Spirituality, complexity, and career counseling

Professional School Counseling, June, 2004 by Deborah P. Bloch

The issues of change and connection are explored through concepts of complexity theory and spirituality. Complexity concepts of open exchange, networks, phase transitions, fitness peaks, and attractors are interwoven with spiritual concepts of change, balance, energy, community, calling, harmony, and unity. Applications to career counseling are provided.

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I begin this article with two stories. The first is a classic legend adapted from the Buddhist tradition (Hanh, 1996). A traveler comes to a raging river filled with debris. There is only one way to get across, and that is to build a raft. So the traveler puts aside the small bag of clothes and begins to build the raft. Building the raft is not easy. It requires gathering and joining branches and reeds. At last, the traveler's raft is complete, and, picking up the bundle, the traveler crosses the river. The question is: What will the traveler do with the raft, a raft that was difficult and time-consuming to build, a raft that was sturdy and true in crossing the river? Letting go of the raft--whether that raft stands for material possessions or beliefs--is essential to continuing success on the journey. Holding on to a raft while crossing dry land is carrying an unnecessary, even dangerous, burden.

The second story is contemporary and real. It was told to me by a colleague as we sat, in a break between classes, in the small cafeteria in my university building. My colleague described his son, a young man between jobs, who was moving back in with him. After bringing in his clothes and other needed items, the son carried in an uncovered carton. In the carton, my colleague saw a small track trophy, two books, four baseball caps, and assorted cheap remnants of parties past. The son, looking down at his own box, asked: "Why am I carrying this with me?"

These two stories are emblematic of the issues in career counseling from the student's point of view. The first issue is: What change am I now encountering? The crossing of the river, the transition to high school, the move from high school to college or work are all part of the issue of change. The second issue is: While I am in this change, how can I feel connected? The raft and the box of souvenirs are ways of feeling connected. Yet, even as my colleague's son implied, the value of what is being held is often unclear.

It is not surprising that people want to hold on to souvenirs and beliefs that are no longer useful. Change means separation, separation from a school, separation from a job, separation from a place one has lived in for some time. Separation and connection are therefore two sides of the same coin. They are complementary as the symbols of the yin and the yang are complementary spiritual symbols and as the particle and the wave are complementary states of being in quantum mechanics. To form a mental picture of complementarity, picture a circle. Now imagine cutting out the shape of the yin. The challenge: can you cut out the yin without creating the yang?

In the swirling dynamics of life, it is easy to think that the only constant is change. School counselors witness the multitude of changes as students move from childhood through puberty, as they develop a growing understanding of themselves, and as they make academic, personal, and interpersonal choices. While it is true that change is one constant, there is another as well. That constant is the inextricable interconnectedness of all living things. Perhaps the most important knowledge that the counselor can impart is how to accept and utilize change and how to understand and rely upon the connectedness of life.

In a study of corporate America, Mitroff and Denton (1999) found virtually unanimous agreement on the definition of spirituality among executives, managers, and workers at all levels in a variety of industries. In essence the definition of spirituality had two components: first that spirituality includes a sense of connection to something beyond the individual, and second that spirituality is a search for meaning, purpose, and integration in life. The themes of change and connection--and their relationship to each other--are thus at the heart of spirituality. At the same time, these very same themes emerge as core concepts in contemporary studies in the physical and biological sciences, studies that have been based on a set of understandings that goes under the headings of chaos theory, complexity theory, or nonlinear dynamics. In this article, the term complexity theory is used to summarize this body of thought. Complexity theory does not have a clear historical beginning. The term has been used by mathematicians, world-wide, for a long time as a theory of classifying problems based on how difficult they are to solve. Contemporary applications of complexity theory have their roots both in the complexity of mathematics and in chaos theory, which, in turn, has grown out of the work of many mathematicians and scientists in a variety of disciplines. Lorenz, a meteorologist, who coined the term the butterfly effect is one. Mandelbrodt, who discovered and developed the idea of fractals, is another. Prigogine who examined dissipative systems such as the body, and understood how systems operate when they are far from equilibrium, is a third. The Santa Fe Institute has promoted the study of complexity not only as a mathematical theory or science but also in a broad, multidisciplinary context (V. Dimitrov, personal communication, December 6, 2003; Dimitrov, 2001; MacGill, n.d.).