Self-Transformation: The Final Project
by Carl Manz
"It is not the proletariat today whose transformation of
consciousness would liberate the world, but the consumer."
- Herman Daly: "The Common Good"
"As human beings our greatness lies not so much in being able
to remake the world as in being able to remake ourselves."
- Mahatma Gandhi
Introduction
At the heart of our project of self-transformation are the fundamental existential questions: Who am I? What am I doing here? What does it all mean? At the core of these questions lurks the existential suspicion that the answer is: I don't exist. The result is an anxiety that fuels the desire to establish a sense of real being.
Throughout most of our human history, religion has performed a dual function with regard to our existential anxiety. The first is the social function of providing a narrative account of what this world actually is, what is really important about it, and how we are to live in it. The second, perhaps more important role of religion has been to provide us with a vehicle for self-transformation that resolves the fundamental questions.
Religion can provide us with principles, precepts, and practices that can change us, or show us how to change ourselves.
What is the trajectory of Western philosophical thinking?
In the context of our project, Western philosophical thinking can be divided into three distinct periods: the pre-modern, the modern, and the postmodern.
The pre-modern is characterized (generally) by a certainty in the narrative that embraced the unity of the "natural" and the "supernatural". God and His creation stood in harmonious relationship, the earth being the center of the universe and Man as the "Crown of Creation" having dominion over the plants and animals that reside there. The "natural" phenomena of the world had a "supernatural" origin and explanation. Systems of self-transformation and redemption were commonly understood and accepted. They relied primarily on faith and belief.
The dawn of the modern era is usually referred to a the "Enlightenment", or "The Age of Reason". It is characterized by the separation of the "natural" from the "supernatural", a shift from supernatural explanations of what the world is and our role in it to an empirical rationality that cast doubts on all religious beliefs, including claims of spiritual redemption. The narrative shifted from "I believe therefore I am" to "I think therefore I am". Modernity is then summarized as the complete rationalization, commodification, and monetarization of all social constructs we have come to know as consumer capitalism. The final phases of rational "enlightenment" then can be expressed as "I consume therefore I am". This total rationalization has, however, led us to the ultimately irrational position of consuming ourselves to extinction.
The current shift in philosophical thinking that addresses the existential question of "Who am I" is coming to be known as post-modernism. Briefly stated, the post-modern realization is this: all narratives of the world, of who and what we are, what we are doing here, and our realities, are understood to be constructed. This is to say that meaning is not fixed: there are no final Truths with a capital "T", but all meaning is embedded in a context that lends itself to various interpretations. The self in this context disappears because as a construct, the self has no ultimate existence and can be easily deconstructed - and reconstructed as context changes.
The ruling elites understand this quite clearly. The purpose behind advertising and other forms of propaganda is to manufacture docile and compliant "selves", a process that evolves as the political and economic needs change. Our realities and indeed, our very sense of "self" is a product of powerful social agendas beyond our control.
Is there an historical parallel to a post-modern realization?
2500 years ago a wealthy aristocrat, a young man satiated with consumer goods, asked himself the fundamental existential questions: Who am I? What is birth, old age, sickness and death? What does it all mean? The analysis he developed resonates very well with the post-modern realization: the world and the self are conceptual constructions. They lack any inherent existence. The nature of our suffering, our unhappiness is the inability to establish a truly existent self - in a truly existent world. He is known today as the Buddha, the "Awakened One", because he realized the solution to these questions.
The answers he found may have some value for our own post-modern dilemma, a society satiated with consumption and driven to species extinction by our inability to answer the fundamental questions of existence and meaning.
How does our "constructed nature" manifest?
The unhappiness we experience can be thought of as being of three types: suffering of pain which includes all physical, emotional, and mental pain or discomfort ; suffering that arises from impermanence, knowing that nothing lasts forever and most things don't last long ; and the existential suffering that our sense of self doesn't correspond to any real ontological self - that the self is a mental construct.
It is this third kind of suffering that is foundation of all suffering, the "hollow" feeling at our core, a desire to establish the self as a "reality". Our sense of self as an "ungroundable construct" is experienced as a "hole" or sense of lack that must be filled up. In pre-modern times, this "emptiness" was filled by faith and belief, and in the modern context, it is addressed by consumption, a grasping at ideological truth, scientific rationalization, and distractions such as sex, drugs, alcohol, sports, and other forms of diversion and entertainment.
In short, we suffer because we wrongly believe that we inherently exist, grasping at "truths" that confirm that delusion or, at the least, distract us. From this springs the two sufferings of grasping (greed) for what we want and aversion (aggression), trying to get rid of what we don't want; subsequently we "spin" in a cycle of conditioned, constructed suffering.
