interview



WIE: I'd like to begin by asking you, from your perspective, what is transformation? What exactly is it that transforms in our development, creating different stages or, as you've called them, orders of consciousness?

ROBERT KEGAN: First, let me say that because both the subject and the phenomenon of transformation are enormously exciting and appealing, there's a temptation to become intoxicated by the thrill, hope, and sheer spectacle of it all, which can make it difficult to get at what transformation actually is. You might say that we can easily confuse the rose with its perfume. These emotions that are associated with transformation, which are what I'm calling the perfume, are a very important part of the rose. However, if you have an actual interest in bringing transformation about in relationship to yourself or others, then it's very important to separate the rose from the perfume. Because the emotions and the experience, the gratitude or the terror, associated with transformation are very different from what transformation actually is. To look at transformation itself requires us to make a shift that can initially feel dry because we're tending to its analytic dimension as opposed to its aesthetic dimension. And to make this analytic shift, I think it's useful to think about the word transformation itself. At the heart of the word is "form." So if you're interested in the analytic side of the rose, not only the perfume, then you can't even begin to engage the question of transformation without asking a very simple question, which is: What form is transforming? What is the form that is undergoing some gradual or dramatic reconstruction of its parts into what is really a new whole?

Transformation entails a reconstruction of basic forms of the distribution of energy or information or production. Take, for example, the cooling of the universe since the big bang—you have a redistribution of energy that changes how the universe hangs together. Or take the transformation of the written word—beginning with manuscripts inscribed by hand on parchment and preserved in urns in the possession of a very tiny priesthood, then to the Gutenberg revolution of the printing press that made possible the mass production of text, and now to the instant distribution of language through a keystroke on a computer—this is the reconstruction of the very form in which information can be composed and distributed. So, first of all, you have to put a stake in the ground and name what form you are following in looking for transformation. And that requires you to have some grasp of the internal architecture of that form and also of the process by which it comes apart and re-forms itself.

So, with that said, let me go back to your starting question about stages of human development and transformation.

WIE: And from what you've just said, I understand that we have to identify what "form" in human consciousness transforms in development.

RK: Yes. And if I look at the discussions about transformation and the ways in which people talk about its practice, I'd say that the piece that I can add to the story here—and it's just a piece, but it is too often missing—is what comes from thinking more seriously about the activity of our knowing, which, in philosophy, is the world of epistemology. Epistemology, which is often considered a very dry and analytic topic, is actually a very dynamic thing. It is, after all, not about what we know but about the process by which we make reality, the process by which we create knowledge.

This is simultaneously a rational and passional matter. All kinds of emotions are associated with having a given way of knowing the world and being identified with it as well as with the process of transition from one way of knowing to another. Why? Because we take our way of composing reality to be reality. The great embarrassment or liberation of transformation itself is the recognition that what we have been taking as reality is actually only a construction of reality.


THE SUBJECT-OBJECT RELATIONSHIP

WIE: How do we construct our reality? This must be an extremely complex process.

RK: Well, actually, simplicity is the key to understanding this process. I think it was Oliver Wendell Holmes who talked about the simplicity on one side of complexity and the simplicity on the other side of complexity. The simplicity on the wrong side of complexity is dull and dumb, but when you get to the other side, you have a simplicity that gets elementally to the point. So, in terms of how we make meaning, at its simplest, we are talking about the transformation of the subject-object relationship.

Have you ever heard such a big buildup to the subject-object relationship, which is usually presented as the driest thing in the world? The darling of sophomore philosophy class, it just puts everyone to sleep. But what I'm trying to do is create this recognition that it's a sleeping key to a better understanding of transformation. For the past thirty years, I've been attending to this one thing: the evolution of the subject-object relationship.

So what is the "subject-object relationship"? It is a fundamental distinction in the way that we make sense of our experience—a distinction that shapes our thinking, our feeling, our social relating, and our ways of relating to internal aspects of ourselves. The subject-object relationship is not just an abstraction but a living thing in nature. What I mean by "object" are those aspects of our experience that are apparent to us and can be looked at, related to, reflected upon, engaged, controlled, and connected to something else. We can be objective about these things, in that we don't see them as "me." But other aspects of our experience we are so identified with, embedded in, fused with, that we just experience them as ourselves. This is what we experience subjectively—the "subject" half of the subject-object relationship.

What gradually happens is not just a linear accretion of more and more that one can look at or think about, but a qualitative shift in the very shape of the window or lens through which one looks at the world. A given subject-object relationship establishes the shape of the window. Thus, for a certain period of time, a particular distinction between what is object and what is subject persists. Then you know the world through that system, and while your knowing gets increasingly elaborated, it all goes on within the terms of that system. So, for example, when you get to be what we call a "concrete thinker," usually between the ages of six and ten, you are able to learn facts, more and more facts, but you're still just learning the facts. Children at this age and stage collect baseball cards, bugs, leaves from trees—they come to understand the world around them by identifying, naming, and labeling the objects in it. But you have to make a qualitative move to transform the subject-object relationship before you are able to organize these facts into bigger abstract ideas, themes, and values. This, then, becomes the next epistemology. Each qualitative move takes a whole mental structure that had been experienced as subject and shifts it so that it becomes seen as object.

