if you'd be up for it, it would be useful to have a sort of Dear Abby advice column, where people would write in with problems and you could identify em as "that's a stage 3 problem and the stage 4 way to think about it would be..." or "that's a stage 4 problem and the stage 5 way to think about it would be..."
You might be the right person to provide some examples of this kind of advice, or maybe run a 'contest' in which your readers try doing this for one example, or a few, and you offer your thoughts about how well you think we did.
If you'd like a taste of that kind of content, I highly recommend 'The Discerning Heart: the Developmental Psychology of Robert Kegan' by Phillip M Lewis. I've read Kegan's books, but some aspects of the theory didn't click until this book, as Lewis points at the difference in *phenomenology* between the levels more clearly than Kegan.
One major insight that it gave me was: even if you are capable of higher Kegan stages, it's probably spikier than you'd expect. For example, even though I am certainly capable of creating the joint-relationship psychological object that is core to stage 3, I'm not always doing this. I don't do this with every cashier and clerk I encounter, for example. I'm often not even doing this with my friends, especially if it's the middle of winter and I haven't seen them in a while. I can still see myself, and I can still see them, but I don't move to see both at the same time (which is what the joint-relationship psychological object of stage 3 allows).
It had somehow never occurred to me that the extent to which even 'someone at stage 5' would continue to 'WANT' to 'operate at' lower stages is pretty considerable. (Duh)
Inter-stage (but intra-person) conflicts are ripe with drama! (Also duh)
Stage 2 seems very Reasonable for lots of interactions with strangers – lots of people meet/see/hear/etc. lots of people that _aren't_ also 'members of their community (or communities)'.
It also seems very Reasonable for people to value _preserving_ life 'lived at stage 3' against the encroachments of stage 4 (or stage 2)! Maybe that's a thing a lot of people miss or are missing or otherwise suffering its lack?
I think I could have generated that point – at about that level of abstraction – but what COPONDER's comment did was jar a jag of 'What would that look like concretely?', 'What would ('stage') mismatches among some people interacting look like concretely?', and similar thoughts.
SPECIFIC ideas along these lines seem likely to be very fruitful!
(I suspect I myself could do with reminding myself of this much more often.)
And of course you included some (more) concrete details in your 'stages overview' post published almost a decade ago; one such detail I liked rereading it:
> Social groups based in the communal mode [stage 3] tend to be dominated by people with personality disorders, who get their way by emoting histrionically.
And man does that match a social conflict I witnessed somewhat recently. One person was trying to communicate at stage 4 – 'You've been a bad member of our joint project.' – and the other at stage 3 – 'I don't LIKE doing that task.'. I'm not even sure the person at stage 3 [in this interaction] even really understands themselves as having committed to the project! I suspect they might have interpreted the initial 'project planning meeting' as more of an 'expression of positive affect' (towards them) than them having made any explicit commitments.
What is more likely and common is that people face problems where some aspects are stuck in stage 2, many aspects are in stage 3, and still other aspects are pushimg in stage 4 and beyond.
Like that scene from The Incredibles where Elastigirl is stuck between several doors.
So some things need to relax, some things need to become boxed, some things need to twist, some things need to close, etc.
Yes... this is a major sticking point for the whole theory. Different theorists have different ideas about how to think about it. (It's called "décallage," "lag" in the field.) I'm planning a post about this... (But I'm planning posts about *everything*, so who knows if I'll ever get to it...)
One thing that's difficult is that, as least in my experience, the three main forms of language that are used described the contours of 'stages of development' are: psychological/academic (mental), religous/mystic (symbol), mathematical/computational (physical).
And ... they don't seem to map very well, or translate in proper ways a lot.
And, so, different people may describe the same thing as:
– heart chakra (as an interoceptive nerve cluster) opening with abiding prescence
– hormetic vasocomputation of blood plasma within heart (as a physiological structure)
1. How to litigate the subtle differences between those descriptions?
2. Which one moves people beyond a systematic comprehension to a fluid comprehension of the phenomenon?
I salute these attempts to convey the nature of advanced experience, something which seems like it should be impossible yet you are doing a credible job. I wouldn't worry about sounding like a stoned hippie; they were (on occasion) onto something as well.
