Each person has persistent and pervasive ways of behaving and responding, which are expressions of his or her personality; how a person speaks, smiles, breathes, contracts muscles, is focused or absent-minded.
Every person has typical ways of making decisions, dealing with authority and autonomy, meeting or avoiding challenges, etc. Personality encompasses characteristic ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling and acting; it constitutes an inner structure, determined by genetic dispositions and shaped by positive and negative experiences. After having reached the age around 20-25, personality usually changes minimally at the structural level, but will usually improve the ways those structures are expressed. Established psychological patterns shaped by genes and the past are constantly reiterated in the present. This is reflected in how experiences are filtered, organized and stored, and in how a person acts and reacts, as well as in how he meditates. The way a person sees himself or herself and the world is a result of active, internal constructions that process input and output in exchange with the environment. In certain areas, the world may be experienced fairly freely, while in other areas there may be persistent patterns of systematic exclusions or twisting of stimuli. Together, this creates a reasonably stable approach to the world and structure of the self – for both good and bad. Information that does not fit into the established structures or patterns tends to be played up or down. Systematic over-emphasis or avoidance of information are usually linked to underlying unresolved issues; reality is bent to fit psychological needs. In the long run and if challenged, such propensities may lead to psychological problems, and often, distort the interpretation of interpersonal or environmental signals. When distortions happen, a person is likely to perceive and act in inadequate ways. One relevant question here is how much can the personality structure really develop or change?
The concept of personality development in relation to meditation has two essential aspects. Firstly, structural changes that give access to new resources and capacities; this is seen more among the young. Secondly, higher degrees of acceptance and consolation in relation to the self, others and the world; this may be referred to as maturation and is more typical from the middle of adulthood and onwards, even though neither of the two is restricted to one particular phase of life. Both imply a freer and less biased experience of the self and the world.
Acem Meditation is an inner activity; its inner challenges are partly shaped by the past and partly by the present. In the long run, relaxation tends to activate unresolved issues formed in the past; they interfere with the inner behaviour of meditating. If resolved through meditation, the changes will gradually translate into the personality and modify some deep-rooted patterns of how a person organizes information, makes decisions and acts. From a meditative perspective, what brings about personality change is an expansion of the free mental attitude into formerly closed and stifled areas. Even so, nobody gets better at accounting or dealing with legal matters just by meditating. Acem Meditation does not develop practical skills – whether physical, technical, social or artistic. But meditation provides a better starting point for acquiring or developing new skills or knowledge – be it task related, aesthetic or interpersonal in nature.
Concentration implies exclusion, shutting certain things out of one’s awareness while focusing on something else. The free mental attitude is including, represents a way of allowing far more manifestations to come into awareness: it is a way of listening to the essential, deeper nature of the self and to bring forward its quiet expressions towards better compromises between the inner flow and external possibilities. It is also a way of listening to others, to society and to the direction of the world – not at the surface level with news updates, fashions and fads, but rather on the level of ontological orientation, the search for meaning and direction. In part, it is a way to individualize, yet at the same time, a way to downgrade individuality, through altruism and the orientation of a person towards the common good with a broader acceptance of human diversity and imperfections.
According to both the old Greek philosophers and modern psychology, humans are social beings. There is a strong trend towards seeing interpersonal relationships and attachments as the decisive factor in shaping personality – be it towards growth and maturation, or in a negative direction, towards decay, psychopathology or destructive conduct. From this perspective, human beings are shaped in interactions with important others in their lives, particularly mother, father, siblings, and later, partners, friends, teachers, schoolmates or colleagues, bosses, etc. In the early phases of life, a personal idea of ‘who I am’ is to a large extent built upon the summation of good and bad experiences from the social sphere, i.e., personality is shaped from outside and in.
