Credits
Cover Image: “Moving Toward the Consciousness” by Exper Giovanni Rubaltelli
Reproduced under the Creative Commons License.
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Prologue
“With the help of favorable measures great individuals might be reared who would be both different from and higher than those who heretofore have owed their existence to mere chance. Here we may still be hopeful: in the rearing of exceptional men.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
In 1947 the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago began maintaining the Doomsday Clock. This clock was created to symbolically represent the worldʼs condition relative to “catastrophic destruction” that could occur should the clock ever reach midnight. At the time of its creation the world was in the midst of the U.S. - U.S.S.R. cold war. Nuclear devastation was an all-too-real scenario at the time. The Doomsday Clock was initially set at 7 minutes to midnight. Since its original inception the Doomsday Clock has come to represent a measure of the severity of nuclear, environmental, and technological threats existing in the world at any given time. The most recent setting of the clock occurred on January 17, 2007. At that time the clock was set to 5 minutes to midnight. This was a move of two minutes closer to midnight that the previous setting made in 2002.
In a statement supporting the decision to move the hand of the Doomsday Clock, the Bulletin Board focused on two major sources of catastrophe: the perils of 27,000 nuclear weapons, 2,000 of them ready to launch within minutes; and the destruction of human habitats from climate change.
Bulletin of Atomic Sciences website http://www.thebulletin.org/content/doomsday-clock/overview
The Problem
“Over billions of years on a unique sphere chance has painted a thin covering of life, complex, improbable, wonderful and fragile. Suddenly, we humans, a recently arrived species, no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature have grown in population, technology, and intelligence to a position of terrible power. We now wield the paint brush.”
Paul McCready
A look at the graph above makes it painfully clear that, according to the scientists responsible for setting the Doomsday Clock, the current world situation is far from desirable. According to some contemporary experts our species may not survive the 21st century. These experts put our chances of failing to survive this century as follows:
1.John Leslie (author and philosopher) puts the chances of our failure to survive at around 50%
2.Sir Martin Rees (author and astrophysicist) agrees that our chances of failing to survive are around 50%
3.Richard Posner (author and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge) says that the chances of our failure to survive is a “significant probability”.
4.Nick Bostrom (philosopher and founder of the World Transhumanist Assoc.) maintains that the chances of our failure to survive are “not less 20%”.
Clearly, there are those who donʼt hold out much hope for humanity and there is much in our world today to support such pessimism. Everywhere we look we find evidence of global unrest. We turn on the evening news and are subjected to the latest report of a suicide bomber, a recent gang related murder, violence in faraway places or in the streets of our own cities. Newspaper headlines cry out about hatred, racism, a rise in crime, terrorism, and a plethora of injustices.
If only we could get at the root of these problems we might be able to do something about them. In this book I will attempt to tease out some of the common root causes and to suggest some rather unique solutions. I will attempt to show that a root cause of many of our problems is a deficiency in our personal and collective levels of awareness. As we will discover, what we experience is largely a product of the choices we make and the choices we make are limited to the contents of our awareness. You cannot choose that of which you are unaware. Our ignorance limits us and it is ignorance that provides the fertile ground in which intolerance, indifference, and other troubling human attributes can flourish and from which they can spread their insidious tendrils. If we can dispel some measure of ignorance we might just succeed in eradicating a corresponding measure of suffering.
This book examines the possibility of ameliorating ignorance and, therefore, of encouraging wider perspectives through coming to understand six levels of awareness. Each of the levels of awareness that will be presented offers greater choice and, therefore, greater freedom which, in turn, affords us the possibility of greater hope.
The alchemy of awareness described in this book is a naturally occurring process. Individuals can and do move from one level of awareness to another without any idea that various levels of awareness exist or of the dynamics involved in making a transition from one level to the next. But, in light of our present world situation, it seems imprudent to leave the important business of expanding our collective awareness up to chance. Moreover, there is substantial evidence that, left to their own devices, few people ever reach the level of awareness required to deal with our pressing local and/or global challenges.
It is my hope that this book may facilitate and encourage the movement of individuals through the levels of awareness to a point where they are able to live more liberated lives and, in the process, learn to be more compassionate and to contribute to a more welcoming world.
Fundamentally, this is a book of hope. We will see the reasons for this when we look at the evidence suggesting that groups and individuals are, even now, seeking ways to improve and expand their levels of awareness, of transmuting ignorance into the wisdom required to face the problems we all share.
