There is a new trend that is becoming increasingly noticeable. The business of change management is taking inspiration, and even incorporating, ideas and concepts from traditions that can properly be designated as spiritual. New Age seems to have matured and is moving into the business arena. Spirituality is an important subject, an aspect of being that deserves attention and cultivation, even though there are quite a lot of diverging opinions on what the latter may imply.
We are not really philosophers at Crossing Signals, although we certainly share philosophy’s love for abstract thought and affection for truth. So, while investigations into the nature of spirituality are not part of our activities, spirituality is part of the reality we live and work in. It is profoundly human and expresses itself in behaviour, communication, symbolism and even attitudes to change.
Spiritual traditions are occupied with an investigation into the nature of the ‘self’ (or the nature of our ‘consciousness’, or the nature of our ‘awareness’) and specifically investigate how the nature of our awareness is related to the universe itself. Not just the mind as a cognitive subject, but the ‘self’ at a ‘deeper’ level. The philosophy of consciousness is an extremely elusive and tenacious subject. It is very easy to produce little more than mystification on the subject, vagueness and obscurity after all are very good places to hide. Since our western society constantly reminds us to be afraid of globalisation, terrorism, global warming, losing our job, et cetera, the possibility of salvation and our own distinct role in this salvation may explain the current popularity of all things spiritual. It is easy to create illusions that appear to be profound, but are not.
Theories of spirituality are theories of the ‘self’; spirituality is about what we really are. It seems to me that this will always be the most profound question: “Who am I?” In coming up with answers to this question we, in the west, have a cultural bias about the self that was expressed strongest by Rene Descartes. “I think therefore I am” means that I am fundamentally a cognitive agent, and as such (and because of it) I am separated from the world around me. Two considerations are crucial here, because this view of the self implies:
• I am the thoughts inside my head and,
• I am separated from the world around me.
One might call this a basic Cartesian dualism. Even in ego-bashing models of transcendence or enlightenment espoused by organizations such as Enlightenext, (see previous post) the idea of an inner self seems crucial. It is called the authentic self and is contrasted with an image of an evil, greedy, arrogant “ego”. Higher consciousness in this model is still MY higher consciousness, and as such these hierarchically structured concepts serve the discriminating tendencies of this school of thought.
Perhaps it was sheer serendipity that exactly in the same week we went to a Club of Amsterdam meeting on the Future of Consciousness I came across the work of cell biologist Bruce Lipton, who has a controversial albeit scientifically corroborated theory. Lipton argues that the regulating mechanism of cells, the mind of a cell, is its skin: the membrane around the cell. To him this is a logical consequence of the fact that cells constantly interact with their environment. Through chemistry, exchanging molecules, through electromagnetism et cetera. All of a cell’s behaviour is directly related to this interaction. Since we are in essence communities of cells, this has implications for us as human beings as well. Relative to cells we are super organisms arising out of the integration and collaboration of the billions of individual cells that form our body, much in the same way as cultures are super organisms produced by the complex interactions and histories of individual humans.
Our cerebral cortex grows out of what is still skin tissue in the early embryo. Lipton’s model suggests that not our brain, but our entire nervous system - distributed as it is throughout our body - and our sensory organs is the basis of our consciousness. This means that there is no centre of awareness; it arises out of millions of sensory and other interactions that go on all the time. Our whole being is controlled by a dynamic balance of constant interactions with our environment. The idea that there is a central director of these experiences and perceptions - an ‘ego’, a seat of consciousness - is just that: an idea, and therefore just as much a part of the constant chaotic dynamic stream of consciousness that is the nature of mind. The idea that each of us has more than one, and sometimes many personalities in his head can be traced back to the work of Sigmund Freud. Our active personality, which is the dominant voice we think of as ‘self’, is subconsciously selected based on its suitability to the given context we are in. Our (re)actions are triggered by the situation around us in ways invisible to us. Psychotics and schizophrenics hear ‘voices’ in their head, and are as such not very different from all of us who are sane. Sanity is just a matter of holding on to the assumption that all the different voices in our head, produced by conflicting wishes, desires and/or frustrations, are one person.
“The mind”, “our consciousness”, “the ego”, all are constructs to attempt to understand ourselves as wholes, as one being, as an individual, as a single personality. But we’re not. We are a set of gates and portals that constantly interact with our environment. We are not IN our context, we ARE our context.
This idea has important implications. I recently read an article by Professor Ganzevoort of the University of Amsterdam’s Business School. He argues that change is impossible on a fundamental level because we have an unchanging essence of self, a ‘soul’. You can change your look and adapt your behaviour, but you can not change the soul, it is your unchanging essence, it is “I”. If we consider the previous paragraph and its conclusion, this ‘unchanging essence’ cannot be real. We need some kind of internal stability in our awareness, and we call it ego, but it’s just a construct. This may be a very scary thought to most of us, but the good news is that if true, change is always possible because it is constantly happening. There is no fundamental obstacle to change. We are creatures of habit who react mechanically in many situations, and thus change seems so difficult to achieve. But real change is possible in every single moment. Change IS the only constant! Fundamental change can happen in seconds. Really excellent teachers, doctors and therapists know this and use this fact to be as effective as they possibly can and thus produce the ‘magic’ they produce. Bandler and Grinder’s original publication on Neuro Linguistic Programming was called “The Structure of Magic”.
This is a powerful insight and one that strengthens our conviction that what you need to understand about change and innovation is the interaction between people and their (social) context. That is exactly what we map with our Collaboration Scorecard, and is the foundation of our understanding of change potential, leadership potential and collaboration potential. This is why we believe it is so important to change the context to enable a group to change, and that is what we do in our workshops. Context is a powerful way to use as leverage as it speaks to us on so many different levels, our perception, our emotion, our intuition, our communication, our sense of connectedness, all of these are powerful aspects of our effort to create and change. This connectivity together with the idea of interaction on multiple levels is the essence of our vision of collaboration.
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