This might be slightly tangential but do you know the book Free Play by Stephen Nachmanovitch? It's also about the texture of experience, particularly musical improvisation or improvisation in general:
"As an improvising musician, I am not in the music business, I am not in the creativity business, I am in the surrender business. Improvisation is acceptance, in a single breath, of both transience and eternity." More here: https://hyperphor.com/ammdi/Free-Play
I didn't know about this, thank you! And I've saved your URL for a great collection of notes on play, for the hypothetical future in which I finally get around to writing about it: https://hyperphor.com/ammdi/Play
This is an amazing articulation of Stage Five. I feel like I am borderline Stage Five, but the statement from Kegan about no one reaching Stage Five before forty leaves me slightly disillusioned, because I am sixteen and want to find like-minded minds somewhat near my age group.
I really appreciate this piece, so much resonates. As it is the first I have read from you I am a bit tentative to comment (as perhaps this is addressed elsewhere). Still, I have some trouble thinking of this as actually occurring in “stages” but rather that we might impose that sort of structure so as to understand it. Some might actually “start” in what is discussed here as stage 5 for example and only realize (when they reach age 40 for example) that not everyone else started there, thus discovering what others may have meant by “stage two” or stage four” etc. The point is: Aren’t these ways of (externally) representing what occurs in regularities, not linearities? This seems to be what you are suggesting when you say these experiences could come ‘at’ any stage, but nonetheless interested to push at it a minute to be sure…
Thanks so much for this — will share widely. Rhymes in an interesting way with K. Allado-McDowell's piece at Gropius Bau on how different media environments lead to different kinds of selfhood — although, disclaimer, this is "common parlance" talk for what Kenric means when they say:
"The immersive media hypersphere that surrounds us via smartphones and other devices is increasingly animated by AI systems that reflect us back to ourselves as embeddings in their high-dimensional space. In this sense, neural media produce a high-dimensional space with hallucinated content for embedded identities."
Co-evolution with learning machines digests selfhood as a coherent entity, relativizes autobiographical identity as a shadow cast by n-dimensional becoming, and refigures selves as reflected by AI as the space seen in the mirror of the machine's latent space. Still plenty of room for computer metaphors to slip in and hijack things, but I like thinking about how these "stages" may be less a linear sequence and more a kind of epigenetic expression enacted by organism-plus-environment.
You went through Ultraspeaking didn't you? An interesting feedback I got there is that I get too lost in abstraction, that my speaking would be more powerful if I instead make it personal. I feel this account would have benefitted immensely from a blow by blow account of a specific time you were operating in stage 5.
I'm an abstract thinker myself, so I was able to glean something from this. I think one time I was operating somewhere close to stage 5 was after the nasty car crash I got in last year. I remember calling 911 under 5 seconds after the crash, and I remember later that I was analyzing how I got in this car crash to begin with (traffic light was busted, and looking at the intersection where it happened, I could see that occasionally other drivers were making the same mistake that I made (running a yellow blinking light), but most were more cautious). So when that intersection is busted, its a car crash factory, because both sides feel they have right of way, and indeed, the guy operating the truck that hauled my car told me he had had another car crash in that intersection the week prior.) Insurance ruled in my favor, as I did have right of way, the other guy was getting a red blinking light.
Your description here gives me a confidence in my understanding of this topic I didn’t have before; thank you for this!
I’m also realizing that selfing is systematic—a repeatable mode of navigating circumstances by understanding what they mean for and about me and others. Kegan’s focus on selves in a lot of the writing he did in his mid thirties to fourties makes sense.
Beats me, and I mostly know these models over hearsay and lived experience, too little primary reading.
My best guess is that what you describe here roughly corresponds to 3rd path+ in Ingram's awakening stage model. And, I have so far mapped SCG's stage 6 on full awakening. I suspect that your 5 corresponds to her 6, and then her at least 4, 4.5, 5 are subdivisions of your 4.
Your description of stage 5 is that it feels closely resonant with the experience of nondual awareness. Perhaps one analogue with Kegan's stages is the Four Yogas of Naropa within the Mahamudra tradition, which goes from concentration to emptiness to nondual awareness to nonmeditation (where you stably recognize the space as your true nature).
