Making peace with change

June 17, 11:13 PMBoulder Science & Spirituality ExaminerEric Thompson

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Are happiness and change incompatible? As best selling author Spencer Johnson has so eloquently stated, “[t]he more important your cheese is to you the more you want to hold on to it” (36). As so often seems to happen in our lives, unforeseen events occur with no apparent purpose other than to steal our “cheese,” foil our plans, or just make life difficult. In truth, not only is this perception common among most of us, it rises out of the deep-seated belief that change and happiness are incompatible. If it is true that our happiness is dependent upon people, places, and things, then it would seem that we should avoid change at all costs.

Now I invite you to think about this: Happiness cannot be pursued, because it is your very nature. If change is the very process by which evolution and growth occur, and if true happiness is the innate by-product of self-knowledge and integrity (rather than exterior acquisitions), then learning toembrace change within the context of intimate self- awareness would seem to be a major key to healthy adjustment in a world of constant change.

In fact, to have such a mental support structure is itself conducive to profound, positive life changes in the midst of stressful and otherwise hopeless situations. People who hold this optimal worldview—self-actualizers, in other words—derive satisfaction from being fully engaged in the learning process itself. They don’t see life as a stationary object from which pleasure needs to be taken.  

The consistent engagement of contemplative and meaningful life practices enables these individuals to experience a practical kind of awakening; one in which they find themselves becoming ever more mindful and conscious within the context of an ongoing evolutionary learning curve. Rather than standing by as helpless victims, caught inside the mesh of the spontaneous flow of emergence, life becomes for them deeply satisfying by virtue of being consciously immersed in the developmental process itself. For them, the learning process itself is life and happiness.

With this observation, a revealing pattern arises: Contemplative training, combined with an optimal cognitive framework, assists us in embracing change as an invitation to become aware of our limiting values and beliefs, to release everything that no longer serves us and thereby develop to higher levels of being and fulfillment. This greater awareness in turn makes possible inner peace and successful adaptation to an ever-changing world.

In creating such a cognitive framework, we may ask whether or not we even possess such capacity for advanced levels of development. Is all this talk of higher potential just wishful thinking? In fact, the evidence for such pre-existing potential is difficult to ignore. Furthermore, this capacity is not possessed only by the select few. A great number of developmental psychologists agree: All aspects of human expression, including human life itself, are the unfolding of latent potentials in a stage-like process.

Various stage models of human development are well-respected within the scientific community, the most influential of which include the cognitive development model of Jean Piaget, the female moral development model of Carol Gilligan, the ego progression model of Jane Loevinger, and the value-systems development model of Clare Graves. These scientifically validated models of human development can play an important role in our own evolution. Once we’ve deeply understood that we all possess this higher potential as a present reality, confidence in our ability to meet the accelerating changes of our time emerges as a natural by-product.

Discussing both Western and Eastern philosophical views on the idea of ever-present potentials in human beings, integral theorist and philosopher Ken Wilber writes:

 The involutionary theories—from Plotinus to Hegel, from Asanga to

Aurobindo, from Schelling to Shankara, from Abhinavagupta to the

Lankavatara Sutra—are all attempts to take into account that the depths

of the higher structural  potentials are already present but not seen . . .

[A]ll of those are sincere attempts to outline involution, and all of them

absolutely agree on the central and crucial issue: the presence of the

higher world spaces as potentials given to us now, but not yet realized . . .

(Wilber 661-62).

 Convinced of such pre-existing potentials and their capacity to be actualized through contemplative training, Charles N. Alexander of the Maharishi University of Management conducted a study with 90 maximum security prisoners at the Walpole State prison in Iowa. Before and after teaching the inmates a basic meditation technique (in this case, Transcendental Meditation), Alexander gauged the inmates' development using the ego development test of one of the foremost researchers and experts on the development of self-identity, Jane Loevinger. Following a full year of daily meditation, the test indicated that the average inmate experienced a degree of cognitive, moral, and interpersonal advancement not experienced by average college students in a typical four-year period (Alexander 10-11). According to the test results, the average developmental gain among the prisoners amounted to an entire stage-shift (from Loevinger's conformist stage to the self aware stage), meaning that each prisoner developed through inherent stage-potentials of increasing complexity.

In case the significance of these findings hasn’t quite sunk in, allow me to point out just how big the implications of this study are: Statistically, a large percentage of the world population—seventy-eight percent by one scientist’s estimation—will never experience such dramatic shifts in personal growth and development in the span of an entire lifetime.

