Growing & Waking Similarities

Waking up to nonordinary awareness, and growing up in wisdom, can be differentiated. Nevertheless there are similarities. One similarity is the rarity:

• Only a small percentage of the adult population profiles as postconventional or post-logical: about 90% profile as preconventional or conventional.¹
• Very few people have experienced pure consciousness or a mystical state,² analogous to the small number of individuals who are Olympic athletes.³

Transcending Perspectives

Another similarity is the way a subsequent perspective recontextualizes the preceding perspective.

Growing and Transcending

Empirically, each new shift in thinking becomes less linear, more complex, and more inclusive in time span. Each way of knowing becomes more inclusive, differentiated, and integrated.⁴ Ken Wilber summarizes this by saying each successor “transcends and includes” its predecessor.⁵ Consequently each later perspective can understand and coordinate earlier perspectives, while the reverse is not true; instead, earlier perspectives tend to reduce later perspectives to their own level of complexity.¹

An illustration is the micromanagement trap, in which the employee’s and manager’s view are subsets of the coach’s view.

Waking and Transcending

Similarly “illuminative” mysticism claims one can realize the nature of ordinary awareness from the “perspective” of mystical states reached through awareness practices, but not vice versa, since ordinary awareness is deluded about what is real.⁶

This fits the metaphor of awakening.

Later Stages and Mystical States

Additionally, descriptions of mystical states and later developmental stages appear similar. Cook-Greuter, for example, names the rarest postconventional stage observed in research as “Unitive.”⁷ This parallels the unitive states of awareness or nondual experiences. This leads to an illustration of development as an arch that proceeds from unconscious union to conscious union, with a peak at self-determining (Achiever) or self-questioning (Individualist-Pluralist or Catalyst), the most differentiated and least integrated stages.¹

A number of academics, consultants, and independent researchers have consequently hypothesized about a convergence of growing up and waking up at the later stages and “higher” states. For example, Herb Koplowitz has projected grown-up thinking into unitary concepts:

Growing & Waking Hypotheses

Given their similarities and differences, what is the relationship between growing up and waking up? Cook-Greuter offers two hypotheses for further research.¹

Stage Influences States

Proposition 1:

Conscious, ego-transcendent experiences tend to become more frequent with increasing ego development at the postconventional tier because ego boundaries need less defending, and the person is more open to non-rational sources of input.

That is, defenses could inhibit mystical states, but a postconventional stage decreases defenses. (Here “ego development” refers to growth in wisdom, or developmental stage.)

This hypothesis has a converse:¹

In addition, I suggest that the lower a person’s ego stage, the more likely he or she is to adapt or distort transpersonal experiences to fit into their existing mental model of reality.

That is, an earlier stage would more likely assimilate the mystical experience into an existing mental model of reality than to accommodate the new information through constructing a new mental model.¹¹

For example, consider a mystical experience from a dualistic way of knowing. The experience could identify the experiencer as part of the in-group (We versus Others) or spiritual elite¹²–or an Authority who can determine Good and Bad, Right and Wrong. As this example illustrates, notionally each stage could interpret each mystical state through its own perspective.¹³

Language Acquisition versus Awareness Practice

Cook-Greuter’s second hypothesis is related to the difference between awareness and discursive, language-mediated, representational, symbolic or verbal thought:

Proposition 2:

Similar to the acquisition of language, ordinary people require systematic instruction and careful guidance by qualified teachers as well as regular, long-term practice to become permanently established in higher states of consciousness. Unlike the automatic acquisition of language, however, competence in ego-transcendent modes of reality perception requires a seeker’s conscious devotion to a specific spiritual path and in many cases the surrender to a guru.

(Here “ego-transcendent” refers to ego as a representation of self.) This proposes a parallel between language acquisition and awareness practices:¹⁴

The most fundamental cultural support for cognitive growth from the sensorimotor to the representational tier is informal and formal language learning and symbol use (Bruner, 1972). We propose that meditation… is as fundamental a technology for promoting development beyond the representational tier as language/symbol-use is for facilitating growth beyond the sensorimotor tier. Whereas language acquisition frees attention from the control of immediate sensory stimuli, a practice that facilitates transcending of representational thought frees attention from the habitual domination of symbolic representation.

George Herbert Mead endeavored to show that language provides the mechanism for the emergence of mind and self–particularly a “self that is conscious of itself as an object”:¹⁵

The transformation of the biologic individual to the minded organism or self takes place, on Mead’s account, through the agency of language, while language in turn presupposes the existence of a certain kind of society and certain physiological capacities in the individual organisms.

Awareness practices like meditation can impact self-schema.¹⁶ If awareness practices provide a way “out” of the language-mediated experiences of a language-constructed self, this hypothesis would explain the outgrowth in nondual or unitive experiences. In addition, “outside” the language-constructed self could be other “transpersonal material”: archetypes, bodily states, dreams, feelings, intuition, etc.⁷ This could include mind-expanding or mind-disclosing experiences like mystic, peak, ecstatic, oceanic, illuminative, nature, communal, and other types of experiences revealing emergent aspects of mind.¹⁷

Notes