The Meta-Modern Stage? A Blending of the Cognitive Structure — Part Two (of Four)
Individual Spirituality at, Transition into, and the 1st Quarter of the 3.2 Stage
Please look for orientation to the first part here: https://medium.com/@romanangerer/the-meta-modern-stage-a-blending-of-the-cognitive-structure-part-one-775ec8941f18
The Dynamic Mind, as Aurobindo calls this stage, is driven by the duality of cause and effect, pure awareness and the causation of previous stage contents, as well as by the duality of being and non-being. The Outside-View of the stage experiences itself largely as cause, as a circumscribed, finite, authentic and free self from which life can be breathed into an infinite variation of being through imagination, while the Inside-View of the stage identifies itself rather with a sense of infinity which, in order not to lose itself in it, seeks the finite, circumscribed and non-being — that which limits its being through being essential.
The first half of the stage is devoted to actualizing mental systems and one’s awareness, rehearsing consciousness of them and how they interact with the previous worlds of matter and life. Towards the end of the second quarter of the stage, man recognizes the failure of active mental differentiation and attempts to create new systems and environments within and without through “differences that make a difference”; this failure occurs particularly again out of a context blindness and a lack of meaningfulness because of an unsatisfying connection to a greater whole or because one’s awareness of consciousness was insufficiently reflected in its functioning and insufficiently nourished by the “divine.”
With the second half of the stage, there emerges an increasing understanding of the way we create mental constructs with the help of our awareness of awareness, and less of a sense of constructing from a responsibility and freedom as if driven. The perspective becomes multi-systemic and numerous definitions and states of consciousness become apparent, and correspondingly greater demands are placed on one’s awareness, which now begins to align with an intuitive reasoning to understand how the general nature of the 3.2 Stage is to unify opposites between mind and life, or to live directly from the source that seems to give us truth and insight, and meaning to the things of the world when we live in a seemingly unresolvable ambiguity between polarities. In this way, the capacity to embody non-dual states increasingly emerges; the possibility for continuous self-transcendence, Maslow argues, leads in the second half away from an orientation to suffering that may predominate in the first half of the stage and toward a more metaphorical understanding of reality; and, at the same time, a distant detachment may also appear, especially in the Outside-View, which reveals one’s own efforts of self-construction as insincerity, as a constant spectacle that alienates us further and further from the oneness we may experience, while the Inside-View loses itself in pure goodness, the experiences of a seemingly transcendent source that supposedly helps to understand reality, but in fact is merely a reflection of causal archetypes of the 2.3 Rule-Oriented stage and creates new forms of domination of the 2.4 Stage.
Susanne Cook-Greuter paraphrases the 3.2 Stage, as the growing into stage 6 Unitary from the 5/6 Construct-Aware, as the increasing realization of the creative ground of a unified consciousness from which every object, every word, every thought, every feeling and sensation, every theory is understood as a human construct that delimits and creates boundaries where none exist. For Terri O’Fallon, in the end of the stage, the late 5.5 Transpersonal stage seems to appear, where states of timelessness and eternity are increasingly accompanied by a realization of boundlessness — which we can interpret as the disintegration of the finite self-definition of the Outside-View — as well as feelings of infinity — which we can see as the opening of the Inside-View into the Absolute. This widening in consciousness is accompanied by intensive construction on metaphysical models that bring together one’s spheres of interest into theories with universal pretensions.
With Erich Fromm and many other thinkers such as the existentialist Jean Paul Sartre and the Church Father Gregory of Nyssa, this stage can be named as the origin of a free will. For Robert Kegan, his fifth stage, characterized as self-transforming and interindividual, is the point at which a self separates from the institution and ideology with which it was previously fused and identified, thus producing the “individual,” the self that can reflect and hold as an object the regularities and purposes of a psychic administration with which it was previously fused. One becomes and knows oneself as well as the others now in relation to one’s own current or possible value-settings, system needs and stories, which one tells and creates for each other, that is, which one wants to materialize.
Individual Spirituality at the 3.2 Stage
The 3.2 Outside View can basically be seen as a search for a middle ground or balance between two extremes, resulting from the ability to step back from the interplay of a mind aspect and a life aspect with the awareness of consciousness — balancing the mind and life aspects by gradually learning how mind aspects, e.g. strategies or ways of thinking, resonate with life aspects, e.g. success or happiness. The Outside-View in its Spirituality thereby identifies with a cause, a finite identity, from which it experiences itself as creating freely and performatively.
