Changes of Mind – a review (3b/3): . . . close to the top

Narcissus by Caravaggio

The Risk of Stagnation

As we have seen in the previous post, conflicts and discomforts begin to make our existing level of consciousness unsatisfactory. This drives us to look for ways beyond that dissonance. This can move us to a higher level of understanding, a more effective model of reality. However, if our level of understanding is one that our culture values discomfort with it may be harder to come by and we can get stuck.

Both Achievement and Affiliative levels of consciousness have a significant value for our societies (pages 145 & 153):

… Prestige-seeking self-oriented traits are admired and rewarded in capitalistic cultures.… a number of studies have shown that many highly narcissistic individuals are successful and valued members of capitalistic societies… They are especially rewarded in business organisations…

Despite the . . . cultural biases against intuition and right-hemispheric processing, a strong bias for aspects of Affiliative consciousness exists as well. The desire to help others, sustain intimate relationships, and be uncritical of others’ differences has historically commanded great respect in western cultures.

All Is Not Lost

At the end of their road also lies an inadequacy in the paradigm that creates discontent (page 158):

Authentic consciousness resolves both the Achievement and Affiliation dilemmas using a synergistic blend of both solutions this is greater than the sum of its parts. If love will not conquer all and power does not obtain the more important things in life, the Authentic resolution is fulfilling one’s own personal mission and supporting the personal growth of others along the way.

According to Wade (page 159) ‘Authentic consciousness represents the height of most conventional developmental theory.’ I think we would need to include Dabrowski’s TPD in that list, as his thinking about development appears to stop at the level of authenticity.

For Wade, and, I must admit for me also, this is where it all begins to get really interesting. Wade nails the core of that interest when she writes (page 162):

The most significant shift in this arena is disappearance of the fear of death . . . ., closely associated with the marked drop in neurotic behaviour. The ego is at last secure. This is a paradox of ego maturity: just as the person reaches the peak of self-expression, he also becomes receptive to letting the self go.

The Shift from Dissonance to Autonomy

At this level much of the earlier dissonance fades away: motivation is far more an autonomous choice than a flight from conflict. People at this level tend, as Dabrowski also describes it, to identify with higher values conducive to compassion (page 163-164):

Authentic people identify not with a particular group or society, but with the human race. . . . . The authentic person pursues what he desires, but never at the expense of others, and in such a manner that serves the greater good, not his alone.

There is a beautiful first person description of how this feels (page 165):

This is how life will be. I must be wholehearted while tentative, fight for my values, yet respect others, believe my deepest values right yet be ready to learn. I see that I shall be retracing this whole journey over and over – but, I hope, more wisely.

As well as being value-driven, people at this level are more flexible and less phased by dissonance (page 168):

Authentic subjects are more likely to change their behaviour to conform to their beliefs once they are aware of the inconsistency. People functioning at the Authentic level adapt more easily than others because they are more open to, and less defended against, dystonic information.

And so autonomous choice, not compulsion by dissonance, is the driver at this level (page 171-172):

At earlier levels, change comes about through exterior events’ impinging painfully on the individual and creating a sort of tension. But from the Authentic stage onward, change appears to be driven internally, as a matter of will and a result of tensions caused by increasing internal activity.

Tintern Abbey

Glimmerings of Transcendence

Whether there is a ‘sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused’ is an interesting question. Wade addresses this (page 172):

Conviction of an uncertain but presumably meaningful existence is often initially linked to an agnostic or completely nontheistic stance, but it incorporates a belief – often quite vague – in some existence beyond the physical plane . . . . Exactly what this may be, or whether it exists at all, is unknown to the Authentic person and unimportant as a motivator, though death is tentatively construed as a transition to some other kind of existence.

In the end, a person at this level comes to realise that their ego is simply a construct. Anxiety sets in. The Ground of Being may even break through ‘in the form of transcendent events.’ When it does (page 174):

. . . The ego is caught in another dilemma: it is irresistibly drawn to the Dynamic Ground at the same time that it is afraid of being engulfed and destroyed.

