Robert Kegan: The Evolution of the Self

[Music] Robert Keegan has been a pioneering developmental psychologist at Harvard since the 1970s in the tradition of the likes of Jean Piaget his major insight was to show how development went far beyond adolescence and into adulthood his models lay out the major processes of development from impulsive self interest to socialized mind self authoring and self transforming mind so Bob it's a real pleasure to speak with you it's same David for our audience we've done a recent couple of films that were quite popular with Ken Wilber introducing the concept of developmental theory and you're you teach developmental theory at Harvard and unknown is sort of one of the biggest one of the most reputed figures in the field how would you wires developmental theory important in a way developmental theory is just helping us to better understand our fullest possibilities so you know a caterpillar is not meant to die as a caterpillar it has a destiny to grow wings and fly the developmental theory is just part of a bigger mission to encourage the greater realization of human potential so that fewer and fewer of our brothers and sisters die as caterpillars and more of us become butterflies could you briefly outline your model and how it differs from other models I mean people might be familiar with say Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs where at the bottom we have sustenance at the top we have self-actualization I guess that was the most sort of that was probably the one that made developmental thinking popular in the 70s and people might be familiar with Ken Wilbur's model as well what are the stages in your model and does it map on to those at all well maybe in different ways my theory is often referred to as a constructive developmental theory which means that it kind of brings together two very powerful ideas the first is constructivism the notion that reality doesn't just sort of happen up to us preformed one of the things we do as human beings is give shape to raw experience and make it into something meaningful for us and that idea of constructivism runs through many many different psychological and philosophical orientations then another very very big idea is the notion of developmental ism that is that living organisms and systems including human beings don't just grow in the sense of getting bigger and bigger we evolve become more complex I mean when a baby is born when you were born David your head was 1/3 the size of your body just like every other infant but as we grow you know I don't become you know 6 foot and have a two-foot head all right so there's a way in which we we grow through stages that kind of form and and reform now if you take the idea of constructivism the notion that we're making meaning of things and the notion of developmental ism and put them together you begin to get this idea that the very way in which we construct reality itself transforms across different stages so there are in other words different logics that gradually develop over time if you if you will or we call them psycho logics because we're talking about kind of the essence of psychology and that and that growing in our meaning-making or even in our wisdom is not about just knowing more and more through a given logic but actually having the underlying logic itself become more and more common in a way to borrow a phrase from my friend ken wilber that transcends but includes the prior logic so 10 I think is one of the great synthetic thinkers on the planet and he brings together a whole lot of different wisdom traditions and in Western academia would be more lines of research and I think one of the most useful of his heuristics is that kind of for box model that kind of underlies the notion of taking a more integrated or holistic perspective on any phenomenon and those four boxes which I'm sure many of those looking at this are familiar with but just in case they're not as kind of just think about the difference between the individual level and the collective level and then think about the difference between the interior and the exterior and that gives you these four boxes now if you zoom in on one of those quadrants thinking about the interior development of the individual that's the box in which you know I spent the first part of my professional life working largely as a theorist to better understand the gradual evolutions of interior individual development standing initially on the shoulders of of Jean Piaget the Swiss psychologist who was the first to kind of elucidate stages of child development and in particular the ways the children organized the physical world and kind of their cognition and my work has been to widen the aperture from cognition to the ways in which we organize all the primary quadrants of personality how we think yes but also how we feel how we construct our social relations with others and how we construct our interior relationships too of ourselves and so my theory kind of opened the aperture beyond just cognition and then extended the study beyond children and adolescence which is kind of where Piaget ended to sort of consider the question you know is there life after adolescence and can we actually continue to grow psychologically even when we've reached our full height physically I mean literally when I started graduate school at Harvard in the 1970s if you were a developmental psychologist it meant you studied infants children or adolescents end of story because that was the period the first 20 years of life let's say when we believed psychological development actually occurred we'd yoked our notions of physical development to psychological development and just as most of us reach our full physical stature let's say in our 20s early 20s it was believed that that was kind of the end state for the development of the of the brain even and brain scientists were very adamant you know what are we talking about 40 years ago now maybe that there were no further qualitative transformations and in brain material after about the first 20 years of life and our research and my colleagues and I basically never felt that seemed very sensible I mean just by common