The Ultimate Developmental Map

[Oeaohoo]

This graph explains EVERYTHING: Change, Progress, Evolution, Growth, Development, Actualisation, Becoming, the Future, the Path…

Copyright: This graph is borrowed from Ken Wilber’s little known work Integral Progress. It shows all of the Stages of Development in their dignity and simplicity.

[Nilsi]

You forgot the other 3 quadrants 

[Oeaohoo]

5 minutes ago, Nilsi said:

You forgot the other 3 quadrants 

This actually came to mind because I decided to re-read one of Wilber’s mediocre books, “Integral Psychology”. Aside from rolling around laughing whenever Wilber was naive enough to claim that modernity is justified by the innovations of “liberal democracy” and “feminism”, I was struck by a particular chapter: “To Integrate Premodern and Modern”. In this chapter, he provides a graph of the four quadrants which, like you said, are literally just four versions of a line going up…

However, I thought that his criticism of the “premodern” (which should really be called Tradition) reveals one of the main flaws in the whole Integral project. He claims that “pre-modernity” was “all-level but not all-quadrant”, whereas modernity was “all-quadrant but not all level”. What he means by this is that Tradition emphasised the Upper-Left Quadrant (intentional-subjective) over the other three, whereas, whilst modernity has mapped the other quadrants more thoroughly, it has only done so at the lower “levels” which scientific materialism accepts as real.

Whilst it is undoubtedly true that modernity has conducted a more rigorous examination of external phenomena, there is a perfectly valid reason why Tradition prioritised the “quadrant” of internal subjectivity, for this is the domain of the spiritual realisation: everything else in life is downstream of and therefore subordinate to the divine Essence and the metaphysical Principles which are its emanations. Any normal society is ordered around a transcendent Principle, embodied by an elite class; it is only modernity which prefers a disorganised chaos, which is completely anathema to spiritual realisation except in isolated cases, in the name of “liberal democracy” and “feminism”. 

Traditional civilisations did concern themselves with the other quadrants of knowledge; always recognising, however, the superiority of metaphysics above all other sciences. For brevity, let us take the single example of psychology: it is obvious that a psychology whose sole purpose is to create a “healthy ego”, which is the highest aim of modern psychology, is drastically inferior to one which maps the psychological states right up to the ultimate annihilation of the psyche in God. The latter is precisely what the psychological sciences of ”premodern” civilisations provide; even if they may lack the exacting rigour of modern science, this rigour is comparatively unimportant.

[SeaMonster]

18 minutes ago, Oeaohoo said:

Any normal society is ordered around a transcendent Principle, embodied by an elite class; it is only modernity which prefers a disorganised chaos, which is completely anathema to spiritual realisation except in isolated cases, in the name of “liberal democracy” and “feminism”. 

The problem with Orange is obvious from the beginning: everyone is NOT equal in a functional, down-to-earth sense which manifests in serious inequality...and that brings Green, which attempts to enforce the idea that everyone is equal via a romantic irrationalism that tells you that all inequality is systemic corruption.

So modernity (and post-modernity) is two layers of stupid.  But we get a lot of technological advancements and feel-good safe spaces as a compensation.

[Oeaohoo]

33 minutes ago, SeaMonster said:

The problem with Orange is obvious from the beginning: everyone is NOT equal in a functional, down-to-earth sense which manifests in serious inequality...and that brings Green, which attempts to enforce the idea that everyone is equal via a romantic irrationalism that tells you that all inequality is systemic corruption.

So modernity (and post-modernity) is two layers of stupid.

Indeed. It seems to me that the emergence of “Stage Green” is not at all a positive development, either. It is something closer to putting out fire with gasoline… 

34 minutes ago, SeaMonster said:

But we get a lot of technological advancements and feel-good safe spaces as a compensation.

Woop-Dee-Doo! 

[SeaMonster]

7 minutes ago, Oeaohoo said:

Indeed. It seems to me that the emergence of “Stage Green” is not at all a positive development, either. It is something closer to putting out fire with gasoline… 

I'd say the saving grace of Green is that it creates enough trouble to usher in Yellow, so that at least reasonable people can understand the proper role and purpose of Blue and the lower stages.  The mania of cult-like irrationality that sweeps through it is not fun to behold at all, though.

[Nilsi]

1 hour ago, Oeaohoo said:

This actually came to mind because I decided to re-read one of Wilber’s fantastic books, “Integral Psychology”. 

Good for you.

1 hour ago, Oeaohoo said:

Whilst it is undoubtedly true that modernity has conducted a more rigorous examination of external phenomena, there is a perfectly valid reason why Tradition prioritised the “quadrant” of internal subjectivity, for this is the domain of the spiritual realisation: everything else in life is downstream of and therefore subordinate to the divine Essence and the metaphysical Principles which are its emanations. 

The problem is that while premodern societys did a good job of mapping out the inner individual experience of reality, it did not have the means to figure out the other dimensions of reality in the same depth. That's why he's saying premodernity got the levels right and modernity found the correlates in the other quadrants (and postmodernity figured out the high contextual sensitivity of all this knowledge).

Of course all of this is downstream from truth, which is neither of the quadrants.

Edited December 24, 2022 by Nilsi

[Oeaohoo]

1 hour ago, Nilsi said:

Of course all of this is downstream from truth, which is neither of the quadrants.

Well, I would say that even if truth doesn’t correlate to any one of these quadrants, it also doesn’t lie at the centre of them. My point is that some truths are more significant than others. I remember reading a funny description of modern knowledge as “knowledge of that which is not worth the trouble of knowing”…

1 hour ago, Nilsi said:

Good for you.

It really wasn’t. In a book that is worth reading the pages subtly emanate a mysterious transcendent light, glimmers of intellectual intuition… This book just radiates a spiritualised form of evolutionary progressivism. So many better books to read, so little time!

[Nilsi]

Just now, Oeaohoo said:

Well, I would say that even if truth doesn’t correlate to any one of these quadrants, it also doesn’t lie at the centre of them. My point is that some truths are more significant than others. I remember reading a funny description of modern knowledge as “knowledge of that which is not worth the trouble of knowing”…

That's fair, but dismissing modern knowledge entirely is obviously not a smart move either.

1 minute ago, Oeaohoo said:

It really wasn’t. In a book that is worth reading the pages subtly emanate a mysterious transcendent light, glimmers of intellectual intuition… This book just radiates a spiritualised form of evolutionary progressivism. So many better books to read, so little time!

It's not that interesting, I agree. The juice is really in all the models he's integrating. If you're deeply into psychology and familiar with all the source material, you will probably get way more out of this book, than an interested lay person, such as we will.

Sex, Ecology, Spirituality is fantastic though (I hope you have read this one... or else!)

[Say10]

On 12/24/2022 at 4:57 PM, Oeaohoo said:

 

Here is a detailed video explanation of this graph.