A parable on transformation in growth

Robert Kegan, in his excellent book 1982 book The Evolving Self, quotes a parable written by another from the experience of seeing an identity stage-transition as an untrusted external force, “glimpsing a whole new way of composing himself and his world, but overrun and exhausted by its motion. — This fear and repression of an impending higher self-balance, rejecting it from awareness as an intrusive Other. The parable is beautiful and worth quoting here (from p 239-240, author credited just as Kenneth, bold formatting is mine):

He left because what he wanted was not here; he came back because it was to be found only here. What he wanted was beauty, and beauty, though he did not know it at the time, is in the doorway to the room. Poor fellow. He could only be outside the room or inside the room, for it was impossible to stand in the doorway. So he kept going back and forth, in and out. He got a steady rhythm going. Each time he moved either in or out of the room he felt he was getting closer to what he was searching for, and the closer he got (or thought he got) the more enthusiastic he became about the quest. And then he made the great discovery: the beauty is in the doorway. And he knew the faster he went, the more he would see of it. He got so he could keep his eye on it as he went back and forth.

But there was a problem. By now he was completely enslaved in the rhythm. He was doing nothing but forces on either side were pulling him in and out. Forces he could not see. Forces he could not fight. Because in his quest for beauty he had to have let them take him there. And this meant selling his soul. This meant trusting to the wind. But the wind betrayed his trust. Poor fellow kept going faster and faster and he tried so hard to keep his eye on the doorway, but he got very dizzy in this attempt and finally had to give up trying to turn his head.

So here he was oscillating at an ever-increasing speed back and forth, and immediately after beauty left him, the whole thing became very strange indeed. He wondered: “I gave myself to the wind so the wind would give me beauty, but now the wind will not let me have it. I go faster and faster wondering what I am doing in this mess if it is not for beauty’s sake. What else is there for man to live for in the world? If not for beauty at least good. They are the same, aren’t they? Now I can’t even see good.”

Well, you can imagine what happened. He kept going faster and faster and became more and more dizzy. Soon he could not even think, he just became more and more frightened about what was happening to him. He left last Thursday. I am sitting here waiting for him to return. He will someday soon, I know. I hope so, ’cause he’s a nice guy to be around.

Selling one’s soul to the Wind in the quest for Beauty — what a beautiful rendering of the fear and uncertainty and yearning associated with any transition. My comments:

• This passage creates a neat developmental-structural twist on the archetypal action of “selling your soul” to a not-quite-trusted Other (a “golden shadow” in Integral community terms). There’s no way to foresee how trustworthy this mysterious prospective soul-owner is; for all the “poor fellow” knows, it could be a demon who he’ll sorely resent. Or it could be a well-meaning and authentically higher self-balance (the Wind) which is still too fragmented, not yet coherently constructed enough, to provide sane guidance towards Beauty or whatever one’s momentary Grail might be.
• The emphasis on the Wind as the only path to Beauty, yet not letting him reach Beauty once it’s in control – seems in an odd way to parallel the allegorical role of the room: “He left because what he wanted was not here; he came back because it was to be found only here.” Could the Wind quandary be seen as a higher-abstraction reflection of the room quandary? Certainly the Wind plays a higher-abstraction role than the room. But the two are not quite functionally parallel, as there is no equivalent for the doorway in the transition to control of the Wind. In the context of this parable, there is no back-and-forth of commitment to the Wind; it’s a one-way decision, making moot the doorway analogy. Interesting, too, that the Wind comes prior to the doorway; the (more abstract) Wind is what guides him to the (more concrete) room in the first place, in a move of invisible higher guidance reminiscent of Wilber’s involution.
• The fascination with transcending polarities and harnessing paradox (neither inside nor outside; it’s the doorway that ‘s the goal) epitomizes Kegan’s characterization of the inter-individual balance (b 5) as being more focused on movement than on form. Yet, elegantly, the dizzying spiral into trans-formal movement is re-grounded in concrete images with the concluding lines: “He left last Thursday. I am sitting here waiting for him to return. He will some day soon, I know.”
• When the doorway is interpreted as the path to conscious adaptation of the intruding identity-balance (here, inter-individual), the image of oscillating around the doorway of beauty at an ever-increasing speed foreshadows the eventual pick-up of this new consciousness as a regime shift which hasn’t happened yet. The “poor fellow” is caught in the turmoil of the lower edge of a hockey-stick curve, with an undeniable one-way trend but no clear order visible after the chaos of transition. Eventually the new consciousness will pick up momentum, fully integrate into conscious awareness, and become the new, more adequate modus operandi rather than a threatening transition.

