The Mental Environment

How social pressures pollute our thinking and make it less accurate.

Human beings as social creatures are immersed in a mental environment of other people's thoughts, including all the books that have ever been read. In this mental environment there are inaccuracies, or "mind pollution," created mainly by social pressures. This is the first and only book of its kind, introducing the mental environment and mind pollution, and making these things into "a subject." It goes much deeper than the obvious pollution of advertising and political propaganda, into the internalized social influences of family, peers, religion, and education. It explains how the high status of physical science has steered psychologists away from the study of the mind, and presents a view of the mind with the "mental senses." It describes ingredients of mind pollution — "unscientific methods," misrepresentation, manipulation, mental warfare, bad logic, psychological problems, sorcery, domination, and status. It presents the perspective of a new civilization, and from that perspective points out inaccuracies in major belief systems of the present culture — the religious, the academic, and the New Age.

Bob Gebelein graduated from Harvard in 1956 with a BA in Mathematics. In 1955, he saw the threat of nuclear annihilation as proof of total systems failure, so he turned his back on the culture and set out to design a new civilization. Through psychotherapy, withdrawal from the culture, and dream analysis, he succeeded. In 1967, he discovered how "human nature" itself can be changed, to create a new civilization. In 1985, he self-published Re-Educating Myself: An Introduction to a New Civilization, describing his search and the answers that he found. He has earned a living by working about 20 years as a computer programmer and creator of software systems. He is now living in Durham, North Carolina, and working as a volunteer for The Rhine Research Center.