The Human Antipathy to Change (part 2)

“How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?

 Just one, but the light bulb has to really want to change.”

 

Cliché light bulb jokes aside, we all recognize the truth in this saying. Significant and lasting change must be of our own making; otherwise we will revert back to our original mode of thinking/behaving once external pressures are removed. Take this image to the left as an example. Upon first glance you might see beautiful young women in a fur coat looking off into the distance. At the same time, others might tell you that it is actually an image of an old hag with a large nose and long chin. Sure, you might be able to force yourself into seeing the old lady. However, without a genuine internal change, you’ll continue to see the beautiful young women because seeing otherwise requires effort, energy, and reorganization--things that individuals and molecules alike tend to minimize at all costs. The inability to see the other meaning is nothing more than inertia at work in the mental realm.


So why is this “psychological inertia” so important; moreover, where does it come from? Well, Newton ascribed inertia as a property of matter back in 1687, and the last time I checked inertia still exists and we are just highly organized lumps of matter. Hence, there’s no reason inertia should not hold true for our thoughts and behaviors, especially if we accept the modern scientific paradigm that the brain is the physical seat and/or correlate of the mind (a quandary which is still hotly debated.) Nonetheless, there are many other reasons why our minds resist change, mostly having to do with the very function of the mind itself. So to help understand the nature of the beast in question please click the link and check out the famous turning dancer illusion .

What do you see? Is the dancer turning clockwise or counterclockwise?

Optical illusions like this are perhaps the best examples of how our minds shape reality: how our unique worldview adds that all-so-important layer of meaning to otherwise meaningless stimuli. The spinning dancer effectively shows us that our experience of reality (i.e. how we see the world) is more of an inventive synthesis than a passive intake of an objective “out there” world. In other words, what a thing is is to an unknowable extent determined or influenced by what we think it is. In the dancer example, the external stimuli never changes, yet a simple internal shift in thinking creates an entirely new reality, one where the women is spinning in the complete opposite direction!

Like in the young woman/old lady illusion, a change in what we see is caused by an unconscious paradigm shift, a Eureka! moment that restructures our representation of the world. I say unconscious because most of the framework which structures our reality is neatly tucked below our awareness, yet it is possible to bring aspects of this scaffolding into conscious deliberation.

Go look at the dancer again. Now look away for a moment and imagine her spinning in the opposite direction. Can you make her change directions? Can your formative powers of imagination will her into rotating to your liking? Doing so requires a top-down change of your mental precept, something that is difficult but certainly not impossible.

In his fabulous book “A Crack in the Cosmic Egg”, Joseph Chilton Pearce describes this phenomenon as Metanoia from the Greek word for conversion. He says,

“Metanoia is the process by which concepts are reorganized. It is a specialized, intensified adult form of the same world-view developing found shaping the mind of an infant. It proves to be the way by which all genuine education takes place…As we change our inherited representations of the world, the world we deal with changes accordingly.”

Metanoia is the intuitive, catalytic mode of consciousness that allows us to reshape our thoughts and behaviors; and if strengthened and enriched, it can provide the basis for transcending the logical confines of our culturally accepted world view and push our consciousness into new uncharted territories.


Pearce claims that  metanoia is the key to creative thinking. In fact he claims all great scientific discoveries from the illumination of E=MC2 to the double-helix postulate are a result of this freely-synthesizing aspect of mind which is untrammeled by harsh realities and cultural impediments.  In other words, most significant "discoveries" or breakthroughs have occurred via this opening of mind to encompass possibility beyond what is considered feasible by our reality-adjusted, social thinking. Only by transcending the logical barriers of our mental constructs can we introduce a new way of "seeing" the world. As I've said before, a new way of "seeing" is not only the end goal of personal change but is absolutely necessary if we wish move beyond the limitations of our inherited egocentric existence and evolve into higher levels of consciousness.

 The above discussion is meant to exemplify three things: Firstly that our first-person experience of reality is a synthetic process of mind, secondly that our mental constructs limit our interpretation of events to the exclusion of other possibilities (which is why we can’t see the dancer spinning both ways at once), and thirdly that these selective interpretations are arbitrary and can in fact be altered through metanoia, a process of radical reorganization. What does this all have to do with change? Well, as we asserted before, personal change is fundamentally a process of altering one’s mental landscape. Changing ourselves, our attitudes is simply a process of making the dancer rotate in a new direction. Of course large overarching change is more difficult to bring about because we are dealing with complicated, ingrained structures of mind; nevertheless, the fundamental process of reconfiguration is the same.

Hopefully, I’ve elucidated the influence of unconscious factors in how we perceive reality and shown the process by which changing our constructs of reality can occur. In the next post I will to go into more detail about why changing our interpretation of the world is so difficult. I ask and answer what makes our worldview so fundamentally averse to change, and what can we do about it.

