Embrace the Karass, Discard the Granfalloon

You assimilate with people surrounding you, and manufacture symmetry with the beings you frequently encounter. Through a psychology transparency you either adapt and assume through simulation or mimicry, the qualities you prefer, or resiliently choose to not acquire qualities your detest. This social vehicle of the people you interact with, live with, work with, have recreation with ideally should be a karass not a granfalloon.

According to Kurt Vonnegut, a karass is a spontaneous, serendipitously orchestrated group -- “a team that do[es] God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing.' The momentum for a karass is caused in time and space by the tensions of the souls in that company. While the productivity and the participation in a karass occurs unbeknownst to the batch of people of a karass, the karass accepts the unknown. Through its mastery of embracing unknown, the karass, while formed via unpredictable connections and links, truly gets very important things done. The granfalloon, on the other hand, is the false karass. The composition of the granfalloon is of bureaucratic structures, identification cards, pre-planned deadlines and lots of policy and paper-pushing. The granfalloon “is meaningless in terms of the way God gets things done”. While finding yourself in a karass is an inherently unpremeditated and impromptu experience, such a collaboration is intuitively unifying and spiritually successful.

Whatever the group in which you most frequently participate -- karass or granfalloon --within that batch of folks, you instinctively watch and decide if you like or dislike their appearance (clothing, hairstyle, physical shape), health diet and nutrition choices, workout schedule, spiritual clarity, meditation), profession (medicine, acting, music are things I love, for example -- also there's business, psychology, academia), their vocational motivation (if they work for activity, money, challenge, philanthropy), biorhythms (when they sleep, when they wake up), recreational habits (when they party, how they party, where they take recreation) and you either adapt with those and develop them or reject them and continue with your own agenda.

For example, if you frequently interact with a rowdy fraternity group, they could wear sweatshirts and business clothing, live off pizza, have recreation by having kegs of beer and loud music, exercise at a gym, and work in a cubicle. If you experience the company of a spiritual guru priest, for example, he or she may wear ironed robes, eat all hand-cooked vegetable foods, workout on a regular schedule in nature walks with meditation, work for benevolence, rise and sleep with the sun, and have recreation by indulging in a feast or reading enlightening scriptures. You must be selective about wanting to, for example, exercise in a gym or with nature, read scripts or watch television, work in a cubicle or work at a podium, or be a pizza-eater or vegetarian. One is not better than the other generally, but personally it makes all the difference. Our bodies respond positively and negatively to different substances. We must discern with a distinct selection process which people, foods, habits, environments, professions, and devices cripple us and which ones proliferate happiness.

The qualities you desire to integrate into your life are cultivated through a selection process and assimilation process. The selection process should be prioritized, causing you to choose only the authentically empowering and uplifting options. In other words, you would only choose the habits and tendencies that would bring happiness and further compassion. Additionally, we must cultivate an ability to repudiate tendencies that cripple our intention. If pizza motivates you to altruistically communicate and share knowledge and cultivate happiness, eating pizza should be selected and assimilated. If it burdens and slows your mind, it should be repudiates. We must undergo these selections or else be denied admittance to our personal agenda and style in exchange for being repulsively delivered a generic, societal, external, preprogrammed blueprint. Working from such preprogrammed blueprint will create functionality -- you will pay the bills, work the 9 to 5, get three squares a day, and have a place to rest your bones -- but never deep happiness. Therefore, we avoid the preprogrammed blueprint. We must take up this largely trial-and-error and intuitive process of tendency and style selection. The process of discarding the habits that blind us from our spiritual goals must be done with care, but, ultimately, the choice of rejecting the burdens and embracing the joys are equally significant.

Either way you generate a tremendously integrated life psychology with the people you are around. Choose with prudence the people that not just surround you, but that you encounter on a habitual basis. Alternatively, make habit of connecting with a variety of intuitively connected people regardless of a schedule or predefined interaction. Ensure that those frequently encountered people (at a home, on the way to work, at work, any potential encounters throughout the day) invigorate and genuinely engender sincere guidance and movement in the direction of your choosing and spiritual fulfillment.