# 9 Consciousness: Where does this lead?
From the first to the last, humans constantly evolve and change. We are doing this dynamically, going through developmental stages with one direction: to realize our full potential as spiritual beings
Last time, we examined how consciousness came into existence. In this issue, we ask what happens during our lifetime: do we have the same consciousness while lying in the cradle as we do on our deathbed? If not, are there patterns or similarities we can observe? How does this help us?
Of crawling and stumbling
Imagine a child just starting to crawl. Lying on a carpet, she has just discovered something that draws her attention. Or maybe she has discovered that shaking and moving her legs and arms allows her to reach a different place. She starts to move, fails, starts again, and over time, she learns how to crawl.
Now imagine an adult in his late thirties. Both his parent died a few months ago, and his marriage is on the brink and heading to divorce. He is struggling, and what helped him until now to come to terms with his life doesn’t seem to help anymore.
From the first breath to the last, humans constantly evolve and change. We are doing this dynamically, back and forth. Sometimes it is circular, but seldom linear and straightforward. The idea that man evolves through different stages is widespread. We can find it concerning child development in the work of Jean Piaget, Gordon Neufeld, and others. Robert Kegan is among those who brought this concept into the world of adult development. We can also find it in ancient scripts like the Bhagavad Gita, picturing the pathway of spiritual growth. All those concepts describe certain phases or stages. In each of them, we learn and develop certain skills and abilities with which to perceive and understand the world. We are developing world models that are growing in complexity, allowing us to do other things, gain deeper insights, and reach out further.
In our child’s case, learning to crawl marks an important maturing. The child leaves the secure cocoon of its mother and the tight connection between both of them behind. What was a unity before now divides into a ‘me’ and ‘others’, or a ‘me’ and ‘the world’. The ability to move increases and perception, with all the senses, increases too. The child takes everything around her into her mouth, tasting, touching and smelling. With all of this, the ability to understand and deal with the world, and with modes of connection and communication, are changing too.
The situation for adults is different. The world the adult used to live in breaks apart, and he is challenged to put the pieces of his life back together as something new. What seem to be stable parts of his life (his parents and his marriage) aren’t stable at all. Life shows that in the motion of an eyelid, things can change dramatically. Moreover, he may lose confidence in his ability to rule his own life. The tools at hand to deal with difficult situations don’t work anymore. Sometimes, they make things worse.
Of stages and phases
Both the adult and child are going through a certain stage of development. They may differ in a few ways, but they also have a lot of things in common. First, every stage has a certain constellation, or base, from which it starts––something that was established in the stage before. Second, each stage has a final constellation: the matured state, where one has developed and learned a set of abilities. Third, each stage is defined by a shift in attachment. We are social creatures, and everything we do happens in relationships with other human beings, nature, or objects. So bonding and attachment are a central part of our being.
Now let us come back to our two examples.
The first and utterly most important attachment is the bond between mother and child. It starts during pregnancy, and it comes (or should, at least) into full blossom in the first months of the child’s life, by being nourished, by being held, by being taken care of, physically and emotionally. In the best case, the child experiences the relationship with her mother as a safe haven. Now, when she starts to move, we can observe something interesting: she starts from the attachment base of her mother, begins to explore, and when she is finished or needs to relax because something unpredictable happens, she tries to return to her mother. She gets back to the safe haven. In a sense, she carries the trust from her attachment base (her mother) with her and transmits it to others: her siblings and the greater family, nature, and society. Over time, she learns to trust her new world (the house, the family, the Earth). She anchors herself in a new safe haven. In our child’s case, it’s the physical world around her.
Now, what happens to the adult?
I never could never depend on my dad as someone to support or guide me, as someone with whom I could have a nourishing and thriving relationship, or on whom I could rely. He was aggressive, violent and emotionally cold, and there was no one I would ever talk to about life questions or challenges I was facing. Nevertheless, when he died I had the experience that there was no one there anymore who was leading, someone who was shielding me, someone I could rely on. From that point on on, that was my experience; I was thrown back on my resources
.
Might it be a divorce, an illness like cancer, or the loss of a job that means the world that the adult experienced, and that he relied upon, changes fundamentally. What used to be the fundament, the basic principles that defined the adult’s life, doesn’t exist anymore. But it’s the same with adult and childhood phases: there’s a starting constellation that the adult sees as his haven. There’s a set of abilities to learn, and a mature state to reach. What differs is the relationship to the ‘safe haven’. The child still has this ‘safe haven’ to return to, while the adult experiences a loss: the ‘safe haven’ breaks apart. Over a period, through experiment, learning, mourning and transformation, the adult learns to rely on something else––at best, on himself and on his ability to self-guide.
Of biology and other impulses
The development of the child is driven by biology, and by an inherent plan that all of us follow. We can understand childhood as the creation of the ego. The Austrian psychotherapist Alfred Adler called it the lifestyle a child is picking up: all those patterns and techniques for dealing with life and oneself. The goal of this lifestyle is full physical maturity. After maturity, this built-in motivator falls apart.
Development in adulthood only happens deliberately or through a crisis. The first occurs if the adult consciousness chooses to reflect on its personality and change it intentionally; the latter occurs if the previous world model becomes dysfunctional and either no longer works or leads to illnesses like cancer, burnout and depression.
If we read the teachings of Western and Eastern spiritual traditions, they all speak of a goal, or at least of a direction in spiritual development, a potential we all can awaken to: the realization that we are all one with our creator. The teachings are about breaking through the shell of our ego, breaking through our conditioned mind and perception to experience the world as it is, to realize that our consciousness is boundless.
Of society and individuation
Now, there are a few things that are hindering us. Primarily, they are all societal. Society isn’t interested in individuals, in getting on one’s own feet, in self-leading and individuation. Although we may live in democratic societies, their goal is still that we obey. Our culture is geared towards social conformity instead of individual development. Take school: it’s where we break the intrinsic motivation of learning and thriving, which we all carry in us. We replace it with the extrinsic motivation of either punishment or reward. By this, slowly, we strangle the light in us. It’s the end of self-driven internal development and a starting point for crises and illnesses.
Now, the guidance we give ourselves to deal with illness or a personal crisis is not meant to break through the ego; it is not meant to help us understand how limiting our ego, patterns, and beliefs are. Its intention is to allow us to replace one concept of ‘I’ with another. That’s what you learn in therapy or coaching, and what most of the self-improvement literature is all about. We replace one concept of ourselves, the one that is dysfunctional and doesn’t work anymore, with another one that we hope will fit better. Instead, we should seek to understand the concept of ‘I’, the structure of our consciousness and mind, so we can break through this concept, let it fall apart, and heal. Only this will lead us to our authentic selves with all our challenges and demands for us and our lives to change. For this, we need to learn and teach ourselves, examine ourselves profoundly, and understand the principles and dynamics governing our lives.
How are our mind and consciousness are connected to society? There’s an unexpected similarity to discover. More about this next week.
Thank you for your precious being.
Warmly,
Gabriel