This is part 1 of an ongoing series of essays deconstructing the field of personal development, of which I have been and continue to be engaged in, both personally and professionally. In these essays, I will be philosophically deconstructing the assumptions that the field of personal development is built upon in order to reconstruct the field in a new, more inclusive and healthier way. Your comments are highly encouraged!
Personal Development has many assumptions. One is that there is such a think as a “person” to develop.
Now this seems fairly obvious, right? Obviously you have your own body, your own emotions, your own mind, perhaps even your own house, car, bank account, cell phone, email address, etc. How could anyone doubt they are an autonomous individual person?
To some extent, you are in fact an autonomous individual–but not nearly to the degree that you might think. There are many ways in which the assumption of personhood is actually quite weak, and may even be false.
Breathing, Eating, and Thinking are Happening
In personal development, it is assumed that there is such thing as a person, and this is obvious and fundamental. Three short examples will illustrate my point that in fact, this is not the case, and that interconnections between systems are fundamental, without which the concept of an individual person would not even make sense.
Breathing
Every few seconds, you take a breath in, and let a breath out. Is this air “you”? Most people would say that it is not. Yet if for some reason you could not breathe for even just a few minutes, you would likely die. So in a sense, the air in your lungs and around your body is both you and not you.
This air is generally composed of an optimum amount of various gases, most notably carbon dioxide and oxygen. The countless plants and animals on the earth help balance and regulate the air in an optimum ratio in a huge self-regulating system. Without this system, you would not be able to breathe. If this system got too far off-balance, life would not be possible.
Most planets do not have a ratio that could sustain life. Earth oxygen levels used to be 21% of total volume in prehistoric times, but due to the burning of fossil fuels (to power civilization), it is now dips to around 19% in many areas, and 12-17% over major cities–a less than optimal level for human health. At oxygen levels of 6-7%, life can no longer be sustained.
Is the oxygen being released from a plant in your office “you”? It supports the larger balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, and you bring a portion of that air into you every few seconds, without which you could not exist. Certainly it is in some way a part of you, and you a part of it. Yet we don’t normally think in these terms.
Eating
Every few hours, you eat (unless you are sleeping, or reading this blog from a country undergoing severe drought and famine). Is food on your plate “you”? Again, most people would say that it is not. Yet if you do not eat within about 30 days, you will die of starvation. Is the digesting food in your stomach “you”? Hard to say. Certainly after it has been turned into tissue or burned for energy it is more “you-like,” but yet you could lose your arm and still be “you,” right? (An aside: How much of your body could you lose and still be “you”? How much of your brain could you lose and still be “you”?)
Where does your food come from? Most likely, animals and plants that are cultivated for consumption by human beings. Almost nobody grows their own food or raises their own chickens, etc. nowadays, so your very personal eating habits depend largely on the production of food by others. If you ate an egg for breakfast, was it “you” when it was laid by the hen? How about before the hen was born? Was there some future “you” in a fertilized chicken’s egg a year ago? If that’s too wacky for you to stomach (pardon the pun), then at what point did that egg become part of this thing called “you”?
Are the people who grow your food you? Certainly not. Yet you would not survive without them, and the mechanisms of production that they utilize to bring food to your table several times a day.
Thinking
Sit for about 30 seconds and try to just notice your breath without thinking. Unless you are a well-practiced meditator, you probably had between 5 and 100 thoughts just then. Where did those thoughts come from? Are those thoughts “you”?
If you practice meditation for a while, say on a silent retreat for 10 days, you begin to really notice how these thoughts come by themselves. After a few days, your internal dialogue, your inner cinema, and the inner feelings and sensations you experience begin to take on a quality of “not-me,” due to the disturbing fact that they keep happening whether you want them to or not!
But what about the thoughts you think when writing a book, or brainstorming a project? I remember the first time I thought I had come up with an absolutely brilliant original idea in Philosophy back in college. Then I found out that Plato had written the same thought nearly 2500 years before. Was the thought original to me? Unlikely. More likely is that I picked it up unconsciously from the culture around me. Ever had a boss or a spouse do this with your brilliant idea?
The same principle is displayed in the acknowledgments section of the beginning of any good non-fiction book. Most authors realize that the book “they” have written was in reality written by a huge team working with them, and that many of “their” ideas were built from the ideas of their mentors, other authors, and great thinkers throughout history. Also, in many eras new discoveries are made at nearly the same time by academics and inventors working independently (e.g. the discovery of calculus by Newton and Liebniz).
Are your original ideas “you”? Hardly. Original ideas also seem to arise spontaneously from mental activity, even when sitting in meditation. Ideas come from the same mystery as dreams, and should be treated as such.
I could go on with more examples, but three is enough for my point in this post.
Why Personhood is a Problem
Personal Development (as well as classical economics) is built on the idea of “personhood,” that there are such things as persons who are basically autonomous individuals. This is an assumption that leads to several kinds of problems.
