My friend Jude brought up some thought-provoking thoughts (from Facebook):
““Think outside the box” – the synonym for this is “lateral thinking”. I understand the latter but I do not understand the former. I remember I used to understand it though. I do think laterally a lot but I really don’t know where that “box” is. Maybe I have thought outside it so long, it no longer exists to me..hehehe..smh.. I want to re-understand it though.“
The following are my comments.
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Here is how I would think about it.
Essentially, a box is the world or rather a world… or if you prefer a worldvew, what I’d call a reality tunnel. So, it isn’t necessarily the same as lateral for that would imply a relationship, a lateral relationship between the worldview and the thinking. Thinking outside of the box implies relationship to the worldview is being excluded. With no relationahip anchoring your thinking to the worldview, your thinking is unmoored and you can potentially lose your bearings.
Also, this can be analyzed mythologicaly. A box has a feminine gender, in fact is a term for female genitalia. A box has space within in which one can be enclosed, but it also has space without. When you were born, you literally began thinking outside the ‘box’.
In Indo-European mythology, the box and the square are feminine and maternal. They represent what enlcloses, what embraces and protects us, and also what sets the boundaries for relationships and society.
This relates to two things (board games and card games) which relate to a third thing (the Trickster).
The square of a board game sets the boundaries in which play happens. Likewise, the mother creates the space for play and the child plays. The Trickster is the child who plays, but he also tests boundaries and breaks rules.
Playing cards (originating from Tarot) are in the shape of the Golden Rectangle or what is known as the Golden Door. The door is part of what encloses for it can be closed, but it can also be opened.
Walking through an open door, you enter a new space, possibly even stepping outside of the box you were in. You might not even recognize the box you ere in until you are outside it. So, if you don’t see a box, it probably means you haven’t yet stepped outside to gain perspective. When you are in the game of play, still on the board, you’re drawn in for your life is at stake, this life that you know. A world is always real while you’re in it.
Games have always related to luck and divination, doorways from our world to other worlds. To truly think outside of the box is to open yourself to new visions, new realities even. The ancients saw the wold ruled by the Fates and by fickle gods. No player controls the game in which you play. No one knows what is at the end of the game, what is on the other side of the door.
Chutes and Ladders originated as an ancient Hindu game called Snakes and Ladders. The game is a model of reality with levels that the players ascend. The players are at the mercy of luck, but if you play long enough all get to the end. It teaches the patient theology of Hinduism. When you reach the end, you win by escaping the game and hence metaphorically escaping the world.
The feminine and masculine, the mother and child are opposites that create tension. Thinking outside the box necessitates a box outside of which to think.
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Let me stick with mythology and extend my thoughts.
The earliest known civilization was in Iraq where comes from the story of Gilgamesh. One thing that always stood out to me is that Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu was originally a wild man. He only became ‘civilized’ through the wiles of a temple prostitute. That gives a new spin to the so-called oldest profession.
The feminine is a civilizing force. This is true in mythology, but some see it as being true in society in general. A book I’ve been perusing is about American violence (Violent Land: Single Men and Social Disorder from the Frontier to the Inner City by David T. Courtwright). The main reason given for the greater violence in the American South had to do with the cultures created during early immigration.
The Northern colonies (specifically New England and Pennsylvania) attracted whole families and even whole communities to immigrate as a group and settle together. So, they brought community and hence the social structures of civilization with them.
The Southern colonies tended to attract more single men. Also, much of the early Westward expansion into the frontier began in these Southern colonies, especially from Virginia. These settlers developed a very violent society of dueling and vigilante justice. It was a long time for religion to be established on the frontier because single men weren’t drawn to attend church.
A church or temple is a box, with or without temple prostitutes. Any structure of civilization is a box. All of civilization is a box… or else a set of boxes, some overlapping, others exclusive.
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The whole world itself is a box or rather a mansion with many rooms.
Any form and this world of form is archetypally feminine. Brahma’s power is infinite potential, but only Saraswati can give birth to form, each and every form, as she takes on that form and gives it substance, gives it life. The Gnostics, of course, would say this is Sophia who fell into the world. But that is the mythologically masculine view to see form as fallen, to see the world as a place of darkness and sin.
