The cult of change

Move fast and break things

Motto of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

While, with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony ...

William Wordsworth

There’s a spot on a bow-shaped wooden bridge above the Merri Creek in the northern suburbs of Melbourne to which I find myself lured on my walks.

There I gaze, for a minute or two, into the water below. After rain in winter the creek is a surging torrent of turgid brown. In summer it is clear and shallow, allowing you to see to the bottom. Depending on the day, the sun’s rays can dazzle as they gleam and glint off the water. Depending on the creek’s depth and strength of current, the water ripples and glides in a multitude of ways leaving behind endless more delightful ripples and swirls.

For a brief time once every few days I am mesmerised on that bridge. And I notice others stopping there too, gazing below as if looking for something intangible; like the way people involuntarily stand and stare at the ocean. It’s the simple beauty and the sight of ceaseless movement, nature endlessly rising and falling. The inner eye is gently opened to the deeper realms of being. Paradoxically, all the shifting and movement brings stillness and calm, an experience of the eternal that lies beyond transient form.

I contrast this with the human world in which I am enveloped for most of the day. Our culture places a high value on change, but doesn’t have the vision to see the changeless. We are caught up in the hurly burly of material existence, without experiencing the eternal which underpins it. Karen Armstrong, in her book A History of God, notes how past civilisations were essentially conservative and resistant to change – they were anchored by laws that were regarded as immutable and divine. But, she says, “The modern technical society introduced by the West was based on the expectation of constant development and progress. Change was institutionalised and taken for granted.”

Without religion to point to the eternal reality, I think the West has developed a kind of cult of change in recent times. Mark Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things” sums it up. Innovation is everything, to be stationary for any length of time tantamount to failure. Boundaries or limits are suspect and will inevitably be broken by the human drive for improvement. The ideal person participates in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of experience generated by their interaction with technology and consumer products. What Zuckerberg and others like him describe is a capitalist managerial ethic overlayed with insights from the world of marketing geared towards consumerism. Once the preserve of corporate executives, the managerial change fixation has now penetrated deeply into the psyche of society as a whole.

The great failure of the cult of change is its inability to answer “To what end?” or to speak to deep human needs. I think it generates anxiety and feelings of inadequacy in many people. Change is a constant of all created reality, but human-generated change needs to be directed and purposeful to the broader needs of humanity and the planet. The idea of constant improvement has merit, but there are times when we don’t need to strive, when simply “good enough” is fine. Indeed most of the time “good enough” is appropriate: it would be silly to attach some notion of excellence to washing dishes, or to walking the dog, or sleeping. Even at work, we should be secure in knowing we are good enough while being open to improve where we can.

There is a steady-state ethic that is starting to emerge as a counterpoint to the mainstream attachment to change and growth. Informed by the environmental movement and the wisdom of indigenous cultures, it values simplicity. It tries to place the individual in context within a web of human and non-human relationships that makes up the totality of life. It reinforces the importance of ecological and other limits. And its measure is quality, as opposed to the generation of movement and money for its own sake.       

About 700 metres south of the wooden bridge of my walks there is another bridge across the Merri Creek. It is a road that for large parts of the day is clogged with traffic, noise and car fumes. I instinctively find it hostile to any sense of peace or lasting value. Yet, on a larger level, this scene is no different to the ceaseless tumult of flowing water – behind both lies the face of eternity. A well-developed eye is required to see this, and feeling to understand that change and the changeless are essentially one.

Dreams and the unconscious

“The general function of dreams is to try to restore our psychological balance by producing dream material that re-establishes, in a subtle way, the total psychic equilibrium.”

C.G Jung, Man and His Symbols

I’m amazed, but mostly baffled, about the way the unconscious operates. Carl Jung emphasised how little we know about it and how important it is to learn more and to engage constructively with it.

Only a few days ago I had a powerful experience that caused me to reflect about dreams and the unconscious. My partner and I were on holiday in far-north Australia and wanted to see the Great Barrier Reef, so we joined a half-day boat tour for snorkelling and whale watching. I’d never been snorkelling and I’m not a confident swimmer – I learnt the very basics in a few days on my own in a hotel swimming pool when I was nine and still need to feel the bottom with my feet or hold on to something after a few strokes. Our guide said that would not be a problem because he had devices to keep me afloat.   

After we made it to the reef and the other tourists jumped into the water with their snorkelling gear, I plunged in – and panicked. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the deep water and the idea of somehow floating while breathing through a strange plastic mask suddenly brought on fear. I gulped sea water and managed to grab the steps of the boat. My partner and the guide were good. They coaxed me into holding on to a life ring, which the guide then pulled through the water as I learnt how to breathe through the snorkel. And within a few minutes I was actually seeing the reef, gradually relaxing in the water.    

My partner and I found it difficult to talk about the experience afterwards. I was embarrassed and needed time to digest and integrate. That night we had broken sleep with disturbing dreams: mine were a mishmash of images, a collage of strange visions and fragmented energies. Though none of them were clear to me, I connected them to my hapless time in the water. A small trauma, a little wound had been created, and the psyche was responding. As Jung pointed out, the unconscious, through dreams, acts as a kind of balancing pole to keep the total mind in equilibrium. Our ego, the personality we present to the world, is in fact quite fragile; beyond it is the vast and largely mysterious unconscious. The ego is subject to myriad stimulations and phenomena every day, all of them registering in some way in the personal unconscious. If we are generally stable in ourselves and in our lives the ego can be solid and firm, but it is always subject to upset or imbalance. New experience is one of the main ways to tip us over.

Unless the ego is mature and flexible, open enough to embrace or relate playfully with new experience, it can be knocked off balance. In that case the unconscious arrives to fill the breach, with its assorted bag of fears, irrationalities and dreams. It is the instinctive and primal counterforce to the developed rationality of the ego. Some experiences of course are just too strong to be absorbed gracefully by the individual ego – on the extreme end I think of wars and natural disasters, which can fracture the psyche and lead to long-lasting imbalances where the unconscious has too much power over a personality. 

Developing a constructive relationship with the unconscious is an important function of psychology. Often we consign the most truthful and telling parts of ourselves to the far reaches of our mind, yet the unconscious continues to speak to us in dreams and other ways, providing balance to the total psyche. Its language is that of images and symbols, which is difficult for the ego, particularly one conditioned in a rationalist, scientific culture. I try to write down my dreams and make a stab of interpreting them, my method a simple one of image association. It’s not easy, the insights coming slowly over many years, but fascinating and rewarding nonetheless. An attitude of holding and accepting mystery is, I think, crucial. Jung was often at pains to point out that the unconscious needed to be taken seriously – we can’t afford to write off dreams, visions or the non-rational as unreal and unimportant – because it reveals so much about our inner selves. At the very least it demands to be noticed and given credence in our lives.  

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