18 How Do I Think of Others?
Eunice found herself both drawn toward her circle of friends and repelled by them. Eunice craved engaging others with her own thoughts. Social media wasn’t enough. Eunice needed to spend time in the physical presence of others, hearing their thoughts while sharing her own. Otherwise, she felt as if she was going slowly crazy, the longer she remained alone. Yet whenever Eunice had finished hanging out with her friends, she felt as if her mind was scrambled, her spirit weighted, and her soul crushed. Eunice couldn’t even put her finger on exactly what her friends said or did that left her so depressed and confused. But before long, Eunice would begin feeling as if she was once again going crazy while alone. She knew she needed to figure out what was happening and make some adjustments, or she’d soon have bigger mental, emotional, and relational problems than she already did. Eunice just didn’t know what to think of others.
Others
While your psyche, soul, or self is you and, as your inmost being, is yours, your psyche nonetheless depends heavily on others. How you think of others affects how you think of yourself. Indeed, how you think with others also affects the nature and welfare of your psyche. Without the right sense of your psyche’s proper relationship to the soul, spirit, and psyche of others, you’ll likely find yourself struggling to make sense of yourself and to keep a sound frame of mind. Grasp that relationship of your psyche to the soul, spirit, and psyche of others, and you’ll find ways to preserve and improve your sense of self and your state of mind. We are social beings, not just in drawing comfort from companionship but also in forming our sense of self and maintaining our soul and sanity. Draw on these insights about our relationship to others to help your own thoughts.
Collective
First, appreciate that your thoughts have a collective aspect to them, simply because of the shared language with which you think. When you think in whatever language you think, you are thinking like others using the same language with the same terms and grammatical structures. When you think using the specialized terminology and constructs of your profession, you are thinking the collective thoughts of your profession. And when you think using the idioms of your region or family, you are thinking the thoughts of your family or region. McCormicks can share the thoughts of McCormicks, and Warrens the thoughts of Warrens. Southerners can share the thoughts of Southerners, and Westerners the thoughts of Westerners. The collective consciousness or consciousnesses (plural) that you share also go well beyond words and grammar to include attitudes, stances, approaches, perspectives, worldviews, and even emotions. You have a composite soul containing all the dimensions, divine and demonic, of your family, community, and culture, and to a degree of all humankind. You are you, an individual in body and self, but a collective unconsciousness dominates your psyche, spirit, and soul. Be aware of its presence and impact.
Contagions
Another important thing to recognize is that the collective influences on your psyche, spirit, and soul aren’t just an operating system running in the background, passively supporting your cognition. Collective thinking continuously influences our own thoughts, even dominates our own thoughts, to the point that, with a little discernment, we can recognize social contagions. We don’t just quickly and continuously pick up memes, those brief mental images that amuse, inform, influence, and even subtly guide us. We also at times recognize something more like mind viruses, problematic images, forms, and ideologies that distort our thinking, deceive our better intuitions, and corrupt our desires and intentions. Psychologically and spiritually mature adults may avoid most serious social contagions, although the subtle ones can still sneak in. But vulnerable psyches of the psychologically and spiritually immature or naive can be fertile ground for infection. Social contagions can propagate swiftly through certain populations, wreaking psychological havoc. Beware contagion. Stay on guard against dark collective influences.
Propaganda
Social contagions can seem to arise spontaneously out of peculiar social developments and events, as if somewhat innocent and curious if not necessarily harmless, which the worst ones clearly are not. Social contagions can lead to the demise of many. Yet social contagions aren’t just incidental. Governments, movements, and other nebulous emergent entities deliberately pursue programs to influence the thoughts, souls, and psyches of the populations, groups, or individuals they wish to control and manipulate. Propaganda is an ancient art and modern science, with vast resources devoted to its development, refinement, and use. But it’s not just propaganda that constantly infects the mind through collective influences. Governments, movements, emergent entities, and nefarious agencies and actors also pursue outright mind control against groups and individuals, promoting assassinations, suicides, trafficking, and similar horrors. Awake to the darkness around you. Keep your soul, spirit, and psyche connected to the transcendent creator so that you can recognize and resist propaganda and mind control.
Company
Setting aside the questions of the social contagions that threaten the health of our souls and the even more-worrisome collective darkness that constantly probes our psyche for vulnerabilities, we have the simpler question of the effect on our psyche, spirit, and soul of the company we keep. Sound company with individuals who have stable, sensitive, and sensible souls can heal one’s own psyche. An hour or even less with a friend or mentor who displays an authentic self in a calming manner, resonant with reality, can revive and restore one’s own self. Groups engaged in healthy embodied practices like community gardening, other outdoor recreation, or volunteer service can share a collective consciousness that likewise revives the spirit and soul. On the other hand, a little time with an individual who has welcomed and embraced contagions and propaganda, to the point of seeking to further propagate them, can poison an ill-equipped mind and soul. Be aware of the psychological and spiritual condition and health of the company you keep. Be a firm witness to the transcendent creator and a trustworthy guide to the spiritually lost. But don’t walk too far with another with whom your spirit should instead disagree.
