March 2009

"Changing One's Mind" (vol. 3, issue 2)

In the School of Holistic Studies "transformation" means a powerful shift in awareness that leads to a new quality of attention. We use the word to suggest a metamorphosis in our worldview, an enlargement of cognition or clarifying of sensory perception by which we may uncover personal meanings and disclose aspects of reality previously unrecognized or denied. This is no cosmetic blush in the realm of appearances, no mere rearranging of the deck chairs of life; transformation is an ontological revolution, an earthquake at the core of being.

Intention is the helmsman of change, as accidental transformation is unreliable, even dangerous. I consciously understand holistic and integral studies and life practices to be my self-directed, operational system to become human at the level of wholeness, aware of what is possible and real in my life. I have not achieved fullness of being, but I intentionally pursue it as a journey without final destination. I have come to see that my creative potential emerges from powerful encounters of self and other. And so through the study and practice of comparative religions, folklore, poetry, teaching, scholarship, contemplative prayer, and meditation, I invite engagements with others, physical and imaginal, in order to achieve an inner alteration that de-centers myself, challenging my foundational values and positions in the world.

The goal is to add to myself what I presently lack, to morph the mind toward renewal. My attempt to enlarge and rectify myself is partially an intellectual move, a form of praxis, an assertion of the cognitive imagination, and an act of love (agape), however flawed. I find it difficult to complete myself because such a transformation presupposes authentic dialogue, courage, openness, developing skillful mindsets, and allowing myself to live in the unknown when necessary. Wholeness of being has not and could not result from my inconsistent attention, half-hearted efforts, and failures of nerve. And yet others have transformed themselves and consequently the world.

The Greek word for transformation is metanoia. Because it indicates expansive modes of consciousness that open the mind, it is the opposite of paranoia that narrows or closes the mind. In the New Testament of the Christian tradition it translates as "atonement" or "conversion." Metanoia shakes up our thoughts and feelings and forms a resynthesis.

Saint Paul comes immediately to mind. As the man called Saul, riding on horseback to Damascus and intending to persecute the growing sect of Christians, he was brought to the ground by a blinding light and disembodied voice that questioned his hateful actions and self-structure. Upon recovering from his brush with death that produced physical blindness and existential uncertainty, Saul changed his name to Paul and his vocation to Christian ideals, surrendering freely to a life he hoped earlier to vanquish as meaningless. Paul eventually became a renowned writer of epistles, indefatigable missionary, and great apostle of the Church of Rome.

In 262 B.C.E., Ashoka, the Maurya emperor of Northern India, launched an invasion of the neighboring kingdom of Kalinga, conquering it and annexing its territories. Surveying the carnage of the battlefield that counted 100,000 dead and 150,000 people deported, Ashoka underwent a radical change of heart wherein he gained insight into a consciousness higher than his own, an unseen reality superior to his will. He abandoned forever his campaign of military conquest by the sword for a new campaign of moral righteousness (dharma) and self-conquest by truth, meditation, and doing no harm (ahimsa). As a result of his atonement, Ashoka directed his empire to serve the welfare of the world, providing free health care for people and animals, hospitals, medical dispensaries, roads, and parks filled with gardens, trees, and water wells. Declaring all people to be his children and worthy of his love, Ashoka decreed throughout the empire religious tolerance and a concord among all teachings, even as he himself was a dedicated Buddhist patron. He engraved maxims of his ethical guidelines called Edicts on rock and pillars throughout India to instruct people to cultivate truthfulness and compassion.

A metamorphosis as remarkable as Paul's and Ashoka's is that of the mystical poet and teacher Milarepa who lived in Tibet during the 11th and 12th centuries. Milarepa is reported to have been the first Tibetan to achieve perfect buddhahood in a single lifetime. This is an amazing achievement since it is believed that most of us will not realize enlightenment even after hundreds or thousands of lifetimes. The case of Milarepa is even more spectacular when one understands that Milarepa arduously moved beyond his criminal behavior that included mass murder. He underwent strenuous forms of expiation for his barbarous deeds and spent decades in isolated meditation to acquire the qualities of enlightenment. Like Paul and Ashoka, Milarepa experienced a dramatic turnaround that shifted the center of his being, rearranging his values and beliefs.

Do not assume that transformations take place only among sages and religious intuitives. The fact is that metanoia is the way that all authentic learning occurs. In Bk. X of The Republic Plato presents his allegory of education (Paideia). Education is the master-key by which we can free ourselves from cognitive bondage in a world of shadows where truth is strategically concealed behind appearances. Plato believed that education should wrest the soul when it cannot move intellectually, so it can ascend from the cave of falsely conditioned realities toward a beatific vision of the good. History marks how scholars and artists have experiences of learning that turn their minds around, producing insights into intellectual or aesthetic questions and moving them along the path of their personal evolution.

