This will be the final post in this series and it brings the ideas we have been working with together into a model for how human transformation happens.

Human beings change in many ways. We become smarter, we become stronger, we become more assertive, we become more reflective, we become, we become, we become… There is seemingly no end to the ways in which we can improve upon who we are. If we make a category for all these ways of changing we can call them forms of ‘self improvement’.

There is another completely different way that human beings change that I would categorize as ‘human transformation’. The distinction between these two classifications of human change is critically important for those of us who aspire to attain dramatic and lasting change during our lifetime.

The experience of human transformation is one in which the sense of identity itself changes. In this experience you do not feel that you have become an improved version of who you already were. You feel like you have become a different person altogether. You have transformed.

What could we possibly mean by this? How does transformation happen? How do we become a different person?

In these posts we have been speaking about our sense of self as being formed by a boundary between those ideas that we experience as ‘thoughts that I have’, and those that we experience as ‘me thinking’.

Those thoughts that we identify with as ‘me thinking’ are also those thoughts that we compulsively act on. When they appear in consciousness we simply do what they say – or fight what they say – either way we compulsively respond to them without feeling that we have any choice in the matter. Our identity then could be said to be composed of those aspects of our experience that we respond to compulsively. (In this series of posts I have been speaking of thoughts, but this would certainly also include feelings and emotions.)

Let’s think for a minute about perception. When we perceive something we don’t think of ourselves as having any choice in the matter. When we see a tree we have no sense that we could have seen a dog or a cat. We don’t relate to perception as something that we choose.

In terms of our thoughts and feelings there are some that we definitely relate to as optional. Certain of my thoughts reveal possibilities for action that I can either choose or not choose to act upon. Other thoughts seem to spontaneously lead to action without me being aware of any conscious choice being made. These thoughts simply feel like me. I don’t act on them because I choose to; the thoughts themselves seem to lead directly to action without my intervention.

What if this was all a function of habit? What if we simply had fallen into an incredibly strong habit of responding to certain thoughts and feelings? And what if that habit had become so strong and so fast that we were not aware of choosing anything at all? Is our sense of identity created from a very strong habit of responding to certain aspects of our experience spontaneously?

If this was true – and I believe it is to a large extent – then it must be possible to break that habit and develop another. First we must find a way, for instance through spiritual practice like meditation, to break our habit of compulsively identifying with and acting on certain thoughts and feelings. Then we must find some deeper and more profound part of our experience and begin to identify with and act on that. The work of transformation would be to consistently make choices that are aligned with that deeper part of our experience. If we do that long enough it is possible that it will become a habit and eventually we will find that we spontaneously respond to that part of ourselves without thinking about it. When this happens we will feel like a different person. We will have the same body and the same mind, but we will be responding to a completely different part of our experience. We will see the world differently, we will act differently and the people that know us will want to know what has happened to us.

Over my last couple of posts I have been writing some thoughts about our sense of self. One way to think about our sense of self is to see that it is formed by a self-border – a line that separates our psyche into the ‘me’ and the ‘not me.’ On the outside of the boarder are thoughts that we recognize to be just thoughts. On the inside of the border are thoughts that we experience as ‘my’ thoughts or ‘me thinking.’

Those thoughts that exist on the inside of the self boundary appear to tell us who we are, and therefore we tend to compulsively respond to them. They do not appear to us to be just thoughts; in fact they feel like us. We appear to ourselves as sentences in our heads.

One way to get a sense of this is to look at the sentences that you use in response to the question, “Who are you?” The most common answer will be, “I am (insert your name).” If you probe beyond just your name you will start to come up with a string of other sentences. Some of these sentences will describe you as nouns such as; “I am a man.” “I am a mother.” “I am a carpenter.” – etc. Other sentences will describe characteristics that belong to you such as; “I am industrious.” “I am lazy.” “I am intelligent.” “I am stupid.” – and on and on.  

Psychological Development

What psychologists have discovered is that our sense of self is made out of thoughts in our heads and they recognize that some of the thoughts that arise on the inside of the self-boundary are harmful to us and others. We may have developed habitual thought patterns that tell us that we are stupid, lazy, or worthless and these cause us to act in destructive or self-destructive ways.