Four other programs in the prison (involving drug rehabilitation, counseling, and Muslim and Christian groups), showed no major progress among participating inmates in the same time period.  Additional studies showed that Alexander's subjects, on average, continued over the next year to develop to Loevinger's “conscientious stage,” which, at the time, was the highest stage discovered among adult samples worldwide. The inmates' significantly reduced recidivism rate, as compared to participants of the other four programs, demonstrates the capacity of self-awareness training for uncovering and initiating internally generated resourcefulness.

Dr. Alexander's findings imply that the increased self-awareness afforded by contemplative practice--whether such practice takes the form of prayer, self-inquiry, or meditation--functions in some vital way to liberate ever-present, yet unnoticed, capacities and possibilities. In other words, these findings strongly imply that the capacity for profound positive change is always available in all people; it simply needs to be recognized, liberated, and voluntarily developed.

Researchers into the factors that facilitate profound, positive change suggest that a constructive cognitive framework increases the efficacy of awareness training by functioning as an attractor or magnet toward which previously undetected potentials are more likely to develop. The significance of such a framework lies in the fact that without its eventual introduction, latent potentials can never be realized, precisely because they have no greater context in which to unfold and see the light of day. 

Such a constructive framework is gently introduced in narrative therapy, increasingly used by therapists and counselors with minority adolescents in foster care, through storytelling designed to assist clients in re-telling their stories in ways that transfer their attention from problems to inherent gifts and advantages; in other words, it strives to create an empowering context in which resourcefulness and the ability to change can emerge.

However, as Joshua Kirven of the University of Central Florida has so duly noted, the predominant view in Western culture esteems exteriors over interiors and thereby inhibits the emergence of an empowering internal context precisely because interiors appear to be of less value. The inner sense of self is often mistakenly considered something to be obtained by first winning respect through exteriors. Exploring the consequences of the development of interior awareness, as well as an empowering cognitive framework, Kirven relates:

 An optimal worldview builds on a holistic way of thinking based on

interpersonal relationships with family and community. Internal

strengths found through prayer and meditation are valued as sources of

motivation when confronted with stress, violence, and discrimination.

The optimal worldview signifies an orientation that is more holistic and

integrative than that found in most modern societies and psychological

theory . . . An individualistic self-centered/sub-optimal conceptual system

validates individuals based upon appearance versus substance, causing

one to look externally for satisfaction. Adolescents often favor such

external markers. In contrast, an optimal/integrative conceptual system

asserts that power is an internal construct and is a perspective typically

favored by mature adults (Kirven 251-2).

 This external search for satisfaction, which Kirven points to as a trademark of Western culture, is often the culprit involved in coloring our perceptions of change, fueled as it is by the belief that satisfaction--happiness, fulfillment, peace, wholeness, whatever name you wish to call it--is something to be gained through material possession rather than being the very substrate of what we are and have become. Our source of sustenance, completion, and contentment is so often viewed to be outside ourselves. We therefore place the responsibility and foundation of our happiness on other people, places, and things; and by doing so, we tend to see change as the purposeful curse of Fate, specifically designed to keep us from happiness. Simply translated, when the “cheese” disappears, so does our inner sense of fulfillment.

When we realize that inner fulfillment is the result of resting in the authentic self, in communion with all of humanity and all of life, the possibility of embracing change as the entry point to new ways of being in the world arises as an acknowledged potential, paving the way for genuine fulfillment and resourcefulness in an ever-changing world.

This kind of development has been shown to emerge primarily via the inner posture of self-inquiry, self-awareness and profound honesty, and the quest for more meaningful and more inclusive or all-embracing value-systems (Beck 2). Ironically, this inner posture often arises only after we’ve experienced pain and suffering from resisting some calamitous change in our lives. When we discover that it is our resistance of change that causes us pain and suffering, and not change itself, we awaken to greater possibilities for greater meaning-making and life purpose. This full engagement with change now becomes our primary source of fulfillment, which, like change, never ceases.

Sources

Alexander, Victoria K. “Applications of Maharishi Vedic Science to Developmental  Psychology.” Journal of Social Behavior & Personality 17.1 (2005): 9-20.   

Beck, Don Edward, and Christopher Cowan. Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change. New York: Wiley, 2005.

Johnson, Spencer. Who Moved My Cheese? New York: Putnam, 1998.

Kirven, Joshua. “Building on Strengths of Minority Adolescents in Foster Care: A     Narrative Holistic Approach.” Journal of Clinical Nursing 15 (2006): 247-63.

Wilber, Ken. Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution. Boston: Shambhala, 1995