Engineered Metanoia
Since being able to change quickly is essential in life to be great and do a lot I wondered how much one can change. Because I believe overtime in order to shape yourself into the person you need to be to do what you want you will change a lot. This is how I encountered the idea of a metanoia.
For those who don’t know a metanoia is usually a spontaneous, sudden and complete change of a person’s perception and behavior. It is usually the product of some crisis or emotional collapse caused by the breaking of something thought fundamental. It is how the mind restructures and reorganizes itself around that.
It is descructive in the sense that the old you is no longer you, you can’t engage in those behaviors anymore, they give no more satisfaction. Some sort of emotional and psychological surgery occurs. The mind prefers to disintegrate the old to be reborn again to integrate the new as foundations rather than edges.
Because it is a change in foundations it is stable and long lasting. The new becomes enstablished.
But this seems to need an existential crisis and profound inner turmoil. So it is something that is not controlled. When it becomes unbearable things break and the new is born. But it doesn’t feel like something that can be planned. Who plans internal implosion?
One can plan it, but to avoid too much pain he makes it softer and illudes himself of being in crisis and forcing a metanoia. I think even if there is a deliberate complete change he would fall back to his old ways in moments of stress. Which demand one to use the economical automatic part of the mind, which expresses the old patterns. Planning it also implies controlling the outcome. But I find it hard because we are irrational and chaotic, so it is hard to predict exactly how things will turn out.
So the question double. Can a metanoia be induced and controlled? I think the answer is yes to both, but to some degree and not in the traditional chaotic metanoia way.
A metanoia is a change in the internal environment. Since the internal environment is the reflection of the external environment, changing the external environment completely and abruptly can trigger adaptive changes that resemble a metanoia.
But the change should be fast. Changing city, friends and identity. One should first define what he wants from life. and here we come to the control part.
Because by defining what you want and don’t want in life you know what to delete and what to add. You also deduce from that the person you need to become, so the behaviors you need to engage in repeatedly. I think isolation from the past, people who remind you of who you were is a good thing.
Once you defined that you make a decision, it is time to engineer the change. You should go to a new city, create new friends and change your identity, what you talk about. The change should be total and fast. You should allow very little comfort of life, so that you are in a position of stress a lot so that reflexive part gets rewired the way you want to. Overtime you can increase your comfort level to healthy degrees.
Having done all that I can say it works and the integration of an engineered change is trained, so it is more gradual. One thing I noticed though was that i could not completely control the details. In fact the metanoia is one of those things where you can control the main shape of, but not the details. You can’t predict exactly the position of all leaves on a tree even with all initial conditions.
Overall the point is that to induce deletion in the brain you have to make the circuits die by atrophic pruning. You cause that by engaging in new sobstitute behaviors repeatedly. This will change the story you tell yourself. You will be born again.
The fear is to repress impulses. But repression is needed to allow transmutation. It is by rechanneling impulses that you change behavior.
Overtime expected responses will go away because they are no longer reinforced. The return of the old is normal, but it is not regression, rather an opportunity. When old responses reemerge it is by choosing the new that you strenghten change.
So while a traditional metanoia cannot be induced or controlled, and engineered total change can be induced and controlled to some degree