Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

[OutOfTheBlue]

Sharing one recently completed Musing by Bill Plotkin published as an essay in Animas Valley Institute's website:

Who’s Up for Building a Cathedral? Ecocentric Human Development, the Hero’s Journey, and Cultural Regeneration

An excellent read, recommended!

Relevant with ERE2 (as in Emergent Renaissance Ecology). Feel free to discuss below (or create a separate thread if so inclined).

[OutOfTheBlue]

Sharing a post from River Kenna's newsletter, who I know from Dustbowl's share of a YouTube video in his journal, as this is relevant to Plotkin's work and in particular the essay I shared above ("Who’s Up for Building a Cathedral? Ecocentric Human Development, the Hero’s Journey, and Cultural Regeneration"), and what Jin+Guice has been discussing in his journal about pathological (patho-adolescent) culture.

Comment: While Plotkin uses Joseph Cambell's "The Hero's Journey" and Arnold Van Gennep's "The Rites of Passage" as a blueprint for the journey from psychospiritual late adolescence to early adulthood in his first book, Soulcraft, in his more recent writings (see The Journey of Soul Initiation and the essay I just mentioned), he somewhat distances himself/diverges from them. For instance, he writes that "The Descent to Soul […] is not the hero's journey or a vision quest.". In the essay on Building a Cathedral, Plotkin stresses the limitations of that myth and the need to turn to more "mature" models as well, which resonates with what River Kenna is writing.

---

Title: The Hero's Journey is a Jammed Door by River Kenna

In it he discusses Joseph Cambell's monomyth of the Hero's Journey, stressing that it's not the only myth or story structure out there, but that it is "a myth with special significance for our age". He also weaves in Plotkin's "Soul-Centric Model of Human Development",

The writing style might appeal to this crowd too,

Here are some excerpts:

It's a myth that's appropriate for a very particular stage of life — it forms a threshold between what we can roughly call adolescence and adulthood. An adolescent leaves normal day-to-day life, meets new friends, faces challenges, discovers that there's more to them (and more to life) than they'd previously thought, learns to make sacrifices and compromises, and then returns to take a new role in the world they come from. They return as a new person, able and willing to do things they couldn't before; able to be someone they couldn't be before."

[…]

If we accept this as a useful frame, that the Hero's Journey is an enactment of a transition from adolescence to adulthood, and further entertain the frame that the compulsive re-enactment of the Hero's Journey is indicative of that transition's failure to complete, then the next question becomes "how and why does this transition so consistently fail to complete in most individuals?

On a mythic & structural level, I can pinpoint the point of failure pretty directly: we aren't dying.

In The Writer's Journey (one of the more famous books on storytelling with the Hero's Journey as a template) the author states it clearly:

Heroes must die so that they can be reborn... Heroes don't just visit death and come home. They return changed, transformed. No one can go through an experience at the edge of death without being changed in some way.

[…]

Something in you has to struggle, fail, and die. It's not for nothing that Plotkin calls Late Adolescence "The Wanderer in the Cocoon."

Cut [a cocoon] open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly... No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.” (Pat Barker)

This process of struggling, failing, and dying is hardly possible — at least not at scale — in a culture where our years of torrential, energetic outpouring-towards-growth are spent cooped up indoors, bound to a desk, judged from all directions by peers, parents, and authorities, not feeling like we're making contributions to the wider life of our family and society, forced to study subject after subject that we can clearly see no one cares about. There's no fruitful decay there, only sapped atrophy.

[…]

I'm as hopeful as anyone, but I'm keeping my eyes on the canaries — one of the biggest, for me, is the prevalence of the Hero's Journey everywhere from movie theaters to writers workshops to inner work retreats to stoned conversations about economic history. When society stops re-enacting the pattern in every medium at every chance, I'll take that as a sign that the underlying frozen energy has been dissipated.

Until then, I wonder: What myths might we find to re-frame and re-fresh this journey, so people can approach it without all the baggage and false familiarity? And if the adventure is successful – what new myths might re-emerge to take its place?

Once we’ve opened the jammed door to true developmental adulthood, what grown-up myths will take on renewed importance?