A paternalistic God rules from above, above us all, not with us. Was the Goddess fallen or was she cast out? If cast out, who did this? The ancient Israelites, like most ancient people, saw God and Goddess as married. Monotheism originated in Egypt, but the difference was that Egyptian monotheism was a part of a henotheistic tradition where (similar to Hindusim today) all deities weren’t always seen as clearly distinct, sometimes even as expressions of the same divinity.
I became particularly interested in the Egyptian religion when reading Christ in Egypt by D.M. Murdock. In a large section, she went into great detail about Isis. Isis worship was one of the most popular deities in Rome. Murdock argues that Isis was the precursor of Christian Mother Mary. Egyptian Meri means beloved which at first was an epithet for a God but over time became associated directly with Isis and may have become a name for her. The two words were often seen associated, both as Meri-Isis and Isis-Meri.
It was through Isis that this concept of beloved became widespread. Before that time, deities were worshipped with submission. A new type of love came to the forefront, a love of equals, the divine came down onto the level of humanity, the common folk even. The divine was no longer far away in heaven but here on earth (or, as Philip K. Dick would so charmingly describe it, “God in the garbage”). This was part of a long shift during the Axial Age which ended with religions such as Christianity.
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To return to the original topic of thinking outside the box, this brings up a number of thoughts.
First, what does the civilizing process mean on the personal level? As a male of the species, what does this mean in relation to the feminine and the maternal? If you feel like you are in no box, then does that mean you aren’t being contained, encompassed, embraced by the feminine/maternal? If you are or identify as a single male, can you internalize the stereotypical/archetypal feminine mode of social interrelationship without fear of loss of self, without fear of deadening conformity?
Second, what does this all mean in this age of complexity and in this world of multicultural globalism? There is no single society that encompasses any of us or necessarily even a single religion or single ethnicity. We find ourselves in many boxes which can create a possibly deceiving experience of being in no box. How do we recognize the box(es) we may be in? What does the possibility even mean to be in a box in an age of instability and uncertainty? Has the world fundamentally changed since the time the ancient mythologies were written?
I don’t know if this relates to Jude’s experience. But from my perspective, I feel like there are always boxes we are in. I feel very sensitized to that which contains us and structures our lives. I’ve wondered for a long time if it is possible to think outside of the box… or do we just jump out of one box and into another? Boxes are like stories. It seems like there is always a story being told, a story we are playing out in our heads, in our lives, and in our relationships. The box is a stage on which the story plays out.
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In his most recent comment, Jude tried to explain his view:
“Yes, I also think the feminine is a civilizing force in as much as it is for understanding. The receptacle accepts and from that, “training”.
“That’s why it is lateral thinking: the ability to think ACROSS boxes. Like the Ghanaian box, the American box, the science box etc.
“For me, as a bona fide liminal, I do not respect boxes. On my own, I’m looking for truth, coherence, correspondence, relevance not social or contextual acceptability. To market to the world is a different thing: I need a box otherwise it makes no sense and it won’t be accepted.
“My point is not that there are no boxes. I, me, do not recognize them“
I say he tried to explain for I don’t know that I understand. I do at least understand the ability of thinking across boxes. That seems like a fair way of describing lateral thinking.
Even so, it still doesn’t get at my own view. There aren’t just boxes next to boxes. Rather, there are boxes within boxes within boxes, maybe all the way down or all the way up as the case may be.
—-
Here is what I see as the key difference.
Jude sees the boxes (worldviews, reality tunnels, etc) as external things, external to himself, separate from and not essential to his personal reality. But to me the most basic box is humanity collectively and our humanity individually. We can’t escape the box that we are (and, in his own way, Jude would agree with this general notion). More importantly, who we are is tied up with what the world is. We aren’t separate from the world. We can’t step outside of the world.