The job of the psychologist is to help us break these habitual though patterns and replace them with healthy ones. It is much better for us to believe that we are “intelligent,” industrious” and “worthy” because then we will tend to act that way and be happier with who we are. Psychologists have helped millions of people live much better, more fully integrated and happier lives by pushing unhealthy sentences outside of the self boundary and attract healthier sentences into it.

Spiritual Transformation

Some spiritual masters will tell you that this psychological approach to development misses the more fundamental issue. In essence what they are saying is that although a healthy self sense is better than an unhealthy self sense, it still limits us to sentences in our heads. We are still left with a false sense of being a something that is the object of all the sentences that we hold about that something.

Let’s go back for a moment to the question who am I? When you ask me who I am and I answer “I am Jeff” what I mean is that I am the entity that the name Jeff points toward. Imagine meeting someone and asking them, who are you? They respond saying; I am the entity that my name indicates. How infuriating is that? If they go on to list all of the nouns and adjectives that describe them you may still feel that they are not getting to the essences of who they are. Saying “I am a carpenter.” is just a way of stating that I am an entity that has certain skills and performs a certain function in society – but what is the entity that has the skills and performs the function?

One way to understand what spiritual transformation is all about is to understand it as letting go of all of the sentences in our heads that describe us and coming to a direct realization that we were, are and always will be, the one that is aware of the sentences. There is no sentence that can capture who we are because we are not a sentence and we are not an object that can be described by a sentence. The great spiritual realization is that we are the subject. We are the source of all sentences and the knower of all sentences. Sentences in our heads can never capture us and hold us in place because we always exist behind all of the sentences in our heads.

We are all trapped in a self-image – a set of ideas that we identify with as who we are. If you want to discover radical freedom then you have to look closely at what choices you are making that are causing you to have the identity that you are experiencing right now. It has been my experience that the key to discovering the mechanism of self-construction is recognizing that there are two kinds of thoughts.

There is one type of of thought, which involves thoughts that appear to just come to us out of nowhere. These thoughts we commonly refer to as random thoughts or inspirations. When we speak of these we usually say that we ‘have a thought.’ There is another activity of thought that we relate to as us talking to ourselves. When we speak of these thought we usually say that we are ‘thinking.’ In this case we make statements that start ‘I think…’ Simply put, the distinction is between ‘thoughts’ and ‘me thinking.’

To contemplate the distinction that I am making more deeply lets use an example. Let’s say that you need to have dinner and the idea of Mexican food crosses your mind – maybe in the form of an image of a plate of tacos, or maybe as the sentence “I could have Mexican food.” There will be times that you will relate to this as just a random thought – a thought that comes to mind and should be considered. On the basis of the arising of this thought you might decide to, or decide not to, go out for Mexican food.

If that same thought comes in a different form – perhaps accompanied by a feeling sense of desire – you might not relate to it as a random thought to be considered, but rather as a description of yourself.  In this form the thought might take the form “I want Mexican food.” The appearance of the thought of Mexican food in this form will probably result in your going out for Mexican food.

Consider these two thoughts, “I could have Mexican food.” vs. “I want Mexican food.” The second is much more laden with identity. It is infused with selfhood. The first one we simply relate to as a thought to be considered. The second one we relate to as a statement about ourselves, from ourselves, telling us who we are. If you examine how we construct our sense of self you will find that it is constructed with thoughts just like, “I want Mexican food.” “I am a mother.” “I am a good person.” “I am a person who does this and not that.”…. and on and on and on. Our self is constructed by a never-ending string of conclusions that appear in our minds as statements directed toward us telling us who we are and who we are not. They are statements of limitation.  I am this and not that. I do this and not that. This never ending set of conclusions draws a boundary around who we are and who we are not.

When we look closely we see that these ideas are just ideas like all other ideas. They are just a collection of ideas about who we are and they may be right or wrong, but in themselves they are just ideas and they do not dictate who we are or what is real.

This realization is part of the dawning of enlightenment. It is the realization that there is a whole classification of thought that we have unknowingly and blindly accepted as accurate descriptions of who we are. This is what spiritual ignorance is – the unconscious belief that a certain set of unexamined ideas defines the limit of who we are.

