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The Development of Mentality One of the underlying principles of The Stelle Group’s
philosophy is that the purpose of man’s existence is to become one with God.
This can simply be termed Egoic advancement. We recognize that there are
three aspects of an individual: his practicality, his idealism and his
mentality. These three aspects need to be brought into balance and constantly
increased in order to accomplish our purpose. In order to balance one’s
idealism with his practicality, an Ego uses his Mind in practicing the
Virtues. The exercise of practicing these Virtues is essentially a mental
exercise; and as we strive to judge ourselves and to discriminate in the
practice of them, we are using our Minds and stretching them. Exercising the
Mind makes it grow much as the use of a biceps increases its size. Over the last 3,000 or so incarnations
that each of us has lived, we have been developing our Minds. Therefore, when
a child is born, he brings with him a personality and certain mental
abilities. Because all of us have had different experiences and have decided
to grow in different ways, we will always remain strictly individual. It is
well to remember that although we may teach children the same tools for
developing their Minds, this will not make them all alike as if they were cut
with the same cookie cutter. It simply gives them each a tool with which to
further the development of their own individuality. In order to better understand what is
entailed in the development of mentality, we must distinguish between the
brain and the Mind and their respective functions. The brain is a physical
organ in a physical vehicle. Like a computer, it accepts and stores all data
to which it is exposed --good or bad, helpful and harmful, beautiful and
ugly. It can only play back what has been fed into it. A computer can be no
better than the man who programs it, and this is also true for the brain of
an individual. The brain can compute and solve problems with its store of
information; and like an animal’s brain it is capable of conditioned reflex
to a stimulus without conscious thought. The Mind, on the other hand, is an energy
of the fourth nutational rate which thinks, decides, reflects and is
self-conscious. There are ten Qualities of Mind: conscience, consciousness,
creativity, curiosity, desire, emotion, intuition, memory and will. The Mind
must function through the brain of the body into which the Ego has
incarnated. In the case of a person who is mentally retarded, the brain has
been damaged in some way; but this is not a reflection on the evolution of
the mentality of the Ego. The Mind of such an Ego cannot function through the
brain and therefore is severely limited in that particular incarnation. The brain and Mind are different though
interlinked with each other, and ii is necessary to learn how to program the
brain as well as develop the Mind. These two challenges should be seen as the
responsibility of the parents, the school system, the civilization and the
child himself. We must remember that the parents are responsible for the
education of the child and for his well-being until such time as he can be
maturely responsible for himself. Often we hesitate to program the child’s
brain or to take an authoritative hand in his mental development. We must not
wait until he understands how to program his own brain and how to develop his
own mentality before we work with him. We must train that brain and Mind
until he can do it for himself. There is nothing wrong with helping another
Ego, but to do something for a child that he can do for himself deprives him
of the advantage of learning; and so we must use discrimination in how and
why and when we teach a particular thing. For those of you who wish to pursue the
idea of how to program a child’s brain before he gets into school, we would
suggest that you read How to Raise a Brighter Child by Joan Beck and How
to Give Your Child a Superior Mind by Engelmann. Both of these books go
into detail on the theory of programming a brain as well as the actual steps
of how to go about it. It is well to remember in regard to programming the
brain that the brain remembers, as we said before, everything to which it is
exposed -- that it blindly accepts and stores all data to which it is exposed
whether processed or screened by the Ego’s Mind or not. When the child is
young, we must act as the evaluators of what the child is going to receive
out of a particular experience, or movie, or book that he reads. Once an idea
or thought is recorded on the brain, it is with that Ego for his entire
lifetime and can never be removed. We are certainly not advocating that
children should be force-fed information and not allowed to think and
experiment; but we are responsible for choosing wisely the areas in which we
encourage experimentation. |
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