To be in liminal space says nothing about that space being outside a box. I suspect that misses the point of the liminal which is simply that you can’t be certain about where you are or aren’t, what you may or may not be within. The liminal as related to the Trickster is yet another archetypal/mythological box. It may be a more spacious and flexible box, but still a box. Every archetype is a box, shades and shapes the world accordingly.
What does it even mean to not recognize the ‘world’ you exist within? Does ‘reality’ care if you respect it? Where would the hypothetical non-box position be located that is objectively above all boxes, i.e., all subjective and intersubjective worldviews?
I’m not actually arguing that one can’t hypothetically get outside of all boxes. I’m not arguing for or against that because I’m not sure what it would mean. As a statement, it doesn’t seem to make ‘sense’. I might even argue that to make such a claim is to forfeit making sense… which is fine as far as that goes. Even if you could get outside of all boxes, it’s not clear to me how you would know this was true for you would have no context or persepctive to know anything for certain, much less communicate what you think you know.
When people speak of thinking outside of the box, I never got the sense that they meant thinking outside of all boxes, just thinking outside a specific box. To think outside all boxes would be the mythological correlate to the God of heaven being above and separate from the Goddess of earth. But like yin and yang, how can they be separate?
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None of this is intended to discredit Jude’s personal experience. I’m not holding myself above Jude in challenging his claim, but he is holding himself above the boxes of others, the boxes of the world. At times, I can also hold myself above certain other boxes. It just never occurred to me that it could be possible to hold myself above all boxes.
Jude’s perspective isn’t necessarily wrong, refusing to be part of the herd. Maybe it is wise to hold oneself above, at least in attitude. I do think when possible that it good to strive to be above average on the self-awareness scale. The problem is if you’re self-deluded you generally don’t recognize your own self-delusion. That is just human nature, for all of us.
I find myself being more of a Buddhist perspective of “no escape”. For Buddhists, there is no escape for the ego is essentially the one and only box. However, only the ego is likely to make any claims about not being in a box. Ken Wilber has noted that it is easy to fall into the Pre/Trans Fallacy. He emphasizes that the shift in human development is transcend and include, not transcend and exclude.
I’m pretty sure that like me Jude isn’t an Enlightened Master. It is as a normal ego-bound mortal that I wonder about his claim of being in no boxes. Still, I completely support Jude’s desire to not be trapped in any boxes. More power to him.
Marmalade said
Prerational and Transrational Spirituality: The Difference Is?
That old discussion on the Integral Pod hit upon something that is on my mind. I think that its easy for the rational to be confused with the transrational when someone is trying to differentiate their experience from the prerational. This reminds me of the analysis of the theory of the Mean Green Meme. Here is what I said in the Integral Ideology thread in the God Pod:
“Jim linked to an article about the Mean Green Meme. In that article, Todorovic looked to the statistics to see if it supported this hypoethesis. According to this view, the criticisms of Green Meme are more likely to come from Blue and Orange than from Second Tier Yellow. She explains that the supposed Second Tier criticism is actually First Tier criticism masking as Yellow which she calls Yellow False Positive.”
Many people are attracted to Integralism because its a very rational model. It does give room for the non-rational, but still its primarily rational. I don’t know if a transrational model is possible. So, if we become too identified with the model, we by necessity become stuck in the rational. Where does this leave the transrational? Can the the term ‘transrational’ within a rational model be anything more than a placeholder for the unknown, a finger pointing at the moon?
The nonrational is another category I’m interested in. There may be some states that are neither specifically prerational nor transrational. How does Integralism deal with this possibility? So far in my research, I’d say it doesn’t to any great extent. I’ve done some web searches about Integralism and Wilber using terms such as ‘paranormal’, ‘supernatural’, and ‘liminal’… but not much came up in the results.
My sense is that Wilberian Integralism hasn’t yet fully come to terms with the nonrational. Even the category of the transrational feels somehow inadequate. I think part of the problem is the medium. Rational language and linear modelling are inherently limited. I suppose poetry and art more capable of expressing the transrational and nonrational than any Integral theory ever will be able to do. This is why I’ve been thinking about how can the imaginative and playful be emphasized more within Integral theory. And in general I’ve been wondering how the rational and nonrational can be experienced without conflict, without either trying to supplant the other.
