How to change

When it comes to change the first hurdles are always mental. Firstly people don’t believe it’s possible at all. Then even if they concede it’s possible, they doubt how much can be changed.

Being the fundamentalist I am, I wouldn’t be interested in change if the answer to all those questions wasn’t a complete and utter yes.

I propose change of almost any part, and any proportion of your actions, mentality, and personality is possible. Far from being a mutant, Mimic from X-Men, is really the most truthful representation of human nature.

But there is a third question, which is also the trickiest one: ‘should I change?’ If we have the power to create our own characters should we use it?

This is the most philosophical, and complex, and interesting question of all (and deserves a post of its own).

Here I’m arguing that absolute change is possible. So, how exactly?

It lies in the interplay between the conscious and the subconscious. Character is formed in the subconscious by integrating millions of strands of experiences and meanings, like candy floss, or a ball of wool, into a somewhat coherent whole.

People think there’s a wall between the two minds, and the subconscious is a dark, tumultuous source of problems and instincts they can’t control. That’s where the blueprint of their personality has been set, ‘that’s just who I am’ they say.

Psychologists compound the problem by blaming your shitty early upbringing, parents or biological settings for current problems. Of course it’s in the past which can’t be changed.

But there are many hidden doorways between the conscious and subconscious. With these the conscious mind can reach in and slowly unravel that ball of wool, then reintegrate and re-engineer it to whatever form you want.

The doorways are not obvious because the subconscious is such a complex, amorphous thing, there’s no direct path to its door. I also think it contains much more than just our character. Rather it’s our oracle containing scripts from millions of years of evolution, and all our potential in the future. It’s a box that we haven’t come close to unpacking yet.

One doorway is art, which opens that mysterious potential. It generates ideas and is a bridge between this world and the next. But it’s very fickle with unpredictable results.

To consciously craft who you are, you need a more humble but reliable channel that goes from the conscious mind to the subconscious.

This is the unglamorous act of repetition. If you do, or think something often enough it finds its way into the subconscious and gets absorbed there. It tames the unconscious as it were by brute force. This is why life coaches have long realised that changing habits repeatedly is the key to changing yourself.

There are other ways – like meditation, and writing (which is closer to the rational mind than other forms of art). I’m not sure yet how they work, but basically the closer they get to the subconscious, without closing down the conscious (like in sleep), the more effective it is. Meditation for example is in that grey area between awake and sleeping.

Thus you can shine the light of self consciousness on the dark corners of your nature.

If this is done over a wide enough range, then it changes an entire worldview. Even the most deeply ingrained character traits can be worked out like a knot with enough repetition, time and effort.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy, and here is where traditional motivation strategies fail.

Repetition is a deceptively simple concept to grasp, but the hardest thing to actually do because it involves the deeply philosophical questions of motivation – the same three questions posed at the beginning of the post.

Moreover it’s not enough to answer them just the once. For every change you pay a price of time multiplied by effort – quite often the time of change takes years. During that time those three questions will come up again and again, and you will have to constantly re-answer them.

Of the three the last, ‘should I change?’ is the deadliest, and is the crux of motivation.

But at some point the subconscious takes over – and that’s when change really starts, it gets compounded and magnified and escalated. When it gets into the realm of the subconscious, character has been unravelled and reintegrated.

Change asks a lot from the conscious mind, but that’s the price of courting the powerful subconscious.

Change

I’ve always changed continuously beyond recognition. A curious, slippery chameleon character, I discard identities at every stage of the past. People now don’t recognise me from five years ago, or even a year, or six months ago. I imagine this is what it’s like to be an international spy, putting on a different array of masks and wigs and fake passports. In the end you become the process of change itself, that’s the only thing left to you – leaving friends at their limited place in time in the past, staring after you.

Why is virtue defined as having unchanging values, when the ability to change is the greatest of all human abilities?

An acorn always grows into an oak tree, but a person can become anything. It’s evolution by design, adaptation by learning. We don’t have to wait for death or mutation to find better solutions. It’s the result of wielding self consciousness like a tool.

Character takes shape like a tangled ball of wool. It’s integrated and wound, knots and all, over time. But with enough time, decision and courage any part can be unravelled and reintegrated differently.

This makes me ultimately mouldable and rescuable.

Can you rescue people from a lack of ideas?
- from a lack of love?
Can you rescue people from themselves?

Of the array of life’s defectives sitting on the shelf, it’s a wise investor who picks me out to take under their wing. I return hope for hope. I promise. My black, greedy eyes are searching out those who feed me even a little of what my potential can be, so that I can grow stronger than they can handle.

