Our society is over obsessed with change. This is almost to the point where we have created a near fantasy about how change may actually transform lives.
The history is full of much hyped and adrenaline pumping quotes on change.
Elections are fought and governments are toppled over with a promise of change.
The business community is over immersed into change management theories.
The education system is designed to create specialists who will then work on changing the existing narrative.
Let’s examine what change really is. At the root of it the word change means to alter.
It’s intriguing to delve further and understand that one can only alter the thing that already exists. This would mean that whatever one alters and changes is always a version of the old.
This basically translates into a very stark reality - that no matter what we apply our overhyped wisdom of change to, shall always remain a version of the old.
The process of change has uncovered value. A small change in technology or physical things may at times have a huge impact on its functionality. A change from film cameras to digital or from audio cassettes to digital devices are popular examples of this. Similar changes in medical equipments, defence capabilities and alike have had a big impact on people’s lives. It has also made fortunes for people who have driven these changes. Perhaps that in part explains our fascination about change.
Though nearly all of that value has been in the outer world of things.
In the inner world or our psyche as a human being has anything changed in the last 5000 years? Not as much as you may be inclined to believe.
Lets examine the most fundamental of things. Over a period of history human beings have been struggling with very basic things like fear, violence, hunger, insecurity and suffering. Human minds haven’t been able to solve the basic problems. No amount of understanding change has led us to be at peace. We have tried every possible idea of change that we could conceive of - from socialism to capitalism, from religion to atheism, from living in larger countries to dividing them into smaller ones, from wars to compromises and from educating kids to arming them with bullets. None of it has transformed our psyche. Zero.
Isn’t it a puzzling question? Why wouldn’t a human mind evolve and at the very least be able to conquer its own fears and find peace? Is 5000 years not enough time? What would it take to transform?
The word transformation comes from the word ‘trans’ which means to go beyond and the word ‘form’ which means a construct. Transformation means to go beyond the construct.
Can one go beyond the construct through a very process of altering or changing the construct? Is it even logical?
Thats exactly what we have tried to do and all we have succeeded in is in finding temporary escapes. You see a change from a behaviour of violence to a behaviour of nonviolence doesn’t mean that the violence ended. History stands proof to the fact that it got worse.
The mind that only knows how to play around and alter things is certainly not the mind that can go beyond the current and create the new. Surely it can go on changing things and that it does beautifully to the outer world. Sadly the same process doesn’t work in the inner world. In our quest for things outwardly we have created a complete mess inwardly. So much so that our fears and insecurities have today created a situation that it may take one mad man only a nano second of madness to press a button and end the world.
The intelligence needed for change and the one needed for transformation are totally different.
Intellect can drive change. The same intellect cannot go beyond the construct and create the new. The new isn’t visible because if it were then it wouldn’t be new.
Creation in nature happens seamlessly, effortlessly and almost always beautifully. In our minds that are totally guided by self entered interests, we have ensured that we remain devoid of the basic intelligence of creation that almost all of the rest of nature seems to have.
Going beyond the construct to create something new is transformation. That transformation needs a different intelligence. That different intelligence is all around us in the rest of life.
Is it even logically possible for you to access it through an old mind? Can you gather the courage to go beyond that itself?
May be a good starting point will be to acknowledge that “I don’t know and have never known how to create” and now maybe there’s something to find out.
Otherwise we live to suffer. It’s only been 5000 years yet.
Chetan Walia
Explore the BeOne program on Creating Creators