The Transformation Of The Self: A Zen Parable

About a sword blade, a ship from Greek mythology, butterflies, frogs, the Porsche 911, and the transformation of the self according to a Harvard psychologist.

An ancient Zen parable asked the following question: If you change the blade of your sword and then change the handle, will you still have the same sword?…

The Zen Sword is similar to the Ship of Theseus, one of the oldest thought experiments in Western philosophy, having been discussed by the likes of Heraclitus and Plato by c. 500–400 BC, and which raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same; if you take away the old planks as they decay, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, is the ship the same or not — and, if not, at what point did it stop being the same ship?

The cells that constitute our bodies are similar to this sword (colon cells last only about four days, skin cells two to three weeks, …).

Our values, habits, behavior and the memories of the experiences that build our identities can be like this sword.

Also our careers — what we do for a living, such a central theme in our life-stories (on average, according to a recent article of The Financial Times, a person changes careers 5–7 times in their lifetime (Barrett, 2017)).

Societies and companies are similar to this sword.

Sometimes the transformation appears to be spectacular and radical. Butterflies and frogs know about it and seem to deal with it.

Other times the transformations are incremental, progressive, and the shifts obviously preserve something from the past, as in the case of the Porsche 911, which was introduced in September 1964 and slowly evolved over generations of car enthusiasts, the model produced from 1994 to 1998 being the last of the air-cooled Porsche sports cars, up to the 2019 version, the Porsche 911 Type 992.

Sometimes change happens without us realizing it.

Form is indeed continuously transforming, undergoing some gradual or dramatic reconstruction of its parts into a new whole.

Jean Dubuffet, the famous French painter and sculptor, claimed that our culture likes to classify and stabilize everything; as opposed to feeling the continually changing appearance of the same object as its shape, its surroundings and what it is linked to varies, our culture insists on its stable identity. Our culture has constituted itself as an apparatus for dealing with the stable and it no longer works well when we want to use it to deal with the unstable (Dubuffet, 1968).

And suddenly — if we cling obsessively to our certainties, devoted to preserving our existing way of making meaning, avoiding questioning ourselves from time to time, and are not careful enough — Notice what you notice, advised the poet Allen Ginsberg, as a guide to perception and creation (Ginsberg, 1994), we may suddenly wake up angry and anxious in a world we no longer recognize and understand, as if all sense of continuity has been lost.

We may not even recognize ourselves.

Some changes can sometimes shake the very bedrock of who we know ourselves to be, the continuity of self that usually remains stable throughout our lifetimes, this feeling of an immutable essence (maybe illusionary but certainly necessary to « live a life », and for sure quite reassuring).

Ah!

Now, if we are receptive to the internal chaos that we’re experiencing, in this potential creative space between fantasy and reality, between un-integration and integration (Winnicott, 2016), if we feel safe enough and the environment is supportive enough (containing would say Winnicott), we may begin to feel that the life project is not about clinging to one’s formation of the self, but about the ability to have the self literally be transformative.

We may begin to understand without grasping, as the poet Paul Valet used to say (La parole qui me porte, 2020, p. 150), that « the enduring nature of being human is to turn into something else (…). What one is, essentially, is this active transformation, nothing more, nothing less. (…) The process of self-discovery requires an undoing of the self-knowledge that you assume you already have. Becoming is the ongoing process of losing and finding yourself. » (Kaag, 2018, pp. 220–221)

It is not enough to have thoughts: one must also be able to think them. Growing up, it has often been through some kind of daydreaming — or reverie — that we have forged our capacity to establish a difference between inner and outer reality, and to develop the ability to discern and think (Bronstein, 2012). If we allow ourselves to enter in this quiet and playful state, where we can encounter patience, tolerance, kindness, openness, and where creativity is welcomed, wandering in and out of awareness without any particular aim or intention, but not without vigilance, images, bodily sensations, thoughts and affects can eventually be metabolized.