1. The assumption of personhood in personal development presupposes that happiness is something that an individual finds for themselves, via rational deliberation, goal-setting, and planning.
This is largely not true for human beings for several reasons. First, we are social-political animals. Happiness studies have also shown that having a number of very close personal ties to friends, family, and community are a much greater indicator of reported happiness than individual success, fame, or money. Even individual enlightenment tends to lead one to the intuition that I cannot be enlightened unless all beings are enlightened, because I and all are not separate.
Similarly, human beings don’t do a good job of knowing what really makes them happy, nor actually following through on our plans. Hence why there are jobs for people like me in Life Coaching! Many people choose goals for themselves such as losing weight, which are both unlikely to optimize their happiness, and they are unlikely to actually follow through on the plans to achieving.
Personally, I’ve found that my best goal-setting occurs when it feels like my goals are emerging from something beyond me, whether I call that “intuition” or “spirit” or whatever else. The rational mind does a great job later at planning how to achieve those goals, but does not work well at all at deciding on which goals to pursue. Looking back, I’ve often found that pursuing these goals was much more fulfilling than other, more “rational” goals. I’ve also found that many things not on my goal list tend to be the most happiness producing, often developing close personal relationships, going through natural life transitions, or living through a crisis.
2. The largest problems facing our world today are problems of interconnected systems: global economic depression, ecological disaster, famine, terrorism, overpopulation, etc. According to Erwin Laszlo in The Chaos Point, we may only have until late 2012 to early 2013 to avert global systems collapse by influencing every human system towards greater holism.
Many of these global problems can be seen as problems of individual systems attempting to dominate other systems (or a part trying to be the whole), rather than working in conjunction or harmony. Cancer cells are the ultimate out-of-control individual autonomy model at the cellular level: they continue to grow themselves without any regard for their environment. Cancer cells are very good at personal development at the expense of others and their environment, ultimately to their own detriment.
An individual pursuing their single-minded personal goals can make the world’s problems worse by emphasizing personal wealth accumulation, fame (even if simply within a niche), and individual success without regard to the interconnectedness of their actions in the larger environment. When personhood is assumed and interconnectedness is minimized, this danger is more likely.
Beyond Personal Development
What are the alternatives? Can we capture the enthusiastic spirit of personal development with all it’s beneficial aspects without the problems of assuming personhood and it’s hyper-individualistic tendencies?
Transpersonal Development
I propose the solution could be called “transpersonal development.” Transpersonal refers to that which transcends and includes the personal. Transpersonal development includes developing in ways that meet one’s individual needs, but also go beyond to serve the needs of others and the systems that supports all beings on the planet, as well as connecting into something “spiritual” that transcends the individual self sense. Core Transformation is one excellent technique for transpersonal development that can be used to find goals that are truly in alignment with one’s needs, as well as solving typical psychotherapeutic problems. Insight meditation (also known as Vipassana or simply “mindfulness” practice) is also a critical practice for transpersonal development.
Transpersonal development includes developing one’s self in such a way as to find healthy individuation and the meeting of one’s needs, but not in excess. For example, transpersonal development sees excessive personal wealth accumulation as “financial obesity” which benefits no one, for beyond meeting basic needs, more personal wealth accumulation does not benefit the wealthy person in terms of real happiness, and limits the flow of financial resources from meeting the needs of others.
Core Transformation is a particularly useful technique for learning to meet one’s needs without excess, for through this process, you discover and experience what you are most deeply wanting, and then from that core state experience begin to act in the world, as an already whole and connected being. This is why I’m changing my personal coaching to be based on this one technique–it changes everything!
There is already a field of transpersonal psychotherapy which attempts to integrate healthy psychological functioning with the direct experience of the spiritual. Transpersonal development is like the do-it-yourself version, not requiring a transpersonal psychotherapist or coach to facilitate (except for emergencies and knotty problems), just as personal development often is a do-it-yourself version of counseling, therapy, or coaching.
Transpersonal development is not simply personal transcendence (surrender of the part to the whole), but it simultaneously does not ignore the whole system in which the individual is embedded. Transpersonal development is founded on the principle of ecology, awareness of the long-term impacts of the actions of one part of a system on the interactions between parts and the health of the systems in which they are embedded, whether economic, biologic, socio-political, relational, etc. In many ways, simple ethics already take this into account. The mortgage crisis would not have come about had ecology and simple long-term thinking been respected.
Transpersonal development also does not engage in dangerous or excessive practices of personal growth that could lead to psychosis, suicide, self-aggression that gets projected outwards (like “personal power”), the cultivation of mania, etc., because these lack ecology, having potential negative side-effects both for the individual and the environment. Instead, transpersonal development starts from wholeness and acceptance of things as they are, and every step of a transpersonal development process is love and acceptance. Yet transpersonal development must be as effective if not more effective at getting results, otherwise it is a step backward in psychospiritual technology.
What do you think? Do you still think “you” exist and should be the focus of your conscious development? Or do you think that both you and the larger systems you are embedded in should be considered in all “personal” development?