I see the hungry future like an eagle flying over the landscape. But reality moves at the pace of evolution, over millions of years, through small accumulations of changes, sedimentary rocks and geological shifts, moving tiny, inching steps forward.

Does the worm writhing in transformation also feel the way I do? Does it struggle to see through the chrysalis its tiny patch of sky? Trapped on this side of what I want to be, claustrophobic. We are arrows of longing shooting for the other shore.

Nothing can happen soon enough because, as the Smiths said, “How soon is now?”

The artistic type

“There are times, when my crimes
Will seem almost unforgivable
I give in, to sin
Because you have to make this life liveable” - Strangelove

This week I’ve been in a strange state of disarray. I took up dancing recently and met someone with the artistic temperament. He’s basically an unpleasant person - bad tempered, unfriendly and inconsistent. But when dancing he becomes totally different – gentle, warm and creative.

This is what always gets me about artistic types. The duality of extremes. You get a glimpse of the naked soul across an abyss of masks that’s impossible to cross. They are trying to reach for themselves, like a mute trying to speak.

There’s a desperation and romanticism in it that captures my imagination. It reaches into my unconscious and rearranges things there. Some connections reach right into your soul, sidestepping all the usual checks and gatekeepers. But it threatens to open boxes in my psyche that I went to a great deal of trouble to close – like the dangerous tendency to rescue.

In the Unbearable Lightness of Being, the soul is described as the crew of a ship that hides, fearful below decks until something or someone calls it forth. I’m normally unashamedly selfish and uninterested in helping other people. But rarely and inconsistently I see sparks of trapped, frustrated potential, beautiful and fragile, and it’s like making sudden eye contact with that fitful crew.

I see myself in my earliest attempts to be a person and to learn to love. I see the same sparks that no one saw in me when I needed it the most.

And then again, I’m interested in desperation. If sex and relationships are only a reflection of who we are, then desperation forms the core (at least for me).

One of my favourite films is The Piano Teacher, famous for its explicit and perverted sex scenes. But people miss the point because it’s not actually about the sex. It’s about the desperation of her hopelessness and lack of control, isolation and inability to connect with any other person in the world.

Connection

There’s a great deal of talk about relationships and sex as if it's this fixed concept that can be applied across the board. As if it has rules. But being a relativist as always I think a better analogy for a relationship is a book. Though every book has two covers and letters on a page, the similarities end there. The content of each and every one is different, so is its mood, its depiction of the world, its view of reality.

There are endless possibilities and varieties. Maybe that's why some people are addicted to new relationships. How can you ever read enough books? There is always more to learn.

Similarly sex is not a thing in itself. It can be as complex, and varied and take on as many forms as the individual person who engages in it. It is a mirror held up to the soul. Anything ugly or beautiful in a person, will be reflected and intensified in sex. When people talk about what sex is, I think they're missing the point. Rather I want to ask them, who are you? What can or can't you express?

We are owners of souls like a big house with floors and stairwells and rooms we don't even know exist. The public sitting rooms and master bedroom are for the official spouse (someone who can help you pay the rent), but what about exploring the whole house?

I've always found this duality between appropriate partner material – financially or personality wise – and the inappropriates. But connection has nothing to do with that distinction. It's much wider, more flexible, more capricious than that.

The inappropriates slip in easily by the back door. They take me by the hand down unused corridors and unlocks secret rooms. And inside I look out of a whole new window with a completely different angle on that house, revealing endless facets of myself.

Monogamy is neither natural nor unnatural, it is simply one of many possibilities.

Connection

There’s a great deal of talk about relationships and sex as if it's this fixed concept that can be applied across the board. As if it has rules. But being a relativist as always I think a better analogy for a relationship is a book. Though every book has two covers and letters on a page, the similarities end there. The content of each and every one is different, so is its mood, its depiction of the world, its view of reality.

There are endless possibilities and varieties. Maybe that's why some people are addicted to new relationships. How can you ever read enough books? There is always more to learn.

Similarly sex is not a thing in itself. It can be as complex, and varied and take on as many forms as the individual person who engages in it. It is a mirror held up to the soul. Anything ugly or beautiful in a person, will be reflected and intensified in sex. When people talk about what sex is, I think they're missing the point. Rather I want to ask them, who are you? What can or can't you express?

We are owners of souls like a big house with floors and stairwells and rooms we don't even know exist. The public sitting rooms and master bedroom are for the official spouse (someone who can help you pay the rent), but what about exploring the whole house?

