What differentiates between a changed way of living, and a transformed
way of living? What is a transformed way of living? It's
problematic attempting to answer this question or its close relative
"What is a transformed human being?" before we address mankind's
already always
listening
which now colloquially hears "transformed" as "changed". Whether or not
human beings change, there's no necessary correlation between a
changed way of living, and a transformed way of living. None. Really.
Fifty one years after the term first burst
exuberantly
onto
our planet
and into our languaging and the depths of our most intimate lives from
the
Golden Gate Bridge
in March 1971, "transformed" is trending, having entered our broader
vernacular unrigorously morphed to mean "changed" - as in "transformed
wardrobe", "transformed
politics",
"transformed house (interior design)", "transformed yard (exterior
design)", "transformed (that)", "transformed (this)", "transformed
(whatever)" etc etc.
There's nothing to do about that (deploying language without
rigor
is one of the penchants of being human) except notice our propensity to
do it, then re-instate
the rigor.
A "changed human being" isn't a synonym for a "transformed human
being". There's no necessary correlation between the two. And
"transformed" (in the plain, correct, accurate way I deploy it here)
occurs in the realm of humans' being, not in the realm of wardrobes or
politics
or houses or yards or that or this or whatever.
So a "transformed way of living", regardless of its colloquial
deployment, isn't a "changed way of living". Moreover, if changed human
beings aspire to transform their lives, they first have to
un-change them - as fifty one years of meticulously
observing
how this
works,
have
discovered.
Another colloquial use of "transformed human being" is "changed and
better and different human being". And changing and being better and
different yet still untransformed, is
a trap
we keep falling into, a pitfall.
Look: only changed human beings can wind up being different.
Transformed human beings aren't different. Transformed human beings are
the same. The milieu of being transformed occurs prior to
being changed and / or being better or different. The first thing for
me to do as a transformed way of living, is to stop changing who I am.
The more I try to change who I am, the harder it is to live
transformed. The more I change who I am, the further I
drift
away from a transformed way of living.
A transformed way of living first and foremost is a
recontextualized
(I love that word) way of living. Who I become as a
transformed way of living, is the context in which the events of my
life occur (or in which they
show up
- if you will). In a transformed way of living, the occurring
world
is a function of the context I am for it. There's no
"the world"
out there in which I move and live, except for
the world
which occurs for me in the context I am for it, which colors the ways
it occurs for me.
In a transformed way of living, the
automaticity
of
thoughts
and
feelings
is
Self-evident.
Recognizing the
inexorableautomaticity
of
thoughts
and
feelings
is massively empowering and freeing. So much of what we struggle with
is what's
on full automatic.
So allowing it to beon full automatic
creates the space to be with the material in a whole new way, to
observe
it. There's a certain poignancy that goeswith (as
Alan Watts
may have said)
discovering
that much of the hardscrabble life with which we struggle is only hard
because we've never taken time to
observe
and verify its
automaticity
for ourselves (it'll do whatever it does all by itself without you
anyway).
The bottom line of a transformed way of living, is being who I am. And:
I am "I am".
So when I aspire to change who I am, that's incompatible with being
who I am.
