Bob Schwartz

Personal transformation is not about changing what you do or what you say. It is about changing what and how you think, thinking that leads to the what you do and say. It is about changing who you are.

It has been going on as long as there have been people. It is unique to people. Other beings act according to their nature, and can respond to circumstances and environment according to their nature and experience. But only people can explore that nature and make a choice to follow it or to transform it, or at least to try.

Changing circumstances and environment are challenges and catalysts for personal transformation. When those changes happen, people may act in different and adaptive (or non-adaptive) ways. Some people will conclude that changing what we do will never go far enough, and changing who we are is needed.

Again and again, the twentieth century threw new circumstances at us. While every earlier era had done the same, this time seemed different. For just one example, three times, in the course of thirty years, global warfare and destruction climbed to heights and descended to depths once only imagined in fiction.

Sometime around the 1950s and 1960s, two intertwined movements emerged. One strand was cultural, social and political, that is, external, a movement that came to be tagged a counterculture. At the same time, not entirely unrelated to psychoactive agents, a spiritual and transformative movement emerged. Down the road, we see that leaving two legacies. Practices like yoga exploded on the transformative side. On the other hand, while drugs as transformative tools never left, there was/is a lot of getting wasted up/down/sideways.

Starting around 1980, the transformative counterculture morphed into what has been called the New Age movement. In essence, we are at a new era, where we recognize that changing ourselves and changing things—which are increasingly challenging—are inextricably linked. If we don’t change, things won’t change, whatever well-meaning strategies and initiatives we try.

The current complexity needs no recap. There has never been a time like this. Whatever we think about the New Age movement, an interesting little moment in cultural history or a still much needed development, remember: If we don’t change things won’t change.