Kirill Polovnikov, mentologist

The process of forming and developing a personal mentality throughout a person's life occurs in several stages.

At the earliest stage of a child's development, certain contents of thinking are formed in their mind under the influence of the environment. These contents reflect the external environment and include the most stable, often repeated, or emotionally charged experiences (e.g., constant remarks or even punishments from parents). These experiences, combined with the child's will and intentions, aspirations, and desires (initially only physiological and psychological), form more rigid structures known as mindsets. It is at this stage that the governing system of future mentality is established. Its governing role is due to the "conservation" of the person's desires and intentions at this level. Combined with signals received from the external world and transformed into contents of thinking, mindsets rationalize these desires, translating them into the language of consciousness and forming them into prescriptions and obligations.

After the formation of mindsets, the process of deepening mentality continues, as the nature of consciousness requires that mindsets be rooted in something (they cannot exist without some basis; this may be due to the logical law of sufficient reason). This leads to the formation of ontological representations. These are even more rigid and deep structures in mentality that, unlike mindsets, do not contain the person's desires and intentions. Instead, they are purely intellectual, logical constructions made of ultimate categories accessible to consciousness, summarizing and refining many contents of thinking and mindsets accumulated by the person up to that point.

Later, with the development of analytical thinking, the emergence of the idea of the whole, and the establishment of causal relationships, a person reaches a certain "critical mass" of mindsets and ontological representations (in terms of quantity, depth, and quality of connections). This leads to the "assembly" of the entire mentality. From the variety of logically possible ontological schemes (pieces of ontological representations), only those that do not contradict existing mindsets (or even justify and root them) are selected and assembled into a personal ontology. Mindsets dictate, prescribe, and indicate which ontological representations will be chosen. These mindsets then become prescriptions and obligations not only for the person and their immediate environment but also for the entire "newly assembled" World (translator's note: i.e. from the person’s subjective viewpoint, the person’s understanding of the World is objective).

It is evident that if mentality is not formed (at the level of mindsets) or if it is contradictory or "soft," the choice of ontological representations is impossible. Once this choice is made, mentality becomes a rigid, static structure on which external factors in ordinary life situations have little influence (crisis situations, impact on mentality, etc., are not considered here). Furthermore, mentality becomes a kind of "prism" through which all events of the external world are reinterpreted and redefined.

In this context, changing ontological representations is possible only from the level of mindsets. Only new mindsets can force a person to change their personal ontology. New mindsets, being expressions of the person's will and requiring justification, strive to root themselves in mentality and will restructure its entire framework until a more or less satisfactory and consistent picture is achieved.

The original publication of this article was made in Russian on the Association of Mental Approach (Mentology) website in 2014.

Translated from Russian by Andrey Kazantsev in 2024.

We conducted a series of group events related to the topic of this article - Personal Ontology Series. Check it out: 

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