interview

WIE: What is spiritual transformation?

YASUHIKO KIMURA: Instead of trying to define the term, I would like to first look at some of the facets of what we call transformation. Transformation, to me, is a uniquely significant dance between being and becoming. Being is in becoming and becoming is in being. The term enlightenment, or spiritual awakening, points more to the movement from becoming to being, whereas the term transformation points more to the movement from being to becoming. Enlightenment is a movement that is primarily from becoming to being, a return to being. Transformation is a movement that is primarily from being to becoming, into creating. So transformation is a part of this evolutionary cycle, this dynamic complementarity of being and becoming.

WIE: Can you describe the process that the individual undergoes in this movement from being to becoming? What is actually being transformed?

YK: In the last several years, I have been teaching a particular model of transformation, which I call the Triformational Learning Matrix. Tri means, of course, three, and so the formational element comprises three formations: information, metaformation, and transformation.

Informational learning is what we normally go through in our educational system and in our own lives. We read books, we listen to people, and we gain knowledge and experience. We develop a more and more comprehensive body of knowledge based on some principle of organization. Metaformation is sometimes called inspiration or intuition; it is a higher form of knowledge that sort of knocks on your door and you become aware of something that is eternal. So when this higher intuition, or metaformation, gets integrated into your own informational learning, you then start to reconfigure the whole context within which you have held the body of knowledge that you already have. And at the same time, you are able to incorporate the higher metaformational knowledge into your own body of knowledge. In this dance between information and metaformation, a transformation takes place. Metaformation is returning to the source of your being, the ground of your being from which you intuit a new form of insight. Then, when that insight is successfully married with the body of knowledge that you already have, transformation takes place. That is my way of understanding transformation.

So on the one hand, there is a dynamic binary of being and becoming, and on the other hand, there is a trinity, with transformation emerging from the creative dance between metaformation and information. It's like alchemy. People used to try to transform lead into gold. And spiritually speaking, gold is the symbol of the transformed state and lead is the raw material. But what happens when this lead becomes gold is that somehow the lead dissolves itself into the noumenon, the cosmic wholeness, and then from there you create the new dimensionality of being, which we call gold. That is the process of transformation, where the ego structure dematerializes itself and then merges into the whole. From there you actually create a new you, so to speak, on the basis of the knowledge that you gain through your metaformation. So you become your own creation, based on the cosmic knowledge that you have received. And once this process takes place, it is an ongoing evolution. Enlightenment then becomes like a trigger, or the beginning of a continual transformational evolution. That is how I see transformation.


TRANSFORMING TRANSFORMATION

WIE: I'd like to ask you about how the process of transformation is changing to accommodate life in the twenty-first century, especially considering that one primary characteristic of the modern age is an ever-increasing rate of change. As the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil recently said:

Centuries ago people didn't think that the world was changing at all. Their grandparents had the same lives that they did, and they expected their grandchildren would do the same, and that expectation was largely fulfilled....What's not fully understood is that the pace of change is itself accelerating, and the last 20 years are not a good guide to the next 20 years. We're doubling the paradigm shift rate, the rate of progress, every decade. This will actually match the amount of progress we made in the whole 20th century, because we've been accelerating up to this point. The 20th century was like 25 years of change at today's rate of change. In the next 25 years we'll make four times the progress you saw in the 20th century. And we'll make 20,000 years of progress in the 21st century, which is almost a thousand times more technical change than we saw in the 20th century.

Dee Hock, the founder and former CEO of Visa International and author of Birth of the Chaordic Age, who is also interviewed in this issue, echoed this point recently, saying that change is not going to happen, nor is it likely to happen, but that change is the very nature of what is happening. So in this context, how must our modern understanding of spiritual transformation take into account our rapidly changing world and the complexity it creates?

YK: It's interesting because what is also happening with all this rapid change is that change itself is changing. The process of evolution itself is evolving. There is a meta-evolution, or a meta-change that is taking place. And in that process what you see is actually an increasing contrast between change and the eternal or the unchanging. I become more and more aware of that which does not change in the context of this continual change you're describing. So the more you tune in to change, the more you become tuned in to that which does not change. In a way, the contrast between the immutable and the mutable becomes much more distinct. To put this in the language I used earlier, not only is the body of information growing but also the accessibility of metaformational insight becomes greater. Compared to hundreds of years ago, people are really becoming much more aware of that which is eternal. So we live at an exciting moment in history, when both metaformation and information are gaining tremendous momentum. We are transforming transformation itself.

WIE: One characteristic of this increasing rate of change and the complexity that it presents seems to be an increasing amount of stress on our systems. It is interesting that some scientists, including the evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris, feel that this stress may be a critical component in our own evolution. In fact, she has said that stress is the only thing that creates evolution in natural systems. Do you agree that stress is an essential part of the transformational process?

YK: It depends on how you define stress. And I have discussed this same issue with Sahtouris. You see, we generally attach negative connotations to the term stress. It can be seen as negative, but it also has a positive impact. My definition of stress is that it is the psychophysical response that is triggered by the perception that you are out of control. For example, when you are faced with a problem that you cannot solve by the body of knowledge that you currently have, you are under stress. When you are faced with a challenge or problem that is bigger than anything that you have encountered before, you are naturally under stress. In this sense, it is the most salient element that triggers and compels transformation. That's why I often tell my students to ask themselves a question for which they have no answer, or read a book that they cannot readily understand. That causes stress. And by the time they become able to answer the question or understand the book, they have evolved. So in that sense I agree with Elisabet completely. You can see that same process in biological evolution.

WIE: What is it, fundamentally, that allows us to transform ourselves at all? What drives this process of human transformation?

YK: What drives transformation and evolution is the very nature of the universe itself. There is an evolutionary thrust for optimization that is inherent in the universe, so the more you are tuned in to that evolutionary thrust for optimization, the more chance you have to utilize that thrust for your own evolution. The universe, to me, is like a drama or a play between zero and infinity. In between, we have all possible ways of being and this one dynamic flow of evolution. You know, we often use the term guru to indicate an enlightened human being guiding others. But if you look into the meaning of the term guru in Sanskrit, or lama in Tibetan, you'll find that it means the force of intelligence working inside yourself and the universe as the syntropic (anti-entropic), order-creating, meaning-bestowing evolutionary principle. So the term guru means your own awareness of that principle. The more you tune into this guru, this lama, or this evolutionary principle within yourself and the universe, the more you have the harmonious sense of cosmic evolution, within and without. That is what drives transformation. It is in the nature of the universe. That evolutionary thrust is there within you. You can try to reduce it, ignore it, or be oblivious to it, but it's like a rocket ship—if you get on it, you'll be going to the moon.

WIE: So are you saying that to really harness the transformative power of this natural principle, we have to personally decide to join in the evolutionary process?

YK: Yes. Unless you intend to consciously evolve and transform, your spiritual evolution is not going to be able to take place. That's one of the five salient points, or tenets, of enlightenment that the founder of your magazine, Andrew Cohen, writes about. He calls it Clarity of Intention. You know, it is essential—the volitional participation in the process of evolution is essential.