The Alchemy of Awareness
The Alchemy of Awareness is the story of an alchemy that our brains perform in making a series of life-changing transitions. These transitions are universal throughout the people of the world. The alchemy involved in these transitions occurs naturally and involves none of the supernatural trappings historically associated with the term ‘alchemyʼ. However, there are a number of parallel concepts that exist between the ancient understanding of the word and the form of alchemy that we will be exploring in this book.
The word 'alchemy' derives from the Old French alkemie and from the Arabic al- kimia meaning "the art of transformation". It is in the spirit of transformation that the term is relevant to the subject of this book. In The Alchemy of Awareness we will be examining the power of awareness to transform our selves and, as a result, our world.
Wikipedia describes alchemy thus: "Alchemy (Arabic: al-khimia), a part of the Occult Tradition, is both a philosophy and a practice with an aim of achieving ultimate wisdom as well as immortality, involving the improvement of the alchemist as well as the making of several substances described as possessing unusual properties."
We will discover that the type of wisdom our world so desperately needs is only to be found through the personal transformation of a critical mass of individuals. As the song says, “We are the world”, and if there is to be any lasting change in the world it will only be accomplished through the accumulated efforts of its inhabitants. The transformation through awareness that we will be tracing in this book is, to use the alchemical term, a transmutation of ignorance into wisdom. This transmutation involves a change in an our individual levels of awareness, much in the manner of the "improvement of the alchemist" mentioned above.
The primary dictum of Alchemy in Latin is: solve et coagula which means "separate and join together (literally dissolve and coagulate)". The evolution of wisdom described in this book, the "alchemical transmutation" of ignorance into wisdom, involves both a separation and a joining together as we will see.
The Need for The Alchemy of Awareness
“Everyone thinks of changing the world but no one thinks of changing himself.”
Leo Tolstoy
Albert Einstein is reported to have observed that we can never solve a problem on the same level of awareness as that at which the problem was created. According to Einsteinʼs observation, to solve a problem requires us to take a step up to a level of awareness beyond the one at which the problem was created. This seems like good advice but a question immediately arises concerning the nature of the levels of which we speak. What is a level of awareness and what does it look like? And, if we knew a level of awareness when we saw one, how would the movement from one level to another be accomplished? These are just some of the thorny questions we will need to address if we are to establish a strategy for improving our individual and collective awareness levels.
When we attempt to solve any problem we are limited by the extent of our awareness. We cannot entertain solutions of which we are unaware. If, in our search for a solution to a problem, we are somehow able to gain a wider perspective than that which we had when the problem was created we would have options available that were not available to us before. A widening of our field of awareness, a grander perspective, affords us an increase in possibilities from which to select an appropriate solution. This is where The Alchemy of Awareness comes in. We will examine what it is exactly that constitutes a level of awareness, familiarize ourselves with six ascending levels of awareness, and look at how the alchemy of awareness that occurs during a transition from one level of awareness to another can result in a broader and wiser perspective.
Developmental Stages/Levels
Over the years a number of well founded systems have been formulated that identify stages in personal development. The chart below shows how some of the more commonly accepted and well known systems align with one another.
Robert Kegan is the William and Miriam Meehan Professor in Adult Learning andProfessional Development at Harvard University. Additionally he is the Educational Chair for the Institute for Management and Leadership in Education and the Co-director for the Change Leadership Group. Kegan is a developmental psychologist and the author of several books on the topic.
Robert Keganʼs The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development discusses five stages of development through which an individualʼs self may evolve as he or she matures. I say “may evolve through” because it is not guaranteed that we will all progress to the final stages. This has great bearing on the subject of this book because it is asserted herein that the level of practical wisdom needed to address our pressing global concerns exceeds that of todayʼs average individual. Robert Kegan maintains, in a book called In Over Our Heads, that our current global problems are largely due to the fact that we have not evolved to a high enough order of consciousness1 to contend with the complexities of the issues we now face. The purpose of this book is to address this dangerous and challenging state of affairs.
1 In the context of this statement Keganʼs orders of consciousness roughly correspond to the levels of awareness presented in this book.
Seeking Solutions
If problems are solved at a higher level of awareness than that at which they are created, we need to find ways to gain levels of awareness that transcend the levels at which our current global issues have been created. Solutions attempted without a transition to a sufficiently high level of awareness are likely to be short-sighted and ineffective answers. To have a fighting chance of finding sustainable solutions a movement toward higher levels of awareness is a necessity.