I imagine this is an obvious parallel to you, and I wonder what you make of it.
Milarepa was plausibly experiencing the world deeply as the space, but also probably did not have rationality as a thinking mode (if we recognize that modernity was a necessary cultural prerequisite).
Yes... I have thought about this a lot, and I don't know what to make of it! There's definitely a structural similarity, and they sound similar when described. The actual experience seems to be different, but it's hard to say how. And if they are different, why do they sound the same?
Fascinating. I wonder how this overlaps with Hawkins’s map of consciousness. The default or steady “state” of stillness or serenity. Stretching one’s band of conscious experience to permanently reside in a space of expansive and boundless awareness within one’s unique expression of experience, the continuous unfolding of events and experiences.
It often sounds utterly bizarre when I share with people outside this particular space related to consciousness “hacking” or expanded states of consciousness and adult development. I’ve described it as “full resolution” and the perceptual experience is holistic and fluid while also being incredibly vivid, visceral and immersive. Immersive and yet not overwhelming. I’m *in* It, the field of consciousness and the unfolding of happenings, and there is deep presencing, without succumbing to or “falling apart.”
Within this space of conscious experience, concepts, beliefs, ideas, fall away, and gnosis, direct experience of this field, just Is. I can still read and understand theory, but not through the lens of mental processes and manipulation or endless pontificating and searching for “truth.” BTDT across the entire spectrum of religiosity and philosophical inquiry. Both came up short. Neither provided “answers” and even the closest descriptions that attempt to describe or explain it are not substitutes for each individual’s unique phenomenological experience. They’re approximations and representations of what our brain’s “machinery” can model.
Just recently, I came upon some emerging research exploring the nature or “seat” of consciousness:
“The findings de-emphasize the importance of the prefrontal cortex in consciousness, suggesting that while it's important for reasoning and planning, consciousness itself may be linked with sensory processing and perception. In other words, intelligence is about "doing" while consciousness is about "being."”
This is key, here. From a neo-Jungian perspective, using analytical psychology and embodied cognition, my default way of navigating my unique expression of experience is through *doing* and *managing* and leans heavily towards systems oriented thinking and relating (object management).
Within the framework of consensus reality and societal expectations, I have “thrived” in this structure, but it was this very structure that needed to collapse to make space for just being, and the space that opens up when stretching that band of consciousness. The need to “do” or even the relationship with “doing” dissolves.
One’s experience of consciousness is “let loose” from the confines of their VR headset or default programming, to echo Donald Hoffman. It becomes much richer and expansive. I can still apply a framework to things, but I know such things are independent of said framework. Structures and concepts exist within the context of the collective consciousness, within the space of forms, the material and classical model. But Consciousness is the ground of All Things. It is the fundamental principle of existence and pure Beingness.
When you’re stretched to the very edge of existence — the “experience” of Consciousness, timelessness, pure nondual Presence, much of how the world or Life / purpose is conceptualized and defined, especially through a more traditional Western lens, falls away.
For me, the “purpose” becomes the experience of life itself through my unique expression of “self.” At the highest resolution. It is an open-world multidimensional sandbox or grand cosmic stage play / game (Lila in Vedic philosophy). There is no-self when one dissolves back into its original, true form. It’s the fundamental principle of being and existence. It all dissolves into the One.
But the experience of *a* self is necessary to, well, have rich, vibrant, textured experiences of life. Personalized, customized gameplay. To embody living myth. To live mythically and intentionally a la the hero’s / heroine’s journey toward individuation (my background is comparative religion / religious studies and philosophy with a focus on metaphysics). That’s what makes it unique and exciting. Only through forms can we have experience, and only through direct experience can we reclaim that awareness.
Beyond discrimination is space (mu). Without substantiation it has the freedom to arise as anything whatsoever.
Space is not empty by itself, dullness is not the luminosity of cognizant awareness, if it were all empty, then there would be no cognizance of phenomena being inherently empty. It is so simple, yet confusion makes it appear complex.