If we dare to stop relying on deliberate ignorance and expect to encounter not only what we already know, but also something we don’t know about ourselves — we can see this in artistic creation, where the artist’s search for meaning seeks to express something that it’s not consciously known, and even something that may never come to be known fully (Bronstein, 2012) — and have the courage to get out of our own way, so something else can take place, we may rise and die to ourselves, to be reborn like Spring following Winter, and to re-create ourselves, again and again, to become what we are.

The Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and the founder of logotherapy (literally « healing through meaning ») wrote in his most famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946, p. 133): « The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. … What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence. »

According to Robert Kegan — a Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, whose significant work, inspired by Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, focused for forty years (until his retirement in 2016) on the importance of continued psychological development in adulthood — the self is more about movement through different forms of consciousness, continuously redrawing of the distinction between self (subject) and other (object), and less about the defending and identifying with any one single static form (Kegan, 1982).

Since we were born, our mental structures have naturally evolved and our experience of what is self and what is other changes. From being a baby, entirely self and no other, unable to reflect on or take an objective look at the world, we « mature », we grow, in our capacity to observe our self in more complex ways.

“Als das Kind Kind war, wußte es nicht, daß es Kind war, alles war ihm beseelt, und alle Seelen waren eins.” (When the child was a child, it didn’t know it was a child. Everything was full of life, and all life was one.) — Excerpt from a poem by Peter Handke, present at the opening of the film Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders (1987)

What we’ve identified with our self in one stage of our life span is transcended in the next. Example 1: To realize that we are not the items, the toys or the clothes we own — these are simply things we have. Example 2: To realize that we are not our work title, but that we have a role and responsibilities related to our current job description.

We may someday become what Robert Kegan calls self-authoring, meaning that we grow beyond being solely a product of our culture, unduly shaped and defined by the environment and our relationships. We realize that we’re always changing and therefore we can negotiate who we are.
« (…) Invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, change your tone and shape so often that they can never categorize you. (…) » — Charles Bukowski, excerpt from his poem No Leaders Please, in The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951–1993, p. 132

Some of us may eventually reach the ultimate state of this evolving process, that would be, in a sense, no self at all. In that transfigured mental state, one would not look out on the world from any vantage point that is apart from it. One’s sense of self would not be tied to particular identities or roles, but would be constantly created through the exploration of one’s identities and roles, further honed through interactions with others (Kegan, 1994).

« You ask me to tell a little bit about my life, under the pretext that I have one, I am not so sure, because I believe above all that it is life that has us, that possesses us. » — Romain Gary, interviewed on Radio-Canada, 1980; Romain Gary (1914–1980), French novelist, diplomat, film director, World War II aviator of Jewish origin, the only author to have won the Prix Goncourt under two different names
The Zen parable of the sword will always be relevant, at every stage of our life.

There seems to be no fixed and final answer to the riddle, it’s actually ever-changing, as our own identity.
​

References
Barrett, H. (September 5th, 2017). Plan for five careers in a lifetime. Retrieved from: https://www.ft.com/content/0151d2fe-868a-11e7-8bb1-5ba57d47eff7
Bronstein, C. (2012). Bion, la rêverie, la contenance et le rôle de la barrière de contact. Revue française de psychanalyse, vol. 76(3), pp. 769–778.
Bukowski, C. (2008). The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951–1993. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.
Dubuffet, D. (1968, 2007). Asphyxiante culture. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.
Frankl, V. (1946). Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press.
Ginsberg, A. (1994). Mind Writing Slogans. Boise, ID: Limberlost Press.
Kaag, J. (2018). Hiking With Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are. London: Granta.
Kegan, R. (1982). The Evolving Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kegan, R. (1994). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Valet, P. (1965, 2020). La parole qui me porte. Paris: Gallimard.
Winnicott, D. W. (2016). From Instinct Theory to Ego Theory, Part IV, Chapter 6: Chaos. The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott, Vol. 11, Human Nature and The Piggle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 153–156.