The via negativa here basically means descending from a finite existence and from there connecting the world to the emptiness that is to be found when one has purified the mind of everything — experiencing limitless, formless consciousness. We find this in Vedanta as in Rupert Spira, but especially in Mahayana Buddhism. As presented in the Great Prajnaparamitra Sutra on Perfect Wisdom, freedom lies in the balance of emptiness and form — “not falling into duality.”
“The Bodhisattva, practicing perfect wisdom, by his skill in means, turns people away from all appearances, makes them enter the appearanceless realm, and anchors them in it — and does so in such a way that they do not fall into duality, no longer distinguishing appearances here from the appearanceless there. Thus, the bodhisattva, when practicing perfect wisdom, by his skill in the means turns beings away from appearances and leads them into the realm of appearancelessness.”
In this process, a kind of ascent to the point of origin is often found first, but while at the 3.1 Stage it was then paused there, in the recognition of the true Self, the person of the 3.2 Stage must inevitably return to the world again and again, thus bringing back emptiness — meditating from the Absolute backward into manifestation.
The via-positiva is less likely to identify with emptiness, but often finds a kind of “big bang of consciousness.” Or as Thomas of Auqinas writes in the Sum of Theology, the “unmoved mover,” that is, God, to whom everything can be traced as a cause, and one’s own free participation in the process of creation:
“When it is said that God has left man to himself, this does not mean that man is exempt from divine providence, but only that he has no pre-set agency directed only to an end, like natural things, which act only as if directed to an end by another, and do not act of themselves as if directed to an end, like rational creatures, through the possession of free will, by which they are able to deliberate and make a choice. Hence it is significantly said: Man is in the hands of his own will. But since the very act of free will is traced to God as its cause, it necessarily follows that everything that happens through the exercise of free will must be subject to divine providence. For human providence is included under the providence of God, as a particular under a general cause.”
In Jean Paul Sartre, this divine cause is abolished and replaced by the providence of one’s own self-design, which acts involutionary, determining us from the future into which we alienate ourselves in the mental design, to thereupon become that future actualized through man — the God is taken out of the equation, but on the other hand, other similar mechanisms are established, such as acting for other men, who in their inscrutability to us have something “God-like” about them, and are always greater than what we can imagine. With Andrew Cohen and the idea of evolutionary enlightenment, however, there are also today more or less one-to-one equivalents of this Christian theology.
The 3.2 Inside-View can basically be seen as a search for an immanent balance between two mental extremes, i.e., the identical transformation of the 3.1 Stage and its inversion, i.e., the negative transformation of the 3.2 Stage. Since there is no third beyond the duality of the two sides as present in the Outside-View, the equilibrium is basically a permanent ambiguity between the two sides and a struggle to align them causally, which means subordinating one to the other — one as master and the other as emissary. In doing so, the inversion as an infinite self finds itself self-limited to an essence through identity, the limits of the emissary.
The via negativa at this stage is beautifully illustrated in Tsong-Kha-Pa’s The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment. Two forms of emptiness are simultaneously held and used together, as two simultaneous meditation practices — one as identity (focused attention) and one as inversion (analytical insight into the nature of things):
“If you light an oil lamp in the middle of the night to look at a painting, you will see the representations very clearly if the lamp is very bright and the wind is not disturbing. If the lamp is not bright or is bright but flickers in the wind, then you will not see the images clearly. Likewise, when you are searching for the deep meaning, you will see the reality clearly if you have both the wisdom to see the meaning of the reality unmistakably and an unmoving attention that remains on the object of meditation as desired. However, if you do not have the wisdom to see how things are — even if you have a non-discursive concentration in which your mind is stable and no other objects appear scattered — then you will lack the eyes that see reality. Therefore, it will be impossible to know how things are, no matter how much you develop your concentration. And even with a perspective that understands the selflessness of reality, if you lack a firm concentration that remains unilaterally focused on its object, then it will be impossible to see clearly the meaning of the way things are because you will be disturbed by the winds of uncontrollably flooding discursive thoughts.”
A full way of looking at things is found, for example, in the Christian dogma of the unity of Father and Son, where two opposites unite, but also in the transfer to the individual human being and his unity with God — as here, for example, when Gregory of Nyssa thinks together the infinite in God and the finite in man:
“But human nature, one interjects, is something quite small and limited, the Godhead, on the other hand, something infinite; how then could the infinitely great be enclosed by the infinitely small? But who says that the infinity of God was enclosed by the barriers of the flesh as by a vessel? Not even in our human life does the boundary of the flesh form a barrier for the spirit; only the massive flesh is circumscribed by its own constituents; the soul, on the other hand, spreads itself freely on the wings of thought throughout the whole of creation, ascending as well to heaven as descending into the depths, walking over the surface of the earth and also making its explorations beneath it, but often also rising up contemplating the wonders of the world beyond, without being hindered by the burden of the body.”
