Creating the Conditions for Transcendence (L4L, Pt. 2)
"Looking for Logos": What are the prerequisites for a transformational experience?
Let’s continue where we stopped last time: we’re looking at deeply transformative experiences, of the transcendent kind, which can impact our lives and change our behavior in an instant.
The first thing we’ll take into account are the necessary conditions for change. What does it take to prepare someone for such a radical experience? How can we open their minds to what they’re about to live?
It takes sacrifice
Something I’ve struggled with all my life is the fact that you can’t change people. It’s only very recently (in my middle-age) that I stopped trying to push friends to change their ways, taking them by the hand and “showing” them what they had to do. People just say, “yeah, yeah, I should see a psychiatrist/ start meditating/ workout more/ stop drinking/ quit my toxic girlfriend/ etc” and then do absolutely nothing about it. You can take them to the gym, but you can’t lift the weights for them…
We talked about this in our post about Plato’s Cavern. The first “liberation movement” fails, because the subject is taken out of the cave and dropped smack in front of the “real” light. She didn’t ask for anything; she may have been complaining about the shadows a bit, but ripping her out of the cavern only startles and traumatizes her. As Plato states, the person is happy to go back and doesn’t even realize the “real” world was there.
The subject succedes when she decides by herself that she wants to leave the cavern. There is a movement of violence, of aggressive fighting against the odds, till she finally emerges and basks in the comfort of the real light (then she goes back and gets lynched by an angry and incredolous mob, but that’s another story).
Without some sort of “sacrifice” the person cannot create the conditions for transformation. Now, I don’t mean you have to give up a kidney or stab your son like Abraham, but you must feel some kind of effort, even loss.
Why? Because every approach to behavioral change involves a radical change in perception. That’s the only way you can re-wire your brain. As human beings, we posses a fine-tuned machine called “consciousness” whose function is to find stability and patterns in a chaotic world around us. We are bombarded by stimuli permanently: without a “system” in place to filter irrelevant stimuli, we’d be completely overrun, incapable of acting (we’ll look at the anthropological factors that explain this - lack of instincts, creation of an internal representation and language, next time).
The goal of these disruptive strategies anchored in sacrifice and sometimes very real suffering, is to prepare the individual to change her perspective of the world. She will rebuild the relationship she has with “the world” and look at herself and “life” in a completely different manner.
Preparing for change
All of this is not new. From the shaman to the psychiatrist (is there a real difference?), all these “institutions for personal developpment” demand we take a specific stance. This can entail food deprivation (fasting - the Buddha, Christ, etc.), sleep deprivation (shamanic ceremonies), social isolation, social ecstasy through extended periods of dancing (rave parties, etc), sexual deprivation (pick a religion), chanting (aboriginal rituals), eating vegan for weeks (meditation retreats), ingesting chocolate (cacao ceremonies) or nausea-inducing psychedelics (ayahuasca, psilocybin) and martyrdom of the body (Opus Dei extremists, Santeria brujos); among many others.
Therefore, the first insight we can draw from our exploration is that we need to give up something, or go through something unknown, in order to “prepare the body and the mind” for change.
Of course we’re talking about transcendent change, not everyday change, but this applies to every aspect of your life. Want to lose weight? Stop eating croissants and do a hundred push-ups a day (I’m talking to myself, here). If you can’t give up croissants, or sex with your toxic girlfriend, or logging on to Twitter first thing in the morning to get loaded up on insults and agressive posts, well, you’re not going to change! (this incongurence, between what we “want to be” or “imagine ourselves being”, and what we actually are now, forms the basis for Sartre’s existentialism and his idea of “nausea” - but that’s another topic).
Next time, we’ll look at the biological and anthropological basis for the “preparation for change” before going into the first step of transformation: accessing the flow state.