Balder said
Hi, Marmalade,
An interesting post! Thanks for your reflections here – they resonate with a number of my own interests and concerns.
Was the person who was suggesting that Spiral Dynamics might be better understood as descriptive than prescriptive possibly me? I don’t expect I’m the only person to have thought of this or discussed it, but this is something I explored on the Integral Multiplex (and possibly also the I-I pod) a number of months ago. My suggestion was that typical descriptions of Orange, for example, often appear to presuppose elements that might be better regarded as historical accidents rather than developmental necessities, and that there may be a wide number of “ways forward” as Amber societies mature – that, while there are social and cultural constraints that might work to encourage development in a particular direction, there still may be a wide degree of freedom in how a post-Amber society takes form (wider than conventional descriptions of Orange appear to allow for). I was using these two particular levels just as an example; the suggestion would apply across the board. Though conceivably, the lower levels are likely harder to shift, just because they have greater historical force behind them.
I agree with you that possibilities such as this do have the potential to “bungle up” the pre/trans fallacy – or, rather, the application of the pre/trans fallacy. But I do think that it would still be a valid tool. Because even if a particular trajectory isn’t the only available one, it would still be possible to distinguish – and also to potentially confuse – earlier and later stages of that trajectory.
You wrote: I must admit that I’ve been more interested in the potential of a Theory For Anything (TFA) and less interested in a Theory Of Everything (TOE). But I don’t know what a TFA would look like.
This is an interesting idea and I’d like to hear more about what you mean here. I relate it to another “vision” with which I’m involved – the Time-Space-Knowledge vision, which I have practiced for a number of years and which I’ve also explored in relation to Integral Theory. Where it differs primarily from Integral is that is more a visionary mode of inquiry and “engagement” with experience than a “map” of the world. With Integral Methodological Pluralism, we get more into the territory of active exploration and engagement (and begin moving away from strictly “mapping” the world or various worldviews). This is why I became interested in exploring Integral in relation to TSK, because TSK already has this open-ended, inquiry-centered orientation. Starting with basic “elements” of reality (time, space, and knowledge), without taking any of them for granted or at face value, it opens various ways to explore the nature and dynamics of our world, ultimately with an interest in the potential of transformative vision. It is a “way” that invites intimate engagement with reality through radical questioning and inquiry, and so in that sense serves (for me) more as a theory for everything rather than a static representation of everything.
Concerning your discussion of George P. Hansen’s perspectives on models and rationality, I am also interested in these questions. If you’re interested, I have a paper online which looks at some of them from the points of view of Integral and TSK. Here is a link to the relevant section of the paper:
TSK and Instrumental Knowledge.
Best wishes,
Balder
Nicole said
Bruce and Ben, thanks, I tend to side more and more with Ben in these discussions. I guess it’s because he is so darned persuasive! Or something.
I’d really like to hear your take on TSK, Ben, as I have been meaning to dig into it, but this week will not be my chance…
Ben, does this discussion here help? http://multiplex.integralinstitute.org/Public/cs/forums/50052/ShowThread.aspx
or what about this application here? http://www.quantumintegralcenter.com/articles.cfm?mode=display&article=4
this looks like a good article: http://www.integralworld.net/chamberlain3.html
Balder said
Bruce and Ben, thanks, I tend to side more and more with Ben in these discussions.
Gee, thanks, Nicole!
Seriously, I assume you mean side with Ben against any number of others, since I’ve only had a couple conversations with him so far…
And for the record, I appreciate his perspective as well.
Best wishes,
B.
Marmalade said
Balder, so far we seem to agree on some things. Its hard for me to say what I agree or disagree with at the moment. I’m presently in exploratory mode and it will take me a while to get my bearings… if ever. 😉 There is so much out there about Integralism that I can feel lost and confused sometimes.
“Was the person who was suggesting that Spiral Dynamics might be better understood as descriptive than prescriptive possibly me?”
It might’ve been. I can’t remember when it was that I noticed those ideas. Would you mind linking to your comments from there?