The transition into the 3.2 Stage
At the end of the 3.1 Stage, it often appears to the Outside-View that the ability to create all sorts of things is basically just the playing out of patterns, the echoing of one’s own unchanging substance, elevated above the flow of time, yet too deeply woven into it to be truly free — the substance in it is a constant search that allows no final satisfaction. There arises a desire to see these patterns — and perhaps to abandon the search, the actualization of the evolutionary impulse with which one is identified — and at the same time the realization that there cannot be just one ideal state of mind, just one ideal strategy or intelligence, but many. The stronger this outside-view is, the more this step from a simple awareness into a double-loop awareness, that is, awareness of awareness or meta-awareness, presents itself as a stage change. Communist, totalitarian rulers saw the transition from the metaphysical age to that of the abolition of all opposites in the dialectical process, a process that frees one from any timeless and eternally unchanging substance and gives one the intelligence and freedom to reshape societies. The negative transformation of Secondness that appears in the 3.2 Stage can easily lead to an allergy to the previous stage, a complete rejection that extends into state terror, or as in the case of Christianity, to the mortification of the body and its “animal needs,” which belong to a lower stage of reason and not to the higher reason itself, which apparently consorts with God. Today we see this transition in Hanzi Freinacht’s allergic reaction to relativity in postmodernism in “The listening Society,” until in the following book, “The Nordic Ideology,” the stage change can be articulated as a transpersonal perspective that understands the meta-modern self as non-relativistic is destined to shape reality through a new freedom and power — “Serving beauty and mending tragedy, we would dance, fight and laugh our way towards more terrifying heights and depths of consciousness, manifesting pristine universal, impersonal love — a love that fathoms and embraces reality, and all sentient beings, with mathematical precision. We would co-create worlds and we would co-destroy them. And we would bear the heavy burden of such responsibility,” thus speaks Freinacht.
In this transition, the Inside-View also often brings forth a kind of stage distinction, though less in a hierarchical manner, but more in the juxtaposition of two mental ideologies, one of which is the correspondence of the 3.1 Stage, that is, an identity, and another one of the 3.2 Stage, an inversion, just as the stage distinctions of the Outside-View also bring forth an identity and its negation. Thus, Michel Foucault in Psychology and Mental Illness distinguishes between freedom and madness, which basically interpenetrate each other in the course of the stage. So, too, Carl Gustav Jung writes about two types of thinking in Symbols of Transformation around 1911: directed thinking and dreaming or imaginative thinking. The former works with elements of language for the purpose of communication and is difficult and strenuous; the latter is effortless, works as it were spontaneously, with the content read and is guided by unconscious motives. Directed thought produces innovations and adaptations, thus fulfills the functions of the 3.1 Stage, copies reality and endeavors to act on it, while the other turns away from reality, and releases subjective tendencies and, as far as adaptation is concerned, is unproductive, but instead dreams productively, or as Wilber calls it, is a Vision-Logic.
The 3.2 Stage is thus a form of expression and repetition of the subtle state — as already on the 1.2 Stage as the imagining of single purposeful movements and on the 2.2 Stage as the projection of promising courses of action — as an imaginative grasping, which here connects with the inner audition — i.e., verbal thinking — and the inner sense of balance of the Dynamic Mind, because these are the essential internalized senses of Thirdness. One the one hand, since the inner verbal thinking only comes to itself in the third stage of Thirdness, it is here still somewhat “intuitive” in the sense of not necessarily experienced as produced from a thinking source, as much as the dream-like thought processes here are still primarily nourished by the figurative ideas of Secondness, i.e., life, and represent an inner support of thinking through the 2.3 and 2.4 Stage, and are less superconscious in nature. The actual shape of the Vision-Logic is in the first half of the stage rather still a mental grasping, an alignment of thoughts in the right angle to hit a target, like an archer, before the second half brings increased wholistic and pictorial conceptions into these mental movements.