This book will present an overview of six levels of awareness. As we examine the movement involved in making transitions between the levels of awareness we will discover an “alchemy” performed in the process. This alchemy is not magical nor does it require the adoption of any particular belief system. An open mind is the only prerequisite. The alchemy of awareness is a real process that occurs naturally when individuals go through transitions from lower levels of awareness to higher levels of awareness.
The only catch is that, although we are talking about a natural process, going through these transitions is not a slam dunk. We will point out some common factors that can inhibit movement between levels. We will also look at some important factors that can encourage and assist individuals to take on the challenges involved in making a transition.
Can We Change?
“Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis-- once that crisis can be recognized and understood.”
Norman Cousins
We have made a number of references to moving from one level of awareness to another, to making transitions between levels of awareness. We have broached the idea of a transmutation of ignorance into wisdom. But can people change and, if so, how much can they change? In Robert Keganʼs research he has observed people developing through five of stages of self. Other researchers have made similar observations so it would seem that people do, in fact, change as they mature. However, these same researchers have observed a tendency in a majority of people, when left to their own resources, to arrive at a personal ceiling of development. Moreover, as Kegan asserts in In Over Our Heads, the order of consciousness arrived at in this manner is typically not sufficient to cope effectively with the demands of life in our modern world. We must now ask whether this situation is the end of the story or if there is any way beyond our current inadequacy as a species.
For most of this century science held to the tenet that, after an initial period of development, the nervous systems and brains of human beings remained in a fixed state. Change in “wiring” was thought to be virtually impossible in the adult brain. Moreover, it was thought that once brain cells died they were never replaced so that a decline in brain function was an inevitable consequence of aging. Fortunately, recent developments in the field of neuroscience have put the lie to these long held assumptions.
Neuroplasticity
The old idea of a rigidly wired brain has been completely overthrown by the discovery of neuroplasticity; the capacity of the brain to rewire itself in response to new learning. Old neural patterns fade while new ones are formed and strengthened. The story of the discovery of neuroplasticity and its implications is told in The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge. As the highly regarded neurologist, Oliver Sacks, referring to Doigeʼs book, says, "Only a few decades ago, scientists considered the brain to be fixed or "hardwired," and considered most forms of brain damage, therefore, to be incurable. Dr. Doidge, an eminent psychiatrist and researcher, was struck by how his patients' own transformations belied this, and set out to explore the new science of neuroplasticity by interviewing both scientific pioneers in neuroscience, and patients who have benefited from neuro-rehabilitation. Here he describes in fascinating personal narratives how the brain, far from being fixed, has remarkable powers of changing its own structure and compensating for even the most challenging neurological conditions. Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain."
In a January, 2007 Time magazine article, Sharon Begley, author of Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, wrote, “... research in the past few years has overthrown the dogma. In its place has come the realization that the adult brain retains impressive powers of "neuroplasticity"--the ability to change its structure and function in response to experience. These aren't minor tweaks either. Something as basic as the function of the visual or auditory cortex can change as a result of a person's experience of becoming deaf or blind at a young age. Even when the brain suffers a trauma late in life, it can rezone itself like a city in a frenzy of urban renewal. If a stroke knocks out, say, the neighborhood of motor cortex that moves the right arm, a new technique called constraint-induced movement therapy can coax next-door regions to take over the function of the damaged area. The brain can be rewired.”
A second myth concerning the aging of brains is that when a brain cell dies we are down a brain cell for the rest of our lives. Again, recent discoveries have found this to be just false. There is an area in the brain called the hippocampus which is capable of generating generic neurons. The process is known as neurogenesis. These brain cells are produced in response to intense neural activity anywhere in the brain. The new cells migrate to the site of neural activity where they become part of the active neural network. In laboratories the brain masses of mice have been seen to increase as a result of the increase in brain cells produced in this way.
Daniel Tammet, author of Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind, believes these recent discoveries have tremendous implications for us all.
“Neuroscienceʼs breakthrough discovery of the brainʼs ability to grow and change throughout our lifetime, known as neuroplasticity, contradicts the classical view of the adult brain as inflexible and mechanical, each part having a fixed, specific role, ticking along monotonously, and gradually wearing down with age like a machine. In its place, we find a new model of the adult brain as a supple, dynamic organ capable of responding successfully to injury and even of thinking itself into new synaptic formations. The implications are staggering, not only for patients with neurological injury or diseace but for everyone.”