sense you live among adults and you see that some people seem to be kind of making meaning and qualitative qualitatively perceiving the world and at a greater depth you know than others and so we began to kind of explore all that and and today you know and I have many friends who are you know quote hard scientists neuroscientists and you know today they have recanted that kind of constricted dogma and all talk now about the phenomenal neuroplasticity of the brains kind of one of the few instances in which the scientist psychologists were actually maybe a bit out ahead of the hard scientists that's Norman Doidge for example the brain that changes itself and the idea of neuroplasticity yeah yeah thinking fast thinking slow Connor men I mean I think that all of Neurosciences were canted the notion that you know the brain is basically done in terms of its development I mean even then of course people probably would grant this notion that some people seem to be wiser than others but they they attributed that largely to the fact that some people were getting more out of the same equipment than other people and that experience of course matters and so some people are wiser not because they're actually kind of making sense of the world with an upgraded system but rather that they're just learning how to get more out of the same system and I think what what what we've come to show is no the the system itself which we have long understood those through qualitative transformations in childhood and adolescence Contini has the potential to continue transforming on into our 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s and Beyond and could you outline what the the basic distinctions are in the model I'm aware of some of the terms you talk about the socialized mind and the self authoring mind for example could you outline what those are and what those mean sure so I'll give you a concrete example since these things are often like pictures worth a thousand words I was talking with a social worker the other day who works with adolescents who have come out of the court system and who've committed you know crimes and so on and she was talking about a young man you know maybe 16 17 years old who had a record of auto theft and she'd been working you know with them and she told me about a session she had with him where he he came to her and said you know you'd be proud of me because I do still I know I shouldn't but I still do hang out with a number of rough friends who could easily get me in trouble and you know just this weekend I was hanging out with them and they wanted they wanted to wanted me to join them in stealing a car and ordinarily you know I might have just gone along with that and because of our work together you know I didn't I'm really glad to hear about that you know so tell me a little bit more he said well you know they wanted me to steal this car and I i I was going to and I stopped and I thought to myself if I steal this car there's a very good chance we're gonna get caught if I get caught because I'm on probation unlike these other friends you know they're gonna get let off I'm gonna go back to jail and she said that she said and well you know I'm really I'm really glad burned that you you know didn't steal the car but I have to be honest and say that I wished the reason you chosen not to steal the car was not just that if you did you might go to jail but because you gave some thought to kind of how that person would feel and the fact that his car's not your car and then he would naturally feel bad and she said he just looked right at me and he said yes but I'm not there yet and she she sat back and she thought you know that was a beautiful answer that she was and he was being absolutely truthful and that her hope for him was a little further ahead of kind of where he was and you know she was kind of telling a story on herself kind of saying how you know you can learn from your clients even from your 16 year old clients now when he said I'm not quite there yet from a developmentalist point of view we would also feel like he was telling a very important truth what are you saying was just give me credit for the fact I didn't steal the car by but my underlying logic is still about what's my best interest and the reason I didn't steal it was because I had at least enough foresight to consider that I could get caught I could get sent to jail that is itself a given stage of development it is the stage that comes before the socialized mind which she was hoping for was a qualitatively different stage where people live not only to pursue their own interests and kind of look at others as sort of opportunities to get their own needs met or obstacles to getting their needs met but where you actually begin to internalize something of the the values and beliefs of others around you it starts with your your society as that make it conveyed through your immediate family or your faith community others beyond it and eventually there's the possibility that I start relating to others family members friends society not just in terms of you know getting my own needs met but where I actually become more a part of society because society has become more a part of me I begin to internalize the values beliefs and expectations of important people around me we call that the socialized mind because you begin to develop the internal psychology that permits socialization that permits you to become a member of a tribe that permits you to become a part of a community of interest larger than what larger than your own self-interest where you will be able to actually subordinate some of your maybe short-term interests on behalf of enhancing the relationship and when that stage evolves typically in adolescence it is a cause for relief and celebration on the part of parents and and the community at large who live with this adolescent it enables employers of fast-food businesses who want to hire teenagers to feel they can hire a person who's begun to make that transition because they become trustworthy you can kind of count on them they may be able to keep their agreements not just because they'll get into they don't but because they want