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Stages of Personal Development The stages of personal, or psychological, development are the essential worldviews we have available to us. Understanding them helps us understand our own development, our own worldview, and how deeper or wider worldviews are available to us. A broad range of psychologists have clearly identified at least six primary developmental stages, or worldviews, that human beings can and do progress through.(i) Because there are so many researchers and so many different approaches to systemizing the stages of development I will rely on the work of psychologist Robert Kegan to briefly describe them. Kegan's In Over Our Heads is an excellent introduction to the different stages of development that we all pass through, as well as being a cogent discussion of the problems arising when our world demands too much of our worldview. Writing about the disjunction between what the world expects of us and our ability meet those expectations, he concludes that it will "…demand something more than mere behavior, the acquisition of specific skills, or the mastery of particular knowledge…" to bridge that gap. It will be a difficult process and it will make "… demands on our minds, on how we know, on the complexity of our consciousness."(ii) Understanding this process can help us engage in it. Synthesizing
the work of numerous psychologists, including Jean Piaget, Lawrence
Kohlberg, Jane Lovenger, and Carol Gilligan, Kegan presents six main
stages of development that each human potentially passes through as
they grow from child to adult. I say potentially, because, as Kegan
makes clear, it is possible for people to either become arrested at
a particular stage, or for them to experience a trauma at an earlier
stage that adversely affects their ability to fully function at later
stages. Kegan refers to these stages as orders of consciousness. What Kegan labels as the first order of consciousness is really the second stage of development. The first stage covers the period of time from birth until a child has become aware of and interactive with its environment.(iii) During this stage the child senses little separation between its interior world and the environment. At the second stage of development, or first order consciousness, the child has begun to become "conscious" in the way we typically understand the word. The child can communicate clearly, and begins to develop a nascent sense of ego-self, or the sense of separate identity that evolves and matures as the mind develops from childhood to adulthood, but it does not fully perceive the meaning of "the other." By second order consciousness, the child has begun to understand the "other," and is able to see things from another's perspective, but not with priority. With third order consciousness a person gains the ability to fully perceive another's perspective, and defines the way they interact with others by very specific rules. With fourth order consciousness a person's perception and identification continue to expand, allowing them to identify with multiple perspectives. Their relationship to the world is guided by an understanding of the importance of the group, though the self is still considered primary. The last stage, fifth order consciousness, is a multi-perspective worldview that tries to see all other viewpoints and order them into a coherent framework. Persons at this stage do not simply consider how they relate to others, or groups of others, but how all groups and individuals interrelate. Kegan labels these last three stages of development as Traditionalism, Modernism and Postmodernism and they relate very closely to the three worldviews proposed by Ray and Anderson's research of Traditional, Modern and Cultural Creative. I will always refer to this final stage as Integral, rather that Cultural Creatives or Postmoderns, because it clearly labels that stage's primary way of viewing the world, as an integrated whole. Interestingly, much of what we typically consider to be postmodernism is really a failure of the final stage to fully integrate its worldview. A postmodern worldview that is fully developed is Integral. For the sake of clarity I will refer to a partially Integral worldview as extreme or dysfunctional postmodernism and one that is fully developed as Integral. At least some of the Cultural Creatives seem to be those people who are attempting to fully actualize the promises of an Integral worldview. Of course this is not easy, as extreme postmodernism tends to love holding multiple perspectives but disdains any attempt to order them. The challenge ahead of us will be not only to transcend the Traditional and Modern worldviews, but to heal and harmonize dysfunctional postmodern perspectives to create fully functional Integral worldviews. The point
of all this is simple, and hopefully has not been missed in the avalanche
of terms and jargon. The point is that we have available to us at least
six stages of personal development, each of which successively embraces
a wider, deeper, and more connected view of the universe. Each stage
will inevitably create problems that can only be resolved by the subsequent
stage. The problems created by a Traditional worldview will be best
resolved by a Modern worldview, and likewise, the problems our Modern
minds have created will be most easily solved by Integral minds. It
is important to note that as each stage is transcended, many of the
insights, viewpoints, and beliefs of that stage, which are perfectly
healthy and valid, should be retained as an individual transcends one
worldview for the next. Footnotes
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