When we make this discovery we experience the freedom of no-limitation. It isn’t that we replace these ideas with some new idea about who we are. We simply realize that we don’t know who we are. And because we don’t know who we are, we could be anyone. The dawning of enlightenment is the experience of unlimited potential.

The most important relationships that we have are the ones that we have with the thoughts in our heads.  Our relationship to thought determines everything that we experience and everything that we are.

Let’s start this inquiry by thinking about our identity – our self-concept. Think of your name. What does that name stand for? It stands for you. It is a word that stands for the person that you are – the person who was born on your birthday, has lived your life, currently experiences him/herself as you and will die on the day that you die.

In the great mystical traditions it has commonly been said that spiritual ignorance is a result of misplaced identity. In other words, we have wrongly identified ourselves with what is often referred to as a small ‘s’ self and not the large ‘S’ Self that we truly are. But what does this mean?

To understand what this means we should start by looking closely into how we identify ourselves in the first place – go ahead, find yourself. The first place you will look might be your body. You will look at your body in the mirror and say this body is me. Of course it is not. It is your body, but you are not the body, you are the one who has that body. You might then look at your history and say this history is me – I am the life that I have lived. Again if you look closely it may be your life and your history, but that life and that history is not you. You are the one that has that life and that history.

If you keep going this way – examining all of the things that you might identify with you will find that in each case what might at first appear to be you, or at least an aspect of you, is not. In the end you will find that they all morph into just another object that you have and you are always the one who has them. If you keep doing this you will discover a sense of frustration as you realize that trying to find yourself is like trying to see the corner of your own eye. Every time you try to look for it, it moves away from your gaze.  Your identity – your self – is like a greased pig; every time you seem to have it in hand it slips away.

In some schools of enlightened mysticism exercises of this type are called ‘pointing out’ exercises because by using them you keep pointing out that you are not what you think you are. If done over and over again these exercises can lead to an experience of awakening – you give up trying to find yourself and you realize that you do not exist as an object that can be seen. You recognize that you are pure subject without substance. In certain mystical schools this is called the experience of no-self, or emptiness. Those who are lucky enough to experience this kind of emptiness will discover a profound liberation. They will see that they are not a limited entity bounded by a body, history and a set of behaviors. You are not a thing in the way that a table, a rabbit or even a body is a thing.

The relief experienced in this realization is so dramatic that it will bring you to tears. It will take the world that you have known and flip it upside down and shake it all loose. It is like you have been wearing a heavy metal straight jacket since the day you were born and it finally fell off. You see that you are full of ideas about who  you are, about what you can and can not do, who you should and should not be. You discover that you have never made an authentic choice in your life because you had been acting out a script dictated to you by the ideas that you had about yourself. You will realize that you had never achieved true autonomous selfhood because you had simply been a self-concept propagating through time and space. You may in that moment look at your life and see that it looks like someone else’s. As you scan through your history it will be clear that although it had always seemed that you were making choices about what you wanted to do and who you wanted to be, in actuality it was only ideas about yourself acting themselves out.

What matters most about human beings is our capacity for active agency. We can do things, we can change things, we can create things. One way to think about evolution is to think about it in terms of the evolution of agency – the evolution of the ability to act effectively as an intentional being.

What is it that makes an entity and agent and not just a thing?
Active agents are able to do three things.

 
1. Perceive the way things are.

2. Hold an an ideal for how things should be.

3. Act in ways that move the way things are now closer to the way they should be.

If an entity cannot do anyone of these three things it is not an active agent. If you were unable to perceive you would certainly not have any chance of being considered an active agent.

If you were able to perceive the ways things are, but not able to act in ways that could effect change you would also not be an active agent.
If you were able to perceive the way things are and effect change, but could not hold an ideal for how things should be then you could only be a reactive agent.

Human beings have agency. We are agents who can effect change that moves us from where we are toward an ideal of the way things should be. And our agency is not fixed – it can grow. We can attain greater levels of agency.

How does agency grow?

The three things that effect agency are perception, performance and vision and all three of these can grow. Our ability to effect change definitely depends on the subtlety of our perception. If you ask a master chef and an average person to go into a kitchen cupboard and produce a meal from what they find, the master chef will be able to exercise a greater degree of agency. They will be able to do more with what they find partly because they will see deeper into what is there. They will also be able to do more because they will have greater skill as a cook – they will be able to perform at a higher level.