you to continue to trust them and to respect them and so on and in very traditional societies which for the most part don't exist anymore on our planet where there you know you could live with it your whole life within a relatively contained kind of ecological niche and where there was a single definition of how one should live and how what it means to be an elder or what it means to be a man or a woman in this tribe the socialized mind might have been completely adequate to the rest of one's life but in a modern increasingly postmodern world where we have so many different definitions of how one should live and who what one should be where there are increasing demands from all quarters for us to resolve complex problems where there's not a single unified set of expectations for us to align ourselves with the socialized mind becomes inadequate to the task what does it take what does it take to not just accommodate yourself to what is expected and to let be shaped by kind of the environment but to begin to create an internal Authority an internal compass an internal way it becomes a filter through which you evaluate the many claims on your attention and on your values where you look at the expectations as they come in from your society from your employer from your intimate partner and you say I I you hopefully say I respect that that that's your expectation but I I also entitle myself to make a certain judgment as to whether I want to meet that expectation exactly like that all of that the ability to do those things which is increasingly required almost of any of now in this complex world in adulthood requires a qualitatively different stage than the socialized mind as valuable as that evolution was in adolescence it requires the ability not just to be written upon by your surround by your culture to be authored to by your culture but to sort of pick up that psychological pen yourself and to author your own identity your own set of beliefs and that authoring makes you then more of a personal authority and that's what we call that the self authoring stage and that transformation the gradual transformation from the socialized mind where you are a good member of the tribe so to speak to the self authoring mind where you remain obviously a member of your community but you're able to almost interrogate a bit its own rules and expectations and maybe act on them and that is your way actually through your own development of enhancing the culture and the surround in which you live instead of just imbibing it and sort of taking it in you you now have the ability to step back a bit from these expectations and sort of make judgments about them this is a tremendously empowering and inspiring move as you come into your own voice but before you confidently move into the self authoring stage as with any transition there is often a lot of terror and anticipated loss and if I object to the existing social and interpersonal arrangements that I've long been kind of contracting to what will be the results will you still love me will I be put out of my society these are all the questions that come up at the beginning kind of of this transition this gradual transformation which typically doesn't begin until the 20s and may not begin for someone until their forties or may not ever occur for them is the most dynamic and gradual transformation in adult development the move from the socialized to the self authoring mind but and I'll try to say this quickly because I know I'm going on for a long time it's not the final stage of development to put together your own internal Authority there can come a time in your own evolution where you come to recognize that as powerful as your own inner compass enables you to be that inevitably your system for making meaning with which you've become identified has limitations has blindsides leave something out privileges something and disadvantages something else and as you come to see those limits you have the potential now to again step away from something you have been completely embedded in that is the gradual move of development that you move from being subject to a way of making meaning to be able to step back from it and turn that into object so you cannot look at it be in some relationship to it and you begin to construct a new subjectivity one which in the wilber in phrase transcends but includes the prior way of knowing and that in in the present instance that we're discussing this ability actually step back from your own inner system begins a new voyage a new transitional journey that can lead to a quality yet a qualitatively more encompassing system what we call the self transforming mind so instead of being just identified with the particular form you have created you can now kind of see yourself as a self that creates forms that can move from one form to another that can hold multiple forms together it enables you to not just be a faithful of a buyer of the law and someone who stands within this this impressive system of law that guarantees rights to given individuals even if I don't know you and I'm not related to you by blood and so on which is what the fourth order is able to do starts constructing these institutions that are sort of outward reflections of the internal institution that you have constructed but in this next transition you can actually step back and say it's great that we have this legal system but just like my own internal system that legal system is always imperfect we might discover one day oh my goodness why don't we let women vote you know and we kind of see that you know up until now we've kind of you know excluded a certain group then we have the opportunity to act upon that system and reconstruct it so you have meta structures like within the u.s. system pardon the parochialism we have like a Supreme Court you know many democracies have that Supreme Court actually is a expression of the ability to say that it's it's important to sustain a system but it's also important to have a position to reflect on that system and see when it has limitations so you actually have to reconstruct those laws well that I'm just using that is almost an analogy on the political front is