There seems to be a tension between people’s often stagnant ideology and the maturation process we all (at least should) go through. The older we get, the more we experience and learn (or, at least, the more opportunities we have to experience and learn). As who we are is this experience, as well as how we process it, it creates tension to handle and process new knowledge and experience in a stagnant ideological existence.
A static ideology is unable to adapt to the constantly changing process of reality and the ongoing experiencing of life. One’s ability to adapt to, and change along with, the constant flux of life is in direct relation to the degree of harmony in which he or she exists. One’s happiness is directly proportionate to one’s ability to adapt.
Unfortunately, most people are not very good at incorporating new information and experience into an ideology that has been conditioned by our individualistic and ego-oriented Euro-American societies to be stagnant and unyielding.
Many people establish their ideologies at a young age, often by means of friends, parental influence and osmosis, religious authority, and culture, and they attempt to cement it into a foundational context through which they live their lives and pursue that which they are told they should pursue by the means they are conditioned to pursue it.
Most people do not see their ideologies (their conceptual frameworks) as a process, for that would make them feel unstable. Many people allow certain levels of their ideology a certain amount of elbow room, but their foundational context is usually pretty set. But, as who we are, and life, is a process always growing and changing, it is inconsistent with reality, with life as it really is, to have a static and stubborn ideology which does not also change, grow, and mature along with our (hopefully) evolving awareness and experience.
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From my personal notes, 8/19/99.
