Sometimes I’m bemused at the question, sometimes a little exasperated: Can people really change?

I suspect the reason that anyone would ask the question has to more to do with the nature of consciousness than anything else. Consciousness appears to be the paragon of immediacy. “We” may have trouble staying in the here and now, but consciousness doesn’t. It is either here, or not here. (There’s a school of thought that suggests consciousness is gone as much as it is away, even when we are awake and neurologically whole and competent and thinking our consciousness is here. These theorists think consciousness is as hole-y as Swiss cheese, online one instant, off-line an instant later, and then back again, and yet we never miss it when it’s gone.)

Because consciousness is so “now” centered, at least when it is here, it’s apparently easy for us to forget how much we ourselves change over time. Or how much others we know have changed.

Yesterday, I took my consciousness (or it took me) off to see one of my professional venders. I’m sitting there, and he’s behind me. Because of my congenital hearing losses, I must read lips a great deal of the time to know what others are saying. I picked up on part of one of his comments while his back was turned, but asked him to face me and repeat it.

“I was married for 32 years, “ he repeated, then shrugged. “She changed.” And that why in his late 50s, he was suggesting, he was now living alone.

Here’s another example. A couple of days ago, I received an e-mail from one of our BTC associates in a land and culture far, far away. For the first time in more than a year, she had taken BTC’s BrainMap® instrument. To her surprise, her new results indicated a pronounced shift toward the top and left of the instrument and away from the center and right compared to the previous time she took it.

What did it mean, she asked?

Before attempting to answer her, I suggested she self-test with another of BTC’s tools, the MindMaker6®. If the BrainMap score is not an aberration, I told her, then she was likely to see changes in her MindMaker6 scores, too. The scores should show a shift of personal values emphasis out of the Alpha worldviews and into the new Beta worldview. She did, and it did.

“What caused this?” she asked.

Knowing a good deal about the circumstances of her life for the past many months, I replied:

“Oh, probably a number of things. You’ve burned some bridges to parts of your past. You’ve made some decisions to allow parts of you that have been held back to enjoy more freedom. You’ve made some important decisions about your future. You are more sure that you know your purpose and are committed to staying on purpose. You are probably getting more encouragement now from people important to you. Those kinds of things.”

Within moments, she e-mailed back, “So TRUE!”

Thinking we know how to change people is one kind of issue. Knowing whether people can change is another kind.

Of course people can change!

We do it all the time.