I’ll be getting back to this blog soon… maybe this evening. For right now, I’ve been reading through and formulate a response to Julian’s blog post about Christianity.
Marmalade said
I can’t speak for Nicole, but my guess is that her agreement is partly with my view of personality types. It seems to me that certain types have more of a preference for certain kinds of thinking such as NTs preference for rationality. From this, I conclude that some differences are just differences. Nicole and I have been discussing typology quite a bit lately and she seems to find it helpful.
BTW there is a particular theorist within the typology field who interests me the most. Her name is Lenore Thomson. She wrote the book Personality Type: An Owner’s Manual, and there is a wiki about her work. Her view of typology touches upon my own thoughts about a TFA. Basically, a TFA to me is a perspective of perspectives. Some relevant pages from the wiki:
Rhetorical Stances
Beyond Personality
Philosophical Exegesis
Marmalade said
Here is the first thread I started at Open Source Integral.
TFA and Perspective of Perspectives
Discussion didn’t really get going in the thread and I never came to any conclusions. I was just throwing around ideas and possibilities. And that is still what I’m doing. I gave up on the idea of a TFA, but I’m glad its come up again in this discussion. It seems some kind of TFA should be possible. I probably should first figure out what purpose a TFA should serve.
Balder, I looked at your paper. I’m curious about it, but it will take me a while to process it. Its a nice addition to Wilber’s models. Time and space also come up in explanations of typological function-attitudes, but typology is less abstract in how it speaks about them.
Nicole said
Yes, Ben, your ideas on typology but so many more, actually. Funny since in many ways we are so different, but I had a long chat with Centria (Kathy) last night on the phone, and of course you were one of the people who came up, since we both think you’re so interesting and intelligent. I was saying that to me you have felt like a soul brother, and she said she saw that energy in some of our blog discussions, like the Rilke ones…
And yes, Bruce, I can see you appreciate Ben as well. Good! I appreciate you too, very much, I hope you know. For example what you offered in balance in that very immoderate Mod Pod discussion lol.
Ben, I will wait to hear more about your thoughts on TSK, it does seem very intriguing for you.
Perspective of perspectives eh? :):) Yes, that’s my Ben…
Balder said
Hi, Ben,
Thanks for introducing me to Lenore Thompson. Her work seems very promising and interesting to me. The typological system I’ve studied the most is the Enneagram. A thought that has occurred to me from time to time is that Integral needs to better integrate typology. It does explicitly include it – AQAL (or AQALALASAT) stands for all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types – but I have noticed that, in typical discussions in Integral circles, the only types that get much mention are masculine / feminine. I have also found that frequently, when people are “assessing” or categorizing each other, they will go very quickly to labels which describe level or altitude, apparently not considering that there may be different typological expressions of the same level. In my case, I have looked at this through the Enneagram, talking about how certain features of a 9 or a 3, for instance, might give the impression of a level, but that actually it’s just more of an overall mode of interaction that can be expressed at any number of levels.
If you haven’t already, and if you’re interested, I think you should write something on Lenore’s work to introduce it to the Integral community.
Personally, I have doubts that a type model is sufficient in itself, and would not expect it to work well as a theory for anything. I don’t think everything can be reduced to or explained in terms of horizontal types. But I do think that it is a very valuable lens you can adopt – one of several different perspectives on perspectives that AQAL incorporates.
Best wishes,
Balder
Marmalade said
I find it difficult to speak about any particular thing using only one model. It often leads to making exaggerated claims. We need multiple models in order to fine-tune our ability to discern differences and to discern their potential meanings.
I was feeling challenged to speak clearly in one of Julian’s blogs. Rational can mean so many things to so many people even within the Integral community. There is this idea that if someone is being rational they must either be orange or second tier, but nobody at green could be rational.
Why do some people seem to think that second tier is just a more complex version of orange with green being a temporary irrational blip in development? And why do so many equate rationality with a materialistic worldview? Why do people who idealize rationality feel such a strong need to deny anything spooky? How would someone act if they were well-developed in orange and yet had come to be centered in green? Or, considering someone who is a more intellectual type (ie NT), how would they think rationally if they were strongly green?