Shared
We can also share our consciousness with others with whom we are close. You likely know the phenomenon of long-term married couples completing one another’s sentences, in essence sharing their thoughts before having completely expressed them. Not just old married couples but also siblings, parents and their children, close friends, long-time co-workers, and other old acquaintances can share their consciousnesses, indeed their souls, spirits, and psyches, in a similar way. We don't know the extent to which shared thinking goes on except when we finish one another’s sentences. But small gestures, reactions, and changes in posture or demeanor may signal to one another all kinds of common thoughts. We all know the phenomenon of one’s yawn promptly producing a yawn in another, but our influences go far beyond shared yawns. The shared housing or other environments in which we dwell together may simultaneously be stimulating common thoughts growing out of shared experiences in those environments. One doesn’t have to believe in literal telepathy or extra-sensory perception to perceive something very like them in action. Your thoughts are not your own but instead shared with those closest to you. We call it compatibility as if it were some kind of simple personality fit, but compatibility may be much more like a shared soul, spirit, and psyche. Attune yourself to the opportunities to share your soul and draw from the souls of others in soul communion.
Sanity
The interplay of our psyche with the thinking of others isn’t exactly or isn’t solely a melding of minds, although it could in part be. The interplay of our psyche with the thinking of others may also or may instead be a resetting, filtering, cleansing, and adjusting. To a degree, we each have a one-track mind. The longer our mind runs down its track, alone without interaction with others, the more out of whack our one-track mind may become. An individual marooned on an uninhabited island for a few days may maintain a reasonably stable mind. But much longer in isolation than that, and the individual may become crazed of mind, having run too far down the individual mind’s one-way and slightly or grossly misguided track. Few of us have the perfectly balanced soul to survive for long without a rebalancing through social interactions with others. That’s what makes prison isolation so frightening, that the abandoned mind becomes one’s own worst enemy. Keep your soul’s balance and your mind’s sanity through consistent positive interaction with mentally stable and psychologically and spiritually mature others.
Perception
The perceptions of others also affect our perceptions, in turn affecting our soul, spirit, and psyche. Others around us are constantly indicating their impressions, evaluations, and understanding of the events, environments, conditions, and circumstances that we share with them. Of course, we make our own assessments. But we may rely for our perceptions just as much or even far more on the perceptions of our group or of leading individuals within it. We may react negatively as a first impression but barely notice our negative impression when our group instead reacts positively. Yet the bigger impact on us may come from how others perceive us, not just how others perceive our common circumstances and conditions. As others perceive us, we tend to perceive ourselves. We know, for instance, the influence teachers can have in their differing expectations for individual students. Expect more, get more. Expect less, get less. That’s the power over our soul and psyche of others’ impression of us. Become more aware of your perceptions and others’ perceptions as they differ, to illuminate and awake your deeper soul.
Emotions
The emotions of others also influence our emotions. You and an acquaintance may perceive and assess your common situation with like minds. You may, for instance, instantly agree that you are both in the same situation of risk or even peril. Yet your emotions may initially differ, perhaps one of you with fear and trepidation but the other of you with excitement and anticipation. Your emotions, though, may quickly influence one another. You may both end up fearful or, conversely, both end up in excited anticipation, depending on the interplay of your spirits, souls, and psyches. Groups regulate their members’ emotions. Individuals also influence the emotions of other individuals. If you find your emotions in confused, unstable, and unhealthy condition, consider evaluating who might be influencing your emotions negatively. Also consider who might help you regulate your emotions positively to get them back into a healthy state and balance.
Reflection
On a scale from one to ten, how independent minded at one end of the scale or collective minded at the other end of the scale do you feel you are? In other words, do you readily follow the crowd in its group thinking? Or do you instead frequently find yourself differing with the thinking of the groups through which you move? How resistant do you feel you would be to the next social contagion? What helps you resist social contagions? What, in other words, is the source or stance of your discernment? Can you think of an example when you briefly fell prey to propaganda, only to soon realize that its promoter had deceived you? How do you detect propaganda, to maintain your judgment’s relative independence? Do you have acquaintances whose company you resist for its negative influence? Conversely, do you have acquaintances whose company you seek for its positive influence? What distinguishes those acquaintances from one another? Who or what within you is helping you distinguish? Do you have someone very close to you with whom you seem to share consciousness, thinking one another’s thoughts? What groups or communities where you socially engage help you restore and maintain your sanity? Should you be seeking out more of those groups or engaging more frequently the ones you already have? To what extent do the perceptions of others influence your perceptions? Conversely, to what extent do your perceptions influence the perceptions of others? Ask yourself the same questions about your emotions. Do you need to curate your social groups and interactions to improve your perceptions and emotions?
Key Points
Others have an enormous continuous influence on our psyche.
Our psyches draw heavily from a collective consciousness.
Social contagions can quickly capture and harm the individual psyche.
Agencies direct propaganda to influence the collective psyche.
The company we keep influences our spirit, soul, and psyche.
We can share thoughts and awareness with those closest to us.
We keep our sanity and sensibility through healthy social interaction.
Others’ perceptions shape our perceptions and our self-perception.
Others’ moods and emotions influence our moods and emotions.