what is happening psychologically where you you you you you can still honor your form but you have a certain humility that recognizes it has limitations so those are the three qualitatively different stages of development in adulthood the socialized mind being a good member of the tribe to the self authoring mind where you begin to construct some of the terms by which you are going to be you know a member of a tribe or of a relationship it's not like relationships are not important to you anymore but instead of being really shaped by them you begin to bring certain criteria to them about how you want your relationships to be self on three-month and then the possibility of actually being able to interrogate now not just the expectations and rules of the society but to interrogate your own internal system which brings into being this third qualitative way of knowing or filter on the world that we call the self transforming mind that's a quick summary of thirty years of research and obviously Ken's model four people are familiar with it takes these user stages of development but then applies them to society at large that's right is your model useful for understanding the tensions in society at large I think it's very useful for understanding tensions in society at large but not necessarily in the way that Ken does it which tends to say look there are probably evolutionary patterns of development that can be brought to the collective level I'm not saying that isn't an interesting idea but it is not the only way to think at the at the level of society and so on from this kind of developmental perspective I think you can make a claim that this gradual move from the socialized mind to the self authoring mind which is the the biggest I mean numerically the most populous kind of place in the transition that where we see people are at that you can you can see that enacting itself at global levels as well so you know we're living in an age where almost in any direction you would look on the planet where we see both at once the the inspiring empowerment and liberation from the socialized mind where various kinds of groups enable that transformation that's kind of the the happiest side of that of that big evolution where you start feeling empowered and find your voice and kind of move more to the self authoring side as those trends become more and more influential across the world they become also more and more threatening to people who are more firmly embedded in the socialized mind and to feel that your interrogation of our social arrangements are an ultimate threat to my identity to my you know fundamentalism and those threats essentially constitute a trigger so the the emancipatory aspects of a general support a wider support worldwide for people's self authorship will inevitably have a shadowy kind of backlash a dimension to it where you don't just have that 16-year old juvenile delinquents saying I'm not there yet but you have a whole community of people who are triggered who feel violated by your declaration that it would be okay for people of the same sex to form a union BnB sexual partners or that it would be okay to reinterpret the literal nature of my holy book to even claim knowing you are still a Jew or you are still a participant of the Islamic faith but you have a different construction of what that faith might be so you what you also have happening in the world is you know people saying in their own way I'm not there yet but instead of saying it in this way that you know that young man did they may say it in a way that leads them to kill other people they may feel like they - you know strike out even at the risk of blowing themselves up in terrorist activities because they're essentially triggered by the ultimate threats to their own way of making meaning that these same emancipatory processes are enabling other people to come into a fuller fuller realization of their voices so let's just show you a little bit the way you can take develop individual developmental theory and use it to speak to you know what's going on in the bigger world and one of the things that can set an interview with with us that he did was that because developmental theory implicitly involves kind of hierarchies of cognition or hierarchies of development there was a real move against it in the 1960s and I think I think what he said was the developmentalist circled the wagons at Harvard and he mentioned your name and a few other people is that is that true and has that changed in any way or is there still a kind of taboo around this idea of hierarchies well first I think the the the trigger or the alert that goes up when anyone is faced with a hierarchy is something that ought to be respected because anytime somebody seems to be suggesting that something is better than something else it's a smart question to say on what basis you know are you making this claim and underneath that question is probably I'm not totally unfounded suspicions that whoever's making that claim is going to benefit from the hierarchy they've created then whoever's making that claim feels like they're somewhere near the top of that hierarchy so you know I teach the stuff over and over again to students who may be coming to it for the first time and you ask you know is this is this kind of response you know diminishing no I mean it it's it's it it comes up every single time I'll teach this class and it comes up because you know my students are off who moved to a place of a kind of greater respect for difference and who have come maybe to recognize their own tendency towards judgmentalism and who are privileged around of progressive or more liberal spirit that you know we shouldn't be saying that one thing's better than another and I very much enjoy welcoming in the forms of discomfort and provocation that a hierarchal presents to people and I encourage them to ask themselves you know on what basis is this hierarchy constructed and is it privilege and advantaging somebody like if it's constructed by a white guy from the Western world who's not poor you know is it basically advantaging that but the best way that we get at this is by showing the people that they hold a