The culmination of the stages would transcend the alaya, and therefore not even be numbered, (the ground, stage mu), yes?
David, lovely to meet you! This article was like sipping a fine wine—we have a lot of alignment in common including a shared “stoned hippie” immersion in Vajrayana 😀 But my straying into Vajrayana is quite sober and dare i say even logical.
I am the creator and founder of Symbiquity, the “great game” of collective consensus building which shares a lot of hallmarks with your thinking, both stoned and sober :)
we demonstrate in this game a moving nash equilibrium through three systems, cognitive, psychological, and computational.
Your wonderful wandering into this area of paraconsistent ternary logic, which is western dialectical logic up until hegel but also “the two truths” doctrine of the east, beginning in the Bhagvad Gita refining through Vajrayana and all Buddhist Dialectics, does bring us to a paradox in what you wrote.
The paradox? Stage four and Stage five are one system of systems, and yes this would be the only beautiful contradiction in your entire provocative piece and yes this is a paradox but a very necessary one.
resolving the paradox with aristolian logic is not possible, but the paradox does resolve using ternary paraconsistent logic (dialectics, basically).
The Bhagvad Gita resolved it 3000 years ago—the non-dual (stage 5) is both dual and non-dual or both stage four and five!
This type of non dual consensus building exercise does allow for a continually open system that is both open and closed, conflicting and resolving and i would love to show you the mechanism design when the time is right 😀
if you'd be up for it, it would be useful to have a sort of Dear Abby advice column, where people would write in with problems and you could identify em as "that's a stage 3 problem and the stage 4 way to think about it would be..." or "that's a stage 4 problem and the stage 5 way to think about it would be..."
That's a really interesting idea! I'm probably not the right person to do it, but... not out of the question?
BTW, we'll be discussing pretty much exactly this in the eG book club TODAY, which starts at 9:30 Pacific! Covering the "psychotherapy" and "university learning/teaching" chapters of Robert Kegan's _In Over Our Heads_. https://community.evolvingground.org/c/book-club/in-over-our-heads-the-mental-demands-of-modern-life-97f83c
You might be the right person to provide some examples of this kind of advice, or maybe run a 'contest' in which your readers try doing this for one example, or a few, and you offer your thoughts about how well you think we did.
If you'd like a taste of that kind of content, I highly recommend 'The Discerning Heart: the Developmental Psychology of Robert Kegan' by Phillip M Lewis. I've read Kegan's books, but some aspects of the theory didn't click until this book, as Lewis points at the difference in *phenomenology* between the levels more clearly than Kegan.
Thank you! I have ordered this book. Sounds worth reading!
One major insight that it gave me was: even if you are capable of higher Kegan stages, it's probably spikier than you'd expect. For example, even though I am certainly capable of creating the joint-relationship psychological object that is core to stage 3, I'm not always doing this. I don't do this with every cashier and clerk I encounter, for example. I'm often not even doing this with my friends, especially if it's the middle of winter and I haven't seen them in a while. I can still see myself, and I can still see them, but I don't move to see both at the same time (which is what the joint-relationship psychological object of stage 3 allows).
It had somehow never occurred to me that the extent to which even 'someone at stage 5' would continue to 'WANT' to 'operate at' lower stages is pretty considerable. (Duh)
Inter-stage (but intra-person) conflicts are ripe with drama! (Also duh)
Stage 2 seems very Reasonable for lots of interactions with strangers – lots of people meet/see/hear/etc. lots of people that _aren't_ also 'members of their community (or communities)'.
It also seems very Reasonable for people to value _preserving_ life 'lived at stage 3' against the encroachments of stage 4 (or stage 2)! Maybe that's a thing a lot of people miss or are missing or otherwise suffering its lack?
Yes, every stage includes all the previous ones, rather than replacing them.
I think I could have generated that point – at about that level of abstraction – but what COPONDER's comment did was jar a jag of 'What would that look like concretely?', 'What would ('stage') mismatches among some people interacting look like concretely?', and similar thoughts.
SPECIFIC ideas along these lines seem likely to be very fruitful!
(I suspect I myself could do with reminding myself of this much more often.)