[ertyu]

I know a couple of young (and not so young) adults who have "died," and they often experience this as a failure; a shameful occurrence that leads them to doubt their own abilities, etc. I'm not sure I have fully gotten over my own "dying," that time in my late 20s when I failed to make the transition between a grad student and a suit-clad imf/world bank drone - failed to get "a real job," to "adult" properly. What I love about the above essay is that it reframes what is commonly thought of and internalized as a failure mode into the only fruitful way to developmental maturation.(*)

(*)Actual adults of ERE, did you ever "die"? Or did you achieve developmental adulthood in some other way?

Anyway -- it doesn't much matter if the above essay is universally true as long as it's useful to those who have experienced "death" and have no other way to conceive of it than incompetence and failure. It could be quite transformative to re-conceptualize the "death" as just a stage in the hero's journey.

[jacob]

I know a couple of young (and not so young) adults who have "died," and they often experience this as a failure; a shameful occurrence that leads them to doubt their own abilities, etc. I'm not sure I have fully gotten over my own "dying," that time in my late 20s when I failed to make the transition between a grad student and a suit-clad imf/world bank drone - failed to get "a real job," to "adult" properly. What I love about the above essay is that it reframes what is commonly thought of and internalized as a failure mode into the only fruitful way to developmental maturation.(*)

(*)Actual adults of ERE, did you ever "die"? Or did you achieve developmental adulthood in some other way?

I'm not sure I completely understand the language of this type of essays. I would say I've had two (and a half) transitions or crossing of the river that are irreversible.

First, going to grad school and realizing that the buck stops with me. This is a very narrow transition into adulthood because it only concerns the solution of technical problems. Still, previously, there was always an "adult" in the form of a professor who knew the answer, because my education up to the masters had basically been solving practice problems. Grad school marked the transition to not only not having the solution but not knowing the problem. Instead of knowing that the institution (professor, textbook, ...) had the answer, it became clear that if there was an answer, I would either be the one who had it or the one to find it. This led to the development of a "if not me, then who"-approach to life which persists to this day.

Second, the smaller death of the techno-optimistic Star Trek future it was my mission in life to contribute to. Also see viewtopic.php?p=279563#p279563 ... it took me about 6 months to get over this "loss". This mainly involved lots of contemplating and creating a new framework for my worldview. This was likely the INTJ equivalent of grieving for the more emotionally oriented. This did not feel like me dying as much as my old view of the world dying.

Third, the bigger death of retiring from physics and going full in on the ERE mission. This is the closest I would say could be identified with a psychological death, namely, the death of my (career-)physicist "subpersonality". At the time, that subpersonality had already become jaded deadwood, but it was still hard to let go off. Note, we're talking a time when I had been blogging for about a year and the ERE book was only half finished. People often ask me if I still follow along with new discoveries in physics and astronomy. The answer is a solid no. I don't care about that stuff at all anymore. I do occasionally have fun reading an physics textbook but I no longer get a kick out of the latest discoveries or find the potential of a fifth natural force amazing.

If I understand correctly, some of these transitions can be described as a death of the old part. I think the trauma involved depends to which degree the new part is ready to take over. I know it's popular in psychopathology to return to old issues over and over. I don't see the need for that. Perhaps it's because of the strong NiTe orientation. I don't think my Fi values changed much in any of the three cases, so I didn't develop emotional baggage, which I'd imagine would be harder to "rewire".

PS: The essay describes Kegan4+ as a minority. While technically not a majority, the fraction is still large. The numbers are: Kegan1 ~ 0%, Kegan2 ~ 14%, Kegan3 ~ 56%, Kegan4 ~ 30%, Kegan5 ~ 1%.

[ertyu]

[other things I am reminded of re: "death": 1. the inner experience of opening up to shame. 2. the meditation advice, "let it kill you."]

[7Wannabe5]

I am currently dead I think of it more in gardening terms. Sometimes your life needs a hard pruning. This is obvious and relatively easy in terms of dead wood, but less so in terms of fresh growth that is changing the ideal balance or suckering off your core strength. However, it's important to recognize that while you were going/growing off in all those ultimately "wrong" directions, you were still gathering energy from the sun, growing rootstock, integrating information, etc.

[jacob]

Have any of you/MMG talked about how Plotkin's circle lines up with the linear model of Loevinger and Cook-Greuter's adult ego development?

http://onesystemonevoice.com/resources/ ... 5B1$5D.pdf

Here too, the natural stopping point of the majority of people happens early in the potential total journey at stage 3 (expertise/being a good worker) or 4 (having a career). 3 and 4 corresponds to the conventional conformist sociocentric stages or Kegan3. Stage 5 (individualization) is the beginning of Kegan4.