hierarchic theory themselves the hierarchy theory doesn't come from me it doesn't come from kin and it doesn't come from developmental theory I can show people a piece of film of somebody talking and you begin to get a sense of how they're constructing the world and I can ask them you know if this person were to undergo a transformative process if they were to have a valuable therapy experience or life itself or to be a great teacher for them can you imagine some other way that they might construct experience that you would consider is not just a different way but you would actually say you think that that way of construct things is actually more adequate that it has a better grasp on reality that it would make them a better parent in relationship to their child for them to have made that kind of move I never get any resistance to that question people could say oh yes I think if she were less concerned with what other people thought about her all the time she would actually be happier herself she'd probably be a better mother as well right now she's being led around the you know by her own daughter because she fears her daughter's disapproval of her she feels like if she doesn't answer certain questions she's being impermissibly secretive instead of being appropriately private and having a notion of boundaries and that there's some things you just don't tell your kid people become very very eloquent in expressing what they think would be a better way of handling the given dilemma that they can see in that piece of film and after they've done that I tell them wow you're pretty judgmental people as it turns out you think that this other way is not just different but actually better they say yes they think it says okay which one of us has a hierarchy the reality is that you know no adult feels at all provoked by the notion that a ten-year-old who realizes they're never gonna get older than their older brother that they're not going to change gender that when they move in one direction someone else moves in the other direction you know the moon can't follow us both these are all things that four-year-olds believe there's nobody who feels that the ten-year-old you know doesn't have a clear grasp of reality when they begin to distinguish between fantasy and reality as every child does between the ages of four intent people are completely at ease with hierarchic notions of how we construct reality when they're talking about children but when you start introducing the same ideas - - into the realm of adulthood it is understandably you know provocative but it's important for people to see and especially in academia um yeah why why was there such a resistance against it in academia I don't think it's an academia loan I mean I think it's it's an you know any any you know community of reflection and all that these are toxic these are ideas and things that got started and that could be Mia so they get most explored there because where else do you have the privilege of actually putting these big ideas on a table and having people spend 12 weeks and a semester thinking about them but you know if I were to go into I spend a lot of my life outside of academia I spend it in organizations that are trying to you know meet their goals whether their businesses or governmental agencies or you know in the social sector or whatever and they they have they know that they can do better and they want help and I could go in there and say you know part of the difficulties here that you know basically you know what you really need are more and more self authoring employees that's really what you're asking for people step up exercise responsibility not just be looking around all the time for someone to give them orders what you really want is more self authorship and I could lay out these developmental theories and there would be the same forms of discomfort that wait a minute you're grading us now I'm fine with the myers-briggs that somebody's an introvert somebody is an extrovert nobody's saying the extroverts better than the introvert they're just saying their differences I'm fine with that you want to bring that kind of psychology into my organization fine I'm fine with the inia Graham I'm fine knowing this guy's more of a peacemaker this person's you know more of a something else because no one's saying the peacemaker is any better than anybody else but what you're saying is that actually it would be better to do this okay so I would if I brought all that in explicitly you know into organizations as a way that I would begin to work in organization I would run into the same forms of discomfort because you know there's a lot of moral relativism that is strongly you know possessed by lots of people who basically are uncomfortable with the notion that some things are actually better than others and in these sort of developmental communities there's often this kind of tendency to it become a kind of development developmental one-upmanship kind of thing I'm more developed than you are well I'm more integral than you or whatever how do we avoid that I mean it's tiring if you spend any time around it yeah and and that's the problem is people what's happening is a given developmental position is sort of cannibalizing or taking over the developmental perspective you know if you're in this kind of like achievement-oriented things show me a ladder and I'm gonna climb to the highest rung as quickly as I possibly can then you know any kind of model you know is quickly gonna turn into a new commodity instead of I want to be rich I want to be famous no I want to be at a high stage of development okay it's basically the same kind of thing so you know I talked to you know Zen masters and the Roshi's and you know people who have spent their lives and you know monasteries you know and then they run into the same thing and I get Westerners who they want to be enlightened or even you know it becomes a new commodity how fast will it take and how much will it cost or okay I don't even need to be enlightened I just want to practice these wisdom traditions so that I have less stress and I'm a more effective executive and they have to deal with the same thing like