We are on the cusp of Transcendent consciousness.

That would need another series of posts altogether to deal with adequately. It is probably best to end this consideration of the dissonance that has driven transitions from one level of consciousness to the next with a sense of what her conclusions on this matter are at the end of the book. On page 265 she summarises it:

Below the Authentic level, change seems to be driven exclusively by external events causing sufficient suffering for movement [to take place]. Transition is much easier by the time the individual has arrived at the level of Authentic consciousness, because egoic survival is not threatened in the least. . . . Authentic people are open to critical input and, if faced with the fact that their behaviour is not in accord with their beliefs, will tend to change their behaviour. Thus from the Authentic level on, change is driven by the will, not by environmental events, though it may be assisted by others (e.g. a spirit guide or grace).

With this I think Dabrowski would be in complete agreement, except for the mention of ‘grace.’ It is interesting to find such close correspondence on key points between such otherwise diverse viewpoints. It has made this process of revisiting Jenny Wade’s book after all these years a most worthwhile exercise for me, at least. Heaven knows whether anyone else will feel the same.

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Changes of Mind – a review (3a/3): moving on up . .

The two previous posts have given a brief overview of Jenny Wade’s thesis and looked at her treatment of near-death experiences and lateralisation.  At last we have reached the core theme of her brilliant book, Changes of Mind.

Transitions between Levels

This theme relates strongly to one of my most recent preoccupations: Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration. He speaks of five levels of personality development (see diagram above from my earlier post on the subject). To oversimplify for present purposes, we move from an overly conformist self-gratifying level through conflict to increasingly autonomous levels where we strive to enact our ideals rather than indulge our desires. Authenticity and empathy become increasingly influential states of mind. He is though more concerned with creativity than mysticism and, as far as I can tell, he has little or nothing to say about transcendence.

From Wade’s point of view he joins the many others whose theory of development stops too soon, probably at her Authentic level (see next post).

The two theories begin at different points. Dabrowski, in the treatments I have so far read of his theory, does not include prenatal and infantile stages. He seems to be concerned with adult functioning and his Level One conflates Wade’s Achievement and Conformist levels. Also, whereas she tracks in detail subsequent developments towards the autonomy he sees as becoming increasingly evident through his Levels Two to Four, he seems to leave it as simply something that occurs if the challenges of inner conflict are met, without specifying what kinds of challenges might be typical of various developmental levels.

I think, therefore, Wade complements his thinking in an important way and would like to spend some time outlining some of the details in her model to illustrate this.

The Driver of Dissonance

Wade contributes, thanks to her close examination of many thinkers including Piaget, Kohlberg, and Wilber amongst others, a crucial conceptual clarification at each stage. Whereas it seems to me from the secondary sources that Dabrowski contents himself with using words like ‘suffering’ and ‘conflict’ to give a catchall description of what in general goes on, Wade is far more precise. Even in childhood states of consciousness, whether they have persisted into adulthood or not, she detects specific conflicts that trigger development. Take for example her description of the move upwards from Naïve to Egocentric Consciousness (page 94):

The essentials – corroborated by anthropological research and theory – are that the individual’s needs fail to be met consistently enough by the environment, creating a conflict that simultaneously gives birth to the self-encapsulated ego and the fear that it can be destroyed. In both children and adults, this seems to occur through exposure to information that cannot be assimilated at their present level of functioning.

In Naïve Consciousness the individual feels safely embodied in their context. When they feel exposed to danger by a separation from that context, the dissonance begins to operate that will drive them to a different level of understanding.

She is clear though that this same basic principle applies across many stages of development (ibid.):

In essence, cognitive conflict results from repeated exchanges that cannot be resolved using resources and solutions available to the present developmental level. The problem does not go away, the motivation to solve it remains strong, and yet the individual’s resources are not competent to resolve the dilemma.

She uses Kuhn’s terminology in saying ‘the limits of a paradigm [have been] reached.’