So, while the Outside-View here moves more into an awareness of awareness that is accompanied by language and can use language, but often experiences itself more as transpersonal or trans-egoic, as a negation of the previous “animalistic” weakness, the Inside-View moves into a dialectical process in which two different perspectives or states of mind begin to exchange. The Inside-View, at the end of the 3.1 Stage, often seems to experience its own inner voice as something prophetic when it becomes mixed up with the 2.4 Stage; at the beginning of the 3.2 Stage it is then realized that it was merely one’s own inner voice that one mistakenly believed to be that of a divine revelation — thus Doreen Virtue writes in Deceived No-More that she was a false prophet, that she had exaggerated her inner voice, and how she realized that she “thought at the time that angels were wish-fulfillers who helped you get everything from a good parking space to a soulmate husband or a successful business” — that the mind was still, at bottom, completely subordinate to desire, which was directed toward material goals — and how she was previously tormented by a constant despair “because she clung to feelings of guilt instead of repentance, because she tried to take charge of her life instead of surrendering to God, because she followed spirit guides instead of the King of kings, Jesus, and because she tried to fill her heart with things, people, or accomplishments instead of with the love of God.” The negative transformation or inversion produces an internal turning away from something old — as Kierkegaard writes, a sadness, a pain, a melancholy arises that leads one into the infinity of the mind where an ethical awareness now looks at and critically examines one’s previous inner wisdom perspective — an identity goes into a dialectical confrontation with its inversion. Neale Donald Walsh also describes this step in his series on Conversations with God — each volume increasingly showing the textuality of the 3.2 Stage, where instead of writing a diary, he begins to address infinity and enters into a dialogue in which he asks questions and God answers him — the conscious mode of the Inside-View is altogether a dialectical one of speech and counter-speech, a mode which, however, can only be recognized and handled abstractly in the second half of the stage.
The Outside-View has less the character of this “back and forth” between two perspectives in the inner conversation, but rather a kind of mindfulness and later control, as described in Voice Dialogue — as soon as the conscious self-process is established, i.e., awareness of awareness at the 3.2 Stage, one can, however, also protect oneself here from the “demonic,” which lies, for example, in the splitting off of inner aspects: it is likewise moralized and a normative good is established. For if we “do not allow these split-off selves to speak to us, if we continue to deny them, they will increase in intensity, they will be projected, and eventually they will invade our lives and we will be forced to dance to their tune” — we would again be controlled by the lower reason of the 3.1 Stage, in which these self-aspects emerge unseen and act out their needs through us, according to Hal and Sidra Stone in Embracing our Selves, and we would thereby become “bad people.”
At this point, it is important to differentiate between the multiple personalities that the 3.1 Stage — the Pluralist and Autonomous person — recognizes, which are primarily memories of 2.3 and 2.4 contexts — e.g., the voice of one’s parents as a reminder — and this kind of practice that awakens various 3.1 Personalities and seeks to understand their relationship to the world. As Terri O’Fallon says, in the transition to the 5.0 Construct-Aware stage, one may suddenly realize that one’s awareness is like a radio receiver that receives no clear frequency and jumps from frequency to frequency. It should also be noted that for the Inside-View, it is not until the 3.3 Stage that a similar experience is produced in which two aspects can be reconciled from a conscious, reciprocal process.
In the image below, on the left side, the Outside-View can be seen as the Trinitarian awareness of the 3.2 Stage, a spiritual awareness (green circle) of the 3.1 Stage tries to balance with life (yellow circle). The dilemma here is that Trinitarian awareness is always separate from the unity between spirit and life — one experiences, perhaps, as Sartre says, an insincerity in the sense that one must always play this union, but it never becomes real. On the right-hand side, the structure of the Inside-View is evident: here an identity and an inversion interact, which, without a third party to guide this process from the outside, leaves a person living in constant ambiguity unless, as Plato writes, in the dialectic of perspectives a moment of insight into the idea of the good resolves the conflict. In the nature of these two structures, the fundamental difference and conflict is also revealed between a more totalitarian system, top-down control in the Outside-View, and a libertarian dispute between two perspectives — where both sides can lead to social extremes: the Outside-View in Stalin and Mao, the Inside-View in Hitler and Lenin, for example.
As we grow into this new stage, we are often experienced by those around us as someone who breaks community standards. Lawrence Kohlberg and Robert Kegan write about an amoral stage in this transition, in which people make responses to moral dilemmas that can be construed as pre-conventional because they reject community standards that were essential at the fourth stage of moral judgment — that is, at the 3.1 Stage. Rather, however, therein lies the discovery of one’s own ethical being, which wants to test out and must break out — as Jean Paul Sartre writes in the Road to Freedom, one must recognize that one is a living choice, possesses freedom, and thereby grows into a responsibility. Doreen Virtue describes how at this point a witch hunt began for her because people thought that “she was ‘going backwards’ in her spirituality because one should ‘go from Christianity to New Age and not the other way around’; that she had converted to make more money in the Christian market. that she had ‘left the New Agers for the Christians’; that she was under government mind control; and that she was going through a temporary astrological phase called a ‘Saturn Return,’ whatever that means. “ Whichever way one looks at it, the transformation can easily be interpreted as a regression, a psychological breakdown or mental illness.
