Does that title seem to be an unexpected way to end this Trilogy of Adaptation=Personal Transformation to get to Planetary Transformation? Probably not if you think about it. Sounds like an excellent means in fact, especially if the tools and techniques get to hide behind language like classroom discourse and being reflective, and then sharing those thoughts with others or through open-ended collaborative real world problem solving. When you are like me and read constantly and have for years in an area, it becomes easy to see how one influential group’s “this is what we intend to require you to do” aligns with “this is what has to occur internally within a person for us to get the desired predictable result in future behavior.” Pity me for my used books and printing cartridge bills in recent years.
It pays off though as I recognized the significance of this 2007 article from a UN official cited in the biblio on how to achieve the required personal transformation we met in Trilogy Part 1 http://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/personal-to-planetary-transformation/ . I don’t know about you but I am tired of public officials telling me that there is a “new science of consciousness” that must be allowed to nonconsensually set about in classrooms and the media “revolutionizing our attitudes and worldviews.” Dr Sharma has another definition of Transformation that we should keep in mind as we examine what is really intended in our classrooms and on our campuses. “Transformation is the powerful unleashing of human potential to commit, care and effect change for a better life.” All of this intended transformation is very much hand in hand with Eastern spirituality and mindfulness and contemplation practices that plan on “revealing our potential for deeper and higher states of consciousness that reveal our essential Oneness in an interdependent world.”
If only this blog came with sound effects I could respond with some creepy duh da duh da theme to provide a bit of comic relief. Again this is a paper cited via what the IPCC described as its intentions to preemptively force Adaptation on people via required personal transformations. Even more graphic though and this time with a K-12 Worldview Literacy curriculum ready to roll into a school near you, or maybe camp, was the also cited 2010 “Worldview Transformation and the Development of Social Consciousness.” Now long time readers should recognize that these desired transformations are already incorporated into the unappreciated true definition of Excellence in education today as well as all the pathways and terms that lead to Robert Kegan’s work. Congratulations on accurately perceiving this same intended end state of altered consciousness is coming in from virtually every direction now.
It’s the constancy of the aim over decades that may not be on our horizon. Yet. If you look up that paper you will find it on the site of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). What I happened to already have when I came across that cited paper was Willis Harman’s 1988 book from the same Institute called Global Mind Change: The New Age Revolution in the Way We Think. As I did in writing my book, I get the most helpful insights from going back to before something became notorious. On the first page is the key to all these instructional shifts and obuchenie mindsets and systems thinking just for three starting fundamental examples: “By deliberately changing the internal image of reality, people can change the world.” Perhaps, but not necessarily for the better.
It is interesting and scary that the Worldview Transformation paper acknowledges graphically that what is targeted is a “reorganization of the relations both between features of a conceptual structure and between different conceptual structures.” If such intentional mindscrambling for a political purpose strikes us as incompatible with a free society, the writers took their comfort and justification in differentiating from “Nazi Germany, terrorist training camps, brainwashing strategies and cults” by pointing out that they:
“hypothesize that these kinds of restrictive shifts in worldview arise from a different process than processes that are life affirming and prosocial.”
Well, at least if we adopt the desired new worldviews and begin to act as desired. I want to point to that League of Innovative Schools meeting recently in Tucson we have already talked about. http://www.digitalpromise.org/content/uploads/All-Summary-Document-4.9.pdf Not only does the summary cartoon acknowledge the desire to achieve second-order change in students http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/second-order-change-why-reform-is-a-misnomer-for-the-real-common-core/ , but page 4 includes the graphic “Resistance to Change: Dealing with People who aren’t Believers.” That’s the mindset of the administrators seeking “innovation” in our schools today. The lack of a swastika or goose step marching in unison is only a superficial difference as the theory of dialectical change would put it. Both developed a fascination with subjective experience and denigrate reason and denigrate the individual vs the collective will. At the core there are hugely troubling consistencies.