If you study the processes of the forming and re-forming of ways of knowing from childhood right through adulthood, you come to recognize a rhythm in this process. We start from a position, in earliest infancy, where there's absolutely no subject-object distinction at all, because the infant's knowing is entirely subjective. There's no "not me," no internal vs. external. There's no distinction,for example, in the source of the discomfort caused by bright light or hunger in the belly. There's no distinction between self and other.

WIE: And what is the ultimate extension of this process? The evolutionary goal?

RK: The ultimate end state of this story—of this process of gradually but qualitatively shifting more and more of what was subject to object—would be a state in which the subject-object distinction comes to an end again, in the opposite direction than in the first minutes of life. You know, in the sixties, Alan Watts was fond of saying that his baby was a buddha. But that showed a total misunderstanding. There are two different ways that you can get out of the subject-object split. One way is by being entirely subject with no object—that was Watts' baby. And the other way is through the complete emptying of the subject into the object so that there is, in a sense, no subject at all—that is, you are not looking out on the world from any vantage point that is apart from it. You're then taking the world's perspective. That's the Buddha. There's an enormous difference between the adualism of an infant and the adualism of the Buddha.

The ultimate state of development would have to do with some way in which the self has become entirely identified with the world. It would be the recognition essentially of the oneness of the universe, which is something we have heard over and over again in wisdom literatures of the East and West, but which usually goes in one ear and out the other, because what does it actually mean to most people?

WIE: That's true. But this would have to be more than a recognition or idea of oneness. As a stage of development, it would mean that one's ongoing state of consciousness would transcend the limitations of the subject-object relationship itself. As far as I understand it, however, this ultimate state is not one of the stages of development that you have identified in your research—not yet, at least. But you have observed that there is a regular pattern to the way that our experience of what is subject and what is object changes over the life span, moving in the direction of greater objectivity.

RK: Yes. At each point in time or development, what gives a form of psychological meaning-making its integrity is that there is a definable, literally namable, distinction being made between what is subject and what is object. These forms have a temporary durability, if you can accept that contradiction in terms, because each sustains itself for some period of time.


AN EVOLUTIONARY TRUCE

WIE: In your book The Evolving Self, you call this an "evolutionary truce."

RK: That's right. And that's what creates a stage of development. In using the word "truce," I am pointing to the fact that this process of formation and re-formation of these natural epistemologies is very dynamic. So, when I say we're constructing reality, I don't mean it in the sense of constructing a house so that we can live in it for the next four or five years with no attention to the continuous constructing and preserving of the house. My hope in choosing a word like "truce" was to suggest that it has to continuously maintain itself. When you keep balance, you are always going out of balance and back in balance, continuously. But when you have a hardy capacity to maintain a balance at a given point of equilibrium, it looks like there is a stability.

For example, when you see someone walking across an expanse, what you are mainly impressed by, if you are really thinking about it, is the stability of that very extraordinary gymnastic activity called walking. And if you have ever lived with an infant and watched him or her gradually acquire this capacity, you come to appreciate this. Because in walking, with each leg, with each foot, you push and propel yourself off that foot and you throw yourself out of balance. You must, in order to move forward. And then, with the other foot, you simultaneously correct yourself and throw yourself out of balance again. You continuously do this, and when you get good at it, what it looks like is a tremendously stable dynamic motion of balance. But it actually is a continuous imbalance and restoring of balance, according to a single principle. Similarly, to maintain a certain evolutionary truce, or stage of development, there is this continuous balancing, a setting and resetting of the distinctions between what is subject and what is object.

WIE: This sounds similar to the balancing mechanism that you call "dynamic equilibrium," which is something that you say impedes transformation. Could you speak about how this works?

RK: Okay—but first some context. I've always liked what philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said about the two great forces of the universe: One is what physicists would basically call entropy, which is essentially the loss of focus, and dissipation of energy, and increasing randomness, and so on, and the other is the opposite of entropy, or negentropy, which means becoming more complex, having more focus, and operating at a higher harmonic or concentration of energy. He was impressed with the way in which everything in the universe, living and nonliving, was participating in one process that had to do with entropy and then also has the possibility of participating in the opposite process—not just "running down," but "running up," so to speak.

The study of development, at least as I see it, is an attending to—both a reverencing and a seeking to support—the negentropic processes of increasingly concentrated energy or increasing focus. Now, in actual practice, when you're trying to be a part of supporting these processes, you pretty quickly come up against a third force that Whitehead never talked about. This force is not about things running down or running up, or even being still—it is a dynamic. There's a lot of energy and movement in it, but because it involves energy and movement in countervailing directions, the effect is a balance, or a tendency for things to stay pretty much as they are. And that's what we call dynamic equilibrium.