Biological factors also contribute, and recent advances both in genetics and brain research have shed new light on their relevance. Even so, inherited dispositions and instinctive traits are rather plastic; they can manifest themselves and adapt in many ways. The stance that humans are social beings has led to a dogmatic notion among some researchers; they hold that personality development can only be achieved in a social context. This book is based on the view that personality is shaped by experiences in the social context, but also that modifications can take place in solitude, by being self-reflective and by meditating. Moreover, it should be noted that in Acem, long meditation is always followed by guidance groups; they offer reflection on the meditation, sometimes also aspects of the person’s life. At retreats with long meditation, both meditative and verbal forms of processing are combined. In most schools of meditation, verbal processing, i.e., talking about the meditation, is advised against. In Acem, the two are combined, though the meditative processing is regarded as the more powerful. By contrast, in Western psychotherapies, verbal processing is seen as the agent for change.
Within the field of psychology, there are several ways to explain personality development and behavioural change. Traditionally, insight and working through traumatic childhood experiences have been considered as the means to obtain fundamental change. It was assumed that behaviour was influenced by a conscious and an unconscious layer of personality, and that behavioural change ensued from insight into the unconscious part. This is mainly the understanding of psychodynamic thinking.
Cognitive behavioural therapy puts less emphasis on the past and plays down the relevance of insight. Instead, cognitive behavioural therapy aims at identifying the automated internal thought patterns, false attributions, etc., that perpetuate inadequate or problematic behaviour. After having identified dysfunctional thinking, the task is to alter this – partly by making it explicit, partly by introducing alternative attribution patterns or by rational counter-persuasions. In this approach, the cognitive processes are primary, and emotions are secondary.
What a person may perceive in a given situation is coded and organized into conceivable structures of meaning or ideas; they shape the way a person sees himself and the world, and thus, they have a major influence upon how he thinks and acts. If the structure of the cognitive coding system and the organization of perceptions change in ways that imply more realism and improved adaptability, a ‘cognitive restructuring’ has taken place, denoting altered ways of seeing the self, others and the world. Jean Piaget (1896-1980), the Swiss psychologist, demonstrated that a child’s cognitive development is biologically determined. Through maturation of the nervous system, the cognitive foundations expand and lead to structural changes in the child’s behaviour and thinking. Cognitive restructuring may also happen in adult life, not due to maturation of the nervous system, but rather in response to learning and resolving dissonance.
The inner activity of meditating can lead to cognitive restructuring. This may happen in response to dissonance during meditation between the way a person meditates, and his ideas about what to do and his expectations about what should be happening. The emerging spontaneous activity occasionally breaks those expectations. Established ways of solving the challenges of meditation no longer resolve the inner situation. However, aided by guidance, understanding and some experimentation during these phases, the meditator may gradually find new ways of dealing with inner challenges, usually in an incremental manner, and the inner changes translate into external life, i.e., into thoughts, attitudes, emotions and behaviour, in short, into personality development.
Psychodynamic theory explains deeper personality change through insight and emotional release, and cognitive therapy through control over automated, dysfunctional thinking. These theories contribute, but only in part, to explaining aspects of how Acem Meditation may lead to personality development. Meditation does not directly provide working through of emotional childhood trauma or modifications of automated thoughts, but alters aspects of the underlying response patterns.
Few human activities are less social than meditation when seated in a chair with closed eyes and effortlessly repeating the meditation sound with free-floating attention. How may this inward activity lead to personality development?
The dogmatists may insist: either that meditation cannot lead to personality development, or that meditation is a social activity. The first view is hard to maintain given the reports of so many. The second argument is as follows: when a person learns to meditate, he spends time and money on this activity, and thereby, he invests his or her interests and motivation. Accordingly, he is socially committed to get something in return. Thus, both in him and her, and in those around, there is a clear expectation of some change occurring. These expectations instigate new behaviours and permit social experimentation that may expand a person’s behavioural repertoire. According to this point of view, the effects are not caused by meditation itself, but because the person considers himself or herself as a meditator; he has entered an alternative social role and context that is associated with new behaviours. The point of view is that meditation is a social activity related to roles, context and social expectations; the changes are derived from the new role and new social context.
With regard to meditation, there may be elements of truth in the above reasoning. Some may have met high-spirited meditation enthusiasts who are brimming with praise over alleged results of which just some are likely to be related to meditation. Not only to the critical observer, but also to the regular meditator, it is important to distinguish between the true effects and what may be enthusiastically attributed to meditation.
