Can the walls come tumbling down?

Big Frank hosted the Social Adventurer's Meetup at his home. The discussion centered on the genuinely sane person as personified in the article by S.I. Hayakawa. Big Frank is not going to try to summarize the entire discussion of the group. However, he will center his few comments on issures relating to "walls". Hayakawa contrasts two forms of security: the static and the dynamic. "The static concept of security may be pictured by thinking of the oyster inside its shell, the frightened person behind his neurotic defenses. The main idea in the static concept of security is to build up lots of protective walls and then to sit still inside thim. The search for security for many people is the task of building and mending walls around oneself. On the other had, the genuinely sane person - the fully functional person, is capable of letting the walls come down, of not relying on set phrases, inflexible rules - never do this, or avoid that. They admit that each person, each situation, differs from its previous manifestion, and they allow for flexibility and change. The 'normal' (not fully functional person) deals with people and situation, not as they are, but via rigid categories that they impose on them. For them the map is the territory, people never change, situations are only what they first appear, and what happened in the past will always happen again. These are not realities encountered in life, they are only encountered behind rigid defensive walls of those living behind static lines of defense - people who don't experience life as it is, but rather as it is in their minds. It is the difference between a person who lives in a catalogue that freezes people, situations and relationships in predetermined categories (abstactions rule here not facts), and those who allow for change, for differences, and for truth to emerge - a truth beyond their preconceptions, a truth that exits outside their walls. In this case, as the group discovered, that defensive person maintains their vulnerable self-concept, impregnable behind its defensive walls, but living in a fictional world completely unconnected from realty and all the richness of life that comes with it.