“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!
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.
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