[OutOfTheBlue]

Have any of you/MMG talked about how Plotkin's circle lines up with the linear model of Loevinger and Cook-Greuter's adult ego development?

http://onesystemonevoice.com/resources/ ... 5B1$5D.pdf

Here too, the natural stopping point of the majority of people happens early in the potential total journey at stage 3 (expertise/being a good worker) or 4 (having a career). 3 and 4 corresponds to the conventional conformist sociocentric stages or Kegan3. Stage 5 (individualization) is the beginning of Kegan4.

Thank you for this reference, Jacob, I haven't read it yet, but it will be very interesting to study, compare and discuss such models at some later point in time.

With the MMG, we're currently taking it slow, doing one Wild Mind chapter each month (next meeting will be on the West facet, before we dive into the four groups of subpersonalities) as there is opportunity for inner work, exploration, practices, additional readings and generally interacting with the material on different levels.

When we pick up Nature and the Human Soul, however, I'm thinking this could be a good occasion to invite other interested ERE folks to participate or set up some broader discussion group/event/series of meetings in open dialog with the forum.

[avalok]

Third, the bigger death of retiring from physics and going full in on the ERE mission. This is the closest I would say could be identified with a psychological death

It is interesting that this was the biggest "death" for you, larger than the loss of techno-optimism. Shedding techno-optimism in the 9-12 months after encountering ERE for the first time was particularly difficult. I would agree that I didn't perceive it as a death, more a dark night of the soul. You spend a lot of time looking for things to rely on again. Perhaps the death->birth cycle here was actually learning that there isn't much that can be relyed on, and becoming okay with that.

How much of the physics death do you think was predicated on being FI? Do you think because you didn't need that career any longer you were more willing to fudamentally question it? No doubt many must refuse to ask such questions because they see no other option.

[AnalyticalEngine]

@jacob - That's been something I've been meaning to write more about someday, but I'm still in the process of collecting my thoughts and doing some research.

What I've noticed is that Plotkin's model ties Jung, Kegan, and nondualism together in a fairly coherent way and then provides a ladder to move up the steps. All the subpersonalities can be thought of as developmental traumas acquired from achieving Kegan3. Learning to manage them is gaining the ability to set outside of your socialization and reach Kegan4.

His four-fold self can be thought of as a Kegan4 skill where you have access to self-authoring and have learned to manage your Kegan3 socialization wounds. This is also where Jung is helpful because the process of shadow formation is essentially everything about your psyche you have to suppress to achieve Kegan3. This is why violence and sexuality often come up in the shadow, as those are common things people suppress when being socialized, but there's also so much more than that.

Now where this gets more complicated to understand are his notions of Soul and Spirit and how those relate to Kegan5. It's really hard to understand this without having a background in nondual philosophy, and getting an actual background in nondual philosophy is difficult because 90% of what's written about it is New Age nonsense. But if you can actually wrap your head around it (I suggest "The Other Side of Nothing" as one text, maybe digging into post-structuralism too), then Plotkin's model and how it relates to Kegan5 make a lot more sense.

Specifically, the goal here is to realize how forces outside of yourself created "you," and just how slippery your experience of "you" can be. This is the purpose of meditation, incidentally. It's just getting good at watching the experience of "you" and then realizing "you" have awareness but you aren't your internal experiences/identities. Do this long enough and you started to realize how this experience of awareness is something into itself and therefore universal across everyone, because you've observed how awareness is separate from experience. Then you realize everyone must have the same type of consciousness and thus consciousness is universal and we are all one. This is nondualism/Plotkin's Spirit. You might also say it's the beginning of the Pluralist stage:

People now realize that things are not necessarily what they seemed at earlier stages because the interpretation of reality always depends on the position of the observer. Thus the idea of myself as a participant observer as well as having multiple perspectives becomes fascinating to explore. Once we realize that as observers we inevitably influence what we observe, pure, detached, that is, “objective” judgment becomes impossible.

However, it's a mistake at this point to assume we are "all one" and therefore there's no individual experience either. People who get stuck here with the nondual realization but WITHOUT Soul often fall victim to spiritual bypass. This is the problem with the whole New Age "my personal problems don't matter because we are all one" thing. Rather, the key is the realization that your experience is pluralistic and start to explore how the forces outside of you created you.