Hypocrisy & the Human Antipathy to Change (pt. 1)

We are all hypocrites. Show me someone who practices what they preach to a “T”, and I’ll show you a hippogryph playing chess with a unicorn. There’s no avoiding hypocrisy; the chasm between what we say and what we do is an elemental part of the human condition. It is rooted in our split-mind: the bifurcation of reality between conscious and unconscious activity.

Jung and other depth psychologists have called the split of consciousness from unconsciousness the culprit of all human troubles, the “fall” in mythological terms. Everything from our impulse purchases to cheating on our diets exemplify our inability to shake-off the unconscious emotional urges that lay below the limen of awareness. Think about how many times we did something we know we shouldn’t have done or simply said yes when we really meant no? The answer is more often than we’d like to admit.

I recognize that there are many situations where we feel coerced to act a certain way, or at least the circumstances makes choosing another alternative impossible. However, even if we had the freedom to choose otherwise, would we? I’m not so sure and if you keep reading, you might agree. Also please note I’m using “we” since I am in no way above such insincere behavior. Moreover, I am convinced that most of us want to change in all the right ways. We want to be good people. We don’t want to be a slave to our primitive drives. We want to be transformed; and as a result, all this hypocrisy makes us uncomfortable.

Author Joesph Chilton Pierce describes the situation as an “underlying desperation in us, unstated and inchoate, that is nothing less than a split mind’s realization of its split world.” We long for a way out, yet we typically remedy this situation by lying to ourselves, feigning authenticity, and repenting when our behavior seems out of line. Sure this might assuage some negative self-talk and ameliorate cognitive dissonance, but does it really accomplish anything? No, the heart of the situation remains unchanged.

Let me use myself as an example. I have proselytized the need to live by one’s principles, be more real, more genuine. I’ve even touted myself as a free-spirit, open to experience, willing to go beyond a personal ego-centered worldview and embrace a globally-minded compassion. While my friends and family probably take my words to heart, little do they know that despite my self-assured talk, the very next moment I go and cower in my insular routine perpetuating all the things I say I’m not. We often make highfalutin claims about the things which we find ourselves most unable to change. Meanwhile our hypocrisy stares at us like a white elephant in the room.

I feel we make excuses that life is too busy, too complicated, and too problematic to do the inner work necessary to bring about change. We assume that if all the external obstacles to self-actualization are removed, we would soar into our fullest potential. Moreover, we take the misguided attitude that such hypocritical behavior is inescapable in today’s society.

A few weeks ago at my University’s conference on forging an ecological mindset through literature, the lunch break consisted of red meat on Styrofoam plates. I thought to myself “this is all wrong”, but what could I do? I could just not eat. Problem solved. But of course I gobbled away since ignoring a table full of free food would break with every survival instinct I have. I justified my behavior by saying that the next time I would act perfectly in accordance with what I know and believe to be right. Though I might say this with an air of certainty, deep down my heart is unconvinced—this is the realization of the split-mind: hypocrisy manifest.

I’m sure every one of us has had a similar experience. Whether it be a small thing like throwing a piece of litter into the street or a large thing like learning to act less selfishly, we all have personal issues we wish to improve. So I ask, what is holding us back from making the changes we want to make, from wholeheartedly adopting the worldview we wish to uphold?

What is holding us back? The answer to the question is plain and simple: it is not “them” or society, but ourselves, our ego, our unwillingness to let go of what is familiar, comfortable, and easy. This is the stark truth most of us are unable to accept.

We wish to shift to locus of control to an external power, but in reality we are the only ones to fault. For when it comes to achieving our higher self-evolution, most of us don’t want to change. Sure, we want things to change: we want to feel better, be happier, and have an easier life. But we do not want to have to change our deep habits of being, our habits of relating to others or identifying with the thoughts and feelings that run through us. Very few of us want to let go of the familiar ways of being and behaving that we’re accustomed to. Why? Simply put, because we do not want to get out of our comfort zone.

We all want to do what is best for the environment, for humanity, for the planet; but will you exchange your car for a bicycle? No. Will you give up your favorite food because farming it creates ecological havoc, emits greenhouse gasses, and causes needless animal suffering? No. Will we only change if the pain of not changing becomes worse that the pain of change itself? Yes.

I use the ecological example not because I’m a tree-hugging eco-nut, but simply because it clearly demonstrates how our desire to change typically cedes authority to a greater desire for maintaining comfort. Bringing about true fundamental change in our behavior, our worldview, is an extremely difficult process requiring extraordinary effort. Some people, I dare say, are even incapable of such change, having not the interiority or knowledge necessary to begin reformulating their behaviors and beliefs about reality. Others who have the genuine desire to change still may never achieve the transformation they desire because there is a host of other factors keeping our behavior and worldview static.

Change is uncomfortable, awkward, and perhaps even painful; but I believe it is absolutely necessary if we want to progress and thrive. As Einstein famously said, “the significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.” We need a new way of thinking and a thorough understanding of the human antipathy towards change. In the coming posts I hope to expound in greater detail the dynamics which inhibit deep-seated change and theorize a new path for evolving past our “split-mind” archaic way of life.