I’ve noticed too that the only type that gets much Integral discussion is gender. Here is something I said about it in another thread at OSI:
There is the matter of whether a type is used consciously or not and this relates to development, and there is a specific order that each type will likely develop each function. This is highly theoretical and I don’t know what research has been done on it. Another theory presents how each function itself develops which is equivalent to saying that each function represents a separate line of development. There is some correlation of MBTI with models of psychological development.
For instance, how the Judging functions(Thinking and Feeling) have much similarity with Gilligan’s work on gender differences and the hierarchy of development that either gender will tend to follow. Typology brings a slightly different slant to this. Statistics have shown that their is a slight preference of males for Thnking and females for Feeling. Also, Thinking males tend to have stronger Thinking preferences than Thinking females, and Feeling females tend to have stronger preference for Feeling than Feeling males.
However, this gender preference is only around 60-70%, and that leaves a good portion that doesn’t fit the social expectations. David Deidda recognizes that gender patterns are only general. He says that his advice for men doesn’t apply to less masculine men and does apply to more masculine women. As a Feeling guy, I don’t entirely resonate with his advice.
———-
Here is something Wilber said about gender in
“Based mostly on work by Carol Gilligan and Deborah Tannen, the idea is that the typical male orientation tends to be more agentic, autonomous, abstract, and independent, based on rights and justice; whereas the female orientation tends to be more permeable, relational, and feelingful, based on care and responsibility.”
That makes me wonder. A tendency towards the abstract is considered more masculine and I’ve heard people make this observation before. But the MBTI research has shown no correlation between abstract cognition and gender. My theory on this is that there are different types of abstraction. An NF appears less abstract because their way of abstracting is less structured as they aren’t Thinking types. So, the definition of abstract used in gender studies is probably NT biased… maybe because most scientific researchers are NTs (?).
Anyways, you’re probably right that a type model couldn’t be a TFA. But it could be a decent model of a Theory Of Theorizing (TOT). Typology gets at the intricacies of our cognitive and perceptual biases. For instance, personality research has shown that certain types and traits are most prevalent in certain professional fields. That is partly the basis of my suspicion that Integralism has a personality bias. Different types of personalities will tend to be attracted to different types of theories, and some types of personalities won’t like abstract theorizing whatsoever. And none of it necessarily has anything to do with what developmental stage they’re at.
I’ll start a thread about Lenore Thomson soon, but not today.
Marmalade said
Theory for Anything v. Theory of Everything
Integrating validity claims & multiple perspectives
Theory of everything?
Holons Within, Holons Without
Marmalade said
Hey Balder, I noticed you started a thread about AQAL and TSK at the II Multiplex.
And another thread of yours about TSK.
I noticed you’ve blogged about TSK.
And so has Davidu.
Ronpurser has some videos about TSK on youtube.
Also, is this the thread you were referring to earlier about Spiral Dynamics?
Nicole said
Ben, when you put it like this, it does seem very odd! supposedly so advanced and not really dealing with personality types, and generalising in such limited ways about men and women…
Balder said
Hi, Ben,
Thanks for collecting all of those links together. Yes, I’ve talked about TSK (by itself and in relation to Integral) on a number of forums online. I also have a TSK pod here on Gaia. I am also friends with both Davidu and Ron Purser. A small world!
And yes, that thread on Spiral Dynamics is exactly the one I was thinking of.
Best wishes,
B.
Marmalade said
Nicole,
Integral has such a focus on development that types can get short shrift. I think Wilber was trying to remedy that with his further developments of the quadrant model, but I’m still uncertain what I think of the quadrants. The quadrants are useful, and the same probably goes for other similar models. In some ways, quadrants seems more of a convenient way to categorize things than necessarily an accurate representation of fundamental structures.
It might be helpful to compare certain aspects of integralism and typology. Wilber uses internal and external as categories, but in some ways it feels like a crude division. OTOH Introversion and Extraversion are attempts to explain how the human brain actually processes information. And yet there seems a basic conception that both systems are getting at. Introversion/Extraversion is likely the most accepted and understood traits in all of personality research. It touches upon something fundamental to human experience. I get the sense that Wilber is trying to get at this same human experience but coming at it from a standpoint that emphasizes objectivity (ie categorization).