And of course you included some (more) concrete details in your 'stages overview' post published almost a decade ago; one such detail I liked rereading it:
> Social groups based in the communal mode [stage 3] tend to be dominated by people with personality disorders, who get their way by emoting histrionically.
And man does that match a social conflict I witnessed somewhat recently. One person was trying to communicate at stage 4 – 'You've been a bad member of our joint project.' – and the other at stage 3 – 'I don't LIKE doing that task.'. I'm not even sure the person at stage 3 [in this interaction] even really understands themselves as having committed to the project! I suspect they might have interpreted the initial 'project planning meeting' as more of an 'expression of positive affect' (towards them) than them having made any explicit commitments.
Nice example! And yes, I've seen just about exactly that same interaction too.
What is more likely and common is that people face problems where some aspects are stuck in stage 2, many aspects are in stage 3, and still other aspects are pushimg in stage 4 and beyond.
Like that scene from The Incredibles where Elastigirl is stuck between several doors.
So some things need to relax, some things need to become boxed, some things need to twist, some things need to close, etc.
Yes... this is a major sticking point for the whole theory. Different theorists have different ideas about how to think about it. (It's called "décallage," "lag" in the field.) I'm planning a post about this... (But I'm planning posts about *everything*, so who knows if I'll ever get to it...)
One thing that's difficult is that, as least in my experience, the three main forms of language that are used described the contours of 'stages of development' are: psychological/academic (mental), religous/mystic (symbol), mathematical/computational (physical).
And ... they don't seem to map very well, or translate in proper ways a lot.
And, so, different people may describe the same thing as:
– heart chakra (as an interoceptive nerve cluster) opening with abiding prescence
– hormetic vasocomputation of blood plasma within heart (as a physiological structure)
1. How to litigate the subtle differences between those descriptions?
2. Which one moves people beyond a systematic comprehension to a fluid comprehension of the phenomenon?
I salute these attempts to convey the nature of advanced experience, something which seems like it should be impossible yet you are doing a credible job. I wouldn't worry about sounding like a stoned hippie; they were (on occasion) onto something as well.
This might be slightly tangential but do you know the book Free Play by Stephen Nachmanovitch? It's also about the texture of experience, particularly musical improvisation or improvisation in general:
"As an improvising musician, I am not in the music business, I am not in the creativity business, I am in the surrender business. Improvisation is acceptance, in a single breath, of both transience and eternity." More here: https://hyperphor.com/ammdi/Free-Play
I didn't know about this, thank you! And I've saved your URL for a great collection of notes on play, for the hypothetical future in which I finally get around to writing about it: https://hyperphor.com/ammdi/Play
This is an amazing articulation of Stage Five. I feel like I am borderline Stage Five, but the statement from Kegan about no one reaching Stage Five before forty leaves me slightly disillusioned, because I am sixteen and want to find like-minded minds somewhat near my age group.
All we *actually* know is that people at stage 5 younger than 40 have never bothered to show up in Kegan's lab for testing.
Careful with premature confidence though, all of us have overestimated our own stage at some point or another. Best not to tie it up with ego games.
Best of luck with finding your people! 🤞
I really appreciate this piece, so much resonates. As it is the first I have read from you I am a bit tentative to comment (as perhaps this is addressed elsewhere). Still, I have some trouble thinking of this as actually occurring in “stages” but rather that we might impose that sort of structure so as to understand it. Some might actually “start” in what is discussed here as stage 5 for example and only realize (when they reach age 40 for example) that not everyone else started there, thus discovering what others may have meant by “stage two” or stage four” etc. The point is: Aren’t these ways of (externally) representing what occurs in regularities, not linearities? This seems to be what you are suggesting when you say these experiences could come ‘at’ any stage, but nonetheless interested to push at it a minute to be sure…
Yes, this is an open question in the research field. The answer is not clear.
Thanks so much for this — will share widely. Rhymes in an interesting way with K. Allado-McDowell's piece at Gropius Bau on how different media environments lead to different kinds of selfhood — although, disclaimer, this is "common parlance" talk for what Kenric means when they say:
"The immersive media hypersphere that surrounds us via smartphones and other devices is increasingly animated by AI systems that reflect us back to ourselves as embeddings in their high-dimensional space. In this sense, neural media produce a high-dimensional space with hallucinated content for embedded identities."