you're turning what I'm offering you into a means to some other end which actually does violence to you know what the whole framework is about we're we started studying development because of the extraordinary joy and Wonder of engaging the miracle of being alive and the difference between being a human being and the chair that you're sitting on is that you have the potential whether you want to call it you know the underlying spirit like Hegel did that the Spirit is never at rest it's always working to give itself a new form that you have this this spirit of you know within you and and I do too and collectively we do that gives us the possibility like the caterpillar and the butterfly to actually transform and the whole intention of developmental theory was not to create a new ladder that one wants to climb to the top of as quickly as they can in turn the development into his joyless a ride as the the ride of trying to acquire the whoever as the most things wins the whole idea was to actually consider the reality that we don't all of us come to experience the fullest possibility of being alive if we're dying as caterpillars there's a whole dimension of life experience that is possible for us that we're not having the chance to realize and that turns us then I mean to me one of the greatest glories of my mission in life one of my greatest satisfaction is to invite people who have leadership responsibilities and opportunities whether within the small context of some team they lead with a few direct reports or the leaders of a hundred thousand person organization for them to conceive that their opportunities as leaders includes the opportunity to help their people develop for their own benefit and for the benefit of the organization and to kind of convert leadership into a form of developmental facilitation how can you how can you make the water better you know for people to grow that to me is kind of the highest use of developmental fear it helped me better understand you where you are right now but not assume that this is where you will always be and for me to think about what are the moves I can make that could make an environment one that will make it more likely you have the opportunity to realize your your fullest destiny that to me is very inspiring when we start turning it into some kind of a grading system and putting people in boxes you know we've turned it into something else but this is I mean one of the humility is I'm in my 70s now I've been doing this for a long long time and one of the things you realize this you put ideas out into the world you do not have control you know it's not like you can sue for the misuse of intellectual property that the reality is you don't have control over how how that material will be used and you just you can't go around hoping it'll never be used for ill it is going to be you just have to hope that it's much more often used for the inspiring purposes that you intended and you mentioned jean piaget yes at the beginning he he's become kind of quite well-known through Jordan Peterson Jordan Peterson quotes him as a as a key influence on his thinking what do you make of have you been following the Jordan Peterson phenomenon what do you make of no to teach me well one thing that he says is in particular what Piaget was that PJ's ultimate aim he talked about he looked at kind of how children develop and the development of morality among children but his ultimate aim was about trying to tie together science and religion and find an explanation for an emergent understanding of morality and tie together the the worlds of science and religion do you resonate with that as an explanation for what Piaget was doing and how does that relate to your work well first of all it sounds like something interesting I should try to learn more about and I'm not entirely sure that the most fruitful way of exploring this is just what psays intentions were but the Piaget was a twelve-year-old prodigy who you know at the age of 12 published something in a scientific journal that had to do with his fascination of molluscs and the ways in which they evolved and he started getting letters from scholars who thought he was an adult who wanted to visit him because they were gonna be in his a village or something and he had to figure out ways to not meet with them so they wouldn't discover that he was 12 years old I guarantee you at 12 years old piya had no notions about bringing science and religion together the initial passion and curiosity was with the ways in which living organisms transform and that went from mollusks to children and basically spend a lot of time asking children about their conceptions of the physical world and coming see that these enduring you know features around space-time causality and objects in the world is not something that's just given that you know recognizing the if-then relationship is something that takes six or seven years of living before you have a mental system that's complex enough to be able to connect two points in time or space that was the main work that Piaget did now it's true that in the latter part of his career he started looking not just at the way children constructed the physical world but the way in which they constructed the social world and he began a field which we now call moral development I think the greatest contributor to that particular field and when it was much more grounded in philosophy and the relationship between philosophy and science and the whole relationship between the is and the art which is a lively conversation in philosophy was not Piaget it was Lawrence Kohlberg Lawrence Kohlberg American psychologist who ultimately ended up at Harvard is really to my mind the true father of bringing this particular paradigm to the study of moral development and himself extending it beyond just the development of children into adolescents and adults and I would say the Jordan would be better off kind of looking at Cole Briggs work than Piaget if he's interested in these efforts to kind of bridge gaps between science and religion and last question that and this is the kind of 64 million dollar question okay we've talked about stages of development