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This worldview shift is the kind of consciousness transformation that lies at the core of Living Deeply. We interviewed Frances Vaughan, one of the found-ers of humanistic and transpfound-ersonal psychology, who described it to us thus:

… transformation really means a change in the way you see the world—

and a shift in how you see yourself. It’s not simply a change in your point of view, but rather a whole different perception of what’s possible. It’s the capacity to expand your worldview so that you can appreciate different perspectives, so that you can hold multiple perspectives simultaneously.

You’re not just moving around from one point of view to another, you’re really expanding your awareness to encompass more possibilities.

Transformation implies a change in the sense of self. There’s both an inner and an outer dimension to it. It requires inner work and an appreciation for how that connects to being in the world, and the outer work of action and service. Transformation involves multiple dimensions of a person: our self-concept, the way in which we relate to other people, how we see the world, and what we feel is worth doing. Transformation really touches every aspect of our lives and has a lot to do with changing values.

Transformation is multidimensional. It involves the heart, mind, and spirit, and affects behavior and relationships in the world. (2002)

As Vaughan tells us, consciousness transformations often carry with them profound changes in our core values and priorities. We heard a similar point of view from physician, teacher, and author of Kitchen Table Wisdom (1997), Rachel Naomi Remen, who explained to us:

What seems real to me is the shift in experience, the permanent shift that happens for people—sometimes spontaneously, sometimes after years of practice, sometimes in times of crisis. I believe it was Proust who said the voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new vistas, but in having new eyes. The familiar is seen in a completely new way. Nothing changes, yet everything changes. The person is different. This kind of experience shifts a person’s values, shuffles them like a deck of cards. And a value that’s been on the bottom of the deck for many years may now turn out to be the top card and become the guiding principle of a person’s life from this moment on. (2003) Ultimately, we define consciousness transformation as a profound shift in your experience of consciousness, resulting in long-lasting changes in the way you understand and relate to yourself, others, and the world. We use the term transformative experience to refer to an experience that results in a lasting change in worldview, as opposed to an extreme, extraordinary, peak, or spiritual experience that doesn’t necessarily translate into long-term changes in your way of being.

Seeing with New Eyes

21 In fact, most experts we interviewed told us that consciousness itself doesn’t change. Instead it is your perception of consciousness that changes. Said in another way, who you are “authentically” doesn’t change—rather, as false selves are shed and buried elements of yourself are retrieved and integrated, your expression of your self aligns with who you truly are. Thought patterns, attitudes, behaviors, and ways of being in the world that are incongruent with your core self may drop away.

Mahamandaleshwar Swami Nityananda Paramahamsa, originally from Mumbai, India, spoke directly to this point. Nityananda is a guru in the lineage of Swami Muktananda and Bhagavan Nityananda from Ganeshpuri, India; as a disciple of Muktananda, he was chosen in July 1981, along with his sister Swami Chidvilasananda, to succeed Muktananda and carry on the work of inspiring people to practice meditation and the yoga of self-knowledge. We spoke with him at a devotee’s ranch home in Petaluma.

On consciousness transformation, Nityananda said:

Consciousness is constant—the transformation is in the individual.

[Hindu] scriptures talk about consciousness as an expanded state of awareness at all times. We talk about the limited self and the whole self or consciousness. The limited self is the mind, the ego, the intellect, the subconscious, the senses, and the organs of action. And it is from this that we actually view the world. But when we say that somebody is enlightened or realized, he or she has understood, “I am consciousness. I am not the mind, I am not all of these other things from which most humans perceive and experience the world.”

So the transformation is going from being limited and small to being whole. And when you come to the experience of a whole consciousness, a full consciousness, there’s nothing else. So the mantra that our families use is,

“What is full and what comes from full remains full, and then merges back into the full.”

Therefore, the wholeness never actually goes away. We are born of the whole, and so even now, in our state of limited experience, we are still whole, still complete, but we are just not aware of that. When we become aware, we simply lose limitedness and become whole again. (2006)

We heard more about this shift in perspective during our interview with Sharon Salzberg, a master teacher of Buddhist vipassana meditation.

For Salzberg, like many of the teachers and writers we spoke with, transfor-mation is a fundamental shift in perspective:

A transformation in consciousness is something that opens a door for us. It’s almost as though we are in a small, enclosed, dark room. We feel constrained, we feel limited in some way, and then the door swings open—

and suddenly there’s a sense of possibility where there might have been none before. There’s a sense of having options where we didn’t perceive any before.

And there’s a change in perception, especially in terms of scope.

I think maybe the best example I’ve heard was a story of the late Tibetan lama Trungpa Rinpoche, who once took a white sheet of paper and drew in the center of it a floppy V-shaped object. Then he held it up in front of his class and said, “What is this? What’s this a picture of?” And apparently everybody responded, “That’s a picture of a bird.” And he said,

“No it’s not. It’s a picture of the sky with a bird flying through it.”

You know that sense of fixation, when we narrow our focus and feel locked in? A transformation of consciousness is the awareness, “Oh! There’s a sky there.” There’s more context. There’s more openness than we have perceived before. There’s a sense of boundlessness. This is not something that we maintain. This is something that if we’re fortunate, we experience, we can renew, and we can reenter—and that changes us. (2002)

From this perspective, you can see that transformation is about opening to new possibilities. It’s about recognizing that your current view of yourself and the world is only partial. Seeing with new eyes allows for a new understanding of yourself and your own unfoldment.