the wealthiest oligarchs and richest Status Quo minions, ever in history. We are opposing them in political, cultural and economic areas. In each of those they are far stronger than we are.

A very asymmetric contest. If we don’t think better than they do, we lose our Freedom, our children lose their futures.

So some thoughts about improving your mentally agility as individuals and groups :

Your mind is not you. Your mind is ideas and concepts that are mental representations of external reality. They are maps, not the territory.

Those ideas and concepts are guides to the preservation of your physical self, which contains your mind, and the preservation of things your mind considers important, e.g. family and neighbors.

Ideas and concepts in your mind may be wrong. Wrong for the situation. Wrong for the occasion. Wrong always.

Wrong ideas can contribute to your survival if they are not too dangerous and if your group believes them and uses them as tests of group identity. Group support may outweigh any direct danger, so a group can maintain wrong ideas for many generations, ideas that lower survival for them as a group and as individuals.

Because you are not your mind, because you are a conscious being that can inspect your mind and decide what ideas and concepts are in your own personal interest, the interests of your family and the interests of your group, you can change your mind without affecting the essential you, your core idenity.

Your ideas today are not your ideas of 10 years ago. Your ideas are not your father’s ideas. His were not his father’s ideas. Some one of your ancestors was the first to join your religion, another was the first to marry outside their faith, yet another the first to marry outside the clan. Some one of your ancestors was the first to join each of the religions in your ancestral tree, another the first to move to each new area of the many your ancestors have inhabited. One of your ancestors was the first woman in the line to learn to read, another the first to go to school.

By merely being who you are, you know you come from a long line of conscious humans who re-evaluated their maps of the reality of the world and changed their minds. They changed their ideas about everything, the most fundamental concepts in their mental world. Their meanings of existence, God, honor and allegiance.

And all did so because it benefited them, their families, their communities. You know that is true, or you wouldn’t be here, the person you are in the place you are.

Continuing in that tradition, your ideas and concepts, every one, should benefit you, your family and your community. If not, get rid of it, that idea is parasitising your brain, at best taking up space, at worst borrowing your your mind for someone else’s benefit.

A major part of success for you individually and for your group is the ability to adapt to a changing environment. That has always been true, and never more so than in today’s very complex and very fast changing world. The coming time of chaos will be an even larger challenge.

To do well for yourself and your family in that world is tough and getting tougher. You must keep looking for better points of view, ideas and concepts, and keep checking every idea and concept in your mind for its usefulness against the reality you live within.

Practical people do this in their work. We compare our efforts to others, adopt best practices, search widely for ideas we can use to improve our products and service, cut costs, improve manufacturing flows. We test new strains of vegetables for the garden, new bloodlines in the herd for fertility, milk or beef production, and resistance to disease, new programming languages for productivity and bug rates, new steels for hardness, good welds, and resistance to corrosion.

And if we don’t, the competition rolls us under.

Likewise and for the same reasons, practical people work to improve their minds, their understandings, their mental agility. Think and Grow Rich. Think Your Way to Success. This has been wisdom as long as we have had wisdom.

It is important to look for information that shows your ideas to be wrong, especially the bedrocks of your mental existence. If you don’t, you could be the last to know how wrong you are, a result frequently fatal to hopes, ambitions, loves and life itself.

Changing your mind is a normal and crucially-important part of life. Do it often. Tell everyone. Be proud of your mental agility.

Groups changing their shared understandings is also normal and necessary. Help people explore new ideas by discussing them openly. Help them decide on what is good and wise. Be proud of your culture’s mental agility, its ability to adapt to changing times.

We have to out-think and out-adapt our opponents. We have to be inside their decision cycle. We have to out-endure and out-maneuver them.

We will win because we understand deeper, decide better and faster, react more effectively and efficiently. We will be able to do all that because we practiced being more mentally agile, were more rigorous in our practice than our opponents.

Give thanks to the mental agility of your many ancestors. You would not be here without that.

Your descendants will thank you for your mental agility.