Co-evolution with learning machines digests selfhood as a coherent entity, relativizes autobiographical identity as a shadow cast by n-dimensional becoming, and refigures selves as reflected by AI as the space seen in the mirror of the machine's latent space. Still plenty of room for computer metaphors to slip in and hijack things, but I like thinking about how these "stages" may be less a linear sequence and more a kind of epigenetic expression enacted by organism-plus-environment.
https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/gropius-bau/programm/journal/2024/kalladomcdowellneural
> ...a fluid is homogeneous and undifferentiated
Only in a physics classroom! Real world fluids aren't like that at all. :D
It might just be me, but I've never imagined anything homogenous and undifferentiated anytime I've heard the word 'fluid'. The metaphor works for me!
You went through Ultraspeaking didn't you? An interesting feedback I got there is that I get too lost in abstraction, that my speaking would be more powerful if I instead make it personal. I feel this account would have benefitted immensely from a blow by blow account of a specific time you were operating in stage 5.
I'm an abstract thinker myself, so I was able to glean something from this. I think one time I was operating somewhere close to stage 5 was after the nasty car crash I got in last year. I remember calling 911 under 5 seconds after the crash, and I remember later that I was analyzing how I got in this car crash to begin with (traffic light was busted, and looking at the intersection where it happened, I could see that occasionally other drivers were making the same mistake that I made (running a yellow blinking light), but most were more cautious). So when that intersection is busted, its a car crash factory, because both sides feel they have right of way, and indeed, the guy operating the truck that hauled my car told me he had had another car crash in that intersection the week prior.) Insurance ruled in my favor, as I did have right of way, the other guy was getting a red blinking light.
Your description here gives me a confidence in my understanding of this topic I didn’t have before; thank you for this!
I’m also realizing that selfing is systematic—a repeatable mode of navigating circumstances by understanding what they mean for and about me and others. Kegan’s focus on selves in a lot of the writing he did in his mid thirties to fourties makes sense.
How does this map onto Cook-Greuter's distinction between stage 5 and 6?
I'm not sure what to think about that! What do you think?
Beats me, and I mostly know these models over hearsay and lived experience, too little primary reading.
My best guess is that what you describe here roughly corresponds to 3rd path+ in Ingram's awakening stage model. And, I have so far mapped SCG's stage 6 on full awakening. I suspect that your 5 corresponds to her 6, and then her at least 4, 4.5, 5 are subdivisions of your 4.
Your description of stage 5 is that it feels closely resonant with the experience of nondual awareness. Perhaps one analogue with Kegan's stages is the Four Yogas of Naropa within the Mahamudra tradition, which goes from concentration to emptiness to nondual awareness to nonmeditation (where you stably recognize the space as your true nature).
I imagine this is an obvious parallel to you, and I wonder what you make of it.
Milarepa was plausibly experiencing the world deeply as the space, but also probably did not have rationality as a thinking mode (if we recognize that modernity was a necessary cultural prerequisite).
Yes... I have thought about this a lot, and I don't know what to make of it! There's definitely a structural similarity, and they sound similar when described. The actual experience seems to be different, but it's hard to say how. And if they are different, why do they sound the same?
Fascinating. I wonder how this overlaps with Hawkins’s map of consciousness. The default or steady “state” of stillness or serenity. Stretching one’s band of conscious experience to permanently reside in a space of expansive and boundless awareness within one’s unique expression of experience, the continuous unfolding of events and experiences.
It often sounds utterly bizarre when I share with people outside this particular space related to consciousness “hacking” or expanded states of consciousness and adult development. I’ve described it as “full resolution” and the perceptual experience is holistic and fluid while also being incredibly vivid, visceral and immersive. Immersive and yet not overwhelming. I’m *in* It, the field of consciousness and the unfolding of happenings, and there is deep presencing, without succumbing to or “falling apart.”