Where Dissonance Might Be Elusive

Dissonance at the Egocentric level is harder to come by (page 106):

Cleckly and Smith point out that lots of people function primarily at the Egocentric level in modern society, many of them rather successfully.

How, then, is a desire for a transition to the conformist level created? One possibility is particularly intriguing (page 117):

[Many researchers converge on the belief] that socialisation results from the certainty, as opposed to the possibility, of one’s own death.

Clearly, such a fear would seem to be enough to derail all but the most intransigent of narcissists. Conformist awareness (ibid.) ‘is thought to represent the mainstream consciousness in civilised cultures, and it is tellingly labelled institutional, conventional, traditional, and conformist – the designation used here.’

Not surprisingly, dissonance at this level is even harder to come by than at the Egocentric level (page 130):

Transition from the Conformist stage is usually very difficult, because the individual is in a fairly stable equilibrium with his social environment and will tend to rationalise away information that does not align with his worldview or self image. When sufficient cognitive dissonance arises, however, change to the next stage no longer follows the invariant pattern of most developmental theories: instead, two paths are available.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference. (Robert Frost)

A Fork in the Path

In effect, the path forks between Achievement and Affiliative Consciousness. There is no clear consensus about exactly what triggers the shift towards either of these higher levels. There is a sense that the exact direction may be partly determined by gender (page 132), women moving towards the Affiliative option and men the Achievement one.

This is one choice point at which I feel Dabrowski may be the more illuminating of the two about the possible trigger. He is clear that a conflict between what a person feels ought to be the case and what they see is the case precipitates a shift from conformity towards autonomy. Wade (page 148) quotes the view that a transition ‘occurs when a dramatic life event destroys faith in established authority.” She amplifies on this later (page 156-157):

When forced to acknowledge that the rules do not work, evolving Conformists will choose either the Achievement solution, “get it while you can” or the Affiliative solution, “love conquers all,” depending upon predisposition and compelling environmental factors.

Dabrowski is also clear that this sense of ‘what is’ conflicting with ‘what ought to be’ may be relatively rare, something with which Wade clearly agrees (page 133):

Researchers have observed that, comparatively, very few adults even in industrialised societies function consistently above the Conformist level.

She accepts that this may be in part because developmentalists do not have the tools to study this level and/or the database may be too poor to contain such information. My own sense is that such states of mind, in terms of stepping up to either Affiliative or Achievement levels, while they may not constitute a majority in any population, in advanced Western societies will not be all that rare. People going beyond these next two levels, however, will be much thinner on the ground. It is more likely to be absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence that is at work concerning the frequency with which people pass beyond conformism. A closer look at what might follow must wait until next time.

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Bone-Cave Dweller

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Changes of Mind – a review (2/3): Lateralisation

This re-exploration of Jenny Wade’s book, Changes of Mind, began with a brisk review of her overall perspective followed by a summary of her views on near-death experiences. Before we come to transitions between levels of consciousness, the topic that is closer to the core of her overall purpose, her sense of how the different hemispheres of the brain influence the realisation of different levels of consciousness deserves a look.

Lateralisation:

Perhaps I should clarify at this point that she is concerned to unwrap the mysteries surrounding human consciousness at least in terms of how it develops and to define more adequately the different stages of that development. When I come to discuss the specifics of this it will be obvious that there are implications for what we term personality or character in the individual and what we term culture or society at the level of aggregates of people. This is very much a concern of McGilchrist as well in his masterly treatment of the subject in The Master and his Emissary.

Her Sixth Level of development is called Affiliative Consciousness. It is one of two stages of development that are open to somebody who has reached what she calls the conformist level of consciousness. All that needs to be said for now is that the choice at that stage, as she sees it, lies between Achievement Consciousness and Affiliative Consciousness (page 147). Achievement consciousness resolves the problems of the conformity level by working on the thesis that you “get it while you can,” whereas Affiliative Consciousness believes that “love conquers all.” We will be exploring the transition aspect in more detail later.

