Life Transformations

Most of the following comes from “Seeing With New Eyes” in the Science of Mind magazine, the November 2008 issue and is written by Cassandra Vieten, PhD, Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, PhD and Tina Amorok, Psy.D.  The article was adapted from Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life (from New Harbinger / Noetic Books, 2008)

The article begins by asking “How do we alter our thinking, not just in small ways, but in ways that fundamentally shift our understanding of who we are and what we are capable of becoming?”  The authors ask “What catalyzes these shifts?  What attitudes, settings, and activities provide the ideal conditions for them to happen?  What factors make difficult, challenging, or painful experiences transformative rather than traumatic, leading to growth, healing, and wholeness?  What helps to integrate transformative experiences and insights into our everyday lives?”

The authors indicate that they are part of a research team at the Institute of Noetic Sciences.  The article mentions that extending this research on consciousness transformation, a new study has begun at California Pacific Medical Center and the Institute of Noetic Sciences to study people engaged in Religious Science to determine how Science of Mind teachings influence everyday lives.  They are also interested in those involved in Centering Prayer or Contemplative Non-Dual Inquiry. 

The study will explore, among other things, whether the kinds of shifts in perspective described in the article that follows account for the ways in which engaging in Science of Mind teachings and practices influences health, well-being, and spiritual development. 

If you are interested in participating, please call 415-600-6516 (the voice mail box is checked on Mon, Wed and Fri and you will need to schedule a brief telephone interview to see if you are eligible to participate or visit -http://www.cpmc.org/professionals/research/programs/behavior/spiritual.html.  Participants can live anywhere in the US.

The research team has spent the last decade analyzing hundreds of stories of individual life transformations, conducted in-depth interviews with 60 teachers from the world's religious, spiritual, and transformative traditions and have done surveys with more than 2,000 people.  Although the teachings were diverse and the stories all unique, they still found commonalities that shed light on the shared terrain of transformation.  In particular, they focused on positive changes that lead to richer, more meaningful lives.

They found that big changes in life spring from changing things at the core.  When people change their worldview, changes in thinking, behavior, values, and priorities follow.  They found dramatic and long-lasting shifts in consciousness spring from a deep and fundamental shift in perspective.

Transpersonal psychologist Frances Vaughan says “Transformation really means a change in the way you see the world - and a shift in how you see yourself.  It's not simply a change in your point of view, but rather a whole different perception of what's possible.  It's the capacity to expand your worldview so that you can appreciate different perspectives, so that you can hold multiple perspectives simultaneously.  You're not just moving around from one point of view to another, you're really expanding your awareness to encompass more possibilities.  Transformation implies a change in the sense of self.

The catalysts for transformative experiences take many forms from life-threatening to mundane.  It can vary from a conscientious objector in Vietnam, finding inner peace through a specific prayer even while watching his colleagues shot down.  Or the experience of a mother's energy healing to help her distraught daughter find balance, leading to profound, transformative shifts for them both.

Some transformations were initiated by experiences of great suffering:  others by experiences of awe and wonder.  But in each, a radical broadening of worldview and a redefinition of identity, meaning and purpose took place.

The words to describe such experiences are very similar even as the experience itself, and practices and traditions had a lot of variety.  From neo-paganism to Roman Catholicism, from UFO encounters to giving birth, from a truck driver in Texas to a Buddhist nun in New York, the experience of transformation as a shift in worldview, following by a dramatic restructuring of core values, appears to be universal.

Perception Depends on Attention

Psychologist Daniel Simons has conducted research into “inattentional blindness”, the failure to notice unusual and salient events in one's visual world when attention is otherwise engaged and the events are unexpected.  This work builds on earlier work by psychologists Arien Mack and Irvin Rock who explore the nature of perception when attention is directed away from a target object.

This research has shown that we literally miss the proverbial elephant (or, as we will see, gorilla) in the room if we are not expecting to see it, or our attention is fixated on other things.  In one research project, participants were asked to watch a video in which 3 people in black shirts & 3 people in white shirts pass a basketball to one another.  The participants were asked to count the number of times the ball was passed from the white team to the black team.  All participants were within 1 or 2 counts of each other.

Later the participants are asked to watch the exact same video but with no instructions to focus on anything in particular.  This time ALL of the participants saw a life-size person in a gorilla suit walk directly into the center of the basketball game, stop, pound on his chest, and saunter out.  The participants in this experiment often don't believe that it is the same video but it definitely was.

These studies suggest that our brains are wired so that we don't consciously perceive even major aspects of our experience when our focus is fixed on something else.  Other types of perceptual blindness occur when we fail to perceive significant changes in what we're seeing because the change happens very gradually - very much like the frog in the pot that (if it happens slowly enough) doesn't notice the water is boiling.

In their book, Inattentional Blindness, Mack & Rock find that perception depends on attention.  Where you consciously place your attention, what you choose to attend to, has profound implications for how you view the world and what you are capable of perceiving.

Buddhist teach and author, Sharon Salzberg described it this way “I think a transformation in consciousness is something that opens a doorway for us.  It's almost as though we are in a small, enclosed, dark room.  We feel constrained, we feel limited in some way, and then the door swings open.  Suddenly there's a sense of possibility where there might have been none before.  There's a sense of maybe having options where we didn't perceive any before.  And there's a change in perception.  Especially in terms of scope, as if we felt locked into something, as if we felt almost - I think the technical Buddhist term would be “fixated” - on something.  Then suddenly we're seeing it in a whole new way.”

