Making a Habit of Blowing One's Monkey Mind

Most humans never rise above "First Order Thinking" -- basic goal oriented behaviours, reading, computing, memorising, and fitting acquired comprehensions within a pre-existing, culturally inherited mental frame. At the most, a typical human will achieve "Metacognition," where he monitors his progress in first order thinking, and grades his progress. It is the unusual human who breaks through to "Transformative Learning."

The capacity for transformative learning develops in middle to late adolescence, although few persons truly experience it, and fewer still achieve mastery of the transformative process. Transformational learning involves breaking through cultural and paradigmatic constraints, to richer conceptual fields beyond.

The academic theory of transformative learning is almost entirely restricted to the field of "adult learning", because that is the field of learning where the theory originated and developed, for the most part. And perhaps those who teach adolescents and young adults in conventional institutions of education are just a bit too happy and complacent with the way things are in conventional education.

Transformational learning is not easy or comfortable -- for either teacher or student. But it is necessary, and those who care about the fate of humans in this part of the galaxy will begin to take it seriously.

Personal transformations often follow  the following phases:

1. Experiencing a disorientating dilemma, paradox, enigma or anomaly
2. Feelings of fear, anger, guilt, or shame
3. Questioning one's assumptions
4. Recognising the need for personal transformation
5. Exploring new roles, relationships and actions
6. Planning a course of action
7. Acquiring new knowledge and skills
8. Provisional trying of new roles
9. Building confidence in new roles and relationships
10. A re-integration of a new perspective into one's life

Ref. Mezirow, Jack et al. (2000) Learning as Transformation

_Hent.org

Most people do not take kindly to being "disoriented." Feelings of "guilt, shame, anger" etc. are not the half of it, for most ordinary monkey-minds. The full play of emotions can enter the dynamic process of transformative learning. Not exactly how you remember school? Join the club.

When a fundamentally disconfirming experience or a disorienting dilemma challenges our frame of reference, we are presented with the opportunity to dive to the deepest level of learning in an effort to make meaning of the catastrophic experience. So powerful is this kind of learning that Mezirow described it as "emancipation from libidinal, linguistic, epistemic, institutional or environmental forces that limit our options and our rational control over our lives, but have been taken for granted or seen as beyond human control." This experience can cause us to critically reflect on our beliefs and presuppositions, resulting in either a transformed way of pattern recognition, or, at the deepest level, a totally transformed framework. _ Learning to Think Strategically

Emancipation? Yes, and much more. Release from constraints plus the motive power to go beyond previous limitations.

Many animals can be trained to remain within a limited perimeter of physical or behavioural space. Then, when the real constraints are surreptitiously removed without the animal's awareness, the animal continues to limit itself as if the constraints remained. Monkey men are just like those animals. Transformative learning wakes them up.

For learners to change their "meaning schemes (specific beliefs, attitudes, and emotional reactions)," they must engage in critical reflection on their experiences, which in turn leads to a perspective transformation (Mezirow 1991, p. 167). "Perspective transformation is the process of becoming critically aware of how and why our assumptions have come to constrain the way we perceive, understand, and feel about our world; changing these structures of habitual expectation to make possible a more inclusive, discriminating, and integrating perspective; and, finally, making choices or otherwise acting upon these new understandings" (ibid.).

...Transformative learning has two layers that at times seem to be in conflict: the cognitive, rational, and objective and the intuitive, imaginative, and subjective (Grabov 1997). Both the rational and the affective play a role in transformative learning. Although the emphasis has been on transformative learning as a rational process, teachers need to consider how they can help students connect the rational and the affective by using feelings and emotions both in critical reflection and as a means of reflection (Taylor 1998). _ericdigests

Very few theorists have come to understand the centrality of grief to the process of learning and growing. Manfred Clynes is one such researcher. Robert Boyd is another. To understand why meaningful learning and transformation should involve grief, is to begin to appreciate how profoundly important being a human (as opposed to being a monkey) truly is.

There is an innate drive in all humans to understand and make meaning of their experiences. It is through established belief systems that adults construct meaning of what happens in their lives...Developing more reliable beliefs about the world, exploring and validating their dependability, and making decisions based upon an informed basis, is central to the adult learning process. _PraegerHandbookVol2

Most pseudo-intellectuals in academia, media, law, politics, and environmentalism are perfectly content to forego the exhausting work of transformation. Their time is filled with a daily routine of monkey games, which is as satisfying as they seem to require.

But those who wish to step beyond the ordinary shite fight and mudslinging of monkey play, into the larger universe of human, trans-human, and "posthuman" possibilities, it's going to take a lot of work, pain, and grief. Over and over, as long as you continue wanting to go farther.

Good little self-satisfied monkeys would never tolerate anything like that.

This is important: The crucially important and helpful techniques of transformative learning can be twisted -- are being twisted every day -- by professors, workshop leaders, propagandists, politicians, and others who shape the minds of others for their own benefit, rather than helping the person shape his own mind for purposes of personal and professional growth. This perversion of the transformative process is called brainwashing, or sometimes "consciousness raising." The goal of brainwashing is to confine the mind -- the opposite of liberation or emancipation.

Anyone who has experienced genuinely liberating and empowering transformation will detect the attempt at false and perverted "transformation" fairly easily. And it will make him very, very angry to see it.

More on this topic later.