So this takes us to Soul and Plotkin's Descent into Soul. The goal here is to realize that we may all be expressions of the universal consciousness, and that means your purpose is to manifest whatever your specific experience in this time and place is going to be. If we are all the universe observing itself, then you are here to observe or manifest a specific facet of the universe. Your Soul or sacred individuality needs to express this, and per Plotkin, this is possible by getting in touch with your deepest inner psyche then manifesting that calling into this world. This seems like the Autonomous stage to me.

The postautonomous stages, however, are currently above my paygrade so let me go reread a few things and get back to you.

[grundomatic]

Having read none of the books in question, I’d still like to share my thoughts. First, it seems like a rite of passage is a different journey than the hero’s journey.

When I think of rites of passage (in the general sense, since I haven’t read the book), it seems to me like they serve to mark the crossing of the South line in the Plotkin diagram, or going from Kegan 2→3. You were a kid, but now after this thing, you are a grown up. You go live in the woods alone for a time, you sit through a stuffy HS graduation ceremony, whatever. Now you are expected to contribute as a member of the group. You’ll now hunt with the tribe instead of staying in the village, you’ll go get a job and contribute to society, etc.

The hero’s journey seems to be crossing the West line in the Plotkin diagram, or going from Kegan 3→4. This is breaking from the group. You leave the village to go slay the dragon, or maybe drop out of college to start your own company. Your tribe is still hunting, or your classmates are still on the GPA-maximizing grind, but you’ve chosen a different path that will fundamentally change you.

Kegan’s premise in In Over Our Heads is the following: there is a hidden curriculum in society for crossing that South line, or going from K2 to K3, but society doesn’t have a hidden curriculum to cross the West line, to go from K3 to K4.

The article seems to want to disparage schooling as the reason nobody actually goes on a hero’s journey, but this is where I think it’s important to separate the rite of passage from hero’s journey. Schooling and other teenage activities like team sports and part-time jobs are just the things that lead up to the modern day rite of passage, graduation. The trouble is that the institutions and customs that would lead to something like a hero’s journey are sparse.

It should be no surprise that the media keeps selling the hero’s journey over and over. Without a common, “institutionalized” way for it to happen in the world today, the hero’s journey remains at the aspirational level for many, and aspirations are simply bought (and sold) in our pathological consumer society. So after the movie the thought of self-authoring gets tucked away and forgotten in the back of the mental closet, like the aspirationally purchased gear in the back of physical closets. Soon enough another movie or another activity will come along, and people will just keep trying to buy their way out of the drudgery until those that have returned from the journey can build the institutions and customs to help people actually go on their own journeys. Those who journey can then return able to healthily express themselves within society, rather than pathologically propagating the deficient system.

[guitarplayer]

http://onesystemonevoice.com/resources/ ... 5B1$5D.pdf

I am finally reading this. I think it is an unfortunate choice of language to talk about 'person' perspectives (this is general, not exclusive to this work). If the 'person' was taken out, perhaps the post modern movement would end up being less concerned with equally valid thoughts, opinions and perspective of each 'person', and more concerned with perspectives of sea weed, coral reefs, arctic ice or crops.

Otherwise a good read, appreciate she collected some numbers and had been at it for many decades. Outside of the system which adds credibility.

[Bicycle7]

@AE:

I appreciate your perspectives on Plotkin, it's helping me to connect the dots in my own head. The notion of Kegan 3 being reached after we stuff everything in the "the long black bag we drag behind us" that Robert Bly describes. Plotkin's four-fold self as corresponding to a Kegan 4 skill speaks to the strength of Plotkin- all of the practices and clear roadmaps he lays out to these higher developmental stages. I've enjoyed mapping/merging MBTI with the four fold self, combining Plotkin's practices and descriptions with the descriptions/prescriptions of my personality type. This has been helpful too because I find MBTI's framework more graspable or natural, though I appreciate the holistic/nature based aspect of the four-fold self. For instance as an INFJ, my fourth function is Se which I would correspond with the East facet. I'm beginning to explore how I can more consistently come to bear out in "meatspace" my plans and visions. Plotkin prescribes practices to get in touch with the part of yourself that uses the direct senses to perceive the world.