As she unpacks the characteristics of Affiliative Consciousness the lateralisation links becomes clear (page 151: ‘. . . ‘ indicates here and below I have deleted her references):

People at the Affiliative level mainly grasp similarities and patterns rather than differences . . . . In part, the emphasis on similarities comes from the need to avoid conflicts that might threaten their sense of community, but it is coupled with a holistic worldview and indifference to the passage of time characteristic of right hemisphere dominance . . . .

In the same way as McGilchirst does, she feels (page 152) that our culture is biased against right-hemisphere processing. As a result is tends to denigrate this level of consciousness:

The bias against right brain processing has created – and perpetuated – confusion between Naïve and Affiliative consciousness.

Naïve Consciousness, Level Two, is characteristic of early childhood in her classification of levels. It is clearly an insult to see Affiliative Consciousness as a regression to such a state and I find her linking of this to our culture’s disparagement of right-brain functioning completely plausible.

She does not contend, though, that Affiliative Consciousness is without drawbacks (page 153):

Affiliative consciousness is not all sweetness and light, however. Turning now to what may legitimately be considered drawbacks of right-brain processing, Affiliative people often do not perceive inharmonious elements indicative of negative emotions and difference, particularly anger. . . .  They avoid conflict and confrontation. . .  Right-brain-dominant people tend to be much less verbal in response to stress then left-brain-dominant people, more prone to deny problems, hold in hostility, and develop an appeasing ‘peace at any price’ approach to personal conflict.

So, not completely satisfactory then. What she feels is better is a balance between the two hemispheres. Achievement Consciousness is the more left-brain mode and is definitely not without its problems either, as its motif is ‘get it while you can’ (page 147). To do this it figures out ‘the “rules of the game” in order to “cut corners”, “play the angles,” increase [its] “odds” and gain an advantage over less able . . . . members.’ Not a prescription for the ideal personality, then, either.

Balancing these two aspects moves the person to the level of Authentic Consciousness (page 157):

Authentic consciousness requires access to the non-dominant hemisphere, but not exchanging one hemisphere’s orientation for the other’s. It is “whole brain” thinking, in which both hemispheres organise consciousness, suggesting some entrainment of EEG patterns across the neocortex.

McGilchrist would wholeheartedly agree that this is a huge step forward (see YouTube video below). In The Master and His Emissary he wrote (page 203):

[T]he rational workings of the left hemisphere . . . should be subject to the intuitive wisdom of the right hemisphere.

Picture from http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/delta-waves

The next stage after this is Transcendent consciousness, the last one before Unity consciousness. At this stage the synchrony of the two halves of the brain goes beyond intermittent entrainment (page 198):

During meditation, EEG measurements show that both hemispheres slow from beta level activity to alpha and theta waves. Theta is the characteristic brain wave pattern of long-term meditators. Not only does synchronisation of brain waves occur between hemispheres in advanced states, but this entrainment forms harmonic patterns called hypersynchrony.

The exact relationship between the hemispheres is not clear at the Unity level (page 260):

It is not know whether people with Unity consciousness have significantly different brainwave patterns than those at the high end of Transcendent consciousness, especially concerning hemispheric influence…

The Transcendent level can be reached via the Authentic level from either Achievement or Affiliative levels of consciousness provided sufficient degrees of dissatisfaction are there to spur us on, but that issue needs to wait until next time. This is the aspect to which she has, in my view, made her most telling contribution.

McGilchrist RSA Version

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Changes of Mind (1/3): a review

When I first read Jenny Wade’s book, Changes of Mind, I was carried away when she hypothesises that the highest possible stage of the development of human consciousness is Unity Consciousness. As ‘unity’ is a Bahá’í mantra, this was enough in itself to guarantee my complete attention and disarm my disagreements.

But there was more. This level of development was the last of nine. In Arabic numerology nine is the numerical value of the word at the core of the name of this Revelation: ‘Bahá.’ I was entranced. I wrote ‘Brilliant!’ inside the front flyleaf after I’d finished the book.

Because my recent reading of Dabrowski (see three earlier posts) has sensitised me to the possibility of categorising levels of consciousness and perhaps even character development, I decided to re-read her book.