Within this space of conscious experience, concepts, beliefs, ideas, fall away, and gnosis, direct experience of this field, just Is. I can still read and understand theory, but not through the lens of mental processes and manipulation or endless pontificating and searching for “truth.” BTDT across the entire spectrum of religiosity and philosophical inquiry. Both came up short. Neither provided “answers” and even the closest descriptions that attempt to describe or explain it are not substitutes for each individual’s unique phenomenological experience. They’re approximations and representations of what our brain’s “machinery” can model.
Just recently, I came upon some emerging research exploring the nature or “seat” of consciousness:
“The findings de-emphasize the importance of the prefrontal cortex in consciousness, suggesting that while it's important for reasoning and planning, consciousness itself may be linked with sensory processing and perception. In other words, intelligence is about "doing" while consciousness is about "being."”
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-04-consciousness.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08888-1
This is key, here. From a neo-Jungian perspective, using analytical psychology and embodied cognition, my default way of navigating my unique expression of experience is through *doing* and *managing* and leans heavily towards systems oriented thinking and relating (object management).
Within the framework of consensus reality and societal expectations, I have “thrived” in this structure, but it was this very structure that needed to collapse to make space for just being, and the space that opens up when stretching that band of consciousness. The need to “do” or even the relationship with “doing” dissolves.
One’s experience of consciousness is “let loose” from the confines of their VR headset or default programming, to echo Donald Hoffman. It becomes much richer and expansive. I can still apply a framework to things, but I know such things are independent of said framework. Structures and concepts exist within the context of the collective consciousness, within the space of forms, the material and classical model. But Consciousness is the ground of All Things. It is the fundamental principle of existence and pure Beingness.
When you’re stretched to the very edge of existence — the “experience” of Consciousness, timelessness, pure nondual Presence, much of how the world or Life / purpose is conceptualized and defined, especially through a more traditional Western lens, falls away.
For me, the “purpose” becomes the experience of life itself through my unique expression of “self.” At the highest resolution. It is an open-world multidimensional sandbox or grand cosmic stage play / game (Lila in Vedic philosophy). There is no-self when one dissolves back into its original, true form. It’s the fundamental principle of being and existence. It all dissolves into the One.
But the experience of *a* self is necessary to, well, have rich, vibrant, textured experiences of life. Personalized, customized gameplay. To embody living myth. To live mythically and intentionally a la the hero’s / heroine’s journey toward individuation (my background is comparative religion / religious studies and philosophy with a focus on metaphysics). That’s what makes it unique and exciting. Only through forms can we have experience, and only through direct experience can we reclaim that awareness.
Beyond discrimination is space (mu). Without substantiation it has the freedom to arise as anything whatsoever.
Space is not empty by itself, dullness is not the luminosity of cognizant awareness, if it were all empty, then there would be no cognizance of phenomena being inherently empty. It is so simple, yet confusion makes it appear complex.
The culmination of the stages would transcend the alaya, and therefore not even be numbered, (the ground, stage mu), yes?
David, lovely to meet you! This article was like sipping a fine wine—we have a lot of alignment in common including a shared “stoned hippie” immersion in Vajrayana 😀 But my straying into Vajrayana is quite sober and dare i say even logical.
I am the creator and founder of Symbiquity, the “great game” of collective consensus building which shares a lot of hallmarks with your thinking, both stoned and sober :)
we demonstrate in this game a moving nash equilibrium through three systems, cognitive, psychological, and computational.
Your wonderful wandering into this area of paraconsistent ternary logic, which is western dialectical logic up until hegel but also “the two truths” doctrine of the east, beginning in the Bhagvad Gita refining through Vajrayana and all Buddhist Dialectics, does bring us to a paradox in what you wrote.
The paradox? Stage four and Stage five are one system of systems, and yes this would be the only beautiful contradiction in your entire provocative piece and yes this is a paradox but a very necessary one.
resolving the paradox with aristolian logic is not possible, but the paradox does resolve using ternary paraconsistent logic (dialectics, basically).
The Bhagvad Gita resolved it 3000 years ago—the non-dual (stage 5) is both dual and non-dual or both stage four and five!
This type of non dual consensus building exercise does allow for a continually open system that is both open and closed, conflicting and resolving and i would love to show you the mechanism design when the time is right 😀
let’s be roommates lol 😆