Before anyone tries to invoke Godwin’s Law, I was not the one who interjected personal transformation, worldview alteration at a psychological level, or Nazi Germany into the conversation. We do after all get to respond to poor comparisons. Especially if we have a copy of Global Mind Change handy and can quote Harman as saying that a second Copernican revolution on the order of losing the geocentric view of the universe is the current understanding that consciousness can change reality, especially if it is unconscious beliefs that are targeted. Effective and invisible, just the vehicle for finally getting qualitative revolutionary change say so many of the cited sources in these papers. This is a little long but it could not be a more concise statement of what is being really targeted so here we go:
“This concept of unconscious beliefs and the extent to which they are capable of shaping and distorting our perceptions of everything around us–and within us–is so central to understanding the global mind change that we shall have to make a temporary digression to look into it more deeply.
Each of us holds some set of beliefs with which we conceptualize our experience–beliefs about history, beliefs about things, beliefs about the future, about what is to be valued, or about what one ought to do. What may be less obvious is that we have unconscious beliefs as well as conscious ones. (There are many ways in which people have attempted to talk about the processes and contents of the conscious and unconscious minds. In the following discussion we will use a way that is adequately powerful, yet as free as possible of psychological jargon. It employs the concept of the conscious and unconscious belief system as introduced by psychologist Milton Rokeach in The Open and Closed Mind [1960].)”
Hold that admission. I have that book and others by Rokeach and I have written about him. He came up with a term to obscure what he was seeking to change, while at the same time getting it in place in classrooms. It was called Competency. Just like what that Digital Promise link calls for and other entities we have discussed and state statutes. (Explained in detail in Chapter 4 of my book). What was targeted by Harman as Global Mind Change and Rokeach as Competency and what is to be required by UN entities as necessary Adaptation at a personal, noetic, level is quite simply a basic recognition that “in the innermost core of the belief system are basic unconscious assumptions about the nature of the self and its relationship to others, and about the nature of the universe.”
We can call this innermost area a personal common core for purposes of discussing it. A nice catchy phrase, and it is precisely what IONS began focusing on in earnest in 1997:
“The goal has been to understand the process by which people experience fundamental shifts in perception that alter how they view and interact with themselves and the world around them.”
It was pursuant to that goal and creating “expanded social consciousness” in students while their minds and personalities remained most malleable that caused IONS to create a “curriculum on worldview literacy for students K-12, designed to foster social consciousness in a standards-relevant experiential pedagogy. ”
That experience is of course perceived though the mostly unconscious belief system being targeted quietly under the banner of the Common Core to create a useful common core. That core would be characterized by “heart-brain synchronization” greatly enabled through “multi-media lesson plans, grounded in engaged conversation, experiential activities, explorations of positive role models, and collaborative learning projects. The programme is designed to offer adolescents, teens, and lifelong learners the ability to understand how their worldview affects their perception and behaviour, and by extension, how others’ worldviews affect their perception and behaviour.”
We keep running into that same area of interest because the 2010 IONS paper says “it is the capacity for self-reflexivity–the ability to step back and reflect upon our thought process–that stimulates worldview transformation.” It is seen by the paper, citing Kegan’s mentor Kohlberg [of Moral Development Theory fame, see tag], as a means of “educating people to become social activists” and “to see opportunities to apply conscious action with the intention of making a difference in some outwardly directed way.”
Once again we see education to become a change agent to alter the material world because students are being taught they have an obligation to improve the wellbeing of others and the world.” A “civic responsibility for the common good” is something we keep running into, most recently here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/willingness-to-make-personal-sacrifice-for-the-good-of-the-whole-to-become-an-integral-component-of-student-identity/
None of this is coincidental, which is why it keeps showing up over the decades and now from every direction.
I promised a trilogy. How do you feel about a Quartet instead? No strings or music, but no references to quarterly tax payments either.
Just too much relevant current scheming going on.