Now described analytically from the outside, a dynamic equilibrium is an evolutionary truce, which essentially can be described as an epistemology. It creates a boundary between what can be seen (object) and what one is identified with (subject)—and so it names a way of structuring or shaping the world. From the inside out, described phenomenologically, this equilibrium is a truce between what we call basic life commitments. On the one hand, you have those commitments that you have and can name—that are the objects in consciousness. But if you work with people enough, and you gain their trust and help them find a language for it, they can begin to name not only the objective commitment they have, but the commitment that has them. The commitment they're subject to, that they are not even aware of. For example, a leader who has a commitment to giving up hierarchical forms of leadership may also have a competing commitment to maintaining control, or to being loved and admired, to being the "big daddy" who dispenses all the goodies. So these two very powerful commitments create a conflict, which leads to a living contradiction. The dynamic equilibrium is itself a contradiction that is maintaining itself, which we are caught up in. And in a way, you can say that growth and development is a process by which, instead of being caught in the contradiction, we have a bigger space where we can look at the contradiction. This gives us the chance to move to some new equilibrium or some new epistemology.


DO ADULTS TRANSFORM?

WIE: What capacity do we adults show for transformation? In his new book, Boomeritis, Ken Wilber writes, "Psychologists who track adult life-span development find that most individuals go through a series of major transformations from birth to adolescence, whereupon transformation tends to taper off. Although many horizontal translations subsequently occur—the 'seasons of a person's life'—vertical transformations to higher levels tend to completely stop. From age 25 to around 55, very few vertical transformations occur." His conclusion is: "It's almost impossible to get an adult human being to transform."

RK: Ken and I have talked about this exact question on numerous occasions. If you tend to focus only on adulthood, as he is doing, you can tend toward a somewhat discouraging conclusion about how rare development is after we've reached our full physical stature.

We need to keep in mind that every adult has a history of a number of extraordinary developmental transformations, and each transformation builds a more complex and elaborated edifice. The process of its undoing—the capacity of the universe to win through these increasingly complex defenses that have better and better ways of deluding us into the belief that we have grasped reality as it actually is—gets harder and harder to do. For example, there's a dramatic transformation from birth to about twenty-one months. In not even two years, a tremendous transformation takes place from having almost no distinction between subject and object to the beginning of a distinction between what is me and what is not me. The child becomes a member of a social world! That's an enormous transformation. But the next transformation takes maybe twice as long, and then the following one takes twice as long as that one, and so on. So then looking at adult development, you could say, "My goodness, things have really slowed down." There's a way in which that's true, but there's another way in which, if you step far enough back, it's understandable that it takes more time.

The great glory within my own field in the last twenty-five years has been the recognition that there are these qualitatively more complex psychological, mental, and spiritual landscapes that await us and that we are called to after the first twenty years of life. Much of my time in this period has been spent following the development of people exactly between the ages that Ken was talking about there. And if you revisit people systematically every three years for twenty years, and then put the different pictures together, the amount of development is actually very impressive.

WIE: Could you speak about what those transformations in adulthood look like?

RK: In adolescence and early adulthood, a transformation occurs in which we essentially develop the complexity to internalize and identify with the values of our surround—an epistemology that enables us to be truly a socialized member of the tribe. Socialization, from a psychological point of view, is the process by which we become more a part of society because the society actually becomes more a part of us. Thus, the self feels whole, connected, and in harmony through its identification with a set of values and beliefs that both make the self up and simultaneously preserve its intimate connections—relationships to the bigger tribe or to the culture of which one is a part. So a person who has reached this level is able to think more long term, more abstractly. Based on the particular tribe or culture, one constructs a set of values with which one is identified. And we call this the socialized mind, or third order consciousness.

Now, the transformation that is most common to the period from twenty-five to fifty is a move out of this orientation of being shaped by one's surround to become what we call self-authoring. This is fourth order consciousness. While this particular transformation doesn't happen for everyone, it does take place with considerable density. In our highly pluralistic postmodern world, we do not have a homogeneous definition of who we should be and how we should live. We're living in the midst of a rapidly expanding pluralism of tribes, which means that there are competing demands for our loyalty, faithfulness, time, money, attention, and so on. Thus, the stance of being shaped by our surround is actually insufficient to handle modern life. Rather, we are called on to have an internal authority by which we ourselves are able to name what is valuable, or respond to the claims and expectations on us, sort through them, and make decisions about which ones we will and will not follow. So we are not just made up by or written on by a culture, but we ourselves become the writer of a reality that we then are faithful to. Within a Western context, this move is often characterized in terms of personal empowerment. This transformation, to the fourth order, is enormously powerful and has a captivating perfume. It is, in fact, a highly prevalent and dramatic transformation between the ages of twenty-five and fifty. But it's not the transformation that people who think about higher stages of consciousness are interested in.