A Brief History of Everything: Revised Edition by Ken Wilber

Author:Ken Wilber
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2011-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fulcrum-5: The Worldcentric or Mature Ego

Q: Which brings us to fulcrum-5.

KW: Around the age of 11–15 years in our culture, the capacity for formal operational awareness emerges (this is “formop” on figure 5-2). Where concrete operational awareness can operate on the concrete world, formal operational awareness can operate on thought itself. It’s not just thinking about the world, it’s thinking about thinking. This is not nearly as dry and abstract as it sounds!

There’s also a classical experiment that Piaget used to spot this extremely important emergence or paradigm shift or worldview shift. In simplified version: the person is given three glasses of clear liquid and told that they can be mixed in a way that will produce a yellow color. The person is then asked to produce the yellow color.

Concrete operational children will simply start mixing the liquids together haphazardly. They will keep doing this until they stumble on the right combination or give up. In other words, as the name implies, they perform concrete operations—they have to actually do it in a concrete way.

Formal operational adolescents will first form a general picture of the fact that you have to try glass A with glass B, then A with C, then B with C, and so on. If you ask them about it, they will say something like, “Well, I need to try all the various combinations one at a time.” In other words, they have a formal operation in their mind, a scheme that lets them know that you have to try all the possible combinations.

Q: That still sounds pretty dry and abstract to me.

KW: It’s really quite the opposite. It means the person can begin to imagine different possible worlds. “What if” and “as if” can be grasped for the first time, and this ushers the person into the wild world of the true dreamer. All sorts of idealistic possibilities open up, and the person’s awareness can dream of things that are not yet, and picture future worlds of ideal possibilities, and work to change the world according to those dreams. You can imagine what yet might be! Adolescence is such a wild time, not just because of sexual blossoming, but because possible worlds open up to the mind’s eye—it’s the “age of reason and revolution.”

Likewise, thinking about thought means true introspection becomes possible. The interior world, for the first time, opens up before the mind’s eye; psychological space becomes a new and exciting terrain. Inward visions dance in the head, and for the first time they are not coming from external nature, nor from a mythic god, nor from a conventional other, but, in some strange and miraculous way, they come from a voice within.

And this means one other very important thing. Because you can think about thinking, you can start to judge the roles and the rules which, at the previous stage, you simply swallowed unreflexively. Your moral stance moves from conventional to postconventional. (See figure 9-3.) You can criticize your own conventional society. Because you can “think about thought,” you can “norm the norms.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.