I've always found this duality between appropriate partner material – financially or personality wise – and the inappropriates. But connection has nothing to do with that distinction. It's much wider, more flexible, more capricious than that.

The inappropriates slip in easily by the back door. They take me by the hand down unused corridors and unlocks secret rooms. And inside I look out of a whole new window with a completely different angle on that house, revealing endless facets of myself.

Monogamy is neither natural nor unnatural, it is simply one of many possibilities.

Two Lessons

Recently Iveve taken up two hobbies: running and investing in stocks. They teach me surprising and contrasting lessons about life.

Running is about determination, planning and controlling your life. The stock market is all about unpredictability and not being able to control the wider world.

There's a saying that life's a marathon – I can definitely see how this is true. Running is like a simplified version of life where you can see your self doubt, self sabotage and sheer laziness at work. It's not the running that's hard, it's self management.

At the heart of self management is planning and persistence. Planning gives you a picture of the light at the end of the tunnel so that you don't lose hope. Persistence is simply tolerating immediate frustration to get to the end of the tunnel. Doing something well repeatedly is the key as it forms habit.

Without all the above, which makes up discipline, I realised I wouldn't be able to keep something good in life even if it came along and slapped me.

Actually it's not hard to understand, or even do. But most people trip up at the ‘repeatedly’ part – which is also the most important. I found it almost magical that profound changes in life are made through mundane habits like these.

I guess running is a lesson in how to order our own lives and the space within our control. By contrast the stock market is about complexity and chance.

It's unpredictable because there are so many inputs of information, forming so many combinations of outcomes – just like life itself.

Yet bafflingly it's also highly rational. Every number is based on certain criteria. In the long term there are even patterns, prompting money managers to think they can outperform the market. Of course they consistently fail.

This is also true of life. There seem to be patterns, and yet we can't predict much about the future. Chaos theory and determinists battle it out over whether things happen for a reason, and whether we can control or change fate.

The way to deal with the market is to go with the flow. Obviously it's futile to insist on it doing what I expect it to do. Yet this is what many people expect from life. You can only try to time the market and ride the waves up and down, hoping the millions of other conditions will come together fortuitously to a high. Then you sell your stock and get out quickly before those conditions dissolve again, which it will inevitably.

In life we also need to learn how to shift gears – between hard headed determination, and learning to let go, waiting for the time to be ripe.

Between this world and the next

The lifelong business of self creation involves two things: looking for new possibilities and bringing them into reality.

We are driven to create something new, and uniquely ours – this is evolution by design. We are innately creative.

In imagination we can consciously find new versions of ourselves. But there's a much greater, deeper pool of possibilities contained in the unconscious. To be the most that we can be, we search in these pools of potential and realise them through action. We move constantly between that murky world and the cold light of reality.

Self creation is difficult because it is balancing between two worlds: the imminent and the transcendent. It's all too easy to get lost in one or the other, and madness is the result.

Dreams

Artists for example live most of the time in potential, with neglected material lives. They explore the realms of possibility until they are lost. Madness in artists is no longer even a surprise.

There's an ingrained romantic myth that living in dreams is somehow more noble than being a materialist. The most famous Chinese novel, "Dream of the Red Chamber," is about the struggle between Taoism and Buddhism (on the side of transcendence), and Confucianism (realism). Like many dreamers the hero gives up the world to become a monk in the end.

But potential is only ever an empty promise until it is realised. It is a ‘nothing’ because nothing exists except in reality. It is a dead end.

Plato dealt in ideal forms – some greater truth out there we can neither see nor touch. Aristotle in contrast collected evidence of what he saw in the real world – and gave birth to science which changed our world beyond our wildest dreams.

There is a complex interplay between imagination and reality – they change each other.

Reality

The other example is interesting. Relentlessly materialistic people who spend their lives pursuing wealth and success are just as likely to be unhappy when they get there. This is a different kind of madness – that of never exploring alternatives.

Buddhists say this is the fault of endless desire, even when we get everything, we want more. Therefore they say desire is bad. But I think this is missing the point. Endless desire comes from our endless potential – which is simply a part of human nature.

Desire is the driving force of life and meeting its challenges with grace is the stuff of adulthood.

It's like a tug of war. We can get lost in either world, but for the pull of the other one pulling you back. It's strange how opposites melt into each other. Try to escape from reality through art or religion and you get lost in endless, empty potential. But try to cling to reality and you find it is itself a manifestation of endless potential.

The only real solution is to face endlessness directly.

This requires coming to terms with freedom and choice (more later), which is the only remedy to being lost.