image by sirtrentalot

Last week we talked about meditation, and how learning to witness one’s thoughts without getting wrapped up in them leads to development. But how? What is the mechanism? When we do succeed in overcoming our individual and collective habits and assumptions to get to the new, how does that happen?

Time to go back to my old friend Ken Wilber, who defines the process of development as this: The subject of one stage becomes the object of another.

That’s a pretty abstract statement, so let me break it down. In this context (and in sentence diagrams, too, remember those?), the subject is the actor. The object is what I’m looking at or interacting with. If I say, “I saw a lovely pair of boots,” I am the subject, and the boots are the object.

How does this relate to development? It’s about identity. For instance, I have had an issue with my weight throughout my life. For many years, I have been saying things like “I’m just a big girl,” while shrugging and continuing to eat mountains of french fries. I have taken my physical size as part of my identify, an immovable part of me, something to be accepted as a fact of who I am rather than improved upon.

Development occurs when we are able to rip these assumptions about ourselves out of our identities, disembed them from who we think we are, and look at them as objects; that is, objectively. “I’m just a big girl” becomes “I see a destructive pattern with food in my life. What is that about?” which leads inevitably to “How can I change this?” which leads to development.

I’m in the midst of disidentifying with this core belief right now and have dedicated myself to a super-healthy way of eating as well as getting 5 hours of exercise a week. So far my physical results have been pretty good, but even more important is the way I’m looking at myself. I’m not just “a big girl”—I have the capacity to be fit and strong, even though I’ve never fully acknowledged it before, and I’m excited to see what arises out of thinking of myself in a new way.

So how does this subject-becomes-object process relate to development in a broader context—i.e., the evolution of culture? Well, throughout history humans have already gone through this cycle many times. The results are explored and defined in the model of cultural evolution called Spiral Dynamics, which we will talk more about tomorrow.

• Tribal people moved from complete identification with their tribes to seeing themselves as individuals belonging to tribes—a huge shift which created warrior culture.
• Warriors evolved into law-abiding cultures by objectifying the problematic violence in their lives and developing legal and religious systems to organize themselves, creating traditional cultures.
• Traditional peoples let go of their strict identification with the faith traditions in which they were raised and brought reason and science into their toolkits, creating modern culture.
• Some people in modern cultures began to criticize their loyalty to rationality and technology as a limitation, objectifying it and learning to value different truths from different cultures.
• And now, integral culture is making postmodernism into an object, analyzing its flaws, and integrating it into a larger worldview that values all the stages that came before it as postmodernism refuses to do.

Each stage evolves out of the problems created by the previous stage, and by expanding our view of what we think we are, and what we value.

So where are we right now? What do we assume as truth about ourselves and how is that holding us back?

At this point, many of us define humanity—ourselves—as fatally flawed. We think there must be something terribly wrong with us on a fundamental level, or else why would there be war, famine, terrorism, environmental destruction, and so on? With all the craziness in the world, which seems to be accelerating as history progresses, it’s easy to assume that we are the problem. And when we assume that this is just the way we are, we have no motivation to make things better. Hope dies and cynicism flourishes.

But what happens if we pull this assumption out of our identities and look at it objectively in the context of everything that humanity is? Then we can see that yes, human beings have and cause major problems. But we also possess amazing capacities to learn and grow. We have moved beyond serfdom and slavery into democracy and recognition of basic human rights. We are capable of beauty and morality every bit as wonderful as our problems are terrifying. We can’t leave out any parts of the picture; it’s all relevant.

The important part of this exercise is this: from a larger perspective of what humanity is, we can choose which parts we want to lean into, which capacities to investigate, and which traits to develop. When we stop thinking “This is just the way we are,” we can tackle the problems we’ve created with clear eyes, without tearing ourselves down or excessively patting ourselves on the back.

Have you grown by pulling back from your assumptions about who you think you are and allowing new ideas in? Let us know in the comments.