Today’s lesson is a continuation of last week’s Orders of Consciousness lesson, and will be referring to “In Over Our Heads” by Robert Kegan. At times, his book most certainly goes over my head, but I have attempted to the best of my ability the explain the concepts within.
Hopefully you’ve experienced some awareness of your excessively selfish or socialized thoughts since the last lesson. Whether it is a past awareness or current tendencies that you still cling to, you shouldn’t be ashamed of your lower orders of consciousness. They are all necessary and they are all natural to have. In a world that would remain naturally inclined, there would hardly be issue in being extremely concerned with what your immediate community thinks of you. Unfortunately for the Third Order minded, humanity has advanced technologically and socially to the point that we’ve weaved complex, elaborate webs of priority, responsibility and stimulation. We are required to manage and track regularly interacting and interdependent group of objects forming a unified whole, a whole that we cannot properly fathom at times. I hesitate to say we’ve created these systems, but rather they have been left to us by our ancestors; being left to us by those experienced in systemic thinking, it isn’t a wonder that we have a difficult time explaining and navigating the arrangements of human society successfully.
We must begin to think systemically if we are to meet the requirements of this artificial and cold world we have been born into and maintain our sanity. Let us remember the previous lesson about being excessively socially minded: one’s experiences are defined by the feelings and opinions of others. One is overly concerned with upsetting others or creating conflicts with the desires of someone else. Remember what the goal of my lessons are: to achieve a level of autonomy to become something greater than what you are, to be what you choose to be. One cannot wield any autonomy when one is excessively concerned with the feelings of others. It is extraordinarily difficult to focus on self-improvement when your ego constantly stands in the line of fire of friends, family or even strangers. It can be even more difficult to do what is truly best for others without being able to divorce your being from their states of mind. First, we have to define and demonstrate what a system is.
Your group of friends is a system. Your family is a system and within your family there are subsystems such as the parent-child relationship, sibling relationships, etc. Your employment is a system. Most importantly your feelings, mentally stability and values are separate from these systems. The systemic order of consciousness is one that births the concept of “self-authorship,” wherein one chooses how their meaning-making operates. There lies a difficulty in learning more about the fourth order of consciousness while operating in the third order due to the fundamental differences in the demands of systemic thinking. Up until this point, a person has been defined by their external and internal environments.
Kegan speaks on adult education experts that try to reach adults that still operate in the third order:
“When the adult education experts tell us they want students to ‘understand how to separate what they feel from what they should feel, what they value from what they should value, and what they want from what they should want’ they may not be taking seriously enough the possibility that when the third order dominates our meaning-making, what we should feel is what we do feel, what we should value is what we do value, and what we should want is what we do want. Their goal therefore may not be a matter of getting students merely to identify and value a distinction between two parts that already exist, but a matter of fostering a qualitative evolution of mind that actually creates the distinction.” [p 275]
I will demonstrate this type of meaning making with what I imagine is an almost universal example: sexual arousal. For myself, being sexually aroused meant an almost complete takeover in my mental state. That sexual arousal is a primal drive that compels us to masturbate, or have sex. It defines our experience to be aroused, regardless of what we were doing. Amusingly, consider the contrasts in the following statements: “I am horny” versus “I have horniness.” The latter phrase sounds pretty robotic and ridiculous, does it not? From a new perspective, it is even more ridiculous to waste productive energy and time on a feeling that could come up at any time, triggered by the unending multitude of stimulating imagery either plastered about in our society or imagined. We can apply this formula to basically anything: “I want to play video games” versus “I have the desire to play video games” or “I want to smoke weed, therefore I should” versus “I have the desire to smoke weed.” Advertisements and commercials are especially powerful on persons that are third order minded, because their beings are so intrinsically linked to what the outside world tells them. Vague suggestions from an ad that other people may not like you or respect you unless you dress a certain way or drive a certain car are insidiously powerful on people that cannot separate themselves from the feelings of themselves or others.
Using different scenarios as examples:
“I go to work because that is my job” versus “I go to work because someone will be upset with me if I don’t.”
“I put limitations on my children for their sake” versus “I let my children do whatever they want so they don’t hate me.”
“I must vote for this party because they’re my party” versus “I will vote for this party because I agree with their values.”