I don’t know if that makes sense. Its just something that has been on my mind for a long time.
For whatever reason, I have a bit more interest in types than in developmental lines and stages. Types can speak more to our immediate experience… whereas development speaks more to potential future experience. As long as someone is moderately intelligent and aware, they can grasp the fundamentals of a system such as MBTI. But a system such as Spiral Dynamics is only meaningful to someone who is already fairly developed. I think Spiral Dynamics requires more abstract thinking to understand it than does MBTI. MBTI has its complex abstract theorizing, but it has been honed for the purposes of therapeutic insight and so has been designed in a very user-friendly fashion.
So… MBTI is a system that can be understood by all of the types it describes. Spiral Dynamics can’t be understood by all of the vmemes that it describes. That isn’t a weakness of Spiral Dynamics, just a challenge of any developmental model. MBTI is also a developmental model, but in its most basic form the developmental aspects aren’t directly emphasized.
I’d love to see someone attempt to create an integral theory of types similar to how Wilber has created an integral theory of development.
Balder,
Your welcome. I like collecting links. Its a hobby of mine. 🙂
BTW I don’t think it was your Spiral Dynamics thread where I saw these criticisms/questions being brought up. If I remember correctly, it was an older thread. Anyways, I was happy to read your comments about this. I haven’t yet read through the whole thread, but I plan on doing so.
Nicole said
Yes, yes, Ben, I agree totally.
While I was looking for more useful links I found this about Haridas_Chaudhuri
Are you and Bruce familiar with him?
Balder said
Yes, I’m familiar with him. His integralism is rooted more in Aurobindo’s model, which was initially one of Wilber’s big influences as well. Wilber ended up going in other directions, though recently he has returned to Aurobindo, using a number of Aurobindo’s stages of consciousness as the highest levels of his model of development.
Marmalade said
Nope, never heard of him.
Marmalade said
I just commented on Julian’s blog The Transformative Power of Development: A Three-Part Distinction:
Balder, I appreciated what you said here:
“If rationality begins with 3p, and transratonality begins at 5p (or expanded 4p), then it just isn’t correct to call a temporary state experience at a rational level (3p) transrational. Because transrational is a structural designation, not a state designation.”
I’m starting to understand the importance of separating states and stages. So, if transrational is a structural designation, then does that mean the pre/trans fallacy doesn’t apply to stage designations? If transrational isn’t the correct label for a temporary stte, then what is?
Even though I didn’t mention it in my comment, I was thinking about the category of the nonrational. I was considering that it might be appropriate to speak of rational and nonrational in terms of states. But if states are differentiated from stages, then pre/trans doesn’t apply. This makes sense to me.
My understanding of the nonrational is that it isn’t specifically developmental in Wilber’s sense, but it does relate to the process of development as the liminal is inherent to initiation rituals. States aren’t static even if they aren’t dynamic in terms of linear development. Maybe states follow more of a cyclical pattern. This could help to show the connection between the theories of Grof and Wilber.
Nicole said
interesting! but i am being called away … back later or tomorrow
Marmalade said
Leaving? You just got here! Called away… sounds mysterious.
Oh well… I hope the rest of your day goes well.
Nicole said
ah, just family. i urgently was required to watch a Nicholas Cage movie, light and funny. not much punishment there lol. and then to bed.
Marmalade said
I see. Just spending some quality time with family and Nicholas Cage.
What movie was it?
I’m watching some Outer Limits episodes right now.
Nicole said
cool! It was um… hang on… LOL! I remember the second part of the title – Book of Secrets – anyway you will find the whole title somewhere else – i know i mentioned it earlier to you. you see the depredations of old age, Ben. 🙂
Marmalade said
You have depredations?
Sounds horrible.
Is that a medical condition?
You probably should see a doctor about that.
I hope they find a cure for it before I get old.
Nicole said
LOLOL!