Locks and Keys

Thinking a little more about molecular lock-and-key models and the templates that form our personalities, we can realize that the act of templating changes both the"self"and the "other." In the case of molecules, when the "right" key is found for the "right" lock, the lock itself, in this case, the enzyme, changes shape slightly, but afterwards, the key, in this case, the substrate, is also transformed.  

 

In terms of human dynamics, each association we have modifies to some degree or another each person in the relationship, be it parent and child, lovers, teachers and students, brothers and sisters, cops and robbers, you name it.  Those changes can be called "templating," as they alter the expectations, the fears and concerns,  the anticipation of pleasure, and the presumption of roles in future encounters.  

For example, if one is traveling in a foreign country and asks a policeman for directions and is treated rudely, one might logically expect to be treated rudely by other policemen in that country until a new and different experience suggests a different expectation.  At the same time, the policeman might have just reinforced his impression of stupid tourists. Both leave the encounter changed, even if very subtly, by the encounter.

This is even more apparent in romantic relationships.  A person, say, leaving an unpleasant relationship with a very controlling person might have new concerns about possessiveness and dominance, and yet because of the existing templates that drew them into that first relationship to start with, winds up seeking out another dominant, controlling partner, because that personality type is the "key" that fits the "lock" of their expectations, attractions, and needs, based on the templates in their subconscious.  They might be more cautious and tenuous in initiating their next relationship based on the templating that occurred in the previous, but the template is still none the less present.

One practical aspect of understanding this is that it helps one get over the disappointment of unrequited love - it's not really "you" they're rejecting, it's simply that you're not a fit for the templates that they've developed over the course of a lifetime, no matter how much they might fit your templates.  

In this theory of templating, then, we're all going around fitting keys into locks and matching locks with keys, both in an almost literal, Freudian sense, but also in all other aspects of life, and in the process, we are all impinging on one another and leaving dents and footprints on each others templates.  So in a sense, we're all the products of every encounter we have, and every encounter we have is altered because of us.  In this sense, the notion of an individual self starts to fall away, and the intimate interconnectedness of all living things starts to become apparent.  

The Buddha called these subconscious templates samskara, and others have called them schemata or mental maps.  I've stated in this blog before that Erich Fromm calls them mental maps, but upon my recent reading I've come to realize that he refers to them as the "frames of orientation" that we all rely upon to understand our place in the world around us.