The fourth order is a shifting of the subject-object paradigm, our desires and instincts are no longer the subject of our experiences but rather they become objects we can manually maneuver around at will. In my opinion, this is what truly separates us from the rest of the animals on Earth, our ability to choose against our instincts. A quick and dirty method of really illustrating the difference of this thought paradigm is as follows: when you have a strong instinctual desire for something that isn’t necessary to being alive, whether it be an action or substance that you wouldn’t have hesitated to assuage, pause. Use your willpower to prevent yourself from acting on that primal desire for as long as possible. When this “pause” goes on long enough, there may occur a strong affectional shock, perhaps accompanied with a feeling of dissatisfaction, guilt or shame of oneself. Kegan tells us: “the ability thus to subordinate, regulate and indeed create (rather than be created by) our values and ideals – the ability to take values and ideals as object rather than the subject of our knowing—must necessarily be an expression of a fourth order of consciousness, evinced here in the mental making of an ideology or explicit system of belief.” [p.91] I’ve experienced this myself, after long drinking binges I would stop, either from lack of money or a destruction of another valued friendship. In those sobers lulls, I would feel extreme dissatisfaction and shame with myself. I was frequently visited by profound psychological insights during these times, I would put together the patterns of inner psychological understanding of what I was doing to myself and why, yet I was unable to make any changes. The issue lay with my inability to do something productive with my insights because I was simply the experiencer of my own internal psychology, not the creator of it.
Frankly, I have difficulty understanding the precise mental mechanics of thinking in the Fourth Order sometimes, probably because I am still evolving mentally. Thinking in higher orders is more than just the result of mental exercise, it can be considered “a wholly different way of constituting what the self is, how it works, what it is most about. This is a self that has gone from being identified with and made up by trans-categorical structures of belief, value, and role to relativizing these structures, being aware of a stance toward or relationship to these structures, that is, of having them as object rather than being them as subject.” [p.111] What this means is that when one’s manner of thinking begins to evolve to the fourth order from the third, you aren’t becoming a “stronger” or “more confident” version of your previous self, you are shedding the preconceptions you had about how you arrive at your ideas. This is a striving to achieve “psychological independence.”
How do we begin to “self-author” ourselves? I believe it takes time, hard work, and dedication to understanding how one defines themselves and choosing to make changes mentally to one’s own internal milieu. The addict’s problem is that they simply do not perceive their addictions as separate from their self: “this is what I am, this is how I’ve always been.” There may be flashes of regret or shame, but they cannot let go of their addiction because that would be the equivalent of destroying their whole world. Certainly, the destruction of one’s world is a terrifying prospect especially when one has lived there their whole lives and cannot see beyond it. Therein lies the key, the opportunity to make of your life whatsoever you choose after you’ve separated the self from transitory feelings. The realization that you’ve been living a fantasy life and that reality is far different than what you believe is a powerful one. With such realizations, one can reshape their lives in whatever ways they see fit. However, it takes mental effort and patience to be able shift perspective as such. I won’t pretend to be fully evolved into the Fourth Order of consciousness, as I still often find myself at the whim of my emotions.
On the horizon, we can begin to see the vague outline of my encompassing theory from the lessons thus far and will certainly be more elaborated on with further lessons: a person’s order of consciousness at any given time could possibly be directly linked to their level of stimulation. Remember, overstimulation can burn you out mentally and physically. Being burnt out can drive you to make selfish actions or demands, as well as seeing the world completely differently. Addicts are perpetually trapping themselves in lower level thought processes because they are constantly stimulating themselves and they are unable to fully comprehend what they are even doing. Compounded with the concept of losing one’s ability to naturally produce certain ligands and therefore emotions without their artificial, exogenous crutches, it makes for a perfect storm that seems near impossible to break. Yet, the key is to stop and think. Beyond stopping and thinking, there lies entire realms of new things to learn about or try. Just trying a new hobby or talking to new people can make the mind more amenable to expansion, as our goal here isn’t to just rewire but also unwire yourself.
As we delve further into these lessons, the “master plan” should begin to unfold without my explicit explanation. I’m hesitating to dive further into my own personal whole operating theory without fully explaining the several different aspects of it first. The big picture will be incomplete without all of the pieces being laid out clearly, thus I will be slowly but surely be elucidating the different aspects and how they will relate in due time.
Your turn: What order of consciousness do you believe you operate in on a daily basis? It’s not so simple as being on a third or fourth order consciousness, so consider what you look at systemically, and what you look at with instinctual thought. You may find yourself to be operating on a mixture of levels at any given moment.