The social constructivist view was very much emphasized in the 1970s and for some decades, but recently, it is given less support. Advances in genetics and in the study of the nervous system by, e.g., fMRI have made aspects of this view obsolete. Social constructivist perspectives are hardly enough to fully explain the extent of the changes found after long-term practice of meditation and in the wake of sessions of long meditation, let alone the physiological and brain changes documented in scientific studies.
As already indicated, structural personality changes are rare in adult life. However, they can occur under favourable circumstances in social relationships, in work involving major responsibilities, in intimate relationships, in some psychotherapies, but also due to long-term practice of self-administered techniques that involve deep relaxation and processing in the brain.
Personality development elicited by Acem Meditation involves in part cognitive, but also emotional, processing. Memories of formative events from the past are rarely activated by meditating, with a few exceptions. Even so, negative experiences from a person’s life when growing up and from adult life are reflected in the behavioural patterns a person tends to follow. When existentially alone in meditation, a person depends completely on himself. It may feel OK to rest in that aloneness. Even so, there is a propensity to avoid the existential encounter and thereby avoid redirecting one’s way of meditating, and of being in the world. If, instead, the person is open to modifications and can act in the present during meditation with a free mental attitude, he may manifest the essence of the present and bring its values into the world and his own future; such changes may gradually translate into personality development or maturation.
In cognitive therapy, change is brought about by verbal exchange and reasoning in relation to automated and dysfunctional thoughts. In Acem Meditation, the inner changes happen in solitude, i.e., during meditation without verbal exchange and conceptualization in relation to dysfunctional patterns of processing. To the extent that verbal processing plays a role in dealing with the interference and dissonance caused by spontaneous activity, it takes place in the guidance groups after and outside the meditation.
First, let us consider what happens in the mind when someone quietly sits down without any meditation sound. The body and mind relaxes a little. Soon, the wandering mind is engaged in thoughts, images, bodily sensations and the like. The content usually encompasses residuals from the day – what happened, or in preparing things ahead – if not preoccupied with needs, wishes and dreams. Certain repeated patterns can be identified in what and how the stream of consciousness passes through the mind. Some of those patterns represent limitations and restrictions in the person’s life, in the way he is processing experiences. These patterns shape perceptions, behaviour patterns and the way problems are addressed. Restrictive patterns tend to be rather persistent in their social, emotional, cognitive and bodily implications.
When a person starts to repeat the meditation sound with a free mental attitude, more inner freedom is created for the body and spontaneous activity; the body relaxes further, the autonomic nervous system shows signs of deep rest, and the stream of consciousness starts to wander more freely, allowing deeper issues to manifest themselves. As demonstrated in scientific studies, the inner state of relaxed freedom would not be possible by simply resting or by simply having firm intentions to relax; the use of the meditation object together with a free mental attitude is required. Several schools of meditation, such as Zen, Vipassana, etc., use the breath or bodily sensations as the objects of meditation. Acem Meditation liberates parts of the thought process by freer use of the meditation sound in relation to spontaneous activity, the wandering mind.
The changes in the autonomic nervous system and the brain invite the deeper layers of the psyche to manifest themselves; the wandering mind taps into more profound psychological structures than during ordinary rest or in daily life. The relaxation and rest in the body and brain allows derivatives of unresolved issues from the conscious and unconscious to interfere – usually not as memories, but rather as flawed interpretations and actions in meditating. The use of force, distancing, isolation or counter pressures may at first sight appear as remedies, but they are not, they are ways of closing the mind. In imperceptible ways, such interference introduces a pull towards concentration and steering. The person lacks a perspective that permits the resolution; there seems to be no alternative ahead but concentration. The meditator has a meditation problem.
At this point, if the meditator adheres to the free mental attitude, i.e., if he continues to meditate without using force, strain or effort, and even more so, if he disengages from habitual restrictions and limitations by a freer mental attitude, progress will occur. That will enable him or her to process issues at ever more profound levels. Learning to deal adequately with the interference helps in the development and maturation of personality. A cognitive and emotional change may slowly and gradually take place.