Learning as osmosis

The learning mind is such an amazing thing. Or maybe it’s better to consider it a process for the purpose of this musing. Let’s say hypothetically that I have a research internship, for which I will eventually be called on to help analyze and interpret relatively complex psychometric data. I don’t have any formal experience in statistics, but I have been periodically looking up statistics videos on Youtube and watching various 5-minute clips so that I can get a very basic sense of how statistics works and what I need to learn.

I use osmosis as a strategy to learn the basics of any discipline. There are some advantages to being a complete beginner in a topic. Let’s say I want to understand the basics of statistics, which I do. I look up a video where I find a person explaining a concept in statistics. I watch it. Note, I don’t actually care about the concept they are explaining. I similarly don’t care whether the person is correct or giving me misleading information about this concept. I don’t have a fully-formed enough knowledge about statistics for minor details like that to matter.

But despite not caring about the concept, not planning on learning or understanding it, and not caring about accuracy, it feels like the video is offering me some sort of benefit. What is that? Watching the video, and engaging in the hopeless task of trying to understand what the speaker is saying, pulls at my mind in a way. While I can’t hope to understand what the speaker is talking about, I do still recognize the syntactical words of their sentences, and these guide me through the logical flow of the explanation. I’m being led on a tour of a museum blindfolded: I can’t see the statues and paintings the guide is pointing to, but I can hear them. I’m not familiar with the names or historical events they allude to, but I can tell that they’re alluding. I can tell that they’re using the word “varimax” as a noun, and based on context I can tell that it represents an action or technique. I can tell that there’s something important about “loading factors”, although it never seems to reach the newspapers (so I also know it can’t be related to political scandals). And there’s something good about maximizing variances. At a more general level, I observe that a lot of statistics activity seems to revolve around taking pieces of information, which seem to have an optimal way of fitting together (although this may or may not be found) and learning various mathematical approaches to combining them into useful generalities. (This sounds like a simple definition of statistics, but would you be able to pull that out of a hat, being unfamiliar with the discipline? I contend it’s useful.)

I still have not learned one iota of factual information about statistics. But having been led on my blind tour, I’ve familiarized a great deal with the terrain – the structure of reasoning used – and when I go to start learning some factual information, I will already have useful conceptual schemas established, rather than having to make them up on the spot – allowing me to put the facts in place more quickly and more painlessly.

Songs and identity

On a rare afternoon with no urgent homework, I take some leisure time to explore new music online. I come up with Maya Filipic – one of many hidden gems buried in Jamendo’s Creative-Commons music collection. I find I love the first song.

The first time I listen to the song, I’m enraptured. It expresses emotions and experiences that I’ve never felt, or if I’ve felt them, have never vocalized in that way. The song is new and vibrant and inspiring. So I do what’s most reasonable: I listen to it again and again and again.

Once I’ve listened to the song around 20 times, something has changed. In a best-case scenario, the song is still beautiful and poignant – but I know its every turn and every twist; it no longer surprises me, and because of this, loses some of its excitement. In the worst case, something about the song still appeals to me but I keep listening to it mainly out of habit; I’m sick of it. Either way, the song is like an expendable resource – I can only enjoy it so long before it gets “used up” and I have to find something else. This pattern really grates on me. What a pathetic, zero-sum way to live my music-loving life!

