SYSTEMATIC HUMILITY AS A COMPONENT
OF CONSCIOUSNESS TRANSFORMATION
Adam Blatner

February 17, 2007

Perhaps it is necessary to take one step back in order to effectively advance. One of the most pervasive problems is the sense of self-assurance of authorities—religious as well as political. However, we have now a number of tools that allow for a finer investigation of truth claims: semantics, investigative journalism, skeptical history, the study of propaganda, psychoanalysis, the postmodernist critiques of various systems of thought, and so forth.

I want to add here that a great deal of folly is supported by two dynamics: First, people tend to avoid thinking about that which they do not know how to think or talk about. There isn’t a generally-known and agreed-on vocabulary, nor a subtle “Roberts’ Rules of Order” for ordinary rational discourse. (Well, there is—it’s called logic—but surprisingly few people bother to play by those rules, even when used in small doses. Indeed, I find few people really know what those rules are, or more specifically, few are able to identify common logical fallacies.)

The second dynamic is psychologically determined: One can sustain an illusory state based on a few supportive images and some supportive people, even in the face of a good deal of evidence to the contrary. It is a feature of selective attention and overgeneralization. If I/we mean well, and have done some nice things, then I/we  must be good, and what I do must be good.

Several forms of folly can operate concurrently. One is the illusion that “what I know is sufficient.” Given that there is enough material to construct a coherent and (at least temporarily) effective adaptation, a system of thought may be clung to in spite of continuing assaults by those who note the limitations, internal inconsistencies, logical fallacies, and other illusory elements in that system. “It works for me” can work, be effective in countering the disconcerting experience or cognitive dissonance.

Children learn to lie this way, simply affirming what is not so, in order to convince themselves as well as the world that the world is the way they wish it to be. Naughtiness can be sincerely denied, and the truth repressed, locked away in the unconscious. Punishment rarely addresses this sin of self-deception, and such habits may progress throughout adulthood.

A second form of folly is generated in support of the first, a mixture of pride and willed ignorance, then justified by calling into question the authority, ability, integrity, motivation, or virtue of anyone who challenges the stability and virtue of one’s own preferred system. Some feature of “them” will be misinterpreted and exaggerated. Overgeneralizations, stereotypes, name-calling, and so forth can evolve from this.

The third form of folly arises when those who represent exceptions to the system, the minority, or those who would challenge the system, become scapegoats. We’d win if it weren’t for their holding us back. This then justifies untold degrees of persecution, genocide, and wickedness rationalized and justified in the service of the greater good—which really means sustaining the complacency, subservience, and benefits to those in power.

The point here is that consciousness transformation requires as a baseline a clear acceptance of the prevalence and effects of individual and group patterns of limited consciousness. We should integrate into the middle- and high-school curriculum programs to teach about semantics, propaganda analysis, rhetoric and its appeals to irrationality, semiotics, the pitfalls of political and commercial advertising, journalism, and a certain amount of dynamic psychology (especially the adjustive maneuvers or defense mechanisms identified by psychoanalysis).

We’re talking about critical thinking here, a phrase that is given lip service, but rarely actually addressed in contemporary education at almost any level. Even at the graduate and post-graduate levels of academia, there is little support for questioning the assumptions or limitations of the majority faculty’s pet theories.

What if, instead, the virtue of systematic humility were recognized as a vital component of any consciousness transformation, insight, or wisdom? What if I were wrong, or mistaken, in whole or in part? In business, they have a term for this: Quality Assurance. In complex systems, it is recognized that problems will arise. New people come onto the job lacking training or needing to unlearn habits they acquired that may interfere with the work. Technologies change, need updating, and the transition to this updating, and coordination of the new technology with the old, inevitably leads to glitches. Markets shift, demographics change, in the workforce as well as the customer base. Financial circumstances evolve, from the top down. Attitudes change about what should be an entitlement in the workplace shift. Sensitivities to what constitutes age discrimination, racial or gender discrimination, sexual harassment, or acceptable levels of stress in the workplace. Put these and other factors together and there is no way that a system can remain stable. Quality assurance assumes that problems will crop up and seeks to anticipate these, or at least develop ways of rapidly detecting and responding to them.

Quality assurance is a nice phrase, but what it really refers to is an effective assessment, identification of relevant factors, evaluation of underlying rules and dynamics, developing hypotheses about which changes might be effective, based on the previous assessment, working out procedures for testing, revising, refining, and implementing those changes, and including the human interface—keeping people informed, morale high, and so forth. Adaptation, then, is really a quite complex process.

We see it in rudimentary form as we watch an infant learn how to stand and walk. But this systems analysis and correction applies to adult situations, also. One interfering operation is caused by the intrusion of a competing shame-pride system. This is what the process of systematic humility must correct.