For example, mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton's "Quaternion Theory" that would be essential to modern mechanics "happened to him" while on a morning walk in Dublin. As he crossed a bridge, the concepts of his mind shifted like the colored pieces of a kaleidoscope, "the galvanic circuit of thought closed" around a goal he had pursued for some 15 years. This aha! moment revitalized his mathematical energies and diligent application of data toward the desired answer. Along this same line Einstein acknowledged the role that kinesthetic and visual images played in his Gedanken experiments. He suddenly saw himself moving along a beam of light at 186,000 miles per second. This imaginal experience resulted in the reformulation of electromagnetic theory. In a letter to an associate describing how he solved a problem he unsuccessfully faced for four years, the mathematician Karl Frederick Gauss wrote, "As a sudden flash of light the enigma was solved...For my part I am unable to name the nature of the thread which connected what I previously knew with that which made my success possible." The Greek poet and novelist Nikos Kazantzakis, after spending months of ascetic practice meant to conquer the "cheap spiritual joys, [and] the convenient hopes" held in his heart, beheld a numinous vision of the transmutation of matter into spirit. Here he found the meaning of his life's work, to transmute each personal capacity and talent into unity with life's transcendent spirit and achieve harmony with the cosmos.

If metanoia is a process by which all genuine learning takes place, what are some of its postulates? According to Joseph Chilton Pearce, metanoia is a seizure by a discipline or a profound question to which we give our total attention and that results in a restructuring of the mind/heart. That is to say, the asking of ultimately serious questions and the seizure by an equally serious quest to answer them reshapes our concepts in favor of the perceptions necessary to see the desired answer. The nature of the question we ask engenders its answer. Pearce posits the following steps:

Desire and Intellectual Passion: There must be a question that has for us intense personal value and for which we have passionately sought an answer, otherwise our commitment will be insufficient for the task. Any idea or set of expectancies seriously entertained tend to bring about their realization if they are unambiguous, fully believed and expected, and held by a single-pointed intensity of focus. Centering the mind with a certainty of faith fills us with power and conviction.

Detachment-Replacement: Assuming that we are asking a difficult question that places the answer outside the norm, we must detach from the limits of the commonplace in order to replace the conventional with a new cognitive and perceptual structure.

Freedom to be Dominated by the Object of Desire: Only after long and arduous training and study can the mind get beyond the mere mechanics of technique and the limits of a discipline to utilize the power of the cognitive imagination. To achieve a synergy, we must have impeccable technique, but we create through our technique and not with it.

Autistic State: From this state of unconventional subjectivity there emerges primary process thinking that recalibrates conventional components of mind that are not useful to the new, desired structure. This type of thinking occurs in the unconscious realm where notions of good and bad and judgment as we rationally understand them do not exist.

Metanoia: This is the moment of the mind/heart's restructuring, the flash, the turning point, and breakthrough answer. It is possible to retrace the steps back through its development of the parts to its source, but the final manifestation is greater than the sum of those parts.

While completeness of being remains for me elusive, I can attest to a powerful metanoia that revealed my life's right livelihood. Throughout my formal education I believed whole-heartedly that I would earn a law degree like my parents, uncle, and brother, and thus answer the question as to how I might lead a meaningful life. While on the waiting list of a law school in Washington, D.C., I decided to accept a teaching assistantship at a university in Boston, thinking that my learning to develop syllabi, student learning outcomes, and interpersonal skills in the course of teaching would somehow make me a better attorney. In my first week I was seized by the insight that what I long knew to be my calling, I did not know. This realization filled me with panic as I pursued what else I mistakenly believed I knew. I suffered sensory disorientation, palpitations of the heart, hyperventilation, general restlessness, and insomnia that lasted three days. To this day I remain humbled to have learned that something within me larger than my ego's intention and wiser than instrumental reason intervened. I have learned to surrender faithfully to the process of creative problem solving as an act of trust and not an act of despair, that life experiences become midwifes to our knowledge as a way of bringing into our bodies imagination and will, and that learning is a dynamic combination of making something happen and letting something happen, a dance of leading and following of directed chance.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD
Dean, School of Holistic Studies

REFERENCES

Pearce, J.C. (1988) Crack in the cosmic egg: challenging constructs of mind and reality. New York: Julian Press.
Spretnak, C. (1993) States of grace: the recovery of meaning in the postmodern age.. San Francisco: Harper.
Thurman, R. (2005) The jewel tree of Tibet:: the enlightenment engine of Tibetan Buddhism. New York: Free Press.