At the same time, I’m confused by a pretty simple question: What changed, exactly? What does “getting used to” (and in some cases, “using up” enjoyment in) a song entail? Clearly the song isn’t finite in and of itself; as a non-empirical and subjective entity, it doesn’t have tangible physical limitations and operates on the logic of ideas, not particles. And just as clearly, the combinations of sounds that relay the song haven’t changed at all; they are exactly the same as the first time I heard them. The only way to account for my increasing familiarity with the song is to suppose that I’ve changed.

That’s easy to say. But what does “I’ve changed” mean? It’s more than just a change in my subjective experience, because I want to be experiencing the song as new and surprising and I can’t. Something about my stable self is creating that experience. But the change is subjective and interior to me; it isn’t physical and it isn’t directly observable in the empirical world. Thus the change has something to do with my identity.

More specifically, my identity has been familiarized with the perspective on the world occupied by the song. This means that the song will feel intimately familiar to me and not novel. But this should also have implications for how I look at the rest of the world, shouldn’t it? I won’t necessarily notice this overtly – but in the process of familiarizing with a song, aren’t I also adding to my ways of looking at the world? By this logic, every time I latch onto a new song that I like, I’m anchoring my experience to new perspectives and new corners of reality.

Still, it’s a shame that this process involves “using up” a song in such a way that I stop enjoying it. By familiarizing with a song, I’m increasing my experience base and my ability to look at the emotional world from different angles. But this process kind of requires that I lose the distant admiration of the song that I originally had. It would be nice to have my cake and eat it, too.

People are different from songs. Songs in and of themselves can’t change; they can just be interpreted through different lenses and perspectives. But people are a moving target, subjectively speaking. As I get to know someone, I’m learning more about them and increasing familiarity. If they never change one whit, and if I get to know them very very thoroughly, then it’s possible to tire of someone’s company. But two factors thwart any attempt to really thoroughly get to know someone:

1. People have countless layers of complexity that defy full comprehension. Indeed, the attempt to comprehensively understand someone will probably change your perspective in the process, opening up new interpretations of the object personality.
2. People are constantly growing and shifting in response to experience, and in response to your intersubjective flows. We’re moving targets by nature, and in accordance with Heisenberg, we can’t observe or learn about each other without influencing each other.

I’m testing out a new mind-trick (I love mind tricks) to feel better whenever I have that feeling of regret at getting so close to something that I enjoy its novelty less: All of the grounding for that excitement and appreciation is inside me now. I’ve eaten it up, and it makes up part of the experience base through which I interpret life. If I feel like I’ve lost that excitement and novelty, that’s because I’ve digested the excitement and added it to my identity. That’s something to be happy about.

Compartments

I tried to sort my WordPress posts by categories today. I don’t like categories. All of my posts are to some extent philosophical; most of them broach on my personal life; many of them are psychological. Categories are never perfect, yet always necessary to create definition and structure so that you can act sanely in the world. Compartmentalization is our original sin: it defies wholeness and unity, yet it is prerequisite to experiencing life.

Formatting tool for text extracted from PDF

I have lots of PDF articles to read. However, my small-screened Sony Reader doesn’t show PDFs very well. I use a Linux utility called pdftotext to extract the raw text out of the PDF, in a very simple layout (either all mashed together, or with whitespace according to the layout of the page).

The problem is, these extracted text files are often very difficult to read because the lines are either completely mashed together (making titles, headers, footnotes, and new paragraphs difficult to spot), or they are formatted using literal layout, such that each line of text is on a separate line – which would only be comfortable if my reader screen were wide enough to fit the entire line of text.

I’ve written a short Linux bash script called formatpar that takes text files generated using pdftotext’s -layout option (literal layout) and bunches textual paragraphs back together the way they should be bunched. If a given line is more than X (say, 70) characters long, formatpar will wrap the next line of text onto it, resulting in a pretty close semblance of the original paragraph structure.

