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.

Simulating cognitive limitations

Sometimes I see a child in egocentric preop, who seems fully, genuinely incapable of conceptualizing that I don’t want to play with her right now. It’s a constant challenge for me to perspective-take and accept it when people have trouble working with ideas that I have more mastery over. Of course, that weakness also suggests the converse: that I will have trouble perceiving, or accounting for the possibility of, areas where others have this same frustration about me.

It’s hard to grasp the feeling of not being able to deal with numbers past 3 or so – as described in Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear: the protohuman race there described simply didn’t have the frontal lobe development to conceptualize numbers with any ease or proficiency. We take the capacity to think in numbers for granted – partially because we have learned tools to abstract numbers to manipulable symbols, and partially because we simply have more brain capacity in that area.

Let’s say that you have a friend who knows fact X. This statement can be reformulated as: “I know that she knows X.” Then tell her this statement. A safe assumption can then be made that “She knows that I know that she knows X” – but saying this indicates that “I know that she knows that I know that she knows X.” But notice that this statement starts to get fuzzy – it starts to fade into “many” – after 3 or 4 repetitions of “know”; our observable difficulty in holding onto layered perspective-taking can be used to give us a sense for what it might be like to lack cognitive capacities that we take for granted. This in turn improves our freedom of thought relating to general perspective-taking.

Distance can be respect

I remember talking to my parents about my passion for learning how people think and perceive the world, and applying that to make communication more fluid and improve understanding between conflicting interests. Their laughing response was “Good luck”… impling that this aspiration of mine is too pie-in-the-sky for anyone to consider seriously.

I don’t like sharing personal thoughts and having them laughed down or dismissed. That happened with my mother a lot. It violates my general definition of “intimacy”: having confidence in someone close to you that they will validate and sympathize with the thoughts and feelings you share. I think that kind of violation can only happen when 1) you assume that the person you’re sharing with, will be coming from the same perspective as you, and 2) the person is not psychologically conscious enough to recognize and counterbalance that assumption. And the deeper and more personal the thoughts you share, the more likely that that assumption will be false. It’s like hugging a horse that isn’t aware that it might step on you or cuff your ear if it moves – you can come close to it, but you can get hurt if you do so lacking an awareness of your differences. That sort of caution doesn’t mean you mistrust the horse’s intentions; it means you understand and respect the nature and limits of your shared subjective space. And it’s hard to step back and develop that awareness with a parent – who, after all, taught you what closeness meant in the first place.

I just likened my parents to a horse. I don’t know how I feel about that.