What is the nature of the "self-transformation" project?
The challenge of self-transformation is to convert grasping (greed) into generosity, aversion (aggression) into compassion, and the delusion of taking the self to be truly existent, into wisdom.
Because the "self" is a construct, it can be deconstructed and reconstructed in a way we can characterize as being transformed". The "constructed self" is a mental process and the procedures related to transformation reverse the habitual mental processes of greed, aggression and delusion that recreate the suffering "self". It should be understood however, that the transformation we are talking about is more that an intellectual realization. It is a fundamental reorganization . When the full truth of the constructed nature is revealed, the grasping for existence is extinguished and one abides fully in simply being. The "black hole" of need is realized to be a "spring" of compassion and generosity. At this point, the techniques of transformation are then abandoned, as one would abandon a raft after crossing a river.
What are the techniques of "self-transformation"?
The most important thing to remember about the project of "self-transformation" is this: there is no external savior, no power outside that can complete this project - it is truly a project we must undertake and accomplish for ourselves. Others can help, can guide, can encourage but ultimately it is up to each of us to make this journey.
The most fundamental techniques for the project of "turning around at the core" are called mindfulness (focusing on one thing at a time) and meditation (focusing on one's mental processes). Both of these techniques involve a slowing down and becoming more aware of our drive to fill the existential emptiness at our core - without evasion or judgment.
David Loy describes what happen next:
"When I stop experiencing my emptiness as a problem to be solved, then, mysteriously - because "I" do not do it - something begins to happen to that hole, and therefore to me. Realization happens when I let go of myself, transforming the bottomless hole at my core. The problem - my anguished sense of groundlessness - becomes the solution as something wells up spontaneously from that core." ("The Great Awakening" page 36)
What is the social context for these techniques?
Simple mindfulness and meditation are not enough. We must also begin to develop the habits of generosity and compassion we expect to manifest during the process of transformation. To facilitate this, we adopt a set of five behaviors that attempt to imitate and express these qualities, a practice for developing good habitual patterns. These five behaviors are: Not to kill; not to steal; not to lie; not to engage in harmful sex; not to use intoxicating drugs.
These five are understood to affect more than our personal lives and expand out to the much larger context.
"Do not kill" is more than a personal injunction against taking life. It also addresses the militarization of contemporary societies where a large percentage of our resources continue to be devoted to the development, sale, and use of increasingly horrific weapons. We must take a strong position that challenges the widespread belief that violence is an acceptable way to resolve disagreements.
"Do not steal" has traditionally been defined as "not taking what is not given". Today it is arguable that our economic system is based on stealing. Corporate globalization is commodifying the whole earth and all its creatures into "natural resources" that tends to concentrate wealth into the hands of a global elite.
"Not lying" must also consider the "systemic lying" of our concentrated corporate media and their clients in government and business.
"Not to engage in harmful sex" is defined as "sex that causes pain to others" but it also includes all gender-based (including gay, lesbian, and transsexual) discrimination.
"Not using harmful intoxicants that cloud the mind" traditionally refers to alcohol, but it applies to many other legal and illegal drugs as well. Today, however, no intoxicant clouds our minds more than the "never enough" consumerism manipulated by a system that needs to keep creating markets for the goods it keeps overproducing. This also includes over indulging in entertainment such as television, movies, and other diversions.
The project of self-transformation then is a combination of mindfulness, meditation, and intention - fortified by developing good habitual patterns around the practices of generosity and compassion. It sounds easy enough but we are struggling against a lifetime of conditioning and a culture that is intensely interested in keeping us confused and unhappy - the very basis for selling the products of consumer capitalism. Self-transformation is the modern equivalent of the heroic quests that inspired the cultures of the pre-modern era. Our voyage is inward.
Summary
In the time of the Buddha, in the company of a small handful of curious seekers, he discovered the fundamental truth of the constructed nature of our self and our world. As a result, others who questioned the "taken for granted" paradigms of their day found a "path" that led to strategies for resolving the existential dilemma at our core.
Today, we live in a world where the over-riding ideas of pre-modern society have collapsed and the rationality of the "Enlightenment" has brought us to the brink of extinction. The post-modern analysis describes the world we occupy and in which our reality is created for us by a ruling elite whose interests are limited to the further concentration of wealth and power. Our salvation, if there is to be one, will depend upon our ability as a species to transcend the post-modern and actualize a fundamental and radical social revolution based on personal "self-transformation".
Contact me: Carl Manz < bcgreens@io.com >