Get or preview the script:

• View as PDF online (syntax highlighted)
• Download the script (thanks to Dropbox)

Formatpar is under a Creative Commons license. You are free to use it, modify / add to it, and share it, for personal, public, or commercial use, as long as you give me credit as author and ensure that users are aware of my licensing terms.

Snowfall and endings

The snow has taken its sweet time arriving, but now it looks like it is here to stay. Saturday evening saw a dusting that just covered the grasses, and today that’s being reinforced by a more serious onslaught of chubby, stubborn flakes. The sidewalks are treacherously slippery. The flakes themselves are silent and focused, intent on their task of closing out the fall.

This is exam week at Middlebury, but for me it’s much less stressful than last week. That’s my pattern at Middlebury: the final week of classes is a massive stressful crunch, and exam week itself is relatively relaxed. I have three take-home exams due between Wednesday and Friday, so I can’t consider it a vacation. Just the same, I am acutely aware that in about four days, I will be at home relaxing; and in about six days and ten hours, Gabi will arrive in the airport from Cameroon and we will be together. I’m more than ready for the relaxation and closure of December vacation.

I’ve had many good moments this semester. I remember the satisfying “click” that assured me, as I decided to change to a joint Sociology/Psychology major, that I had made the right choice. I remember meeting with my friend Amanda for long thought-walks. I remember first recognizing, and ceding to, the odd and out-of-place yet deeply compelling urge to take time for daily meditation. I remember the many moments in my invigorating African anthropology class when our professer would reveal some corner of his personal reactions to the themes and conflicts we discussed, leaving us deeply touched.

It’s also been a straining and disconcerting semester. I have experienced periodic “existential crises” all fall – concerning my major, concerning my passion for Integral Theory and lack of clarity about how to enter into the Integral community, concerning my post-graduation plans. Sure, graduation is still a year and a half off… but for the first time in my life, I am closer to graduating college than I am to entering college.

Guilty regrets flit through my head: Why haven’t I been involved in more activities up to this point? Where has the time gone? Have I wasted it? I know these thoughts are ridiculous. I have pushed myself, my growth, and my time-availability to the limit during most of my five semesters here so far. Just the same, these regrets bely an underlying fear and panic that I will somehow “under-engage” Middlebury and miss out on opportunities – which in turn belies my intense valuation on taking the most out of Middlebury. I can then take that value and rest comforted in the knowledge that I am making every effort to optimize my growth and engagement here, and that I will continue to do so.

The evolution of freedom, self-actualization, and enslavement

That all living beings have an equal right to freedom is simultaneously a truism and ridiculous nonsense. In one sense, restriction and lack of actualization of one’s potential causes suffering no matter who or where you are. In another sense, the condition that a being defines as “restriction” is highly variable based on the complexity of the species.

Freedom only has meaning in relation to what you would be capable of doing with it. A dog has less potential of freedom than a person, therefore we generally feel less compunction about denying freedom to a dog and keeping them in a house all their lives. Imagine: “Bye-bye, Fito. It’s time for you to go out and make your way in the world.” By the (somewhat socially constructed) reality of dogs’ nature, they simply aren’t as chafed by certain restrictions as we humans are.

So for a horse or a dog, some of what we would call “enslavement” by human standards just doesn’t apply because horses and dogs don’t have the same extent of urges to be free. For them, providing a warm and loving hearth, safety, sufficient physical exercise, and plenty of food tops out their Maslow hierarchy – whereas for a human, these conditions only provide a starting point from which we look upward and yearn for ever more. As beings grow more and more complex, it becomes harder and harder for them to feel self-actualized. There are multiple planes or complexities of freedom and actualization: physical freedom and actualization, emotional freedom, mental freedom, and (probably) so forth.