Humility is simply the application of the recognition that one might be mistaken. Humiliation is the compounding of the perception of having made a mistake, making a big deal about it. Humiliation is rarely if ever necessary, but it is an inevitable stage in the developmental process. Child rearing should help youngsters, learn how to recognize and cope with shame effectively. Sometimes, shame is good, it inhibits brashness, impulsivity, and various forms of folly—and, indeed, that is what it has evolved to do as a fundamental operation in the nervous system. Compounded shame, humiliation, is an artifact of the reflective, self-conscious human mind. Animals don’t get embarrassed. And in most situations, we should cope with making a mistake by registering the mistake, or sometimes even ignoring it, and moving on.

You’ve heard the phrase, “anger managment,” as trends towards the integration of psychology increasingly impact our culture. Next we need “shame management,” so people learn to overcome excessive degrees of shame and enhance their capacity for improvisation, engagement, public speaking, speaking up in group settings, and so forth. (Yes, there are some folks who need the opposite—a greater capacity to both experience and be inhibited by shame, but this is a different problem.)

These various components should be recognized as part of the foundation of consciousness transformation. There tends to be a childish impatience, a desire to “be all grown up,” as if that status would then automatically make up for all the residues of folly that haven’t been actually worked through piece by piece. The desire to be “saved” and taken into “Heaven” has some of the same features: There’s a feeling that the self is impossibly contaminated, complex, and cannot be taken apart and developed. In contrast, what if people more pervasively assumed that such a psychological and moral analysis and correction process can work, bit by bit? People can use systematic humility to help themselves and each other to mature, be forgiven, clarify their minds, and learn each lesson clearly and effectively. Having learned the lessons, further forgiveness isn’t needed, or is assumed. No saving is needed as the individual isn’t lost.

What I’m suggesting is that there are no short cuts, and none should be sought. Consciousness transformation is a continuous exercise of love, faith, and responsibility.

Discerning Faith

There are two meanings to the term, “faith,” and yet they tend to overlap in ways that muddy up our thinking.

The first meaning refers to a kind of willed optimism in the face of ambiguity. I think there should be at least some plausible reasons for optimism, and no significant evidence that contradicts this attitude. A certain number of issues in life are this way, and faith is thus an attitude that, like love and responsibility, tends to be on the whole quite useful in engaging life in a constructive fashion. As such, most find faith to be a virtue.

The second meaning of the word “faith” is the adherence to a belief that often stands in contrast to what seems obviously or intuitively true, or in the absence of evidence, or even flies in the face of evidence. It is a euphemism, a way to cling to an attitude, a relationship (even when it is abusive), or a system. The benefits of irrational belief derive from social support, belonging, reassurance, and operate at a rather primitive level.

Faith as irrational belief often mixes with the first usage, and rides on its figurative coattails. Buoyed up by an increase in morale that comes from social support and the affirmation of an often paradoxical belief system, many people perform acts of benificence. Alas, with the same belief, in other contexts, they may use these beliefs to justify great wickedness.

The mind assesses probabilities in distorted ways, and this has been shown repeatedly. People believe what they secretly or overtly wish to believe, what will serve their needs and desires. There is an amazing capacity to rationalize these beliefs, and if three good reasons can be assembled, that may obscure three unworthy motivations and some fallacious assumptions at the root of a system. If some good comes out of it, how could it be rotten? This type of thinking operates in large aggregates of ideas, images, historical events, and selects those that serve its desire, conveniently forgetting or ignoring those that exemplify negative extensions or effects of that same belief.

Thus, religious institutions have claimed the moral high ground in spite of a long history of support for war, slavery, the violent subjugation of women, child abuse, torture, religious persecution, gross superstition, witch hunts, internal corruption and hypocrisy, and so forth. Like the Wizard of Oz, it said, figuratively, “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” In a deeply irrational denial of the intrinsic faults of the system itself, any wickedness identified in later years was attributed to the faults of individuals—not the system.

The Mystery of Death

One of the most difficult problems is that we are taught that it is a tragedy for us to die. Other people are able to attain eternal life, and continued happiness. Hey, if they can, why can’t I? Why should I have to sacrifice my ego, the illusory aggregate of thoughts about who I am and what I am entitled to? The key, here, is the irrational factor of social comparisons. Everyone else gets it, so it would be unfair—and this is experienced at a very deep, inner-child level—if I have to not get it. It’s like, “How come they get a Christmas Tree and I have to settle for this lousy Hanukah menorah?” We’re talking about the deep feelings of expectation of who gets what, and what happens when it seems as if they are getting much more than we are.

Lest this seem to trivialize death and the great profundity of contemplations and philosophy given to this conundrum, I insist on the right to question some very fundamental assumptions. The first is a deeply felt “right” to not die. The depth of this feeling can bend our thoughts— make no mistake about it! Still, that doesn’t justify the assumption that the consequent thoughts are rational, because if we dare to question clearly, they aren’t.

