Consciousness & Change: Don't tell me, show me.

Have you ever attempted to change someone’s mind or help someone "get it"? It is impossible isn’t it? I mean, for someone to truly change requires a revolution or evolution and an increased state of consciousness-- on one's part. This doesn’t occur over night and in a limited culture context. I cannot change someone; I can only change myself.

Ken Wilber says, in order for any sort of genuine transformation to occur--or any sort of real "revolution"--one must possess a new paradigm, which means that it must possess, not a new theory or worldview, but a new type of social practice, mode of production, concrete behavioral injunctions, or experimental exemplars. These social practices, injunctions, or exemplars--these new paradigms and methodologies--generate, enact, bring forth, and illumine new types of experiences, occasions, data, phenomena. Ken Wilber says that research suggests that somewhere around 25% of the population is traditional, 40% is modern, 20% postmodern, and only 2% or so is at integral or higher.

I think it is important to recognize that a new paradigm does not occur simply because one has more information. One has to be at a state of consciousness that he/she is willing to receive the new data. Think about your own life, most any paradigm shift occurred gradually and through time as you received more information and encountered new experiences. Perhaps some of your long held ideas of self or God changed as you moved from on cultural context to another.

Harvard professor Robert Kegan suggest five primary stage of consciousness.
Human beings develop through stages of consciousness, although not everyone achieves the higher levels. As new-born infants, we're unable to differentiate ourselves from our surroundings. We then begin to realise that our mothers are separate from us and that our bodies represent our boundaries. The third stage is socialization, where we examine the values of our tribe or culture and adopt those that resonate with us, so gaining our sense of identity. Adults who are at a lower stage are unable to see that maintaining good relationships is fundamental to their own well-being. Kegan's fourth stage is self-authoring consciousness, where we've recognized the validity of multiple viewpoints and that our culturally-derived values are insufficient, and so we formulate our own values - a quite outstanding mental achievement. At the fifth or self-transforming stage, we begin to recognize all ideologies as partial, and to seek to build relationships between them. In this way, not only do we approach our own potential, we accept our responsibility, as the most intelligent of living creatures, to look towards the welfare of the whole of our planet and its lifeforms - human, animal and environmental. (Source)

The only person I can change is myself. Thinking that I "get it" and wanting to fix others so they "get it" just like me is a sign that I haven't yet "got it." I can help others become more conscious more by what I do and less by what I say. The "doing" requires my having first evolved and changed with an understanding that I am continuing to evole. I need to remember this the next time I think I need to defend my postion in order to attempt to change another's mind. Don't tell me who you are or what you think, show me.