On the other hand, our standard for humane treatment of others is constantly expanding. Just as there are different planes of freedom, there are different planes of enslavement. We humans have a nasty habit of enslaving the “other” (the Other is a group with whom we cannot perspective-take) for our purposes; all of modern society is intractably rooted in this enslavement. There is no way that Modernity could have occurred without the uncompensated and compulsory input of countless slaves, whether bound by physical chains or economic ones or ideological ones. As we grow, we recognize new, more complex ways in which we have wronged others in our past, and adjust our behavior accordingly. There was a time when genocide was not widely condemned. There was also a time, more recently, when criticizing one’s leader was widely acknowledged as a crime. The Bill of Rights gives us rights that in the distant past would never have been dreamt of and would have been ridiculous to propose. We can assert that these are fundamental and necessary human rights – not just arbitrary decisions and not just founded in the interest of social stability – and still know that it is our evolving society that has given them significance.

I personally think concepts such as net neutrality (the freedom of equal treatment of internet traffic regardless of type or company) and decentralized press are fundamental human rights. Whether society at large decides to agree or not, I am certain that our standards for “fundamental and inviolate human rights” will continue to change.

Broadening experiences, such as education, tend to stretch people’s identities and thus expand 1) their requirements for self-actualization, 2) the types of freedom they care about, and 3) the types of restrictions / lacks of freedom which they can perceive and will resent. You need to be aware of political happenings and understand how they affect you and others in order to care about corruption. Areas with lower education levels tend to exhibit this attitude, in my experience: in Nicaragua, there is minimal open anger or resentment at presidential elections that were apparently heavily tweaked, and those people who do express resentment tend to be the university students and the educated elite.

Full justice undermines growth

Let’s hypothesize that the Africans kidnapped from their shores by European slave traders succeeded in a mass revolt, took over European technology, and after a significant struggle attained revenge by enslaving all White people. Cruelties, whippings, rapes and reversed living conditions later, you have a society that has not righted the original wrong at all – just switched the colors involved.

Perhaps our greatest blessing as a human community, and as each individual person, is that we are not doomed to live the full consequences of our actions; we have been let off the hook with just a hint of what kind of harm we have done. We have been allowed to travel down our chosen path far enough to get a sense of where it leads without actually going to its culmination. In many cases, full justice would undermine our opportunities to grow, reflect, and learn from our mistakes as a society.

As Frank Herbert puts it: “Any path followed precisely to its end, leads precisely nowhere.” The lesson I take from this is that while focus is good, it’s unhealthy to reify your goals and insist that they be completed. Oftentimes it’s better to fulfill your goals only a little, then move on to something else. Everything in moderation.

Change means nothing unless it is era-appropriate

“Based on my own reading of Whitehead, I give him tremendous credit as a unique historical who broke with the scientific materialism of recent centuries. His philosophy of organism is such a radical break that it is only in the last twenty years that an intellectual climate has emerged allowing Whitehead’s work to be received by a wider audience.” – Keith Thompson

Even in my conceited moments, I don’t want to be that. That is not one of my dreams, to be recognized in awe far into the future. I have ideas that I think are valuable and I want them to be accessible to people and cause change, if at all, now – here – in these decades when change is so direly needed.

Eclecticism

“Well, I really consider myself more of an eclectic.” I hate it when people say that! Eclectic? No kidding? That doesn’t tell me anything about you. When someone identifies themself as an eclectic, all that tells me is that they take in different approaches and mix them together in mishmash fashion. (Not an organized fashion; when I see people who integrate disciplines and techniques in organized fashion, they usually find a much more creative and descriptive word than “eclectic” to identify themselves with.)

When someone says “I am an eclectic”, I can assume that they value open-mindedness and do not consider themself a fundamentalist married to any one theory, approach, or discipline. But eclecticism is an intellectual capacity, not an identity. If eclecticism were a specific identity, it would suggest that it is not necessary for wise and thorough intellectual contribution, whereas I do see it as very necessary and a needed ability. Calling yourself an “eclectic” implies that the 10 people around you are not eclectics, which to me implies that the other 9 people (including me) are rigidly narrow-minded. Please don’t be so pessimistic. Hey, they are probably thinking the same thing about you.