I have decided this time round that it is brilliant (for different reasons though) but flawed.

Still brilliant after all these years

Why do I think this? My reasons fall into three main groups for present purposes: near death experiences, lateralisation of brain function, and the drivers of transitions from one level to the next.

The first topic is, in my view her weakest, and why I feel the book is flawed. Her treatment of this topic does not stand up well after reading Mark Fox’s thorough examination of the issues.

Her reflections on lateralisation and its relationship with the development of consciousness are intriguing and will probably prompt me to revisit Iain McGilchrist to check them out more thoroughly, but as it stands I resonate strongly to what she says. She maps out her levels of consciousness against the back drop of lateralisation and mounts a compelling argument for the value but extreme difficulty of achieving a proper balance in our lives between the operation of the two hemispheres of the brain. But more of that in the next post.

Her most interesting observations to me at present relate to the way that her model maps closely onto Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration in key respects. She analyses, in a more close-grained fashion than Dabrowski, which kind of conflict and discomfort spurs us to move up from the comfort zone of our present level of consciousness to the next step up the ladder of awareness.

David Bohm

It is probably only fair to add that I am completely incapable of properly evaluating the foundation of her thesis in Bohm’s work on the implicate order as I simply do not understand Bohm’s thinking well enough. You may well wish to stop reading at this point if you feel I have totally disqualified myself from commenting on her other lines of thought.

My simple summary of what I think she means in terms of Bohm is this. There is a hidden order and a visible one. Both are inextricably intertwined. The visible, or perhaps more accurately, the accessible order is the material world as we commonly experience it. The hidden order (though transcendent, timeless and placeless) is also expressed in and through the physical world here and now. Our highest self exists fully realised already in the hidden order but remains invisible to almost all of us. The purpose of our lives is to come to a realisation and expression of and identification with that self, consciously in the visible order. When we do so all ego and desire will fall away, and self in any sense we currently understand it fades away completely. If we fail, in her view we are reincarnated again to have another go. Moving up the levels of consciousness is primarily about cleansing the lens of perception so that we can experience in its true nature what is currently hidden from us.

For those of you who have continued reading, we need to look slightly more closely at the first of the themes I mentioned, and later at the other two in even greater detail.

Near-Death Experiences (NDEs):

One of the key problems here is that she fails to recognise, from the evidence available to her at the time, that NDE-type experiences are not uniquely linked to close encounters with death as she contends (page 324) on the basis of evidence drawn from Morse. Fox’s access to the RERC data enabled him to recognise the common elements between so-called NDE experiences and other mystical and spiritual states where there was neither a threat to life nor any kind of trauma. She does though accept (page 239), but more cautiously than Fox, that ‘near-death consciousness . . . appears to share some characteristics of Transcendent consciousness.’

She also rather too uncritically accepts a long list of core elements (pages 225-226), something about which Fox’s critical re-examination has caused me to be rather more sceptical.

Given that NDEs are very much secondary to her main thesis and her treatment of the issue covers a mere 24 pages out of her total of 341, it is perhaps not too surprising that it falls short of Fox’s focused and thorough treatment.

It certainly does not seriously blemish the overall case she is seeking to make. More of that next time.

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An Approach to Psychosis: Fitting It All Together (6/6)

Some years ago I posted a series of attempts to describe my work in the NHS as I experienced it. Since then I have been also attempting to use poems to approach the same experiences from a different angle. Because my poems tend to come from a darker place than my prose it seemed only right to publish the poems alongside the more positive feel of the republished mind-work posts. It felt as though that would be more balanced, more true to the experience as a whole. So, what I am doing is following up a prose post with a poem after a day or two, but they need to be read together to get a more complete picture of what was involved in the work I did. Above all else I would hope to convey the reality of this area of experience more completely by tackling it this way, and do more justice to the courage of those who suffered. They are stronger than we realise for bearing the unbearable so bravely. 

Only Our Simulations to Go  On

At best we never achieve more than a simulation of reality. Even something as apparently clear-cut and concrete as colour is no exception.

