WIE: Yet even for people who do know about these models of transformation, too often that knowledge, in and of itself, doesn't seem to provide the impetus to change. What other factors make transformation difficult for humans?

YK: Well, even though I'm from Japan, I was educated in the Western kind of educational system, where we are so deeply immersed in the kind of thinking that is reductionistic and dualistic. So when we talk about transformation, we divide individual transformation and world transformation. And there is a difference, but they're complementary. One does not exist without the other. So one of the points that is very important is that there can be no authentic transformation of the world without an effort on our part toward self-transformation. It is essential for those people who are engaged in the transformation of the world to be willing to be transformed in the process of their own engagement. But what happens is that people go out and try to change and transform the world, but individually they are stuck where they are. Transformation always and necessarily calls for a transformation of oneself and one's environment. But I don't see that happening. People are stuck with their own positions that never change.

So first, we don't have a culture in which transformation is an essential component of the conversations that comprise humanity. And second, people are not willing to be transformed in the process of transforming the world.

WIE: One of the people we spoke with for this issue was developmental psychologist Robert Kegan. He speaks about a force that he calls "dynamic equilibrium." As he writes:

Is any effort at personal change—our own or that of others we may seek to lead—likely to be powerful without better understanding of this ... force in nature, our own immunity to change? Specifically, is change likely without grasping how this ... force expresses itself in the unique particulars of our own lives? And yet, one of the things that makes gaining this understanding so difficult is that we tend to be held captive by our own immune systems. We live inside them. We do not "have them"; they "have us." We cannot see them because we are too caught up in them.... How can we secure for ourselves the supports most likely to foster real change, change that actually escapes the immunizing gravity of our own dynamic equilibria and leads to new concentrations of energy, enhanced capacity, greater complexity?

Is this dynamic equilibrium something you've come across or seen in yourself or in others?

YK: Well, it is similar to what Andrew Cohen calls ego, or homeostasis, where people get to a certain point and they just want to stay there. It definitely exists.

WIE: How does one deal with that?

YK: You see, all conscious and cognitive beings are meaning-seeking beings. We are somehow trying to find meaning in life. And unless a human being finds meaning in what he or she is doing, he or she is not going to engage in that action for too long.

Now, some people find meaning in the very act of transformation. And if you consider conscious evolution, ongoing growth, and transformation to be the essential meaning of life, then you will engage yourself in the act of transformation. But for most people, transformation does not provide meaning. "What's the point in continuously growing and continuously transforming? I'm fine where I am. I have my house and my job, so don't bother me. Don't even try to destroy the edifice of meaning that I have built over the years." And I respect that. They're just being human. They have found some measure of meaning in their lives and they don't want to change. They don't want to see that what they thought was meaningful may actually be meaningless. But transformation, ongoing transformation, implies that you need to continuously dissolve the old meaning of your life and create your life anew. You actually need to recognize the central meaning of your life to be the evolutionary process itself. And unless we build a kind of culture in which that is so, people are not going to ongoingly engage themselves in a syntropic (anti-entropic) evolutionary process. They will want to stay in this dynamic, or static, equilibrium.


A WAKE-UP CALL

WIE: So you're saying that the goal is to get to the point where the meaning you're making as a human being in the world actually has to do with a continual engagement in the transformational process itself.

YK: That's right. In my own life, I was crazy enough to shave my head at age eighteen, go to a monastery, and then spend three years in India and five months in the Himalayas all by myself. Why? Because I found meaning in the transformational process itself.

WIE: Another way of saying that would be that we have to completely embrace the process of change.

YK: Yes, to stay unstuck wherever you are. Ecstasy means being unstuck, ongoingly ex-static. So you must commit yourself to an ecstatic life.

WIE: It seems that in order to live that way, one would not only have to continually transcend any movement in oneself toward rest or stasis, but one would also have to resist the cultural tendency toward inertia. In fact, you've spoken about a "conspiracy of mediocrity" in the larger culture, which one must resist. Could you say what you mean by that?

