Changes and Mentology. 

The very essence of human thought is commonly considered to be conscious and rational. However people are usually also motivated by subconscious beliefs whose origins can stem from influences such as the always ubiquitous cultural memes, learned systems of reasoning, as well as shared underlying assumptions and beliefs about the world.  These beliefs are gathered from a plethora of sources over a lifetime. Most of these subconscious beliefs are formed in the early childhood and adolescent years and never reexamined.  As a person develops in early life, individual experiences from a myriad of background influences are absorbed from natural and cultural surroundings, a person’s own subjective perception, as well as their education, and most of all from family.  Almost none of these are consciously chosen. 

Lessons from these experiences become core beliefs, values, rules, etc. of the person in their adult life. The main part of these core beliefs, values, and rules generally remain unconscious throughout life, never rise into conscious awareness, and are therefore never re-evaluated, or examined. Moreover, these core beliefs result in individual mindsets that highly influence or determine present day adult behavior.  Because they were formed long before any present everyday activities an individual undertakes, they can be suboptimal in their manifestation in an individual's life.  Unfortunately, these beliefs are often grounded in childhood and not in adult logical reasoning, and are based on erroneous premises. The resulting “personal mentality”, the individual system of core beliefs and values, influences the whole manifest life of an individual.  These core beliefs influence and can limit the ability to achieve personal life goals, decisions, relationships, and even feelings.

Sometimes the reasons for disappointing achievement are not clear.  If an individual wants to change some aspect of their life, they must examine and understand and then change any restrictive beliefs which have led to current life circumstances.

Mentology can be used as a mechanism for such change. Mentology is a framework developed for the elucidation and subsequent examination of these core subconscious beliefs. It is an opportunity to perform a deep reflection of these individual personal values and beliefs no matter their source. In practice, people are helped to identify default, core, or individual base ideas which cause suboptimal situations in life and misunderstandings on a personal level. 

How does Mentalogy work?

Mentology operates under the premise that an individual’s belief system grounds the whole content of thought. A specific core mentality forms the basis of thought, expressed in words, that was adopted in the past due to specific cultural surroundings and personal experiences. The formation of a specific core belief, which results in the formation of individual truths and basic categorization of thought, is based on personal living experience and cultural semantic space. That is why these ground beliefs are generally unconscious to the individual, because their origin is outside the individual.

As we deal with a person's basic values and beliefs about the world and people, which we call an individual’s belief system or mentality, we need to elucidate these core ideas with their resulting mindsets and retrieve them onto a conscious level of thinking. Toward this purpose, a mentologist asks the person a series of Socratic questions. These individually customized questions allow the questioner and the person to become aware of exactly what the underlying assumptions a person has about the world (in a broader sense), him or herself, and the other people in it. In short, it becomes clear which unconscious beliefs generate which thoughts, and what makes them important to the individual.  The questioner, then, during the conversation with the person, elicits a specific value judgment based on these core assumptions from the person being questioned. What is the value of these Idas to the person?

This value judgment has specific personal meaning to the person being questioned. Both parties find out what general meaning, context, or idea this value-judgment carries behind it. The origin of the belief may be important or not, but the purpose of the session is to make the person being questioned firstly, aware that they hold this core belief and secondly, what position this belief plays in their life. The conversation can include the person’s motivation and a purpose to hold such a belief such as: “What for?” or “What is the purpose?” But it is not mandatory in all cases, for the questioner to have this deep understanding as the short session is focused on the individual being questioned. The point of the conversation is to bring into awareness the ground belief of the person with enough information that they can choose or not choose to examine the belief further and perhaps change the belief which generates this mindset that affects their life. Afterward, its conscious recovery, they can discuss this belief consciously and through the guided dialogue if they choose.  The questioning is based on the Socratic method of and seeks to consciously identify core beliefs and examine their effect on the person’s life.

When this belief becomes conscious for a person, he or she is able on their own to decide to keep or change it depending on their personal life goals and by examining how effective this belief has been for achieving them.

This article was initially published in English on the Association of Mental Approach (Mentology) website and then slightly adapted for the American reader by Andrey Kazantsev.

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