Lastly they would be able to do more because they would hold a higher vision or standard for what a meal should be. They would be striving for a level of an ideal meal that was much higher than the average person. One person might see spaghetti and tomatoes and make a meal using just that. The chef might pull out 10 different other items and make a three-course meal because their ideal for what a meal should be would not allow them to settle for less.

Our ability to act as an autonomous agent increases as our perception gets wider and subtler, and as our skill levels increase, and as we hold a higher vision. Many of us are interested in the evolution of consciousness. I would say that thinking in terms of the evolution of agency might even be a useful way to think about it.

Our agency as individuals certainly increases through our lifetime and also the potential for human agency in general has evolved through history. Agency is not limited to individuals alone though. Groups of individuals can also act as agents. Groups can perceive things the way they are, hold an ideal for a higher possibility and act to move the way things are closer toward the collectively held ideal. Evolution marches ever forward toward higher and higher levels of agency. And we are agents in the universe that have the ability to apply our agency to increase our agency.

Anyone who reads philosophy will inevitably bump into certain terms that will cause consternation and distress. Eight of these are; Idealism, Materialism, Rationalism, Empiricism, Realism, Nominalism, Dualism and Monism. Just reading them induces stress. And as you begin to understand what they mean you find out why. Some of them seem to mean almost the same thing and are used interchangeable even though they are not the same. Some sound exactly like what they mean and others sound like the opposite of what they mean. The meanings of these terms are separated by subtle distinctions and partly because some of them have both a technical philosophical meaning and a more common meaning that seem to conflict.

So for the sake of would-be philosophy enthusiasts everywhere let’s walk through them slowly.

First of all of these terms are in a  general way related to one of the most foundational philosophical dualisms there is – mind and matter. At least since the ancient Greeks the problem of mind and matter, thought and thing, the spiritual and the material, has existed. And as long as that dualism exists the fundamental question that needs to be tackled is, “Which is more real – mind or matter?”

Idealism is the belief that the mind and ideas are the primary structure of reality and that physical or material reality is secondary.

Materialism is the opposite of Idealism and sees matter as the primary reality and all other things including thoughts as the product of interactions of matter.

Rationalism is the belief that the rational mind is the best way to know something. If you are a rationalist you believe that your mind is more trustworthy than your sense. A stick in the water might look bent, but you know rationally that it only looks that way because it is in the water.

Empiricism is the opposite of rationalism and it is the belief that the senses are the best way to know something. You might think something is true, but you only know it is true if your senses confirm it.

In consideration of the above it is good to keep in mind that you can’t be an Idealist and a Materialist and you can’t be a Rationalist and an Empiricist.

On the other hand, you can be an Idealist and a Rationalist or an Idealist and an Empiricist. You can also be Materialist and a Rationalist or you can be a Materialist and an Empiricist.

That is because Idealism and Materialism are statements of ontology which means they are statements about what you believe is real. Rationalism and Empiricism are statements of epistemology which means statements about what is the best way to know what is real.

As if this were not confusing enough we also have Realism and Nominalism.

Realism is the belief that there are real existing entities behind universal or general ideas. For instance there is a “thing” called justice.

Nominalism is the opposite belief that these general ideas are not real things but names that point to real things. There is no such thing as “justice”; the world justice is just a name and only the individual instances of justice are real.

Now for our last two terms we have Dualism and Monism.

Dualism is the belief that mind and matter represent two different and distinct types of being.

Monism is the belief that there is ultimately only one type of being. A onist could be an Idealist believing that everything is made of mind or ideas including matter. A monist could also be a materialist believing that ideas are ultimately products of matter.

Ok, now for the one paragraph recap…

If you believe that the universe is made up of mind you are an idealist, if you believe it is made of matter you are a materialist. If you believe that best way to know something is to think about it you are rationalist, if you believe that the best way to know something is to experience it you are an empiricist. If you believe that ideas are real things you are a realist, if you believe that ideas are only names of real things then you are a nominalist. If you believe that mind and matter are two different kinds of things you are a dualist, if you believe that one of them is really real and the other is made of that one that then you are a monist.