@ertyu:

I'm not sure that I've have died yet. Yesterday, I was reflecting on the simplistic notion that not having a job for the past 7 months has made my identity feel a lot more fluid and unsure. This opened a lot of avenues of self-growth, I found a lot of value in just that. It's funny because I was especially hit with this because I accepted a job yesterday and now am kind of anticipating somewhat identifying/being identified with it. It helped me understand too why Plotkin stresses the difficulty of his "descent to soul" while working a full-time job- constantly having your identity reinforced as a title to a job.

[AnalyticalEngine]

@Bicyle7 - Mapping MBTI onto Plotkin is also useful. I've noticed I tend very heavily toward North (Te) and West (Ni/Fi), and all my most problematic subpersonalities are East (Fe, Se shadow). What I've enjoyed is seeing how all these personal revelations I've had either through journaling or research are actually already covered by Plotkin. He really used a wide range of theories in constructing his model!

@The death discussion - I'd like to bring up the concept of ego death here, as that was a formative experience for me after getting good at meditation and active imagination that lead to a lot of personal change. For me, it was this non-dualist subjective experience that made me realize there's nothing innate about all these things I thought I was and that I can therefore step outside of them and write a new experience.

Getting good at noticing how whatever Kegan3 hat you're wearing is driving you too is also important. That might be identification with a job or similar.

[ertyu]

@The death discussion - I'd like to bring up the concept of ego death here, as that was a formative experience for me after getting good at meditation and active imagination that lead to a lot of personal change. For me, it was this non-dualist subjective experience that made me realize there's nothing innate about all these things I thought I was and that I can therefore step outside of them and write a new experience.

For me, this isn't an experience but a process. Just you wait: life and your internal experience will serve you with all sorts of slights, humiliations, flashbacks to past instances of social shame or of instances where you fucked up and looked like an idiot, instances of feeling vulnerable, out of control, you name it. If your life isn't serving you with these, look better: notice the desire to be the shit, to be macho. Look behind that. Notice the pleasure of feeling powerful, or of finding someone lesser-than. Look behind that too.* Keep opening up to what arises as it arises. Keep letting it kill you.**

*There's a particular flavor of this on the og ERE blog and, given how the blog often selects for the forum, on this forum, too: seeing oneself as somehow advanced and smarter-than for engaging with this here bunch of ideas while everyone else is clearly sheeple

**This is not a metaphore. This is an inner experience you feel for in a trial and error fashion until you get an, "ah! So that's what they all meant!!"

[jacob]

It is interesting that this was the biggest "death" for you, larger than the loss of techno-optimism. Shedding techno-optimism in the 9-12 months after encountering ERE for the first time was particularly difficult. I would agree that I didn't perceive it as a death, more a dark night of the soul. You spend a lot of time looking for things to rely on again. Perhaps the death->birth cycle here was actually learning that there isn't much that can be relyed on, and becoming okay with that.

I think it was because I was still rather egocentric (Kegan2) at the time. I saw myself as an intellectual gunslinger who solved problems, but I did not identify with the problems or culture in a sociocentric sense. It was a "I do physics"-mindset more so than "I am a physicist". The idea of relying on something/someone else had already been shredded by getting thrown into the deep end of research---"the buck stops here, with me now".

How much of the physics death do you think was predicated on being FI? Do you think because you didn't need that career any longer you were more willing to fudamentally question it? No doubt many must refuse to ask such questions because they see no other option.

I don't think it was predicated on being FI as much as knowing about FI. The lock-in perspective I described in chapter 2 of the ERE book had existed for quite a few years by the time I wrote it. In Plato's Cave terms, I didn't have to drop the chains as much as turn the head. I had to juggle two perspectives or cave walls: The techno-utopian and the limits/boundaries-dystopia and the latter felt increasingly more real. In Cook-Greuter terms, this was the Individualization stage (5) after Achiever (4) wherein one begins to see oneself as "not just one's career". I vividly remember stage (3), the expert.

[jacob]

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.

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. Lemmesplain for those who don't know it. In transactional analysis, we differentiate between three ego states of the adult, the parent, and the child. (Perhaps this is a generalization of Plotkin's subpersonalities... if so, then it is useful to figure out whether a given subpersonality is a child, a parent, or an adult.)

The adult ego-state deals with thoughts and emotions within an interobjective 3rd person framework. (This is technically Kegan4)
The parent ego-state is handed down behavior or rules Copied down from other parent-figures. (This is Kegan3)
The child ego-state is a two-parter. There's an innate spontaneous and playfully creative kicking rocks called the "natural child". And then there's the "adapted child" which contains the naive/dumb responses to parental influence during childhood. The adapted child is the part that acts out in immature ways despite one's age. (This is Kegan2).

