So what do I get out of this?
This is THE FAQ (frequently asked question) with which we move every second, make every decision & live our life. The world around us and the socio-cultural environment of our times (with a robust backing of our educational system) has given us all a MENTAL SETUP of a businessman. We invest in every single walk of life with expectation of returns. We invest in reading to get the returns of passing (or good grades), we invest in working to get paid (or promoted or recognized), we invest in socializing to be returned or reciprocated emotionally, we even go to the extent of exploiting the natural necessities of hunger & sleep, to derive pleasure of taste (and overeat) &, lie around lazily even when the body has had complete rest and is crying for some exercise and activity.
The same holds good for the process of SELF INTEGRATION too. Even before getting started the mind needs an assurance that all the outcomes projected and promised in “the utility value” article (one of the first on the blog) will hold true, the investment of reading all this would fetch all the previously promised returns.
Let us further simplify our understanding of MENTAL SETUP before we proceed any further. Simply put MENTAL SETUP may be understood as an archive (record) of all previous experiences, events, ideologies and perceptions of our life. Anything and everything that we perceive is constantly cross checked and cross referenced with this data bank of ours and then categorized into one of the pre-existing categories and then our MENTAL SETUP hands over to us a response appropriate to that category and we react accordingly.
An example, if we are habituated to drinking tea first thing in the morning then NOT getting tea is categorized as an UPSETTING situation and we will keep getting upset about this silly thing all our life no matter how many times or how different a situation in which it repeats itself. We will be upset about it even while trekking on mountains in the early morning or even when served with the finest coffee instead of tea while on vacation at a coffee plantation of coorg. All because we have a generic response system in our MENTAL SETUP records we have categories (or genres) once something is perceived it needs to be classified and once classified a response linked to that category (genre) will only be generated nothing new is possible. That is why people around us are so predictable all of us know “do this to him & he will be happy”, “don’t do that it will upset him” about every single person around us. We have jailed ourselves in our own MENTAL SETUP and shut the door of possibilities tight.
