So I just watched
Cook-Greuter's lecture and this helped clarify some of my thinking.
jacob wrote: ↑Thu Sep 21, 2023 10:40 am
I revisited some earlier posts in this thread and I don't think my framing/understanding has changed. I still think there are two tracks, perhaps best differentiated by the thinking and the feeling part of the brain. Philosophy deals with the former. Psychology with the latter.
Do you mean two tracks that lead on a path of ego development? Is the goal to get to the end stage of "enlightenment" (aka Cook-Greuter (who I am now going to abbreviate CG) 6th stage of the Unitive ego?
What Kegan and CG in particular have in common is this bell curve where ego development follows a path of differentiation from the Other until it reaches a zenith (K4, GC4-Achiever) then starts to follow a path of reunification with the Other. In concrete terms, think about Freud's original insight on how a baby is, at first, fused with its mother. An infant makes no distinction between Self and Other. We could say this is primitive non-dualism. As the baby grows and becomes a child, it learns to make increasing distinctions between Self and Other, learning that other children are separate from it, the world exists outside of it (object permanence), etc. This peaks at K4/GC4, and in order to move past those stages, one has to start realizing the map is not the territory and therefore the story one tells about oneself and the world has been driving one's experience. Increasing levels up the GC ladder therefore then follows a path of realizing the map is really, REALLY not the territory, but in specific ways. It's a misunderstanding of this stage that you've declared reality as nonexistent, rather, you start to see how you're cutting the world into categories, and as such, those categories can be pretty damned fungible.
With development, one sees how one cuts the distinction between Self and Other can become a conscious choice. At the highest level, you can choose to fully do away with the distinction (non-dualism, the Witnessing Self) OR you can choose to take the perspective of any one of the many paradigms one has learned to understand (take the perspective of mother, child, employee, elected official, etc) OR you can create a new paradigm all from scratch (make your own map). But what you're doing at GC6-Unitive is realizing all of these things are all true at once because humans make maps and cannot understand reality without a map because we don't experience reality directly (Transcendental idealism). Thus even science is questioned, not because empirical reality is false, but because science itself runs on a set of assumptions (a paradigm) that are often overturned (see Paradigm Incommensurability, which basically states that because paradigms define the context of truth, you can't carry truth from one paradigm to another, hence the map is really,
really, REALLY not the territory).
(Side note, this is what "chop wood, carry water" really means. It means that even once you've had this profound experience of the non-dual, it really doesn't change much. You still have you live your life, and you will often be doing so under conditions of ordinary consciousness. Also you realize you're never going to escape any one paradigm and arrive "at the single truth," because truth relies on paradigms. Rather, paradigms are constantly shifting, and you learn to embrace the paradox of using multiple maps (or inventing a new one), as one can't really exist with
no map.)
jacob wrote: ↑Thu Sep 21, 2023 10:40 am
Eric Berne's transactional analysis puts some perspective on the development of Kegan3. Personally, I think I might have either skipped most of that stage or used the equivalent of a spiritual bypass that is the intellectual bypass...Also interesting is that perhaps the Kegan model is broken insofar Kegan2, Kegan3, and Kegan4 perspectives exist in the same person.
Question: Does the adult/parent/child ration change as people go through the Plotkin circle. Under the above framework, subpersonality work is about removing/changing dysfunctional aspects of the Parent and Adapted Child groups.
This is an interesting question. We've discussed on this forum how one can have "complexity collapse" under conditions of stress and revert to earlier Kegan stages. And if we look at GC-4/5-Pluralist, we get the description of "the inner tribe," which is the experience of consciously observing how different parts of yourself seem to have contradictory needs and wants. So because Kegan doesn't flesh out what K5 looks like that fully in his book, I think this is something he probably missed and you can have different parts of yourself stuff at different Kegan levels (like SD).
One thing to keep in mind about Plotkin is that his stuff relies on archetypes like Jung, so it's more metaphorical than some of these other writers. That being said, the subpersonalities could be thought of as parts of yourself stuck in K2/K3 because behaviors that involve meeting base needs/desires (K2) or trying to fit in and avoid abandonment (K3) are what make up subpersonalities. However, I think this comparison between subpersonalities and transaction analysis breakdowns when you compare the fourfold dimensions of the self (the West, the East, etc) because those are more about how to embody the trans-paradigm paradoxes of K5/GC5+.
I'd also say that bypassing Kegan3 is not so much a subpersonality but a missed developmental milestone. Part of ego development per Plotkin (and also just regular psychotherapy) is about achieving missed developmental milestones in adulthood. So that if one uses intellectual bypass to avoid Kegan3, an important task of later development will be to try to embody Kegan3 in a healthy way in adulthood, as the missed development of that stage go into your shadow and therefore out of consciousness. IIRC, Plotkin has his list of lifecycle milestones and part of his journey into soul is getting back anything you missed from earlier development. Bypassing K3 would amount to missing milestones in adolescence of fitting in and social esteem. This is significant because later stages of ego development require a conscious union with the Other, so if one has failed a milestone, the lessons from that milestone remain in the shadow, and full differentiation/reunion can't be achieved because it's a perspective one can't take.
jacob wrote: ↑Thu Sep 21, 2023 10:40 am
Lets consider the extreme situation of 100 adult / 0 parent / 0 child. Does this situation even include a "you". All it has is an interobjective reality with different parts (humans, plants, squirrels, rocks,...) in service to it. Service is probably the wrong word here. I mean "service" as in part of this complete breakfast. How a computer can contain the blueprints to its own (re)construction. As such, I see nonduality as an extreme(ist) position. Basically concluding that N=infinity while ignoring all other possible perspectives---blame decades of dissociation-inducing meditation.
From a physics perspective, it's almost trivial to include the observer as part of the observed all the way up and all the way down to whichever degree of resolution ... It just depends on how strong the connection (transfer rate) is.
A common feature of many of these enlightenment experiences is that you eventually come down from them and have to embody your ordinary consciousness once more. But what they do give you is a wider experience of consciousness so that you can drag stuff out of your shadow and more fully embody what your conscious experience is. I don't think you can get stuck in a state of "forever nondualism," and those who claim to be in that position are falling into spiritual bypass. Because the end goal here is to be more fully conscious about what paradigm's one is using and fully embody the role your experience plays in the unfolding of the universe (what Plotkin calls Soul).