To see how Visual Illusions work – go to link

What we perceive as red is really nothing more than a wavelength of light and our experience of red is a coded response that has been allocated quite arbitrarily. We could just as well have experienced the “red “ wavelength as blue! More abstract things are of course even more liable to be the product of construction and elaboration in the brain-mind system which habitually fills in the gaps in experience as best it can to make sense of it all. For present purposes three aspects of this simulation concern us most: experiences, beliefs and flexibility.

Experiences are the raw material of the mind. They are what we access of the inner and outer worlds through our senses, albeit modified by the interpretive activity of the brain. Experiences range from mainstream to the extremely idiosyncratic. Dreams are about as idiosyncratic as experience gets for most of us unless we are placed in strange, extreme and possibly frightening circumstances. For some people however dreams seem to become part of their waking reality.

Beliefs are the ideas we form usually on the basis of experience. We often make heavy emotional investments in our important ideas. These then colour experience in turn and can even distort it at the time it happens or in memory. Again beliefs range from the conventional to the extremely unusual. Even the most middle of the road person can find their way of looking at the world morphing into strange and frightening shapes as a result of such things as prolonged isolation.

Experience suggests that most people manage to negotiate their way through the world without too much of a problem on the basis of the models of the world they have developed. Many people whose experiences and beliefs are well outside the usual run of the mill rub along quite well. There are relatively small numbers of people whose beliefs and experiences are not only unusual but also very troubling. These are often the people mind-workers have to deal with. The majority of them have only short-lived difficulties.

Much of my work, before I retired, was with those who are stuck in their difficulties. Their experiences are unusual, troublesome and intractable. It is in helping people deal with this intractability that the model of mind-work I am proposing here is most useful.

Steering between Rigidity and Chaos

Most of us live somewhere between rigidity and chaos. Our models of the worlds are sufficiently malleable to respond flexibly to the shifts and changes of the world around us. If systems of thinking are too unstable or unformed we will be unable to make sense of our world and make reasonable responses to it. If they are too fixed and too compelling we cannot adapt when circumstances require it. The antidote to such unhelpful fixity is the flexibility which comes from reflection, relatedness and relativity.

Complete fixity, which often though not always in psychosis results from the kind of high emotional investment and simplification of thinking that feelings such as terror can induce, makes therapeutic work of the kind I am describing difficult. Someone who believes that their survival is in doubt is unlikely to see too much point in a leisurely exploration of their inscape! If the terror, or whatever is driving the investment that is creating the fixity, can be somewhat reduced, then conversation becomes possible. I suspect that medication, where it works, achieves its effect by calming someone down.

Increasing our Leverage

Once conversation is possible two powerful tools, implied in all that has been said above, become available. First, some space can be created between consciousness and its contents, and secondly there is a chance for more than one mind to be brought to bear upon the experiences. The space can be used for people to compare notes as equals – as two human beings, both with imperfect simulations of reality at their disposal, exchanging ideas about what is going on, with no one’s version being arbitrarily privileged from the start. There is a wealth of information that suggests most strongly that this process of collaborative conversation (Andersen and Swim), of consultation in the Bahá’í sense (see John Kolstoe), of inquiry (see Senge), of interthinking, can achieve remarkable results: Neil Mercer talks of the crucial function of language and says:

it enables human brains to combine their intellects into a mega-brain, a problem-solving device whose power can be greater than that of its individual components. With language we are able not only to share or exchange information, but also to work together on it. We are able not only to influence the actions of other people, but also to alter their understandings. . . . . Language does not only enable us to interact, it enables us to interthink.

I’d like to slightly alter the wording of one sentence there to capture the essence of what I think I’m describing:

We are able not only to influence the actions of one another, but also to alter one another’s understandings.

I feel that the conditions that I have sought to describe in this sequence of posts go a long way towards making effective interthinking possible. Effective interthinking and mind-work are closely related activities. Neither can happen at their best and most constructive in the absence of good relationships, reflection, relativity and relatedness.

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