Great external changes often come out of this shift in perspective.  As meaning and purpose become clearer, things that are out of alignment in our life gradually (and sometimes quickly) fall away.  But the most fundamental change is within us; it is a profound shift in where we direct our attention.

The “Aha!” Experience

Transformation is, at its essence, a shift in the way we understand and experience the world.  Stimulated by a variety of potential catalysts, worldview shifts often begin with a glimpse - an “Aha!” moment or epiphany - that alters the status quo.  These moments can result from experiences of awe, wonder, or great beauty.  They can also result from great pain, loss, or suffering.

For more than a century, psychologists have been curious about what happens in people's brains during such “Aha!” moments - those moments of clarity when the solution to a vexing problem falls into place through sudden insight.  A series of experiments suggests that “Aha!” solutions to vexing problems are often actually preceded by brain patterns that begin prior to the act of solving the problem - sometimes even before a problem is presented.  This suggest that how a person is thinking before problem solving begins may be just as important as the kind of thinking involved in reaching the solution.  It's almost as though one puts the mind into a receptive state that primes it for insights and integrations.

As people approach an “Aha!” solution, brain activity suggests that attention focuses inwardly.  It appears that, to switch to new trains of thought, irrelevant thoughts must first be actively silenced.  To facilitate this, the brain momentarily reduces visual input.  This produces an effect similar to closing our eyes or looking away - physical tricks we often unconsciously employ to help solutions emerge into conscious awareness.

Learning to focus attention inwardly, to reduce visual and auditory inputs, and to silence irrelevant thoughts temporarily can all set the stage for moving into a different kind of cognitive processing - one that includes increasing insight-based knowledge along with the traditional “figuring it out” knowledge.  It's intriguing that so many transformative practices, like meditation, contemplative prayer, or even a mindful walk in nature, inherently foster qualities like introspection and internal silence that scientists are revealing as key factors in growth, learning, and transformation.

Expand Perception for Transformation

Not all transformative paths start with a dramatic peak experience, but most begin with some kind of deeply felt, unshakable internal realization.  This shift can be triggered by something as subtle as reading a book that discusses a new idea, or by something as dramatic as a near-death experience or a sudden awareness of a physical or perceptual phenomenon that is completely unexplainable.  Typically, these moments are characterized by a recognition of some undeniable truth that flies in the face of - or puts the lie to - some fundamental belief we've held, possible without even knowing it.

Shifting our worldview is more likely if the experience is dramatic, profound, earth-shaking.  But some experiences simply carry with them such authority that they are undeniable from that point forward.  Take, for example, the Magic Eye posters that, upon first glance, appear to be just a jumble of lines and colors.  If we don't have someone, or many people, tell us that there's something to see in the poster, we won't give it a second glance.  But if we heed others' advice to look at the poster in a particular way (much like the broadening of focus that occurs in many transformative experiences), something previously unseen will leap into our field of vision.  When we finally do shift our focus and attend to it in a different way, Aha! - a 3 dimensional airplane, dolphin, or ship emerges.  Once we've seen the image, a thousand people can tell us it's not there and we'll still be certain that it is, because of the veracity of our direct subjective experience.

We've stretched our worldview to include the possibility that , within seemingly random visual stimuli, a cohesive object can actually be perceived.  Similarly, what makes an extraordinary experience transformative is when our worldview is forced to expand to make room for the new information we've encountered.

Seeing with New Eyes

Transformation is something we grow into.  As our path deepens over time, a reciprocal interaction takes place between our inner subjective experiences of contemplation and self-inquiry and our more outward practices and actions.  The inner and the outer reinforce one another, helping us integrate transformative realizations into daily life.  By training our attention through practices such as contemplative study, being in loving relationships, reading sacred books, and much more, we can literally lay down new neuropathways in our brains.  The subjective and the objective become linked.

In our research, we found that while each person's journey is unique, several common elements foster the kind of deep, profound, and lasting transformation that shows up in our real-world everyday life - in the way we treat people, in our capacities for gratitude and forgiveness, in our whole orientation to life and priorities. 

Some of these elements are:

[1]  Being part of a like-minded, inspiring, and challenging community (deb's note - like this Living Metaphysics pod or the larger Gaia community)

[2]  Continuing to access teachings through multiple ways of knowing - experiential, intellectual, kinesthetic, visual, auditory (deb's note - certainly something we encourage in this pod - to “live” metaphysically or holistically)

[3]  Having daily reminders in our environment (deb's note - such as our Daily contemplation Guides in this pod or reading inspirational blogs at Gaia) - because it's easy to forget who we are and where we are headed when the larger society can be unsupportive, and we've got our old habits and conditioning to wrangle with

[4]  A daily mind-body practice (deb's note - such as yoga, meditation, walking in nature or some of the other exercises Dr Dyer suggests in our Tao study)

[5]  Making time for silence, solitude, and engagement with the natural world (deb's note - I HIGHLY recommend that one can not get too much of this kind of experience in life)

As we become more aware and more conscious, we are able to intentionally choose how we attend to each situation.  As our mind opens, we become more open-hearted.  And we begin to see ourselves, and one another, with new eyes.