we've talked about how we talked about development per se how do we develop how do we move up these spaced stages of development if we could live infinitely we would all develop we will all develop instructions because although we've run into all kinds of experiences which we're not supportive to our development we would eventually run into the happy accident of the convergence of those features that are most conducive to development and so essentially what education is about from a developmental perspective is whether it's formal education or any kind of intention to educate to train to develop whatever you want to call it it's about essentially creating bringing together as many of those conditions as you can for someone so that you create a very very fertile space that wouldn't just spontaneously you know create itself so what does that fertile space look like first of all it's psychologically safe enough that I can withstand some of the discomforts that will inevitably be a part of an invitation to leave my comfort zone leave my familiar way of making sense so I need sufficient forms of support to kind of help me with what is actually going to be a very difficult thing which is to ultimately consider that the problem I'm running into is not about the world it's about me it's some way I need to grow I'm somehow running up against my own limitations this is the extent to which learning which is so widely and superficially celebrated in the world is not fully enough honored for the true difficulty of its nature a person who was willing to put themselves in a learning mode is someone who's willing to say something which is to go back to your earlier question kind of the fundament of kind of the religious experience Martin Luther you know there's there's something you know limited about me as I now stand I need something more so learning is putting yourself in a position where you're acknowledging it's some level I'm inadequate I'm not fully done okay and there can be something extraordinarily empowering inspiring uplifting about getting fuller becoming more adequate but initially it has just do with acknowledging I'm not as enough as I want to be that's very difficult kind of thing requires a form of support but the other dimension is kind of what is it that what is it that curates these experiences that I need to learn I need to grow so you need forms of challenge you need experiences that run you into the limitations of your current way of making sense you need good problems you don't seek to solve too quickly because when you solve a problem quickly you're the same person coming out of it as you were going into it you need problems that you can build a relationship to so that you are using these problems to solve you more than you trying to solve these problems so you need good problems to grow on the challenges that will provoke you that will create the desires in you to actually become a bigger version of yourself and you know you then you need the supports then enable you to withstand the discomfort after all of this the part of you that wants to say I'm going to just pull back and just kind of stay back here in my comfort zone those are the fundamental kind of conditions that's the sixty-four million dollar question the 128 million dollar question is why are humans developing why are we doing this and I want to just give you a quick glimpse of this here before we conclude because that it's important for people to recognize that we are the only species on the planet living as long as we are beyond the years of fertility and reproduction most organisms finish their fundamental job of replacing themselves and then they perish whereas we're living a whole generation now beyond the years of fertility and this is something which humans have only recently come to do we are today living you know most people died through most of human history in their 30s and 40s and 50s and today we're living a whole additional generation and that provokes the question why is this happening and the glib answer is advances in medical science and reductions in poverty are helping us fight the things that tend to truncate our lives and so that's why we live longer but that's a kind of a thin technical answer to a much bigger question which is not what are the means by which it's happening but why is it happening and in the Western world where we have all this valorizing of individual autonomy if you feel satisfied by an answer that says this is this the species wide manifestation is just the consequence of a bunch of individual random choices I'll leave you to that explanation but I want to suggest a different one which is when a whole species is collectively doing something you should pay attention to it and generally why does any species do anything collectively but then to survive to to succeed kind of evolutionarily to maintain itself and we are a species that is conscious of itself and we are living in a world which any person with their eyes open we'd have to say yes it's a race to the top there are all kinds of extraordinary expressions of human spirit and imagination and generosity but we are also living in a race to the bottom and there are all kinds of threats that are hanging over us that could you know wipe us out and we know from developmental theory that the higher state of development the self transforming mind this ability to actually stand back even you know from our own internal systems is a potential way of handling the most lethal features of being a human being these sovereignty is of mind and state so what if the fundamental reason that we're developing and staying alive so much longer than we ever did before is to create more of that order of consciousness that will enable us to save ourselves what if collectively we are living longer in order to solve the biggest problem of our survival that we face today wonderful place to end Robert thank you my pleasure Dave [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Rebel Wisdom

Views: 69,030

Rating: 4.9264622 out of 5

Keywords: robert kegan, rebel wisdom

Id: bhRNMj6UNYY

Length: 53min 7sec (3187 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2019