The problem boils down to the question of identity, self, and all sorts of complexities. Okay, there’s life after death—let’s for the moment grant that. Now don’t wiggle away when I ask, “What is that life about, what is it like?”
    Which parts of you continue in the afterlife? Which physical features, emotional features, personality quirks, intelligence abilities?
    If you’re tone deaf, do you get fixed so you can solo in the heavenly choir?
    If you’re klutzy, do you remain klutzy and have to stay off the skate-cloud team?
    If you have bad hair, what does that do to your halo?
    Are there some weaknesses that you have become aware of in later life operate in certain ways as strengths? Or some strengths that really reinforce certain weaknesses?
    Do you retain certain qualities that you would rather let go of?
    Are you forced to relinquish certain qualities that you would like to retain?
        If you were forced to relinquish some of those qualities, would that be painful? Torture? Experienced as Hell?  Purgatory, at least? Which qualities?  Any others?
    Do you continue to have numbers—addresses, social security numbers, phone numbers, email addresses? What do you need to remember? (Remember how hard it is to accurately remember, or read words, in the dream state.)
    Do you have to follow rules, and if so, which ones? No spitting? Farting? Do you get to eat food but never have a bowel movement? What if defecating is a special pleasure?
    How hard is it to sustain belief and orthodox dogma, to affirm certain ideas, when your mind is attenuated in the afterlife?
    Are there any challenges? Is it boring? Even if it is a cocaine-high, a heroin-high, a blissy floating, for how long would that actually be fun?
    And so forth. I’m looking for a true believer who will dare to tackle these questions and discuss them with me.

An Alternative Hypothesis

You die, the end. Your life has been a rich symphony, a product of your historical background, relationships, temperament, tastes, abilities, interests, all of which in turn have been a combination of both intrinsic and cultural elements. Whatever you might take with you, stripped of the history and culture, would be unrecognizable, like the steam in the locomotive. But the locomotive doesn’t continue. Your life has been a contribution to the ongoingness of the Greater Wholeness, the Creative Advance, the Evolution and Adventure of God. We might imagine that God is alone capable of fully knowing and appreciating the richness of even the most minute experiences of your life, and taking these into the Divine becoming, just as you might with infinite sensitivity allow the listening to the fulness of, say, a Beethoven symphony, to move and affect your life-becoming. This in itself should be recognized as glorious and meaningful, however minute and humble that contribution might be.

Or perhaps you might imagine yourself as a blood corpuscle that has helped in the vitality of a dancing Divinity, and that you, like blood corpuscles, have a time limit, you die, dissolve, and your components become partly degraded and excreted, and partly re-cycled into new blood cells and other parts of body nutrients—for that is what happens to blood corpuscles—still, you are part of the living-ness of a greater vitality in the Kosmos. That’s pretty good.

Or perhaps you imagine that you are the product of innumerable general and local historical events, and that in your life you have in turn generated innumerable general and local historical events, however minute, based on your actions. You’ve supported this cause with a subscription to this magazine; attended a concert of that artist; helped build the world, for better or worse, by your job and your behavior in relationships, and so forth. This, too, is a kind of subtle immortality, even if your name and face is forgotten.

After all, is your name and face the essential truth? What do you really want remembered, anyway? For myself, I would rather you found these words stimulating to your mind, advancing your thinking, and if you forget my name or face, that’s really rather peripheral to my desire. So we honor ancestors—those few of us who can remember, with the aid, perhaps, of genealogy—, but do we know what they really wanted us to know? What if we could gain access to their dying wish, their ethical wills? It might be that what they really wanted their lives to witness to was something quite different from who we think they were or what they represent to us?
    (Have you ever had a friend who was unorthodox or an unbeliever, and when he or she died, her funeral was traditional? I have. I’ve imagined him sitting up there laughing and saying, “Okay, if that comforts you, fine. I don’t care. But really, it’s not about me at all!”)

Anyway, my point is that relinquishing the ego, the sense of the personal self, doesn’t have to be all that big a sacrifice. It’s partly because we think it isn’t necessary, and that if we will ourselves to believe certain things—and that assumes a belief in the power of belief—, that we hold on to the belief that we really need the afterlife, that we would be cheated or, worse, punished somehow, if we couldn’t have it—because all our friends are getting it—, and so forth.

Yet there are hundreds of millions or even billions of people who don’t think this way and live full lives. Some believe in reincarnation, which is a kind of after-life, or it seems like it. Other thinkers see it all as illusion, and letting go of the personal self is itself simply giving up a useful scaffold, a structure that supported that illusion. It detracts not a whit from life’s meaning or purpose to accept that all living beings die, end, but the greater cosmos continues. Perhaps that isn’t so, but that belief requires far less metaphysical baggage than its opposite.

I can assure you with absolute confidence that I don’t know in any final sense what is the truth of this great mystery. Yet, using Occam’s Razor, the philosophical idea that a system should not multiply hypotheses unnecessarily—i.e., the simpler, the better—the quest then is for what belief tends to support the optimal attitudes in living and generates the fewest unfortunate side-effects.

Enough for now. I’m open to your comments.