The amalgamation of thoughts becomes our mental constructs that shape reality from moment to moment.

Before I go further, mental constructs and images can be used interchangeably to describe the idea of how we see things rather than reality directly. We usually attribute these as points of view, beliefs, and perspectives. Their purpose is to assist in our interpretation of the world and its surroundings.

For instance, if we talk about how society should function (I.e, capitalism, democracy, socialism, and any ideologies you may want to insert here). Everyone will have something to say, believe theirs will be better than others and sometimes discussion becomes heated until violence is used to resolve things.

The simple truth is that most mental constructs are deeply ingrained in us, and backed up by experiences and emotional baggage, that we fail to see them as what they are, not facts.

You can imagine them as scaffolding for a building under construction or the bones in your body giving structure and support. Removing the scaffolding would mean the collapse of the building and if your bones disappear you will become a pile of rubbery goo.

We rely on mental constructs to help us understand the world around us, make sense of interactions with others, what society demands, what duty we need to perform, what do the experiences mean, what we choose to cherish, and what to no pay attention toward.

It helps to define who we are, how we feel emotions and gives meaning to our experiences.

We can’t escape mental constructs as it is part of us as we grow up nor we should abandon them. It would be wise to realize that these constructs exist and we should carefully curate them with good and durable scaffolding.

The Contradictions Within

If we spare some time to examine, we’ll be able to find contradictions within ourselves. The images we tend to hold readily and without examination could cause inconsistencies to exist and when stumbled upon them we might feel hurt as the image is threatened.

Remember I talked about thoughts consisting of ideas, concepts, theories, opinions, beliefs, knowledge, memories, and symbols? I’m sure in each we all have some powerful images stored that we use as a lens for the world around us.

We kneed images like dough in our mind forming to shape that we can agree toward and be happy with. This creates contradiction because it might not be based on anything real thus leading to conflicts when we feel our images are under attack from outside which then leads to feeling hurt.

For instance, when you fell in love with someone. Do you love what you see? which could be an image of the person you’re made up in your mind or do you love the whole being of your significant other wholeheartedly?

What Constructs/Images Do You Hold?

It’s the invisible layer upon the reality we imposed to understand what does it all means.