What's interesting here is that people's ego-state distribution differ a lot. For example, mine is something like 80/5/15... so very similar to "an semi-inquisitive machine that turns data and experiences into new theories". It is so, because I grew up surrounded by books (lots of rational interobjectivity there) and the received parenting was "do what you want as long as you're happy and not getting arrested; there's always a safety net for you" (IOW, there were no expectations of getting rich, being successful, believing in God, taking care of family, ...). As such I have relatively few "adapted child" problems + I'm open-minded to Parent-figures because I don't have a very many subpersonality voices telling me what to do (other than not getting arrested). One could say the self-authoring started before socialization kicked in. Growing up in the boondocks helped a lot. This ratio also existed when I was 14 or 15 or so. (Tested)

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.

Kegan suggests a holarchy. However, the model above is more along the lines of two (or three) different lines ala Spiral Dynamics. For example, it is possible to have an objectively useful albeit intellectual understanding of different cultures w/o having felt the feels of the given cultures or EVEN ONE culture. This being better than having no understanding at all of other cultures. Contrast swimming in one aquarium w/o realizing that it's an aquarium vs seeing multiple aquariums w/o having swum in any aquarium.

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.

There are some interesting pre/trans-fallacy concerns to ponder here.

[jacob]

To add.... it's also useful/interesting to contemplate what is the ultimately goal of humans, humanity, the universe ... the adult, the parent, or the child state? Parts, roles, etc. considered? Quo vadis?

To add more: The current state of AI is very interesting in that it's at the level of being trained on conformist/conventional thinking and passes the Turing test at that level. IOW, AI is at the [previous] parenting state of the average parent already.

[OutOfTheBlue]

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.

River Kenna's newsletter post and Plotkin's essay above (Who's up for Building a cathedral?) mostly relate to his eco/soul-centric model of human development (from Nature and the Human Soul, see the diagram in Kenna's post), not his nature-based map of the human psyche (from Wild Mind).

What you are asking is related to Wild Mind. His human development circle (or wheel as he calls it) doesn't really deal with subpersonalities.

When drawing parallels between various models, comparing helps find similarities, but also appreciate differences and nuances.

Here his map of the human psyche cannot be easily reduced to these three aspects of adult/parent/child from transactional psychology.

Okay, so for Plotkin, if an immature Ego is often hijacked, activated by or stuck in a fragmented/frozen/wounded perspective (our subpersonalities or constellations of affects, images, and behaviors that operate more or less independently from one another and often independently of our conscious selves, our Egos), a mature Ego or "3-D Ego" would be one blessed with some degree of conscious communion and integration with Self, Soul, and Spirit. Note: The Self is not to be confused with the Ego, which is the conscious self, the center of conscious self-awareness within the human psyche.

Hence the goal of cultivating our facets of wholeness (a process called Wholing), which also helps further tackle Self-Healing, embracing our fragmentedness from an Ego rooted in the Self.

When working with supersonalities, the goal is not to remove them (we can't) or further repress them (in fact one of the four groupings of the subs are our Shadows, and the goal here is discovery and integration). I'm also not sure about directly changing them. This comes naturally, organically. What I think Plotkin suggests is cultivating an attitude of radical acceptance, understanding and genuine gratitude because we wouldn't be here without their help. These parts have even kept treasures/gifts for us to discover when were are ready to retrieve them. For instance see what he says about the "sacred wound" in Wild Mind. What does change for sure (and I personally believe a sub may change as well to the degree it is heard/acknowledged, honored and accepted to the fold) is our relationship to them, our ability to be (less) identified with them while not rejecting them. We learn to operate from a larger perspective (that of the Self with its four facets, plus our relationship with the transpersonal realm of Spirit/Soul), which can hold and embrace our woundedness and subpersonalities (if any). I like the map I shared here: viewtopic.php?p=276667#p276667 because it shows clearly the subpersonalities as being included in the larger circle of the Self.

I think this "aware" Ego could be seen as an observer, but an observer who is immersed in life, in duality. In other words, an involved observer, an Actor-Observer. Also an observer who is aware of belonging to and participating in a wider ecology (Anima Mundi?).

[AnalyticalEngine]

So I just watched Cook-Greuter's lecture and this helped clarify some of my thinking.

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.)

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.

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).