Diane Hamilton on Zen, Meditation, and Human Development
Erik: Can you say more about what the shift is like, moving from an egocentric way of holding one's inner life into these progressively higher stages?
Diane: Of course. Think about the people in your life whose developmental center of gravity sits in the egocentric range. When the self feels unsafe, when its security hasn't really settled, a great deal of a person's attention gets spent guarding that self. There isn't much left over. As identity firms up and the background hum of anxiety quiets down, free attention opens up, and a person can start turning toward others. Once that turning happens, they begin to take on what other people want and need as something that matters to them too.
A concrete case: picture a woman who is a mother but doesn't mother especially well, not because she lacks love, but because she can't yet keep her attention on what her kids actually need. So much of her is occupied with holding herself together that the children get a little neglected. They sort of raise themselves. She's physically present in the field of their lives, yet she can't bring herself fully to the work of supporting their growth.
Now compare her to a mother operating at an ethnocentric level. Her sense of self and her self-esteem are solid, settled enough that she has the spare attention to genuinely care for her family and to show up for groups beyond the household, whether that's her church, the junior league, or whatever community she belongs to. You can be at that ethnocentric stage and work at a college, or in a research lab, anywhere. The underlying point is that once there's enough security established in the egocentric realm, a person becomes free to move into the ethnocentric one. That contrast, the mother who can't quite reach her children versus the mother whose steadiness lets her pour attention outward, is roughly the difference between the two.