Neuroplasticity and brain cell generation (neurogenesis) underlie the brainʼs ability to evolve over the course of an entire lifetime. These brain properties are fundamental to our capacity to move through the Levels of Awareness and for the transmutation of ignorance into wisdom as we move forward on lifeʼs journey.
Mindsets
Whether you think you can change or not you are probably right. Your mindset will determine, to a large extent, the possibilities you are willing to entertain. Some people believe that we are born with certain talents and capacities (such as intelligence) and that we should concentrate our efforts on making the most of the hands we have been dealt rather than beating our heads against the proverbial wall in the vain hope of outsmarting our destinies. On the other hand, there are those who like to think that nothing is preordained and that anything is possible if we just believe we can make it happen.
Most people probably fall somewhere in between these two extreme positions. However, which side of centre you fall on can make a very significant difference. In her book called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success Carol S. Dweck discusses two fundamental mindsets that people tend to adopt. One she calls the “fixed” mindset. Those with a fixed mindset subscribe to what, until recently, was the conventional wisdom concerning personal change. They believe that we live lives mainly determined by heredity and that most of our attributes are, if not carved in stone, largely resistant to efforts to modify them.
The other mindset that Dweck identifies is the “growth” mindset. People with this mindset see themselves and their lives as amenable to choices and effort. They are not wishful thinkers like those I described above who think that simply believing something is possible is enough to make it happen. Growth mindset individuals are willing to make the effort required to bring about their goals and to realize their dreams.
A typical example of a person with a growth mindset is Wayne Gretzky. Known by hockey fans as “The Great One”, Gretzky was the most prolific offensive player in the history of the game. Are his accomplishments the natural consequences of God given talent or a determined effort to develop the skills necessary to succeed in the sport he loved? The truth is probably a combination of the two but if Gretzky had relied solely on his natural talent it is unlikely that he would ever have reached the unusual level of success that he did. The stories of the countless hours he put in practicing as a youngster on a frozen pond in his back yard corroborate the theory that determination and effort played a significant role in his later success.
Interestingly, the mindset you have determines the meaning of both success and failure. To a fixed mindset person a failure is a reinforcement of their “why bother” mentality. A success is just a natural result of an innate talent. In contrast, a failure for a person with a growth mindset is diagnostic. It tells him or her what needs to be worked on and is not seen as the result of some inherent handicap or innate inability to succeed. Success for these people means that they have worked hard and earned their just rewards. They have made something happen through their consistent effort and determination.
Two Thinking Systems
In his book Kluge Gary Marcus identifies two types of thinking that we use. One he calls “reflexive” and the other “deliberate”. Reflexiive thinking operates at a largely unconscious level and takes place in old brain systems like the cerebellum , basal ganglia (motor control), and amygdala (emotions). Deliberate thinking takes place in the prefontal cortex. In other words, reflexive thinking is mainly done by the reptilian and early mammalian brain areas while deliberate thinking is the province of the more recently evolved third region of the triune brain. This means that we humans are endowed with a capacity for deliberate thinking that may be unique among all the species of this planet. Certainly, we are the most generously endowed with this ability meaning we are uniquely advantaged to pursue the benefits of a growth mindset.
A growth mindset provides the setting and conscious thinking provides the tool for personal change but neither provide the means. If we are to truly be capable of change over the course of our lifetimes there must be some capacity by which our brains can restructure themselves in ways that allow our thinking systems, particularly the deliberate thinking system, to improve with time. In other words, it must be possible to physically change the structure and composition of our brains if psychological growth is to occur.
The Alchemy of Awareness: A Fundamental Formula
Historically, one of the concerns of the ancient alchemist was the discovery of the elixir of life. The elixir of life was believed to be a remedy for all illnesses and a potion capable of endowing immortality to individuals. While I make no such grandiose claims
for the alchemy of awareness I do believe that achieving higher levels of awareness has universal application in the service of alleviating much of the suffering presently endured in our modern world. Following in the tradition of the alchemists of old the following formula describes the foundation of the transmutation of ignorance into wisdom, the capacity of the brain to physically evolve during our lifetimes.
a = Setting For Change (growth mindset)
b = Tool For Change (deliberate thinking)
c = Capacity For Physical Change In The Brian (n