A Mason's Work

We look at this principle of correspondence or the application of the idea of asable of

so below as within so without across groups of people or across the people that are close

to you.

You'll start to see repeating patterns.

And again, a lot of the principle of correspondence is about pattern identification.

It's about understanding how the pieces of behavior and thought and emotion fit together

in a way that kind of yields the outcomes that you may or may not be currently experiencing,

but certainly show up in the world.

And again, to be quite clear, and I've said this in both recent episodes on the subject,

the accuracy of the things that we're talking about, the sort of truthfulness of the principle

of correspondence is less important.

The functional utility here is the same.

You're going to get some level of insight into the way people and groups interact when

you start down this line of inquiry, even if you can find evidence to the contrary when

it comes to a broad application of the principle of correspondence.

Trees don't look like fish kind of thing.

You will find that there is plenty to functionally use to help illuminate the sort of dark corners

of your mind or the concepts that we're talking about.

So when you look at the relational conversation or the relational sort of interpretation

of this principle of correspondence, you start to be able to analyze group behavior,

your behavior in groups, behavior of groups without you, all of that kind of stuff to illuminate

sort of the systemic patterns that make people in groups do the things that they do.

For example, you can take a principle like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which is just

a concept about the order of priorities that people tend to focus on when they are trying

to present themselves in the world.

There's their survival instincts, there's the security instincts, there's the sort of

care behaviors, and then there's self-actualization principles.

That whole Hierarchy has been largely, again, just like any of the concepts we're talking

about, it's useful but not accurate.

When we talk about some of the sort of lower level or more primal needs that people have,

how they manifest in groups changes significantly.

So you take a principle like Attention.

Attention is something that is useful for getting care, for having people care about you

and essentially tend to your needs.

When you're a child, you get attention through a progressive sort of system, right?

When you are an infant, you cry.

When you are a small toddler, you tend to nag, right?

And when you, as you go up, you move from this demand-driven sort of loud alarm-style

attention-seeking behavior to much more sort of a novelty behavior-seeking.

So look at what I can do, Daddy, is kind of a thing that you'll hear amongst the children

as they grow.

And you get stuck as a person.

You'll see people say that kind of thing, like look what I can do, even as 75-year-old

adults.

This is not something that you have to worry too much about where you are, whether

or not you do this and all that kind of stuff.

What the functional use in this context, this principle of correspondence, is to allow

you to see these things that you may have done at one point out in the world and how that

shows up and how these people interact with each other and how that may then in turn come

to impact you.

When someone's needs aren't getting met out in the world, very likely they are going to

attempt to get you to help them meet those needs.

And that means you are going to want to know what that looks like and how it works so

you can get ahead of it and not be essentially enslaved by someone else's unconscious needs.

That's a big heavy lift for such a simple concept as the principle of correspondence.

When you start changing these behaviors together, when you start changing these understandings

together, they start to illuminate this sort of large structural edifice of a behavioral

system or a social system that interacts to move you if you're not aware of it from

place to place.

So we're trying to help you become aware of these things and in that process, you'll

be able to then increase your level of agency so that you are no longer swayed by the sort

of unanalyzed needs that other people may be putting on you.

We'll talk more about this at a systemic level in our next episode.