July 1, 2025
My research on Transformative Information Encountering has resulted in a joyous journey back to my academic roots in Philosophy, my undergraduate major. I had been reading L.A. Paul’s book, Transformative Experience, which gifted me a beautiful approach to describing the difference between the ongoing development customary to any human as they mature, as opposed to the less frequent major transformations, what Paul calls personal transformation. I leaned on her description of this distinction in the article I am currently writing. This one will share the results of my interview study.
I intended to continue reading her book today, but as I settled into my office chair with a warm mug of tea, I discovered that I had left the book and my reading notebook at home. Not wanting to waste a rare opportunity for hours of uninterrupted reading, I turned to my bookshelf and opened the book I had been planning to read after Paul’s: Becoming Someone New, a collection of essays on transformation, edited by Enoch Lambert and John Schwenkler. This morning I read and contemplated the introduction, which describes the current landscape of thought about transformation. This means I have yet to dig deeply into the ideas that will be presented in each chapter, but even the introduction had me scribbling notes and questions, which I will present in the following paragraphs with full knowledge that further reading will further illuminate these preliminary reactions. I reserve the right to disagree with myself as I learn more.
In discussing L.A. Paul and Edna Ullman-Margalit, Lambert and Schwenkler present the idea that transformation is incongruous with a rational tendency towards self-preservation, in that to transform is to obliterate an old self in favor of a new self (Ullman-Margalit’s terminology). It is not rational to choose to obliterate oneself. This makes sense to me on face value, and also reminded me of a further reason opportunities for transformation are often rejected. Psychologists Sloman and Fernbach, in their book The Knowledge Illusion, describe how humans have an instinct to fear and avoid changing their beliefs and values, because beliefs and values are shared with a community. Humans rely on communities for survival, therefore turning away from the beliefs and values shared with our communities has the potential to separate us from our means of survival. This adds to the idea that choosing transformation is not obviously rational.
But then I remembered a book I read nearly two decades ago called Walking on Water, by Derrick Jensen. In discussing what education should be, Jensen explores the root word of educate, educe:
Here’s something I wish I would have told my students. The word education . . . comes from the latin root e-ducere, meaning “to lead forth” or “to draw out.” Originally it was a midwife’s term meaning “to be present at the birth of.” I would contrast that with the root of the word seduce, which is closely related, but with a striking difference. To educe is to lead forth; to seduce is to lead astray . . . I wish I had suggested that our departments of education be called, if we were honest, departments of seduction, for that is what they do: lead us away from ourselves.
Derrick Jensen, 2003, Walking on Water, Chelsea Green Publishing Company, p. 15
Merriam Webster defines educe as bringing out something latent, i.e. potential. As Jensen characterized seduction as leading someone away from themselves, then maybe education is leading someone towards themselves. As a former teacher, I connect with the goal of education as leading students to be their most actualized selves. I do not think I ever mastered teaching in this way, but this idea defined the kind of teacher I aspired to be.
If humans are indeed on a journey of becoming more themselves, then perhaps experiences of personal transformation are not as much a destruction of the old self as moments of accelerated progress towards increased selfness.
I think I agree with Paul that there is opacity as far as who we will be and what we will value on the other side of a transformation, such that we may not be able to rationally choose to transform with our conscious minds, but there is also much written in neuroscience about how the unconscious mind drives our behaviors and decisions (see Leonard Mlodinow’s Subliminal). So a question I have in mind is whether our unconscious mind can make a rational choice for us to become more ourselves. Can we sense when the opportunity to engage with an experience of personal transformation will lead us into a more authentic existence? Given how instinctual the unconscious mind is, can any rational thought be ascribed to it? Then again, what is more rational than, “That’s a tiger. Run!” (Must “ration” and “reason” be conceptually separate? Is instinct not an accelerated process of reasoning?)
In 2007 I accepted a two-year contract teaching at an international school in Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia. I knew the experience would change me, and though I did not know exactly how, I knew what I hoped to get out of it. In teacher-training school, we had spent a lot of time talking about how the teacher becomes the dominant culture in a classroom, and for students who share their culture with their teacher, that can be an affirming experience. Then again, for students who don’t share their culture with their teacher, it can be extremely alienating, to the point of being a barrier to learning, unless the teacher takes steps to mitigate the harm. In reflecting on these lessons, I came to the conclusion that I had never really experienced being in a setting long-term where the culture I grew up in was not the dominant one. Of course, given my ethnic and religious identities, I have plenty of experiences in which my identities were in the minority in a given setting, but I had never truly been in a situation where the dominant culture was entirely foreign to me. I felt like I would not be able to empathize with the full diversity of my potential future students without this firsthand experience, so I sought it out deliberately. (Yes. I also wanted to travel and had limited funds.)
As I approached my date of departure for Addis, my friends would ask me how I was feeling, and all I could think was, “It feels like I am about to die, and I have no idea what the afterlife will be like.” Comparing it to death was not to say I was dreading it or regretting my choice to go, but simply that I could not picture life on the other side and was very aware that life as I knew it was about to end, because even if I returned home after the experience, I would be returning as a person wholly changed by the experience. I had read the guidebooks, watched videos, studied the language, eaten the food, talked to people who had been there, but none of this could actually tell me what I would be like and feel like once I was living full time in this new country.
I had a similar experience becoming pregnant and giving birth, which is an experience of personal transformation Paul discusses explicitly. Bringing a new life into the world is maybe a strange thing to compare to death, but I remember having the same thought as I had before moving to Addis: life as I knew it was about to end.
If transformation is like death, I am also reminded that in my circle of family and friends we often refer to death as a transition. This is a conceptualization of death not as an ending, but as a changed of the state of existence. Leaning on this leads me to question Ullman-Margalit’s conceptualization of old self vs. new self, and long for a better understanding of a continuity of self, a self that with each transformation/death/transition becomes more of itself rather than a wholly different self.
Wrapped up in this are questions I have about truth. In choosing (or rejecting) opportunities to transform, are we choosing whether to take a leap into a truer self? Are our unconscious minds aware of such a choice even when our conscious minds are not? And if this is a decision-making process that is driven by our unconscious, is it something we share with other living creatures, or is a sense of truth—or a drive for self-actualization—uniquely human?