A Soldier Murdered in Woolwich, and Gandhi's 'Way Out of Hell'

After the awful events of the previous day, yesterday I had the pleasure of listening on-line to the Harvard professor, Bob Kegan, giving a talk at the RSA. It will be available in a few days in both audio and video versions (http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2013/the-further-reaches-of-adult-development-thoughts-on-the-self-transforming-mind)

Professor Kegan is interested in how the human mind goes on developing even once adulthood has been reached, and has spent a lot of time researching this subject.

We are said to have reached adulthood once we have developed a ‘socialised’ mind. Many of us do not develop further than that, though some of us do go on to develop what Kegan calls a ‘self-authoring’ mind. Some adults, though a small percentage at the moment, go on further to develop a ‘self- transforming’ mind. Over the years Kegan has never come across anyone who has gone back a stage, though he has found many increments within each stage.

The socialised mind,  the stage at which the majority of adults in the world remain, seems to me to correlate with Maslow’s ‘need to belong’ (in his ‘hierarchy of needs’ model, which is taught widely in business schools as a tool for understanding the various motivations of workers.) I would also correlate it with Spiral Dynamic’s ‘blue’ or traditional stage.

The socialised mind  is a wonderfully civilising level, where the individual’s focus shifts from ‘me, me, me’ to ‘us’. The good of one’s ‘tribe’ becomes paramount here, and it’s where loyalty to one’s family, religion and country springs from. The rule of law is accepted, even when it inconveniences the individual, for the greater good. There is a reliance on tradition for deciding how life is to be carried on.

I think the correlation in Kabbalah would be the so called ‘vegetable’ person (although I really hate that term) because those of us who have developed to the socialised mind state, though not beyond, are happy providing we can lead comfortable lives – eat, grow, reproduce, and feel the sun on our skins (the simple things for which so many of yearn!) See my earlier post on this: Vegetable,Animal and Human People.

Those of us who go on to develop a self- authoring mind also need those things, especially a set of laws which apply to all; one doesn’t suddenly start driving on whichever side of the road one feels like, when it’s much more sensible to stick to the left like everybody else in the UK. However, people moving into this stage find a new capacity for independence, especially independence of thought. “Emotional life seems to be more internally controlled” as well. (Kegan, 1982, page 102). At this stage the individual’s ‘sphere’ of loyalty tends to get wider, going gradually from ‘ethnocentric’ towards world-centric’. Kegan himself, in the book quoted above, “The Evolving Self”, equates this level with the ‘need for self- esteem’ stage in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs model, and talks of people at this stage exercising “personal enhancement, ambition or achievement” (page 120).

In Kabbalah, I would correlate people at this stage with those referred to as ‘animal people’.

The next development is that which most excites Kegan.  He says that he has not yet encountered a stage of development beyond this, though he admits that this may be because he isn’t able to recognise it. (It is widely accepted that up until and including the self-authoring level, the level before is seen as ‘backward’ and the next level as incomprehensible and threatening. People generally have a nasty habit of killing other people who stand out at or represent a level or two above.)

A person with a self- transforming mind is able to hold multiple interpretations of one situation at the same time, more and more comfortably as they develop further into this stage. Strange, confusing and even irrelevant as this would seem to many of us, this is ‘a way out of hell’. In last night’s talk, Kegan referred to an incident in Gandhi’s life – particularly relevant as I write this, a couple of days after the brutal murder of a soldier in Woolwich. 

A Hindu comes to Gandhi to tell him he has killed a Muslim child by hitting its head against a wall, because Muslims killed his own child. Now he was ‘in hell’. Gandhi (a Hindu himself) suggests a way out of that hell – to adopt an orphaned Muslim child, and bring it up in its own faith, while continuing to practise Hinduism himself. This is a suggestion from a self-transforming mind. In Kabbalah I’m presuming that a person at this level of development would be called a human person.

Kegan reported last night that he had never come across this stage fully developed in anybody who had not yet reached mid-life. (Can I throw in here that I think I may have met younger people who were well on the way? But I’m not an expert.) He pointed out that two thirds of the people who have ever lived / are living into their sixties are alive now, life expectancy having grown that much in the last few decades. He assumes therefore that many more people will develop self-transforming minds and this is most propitious, because socialised and self authoring minds cannot solve the problems on this planet caused by socialised and self authoring minds! Only from the next level, which includes and goes beyond the two previous levels, will that be possible.