YK: Yes. Mediocrity is not being average; mediocrity is conforming to the average. And if your value system and your meaning in life is to fit into the society successfully and make a good living and so on and so forth, you are conspiring with others to conform to the average. Mediocrity takes place when conforming to the average becomes the highest meaning of life—to fit in and to succeed in the existing society and make a good living and be happy. And unless a person realizes the meaninglessness and emptiness of success in life at that level, he or she is not going to shave his or her head and become a monk or nun or go to see a spiritual teacher. That is the bottom line. But even within the New Age community and in today's spiritual culture, the conspiracy for mediocrity exists.

You know, the first time I became interested in What Is Enlightenment? was when I read the issue in which you dealt with authentic spirituality [WIE Issue 12, The Modern Spiritual Predicament]. I liked that one very much. And this is exactly what needs to be examined continuously. What is missing in the New Age community is real intellectual rigor. If you feel good, you're enlightened. So feeling has taken the place of real awareness. And that permeates the whole culture. It is mediocrity, and a conspiracy toward mediocrity, and those people who conspire very well can become excellent speakers on the conference circuit and make lots of money.

WIE: Have you found yourself becoming the target of this conspiracy?

YK: Yes. Even within The Twilight Club—particularly with the people who were here before I came onto the scene. I'll tell you one strange anecdote. I came to this country when I was twenty-eight years old, nineteen years ago, and I attended one of those New Age group meetings. I went to this meeting and they were talking about the "hundredth monkey." Everybody was talking about this hundredth monkey, and I said to them in my broken English, "What about the first monkey? It is more important for us to really struggle to be the first monkey than the one hundredth." Nobody liked that. Then one person in the group called me later and asked me about my background, and he said, "If you shave your head again, wear the monk robe, and make me your manager, I'll make you rich and famous." I said, "No thank you." But when you look at the gurus coming from India, and Tibet, and Japan, most of them are, I'm sorry to say, very mediocre. That has been my experience. So in my own way, through my writings, I have been ongoingly talking about that particular aspect of contemporary spirituality.

But the conspiracy for mediocrity exists in any segment of society. And I have many friends in physics, science, who have the same experience.

WIE: Some pundits and scholars are already calling September 11, the World Trade Center disaster last year, the end of the postmodern age—a culture-changing wake-up call that demands new thinking in recognition of the extraordinary complexity of the world we live in. In fact, Don Beck recently described it as an inflection point in history. So I wanted to ask if you see any signals on the horizon indicating that a new transformation in human consciousness may be under way in our culture.

YK: Yes, it really was a wake-up call, and many people globally became aware of the dysfunctionality of existing systems, and of the fact that no amount of effort based on the old paradigm is going to solve the problems that we are facing. It was a great source of positive stress. One doesn't need to be a scholar or an enlightened person to realize the dysfunctionality of society.

When September 11 took place, there were basically two kinds of reactions. To use terms from Spiral Dynamics, one was a BLUE, more militaristic reaction, and the other one was a GREEN, more liberal, egalitarian reaction. In the existing White House, we have basically a BLUE organization, and the people who are criticizing the Bush administration are more inclined to be GREEN. The rest of us are seeing that neither of these approaches is going to solve the problem. The military isn't going to solve the problem, nor is the egalitarian effort to try to understand the Arabs going to solve the problem. There's something else that we need. And people can see that.

You see, we want to have a new world, based on your and my profound creative vision for ourselves and for humanity. And that kind of thinking can only be understood by integral thinkers, those who have reached the Second Tier on Beck's model. So the September 11 event can be utilized as another call for Second Tier thinkers to gather together to really make an impact on society. That's a fundamental purpose of The Twilight Club. What we are trying to do is to get all of these thinkers together and mutually support and empower one another's work so that we can actually create a Second Tier, or integral, culture in accordance with the evolutionary prime directive and thereby make a difference in the whole culture of humanity. In the last four years, my colleagues and I have been doing exactly this. So yes, September 11 can be a watershed event for a new kind of civilization to emerge. But a lot more needs to be done.