According to Kitchner and King in their work on Reflective Judgment, the 3.2 Stage — their stage 7 — is characterized by the belief that reality is never given, but that interpretations of evidence and opinions can be synthesized into epistemically justifiable conjectures about the nature of the problem under consideration. Knowledge is built by using critical inquiry skills or by synthesizing evidence and opinions into coherent and cohesive explanations of beliefs about problems. It is possible, therefore, through critical inquiry or synthesis, to determine that some judgments, whether expert or one’s own, have a higher truth value than others, or to claim that a particular judgment represents a reasonable, defensible solution to a problem-and this process requires disengagement, such as that accomplished by Doreen Virtue, who, in the months and years following her crisis of faith, entered into a deep process of research on Christianity and found a “scientifically sound interpretation” for her faith, beyond her own arbitrariness, which may seem like a regression to many, but was achieved through more complex inner process.
The first quarter of the 3.2 stage: The judgment of “Being”
Taking Hegel’s subdivision of judgment, a function of man that most closely corresponds to the deep structure of the 3.2 Stage, we find first and foremost an immediacy in which one makes judgments. By judgment here, in accordance with the Outside-View embodied by Hegel, is actually meant that through one’s own “awareness of awareness” one seeks to reconcile the previous consciousness, which is a simple ideology, a concept, with the world — which in the first quarter of the stage means being receptive to various experiences of a self and the world viewed from the new identity; at the same time, however, the dialectical movement of the Inside-View can also be described as looking at how an identity and its inversion interact, that is, the consciousness of the 3.1 Stage interacts with that of the 3.2 Stage, how both exclude each other or belong together, and whether there can be experiences of unity between two poles, or an identity on one of the two sides. With Terri O’Fallon, this can be seen as the core feature of the 5.0 Construct-Aware stage — as people mature into this stage, O’Fallon says something like they “see the recursive patterns of development, the social construction of reality, projections in the moment, and how all of this plays out historically in addition to their own history. She begins to see how we solidify and concretize our own individual our own individual constructions and histories through our words and their assumed definitions and boundaries and limits. By seeing all of this in the moment, they are able to be incredibly agile, to see things that other people can’t yet see, and to turn things inside out, upside down, to change in different ways in unusual and paradoxical ways to drive processes.” Robert Kegan similarly writes that at the fifth stage, the self-transforming mind is no longer identical to its “filters.” It can step back from its own filters and view them, no longer just view through them.
Examples here are numerous but let`s start with an Outside-View: Jane Loevinger, for example, defines her stages of ego development as forms of selective apperception on which “the ego remains stable because the operations through which the person perceives his environment effectively admit only those data that can already be understood, that is, are already compatible with the present ego structure.” Thus, according to Loevinger, the sequence of stages is basically a sequence of deliberately controlled attentional patterns and not a sequence of stages in the real sense; because development merely follows attentional control, it is basically arbitrarily adjustable and is not subject to any real transformations of consciousness, there are no real stage jumps, but one can willfully control on which stage a person is now — though she defines them as discontinuous. These inner contradictions are found in all stage theories of the 3.2 Stage, since development as a real fact of the mind can only be recognized after the early 3.3 Stage — somewhere there is always a self-refutation of the nature of the found stage sequence and a reduction to a learning sequence, psychological illness or quasi-spiritual attainment within the 3.2 Models; just as development models of the 3.2 Stage basically always see two mental stages: Loevinger, for example, sees basically only degenerate stages and an integrated stage as the culmination point of human ego maturation, or Cook-Greuter only postautonomous stages and those before; where the earlier stages are not really free, but blindly trapped in their patterns of linguistic meaning-making because they have no awareness of how they create their reality with language.
In addition to stage sequences as filters, however, numerous patterns can be found here. If one thinks for example of Howard Gardener’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, suddenly there is no longer only one social construct, one form of intelligence, but numerous of them, all of which are a 3.1 State, which unites itself differently with the world, whether by kinesthetic, naturalistic, intrapersonal, logical, existential or any other kind of intelligence. Too, Erik Berne’s transactional analysis now sees not merely one awareness, but numerous different adult games that we can either play along with or leave behind — at least when we learn to see how different self-states emerge within us, as in a patient who sees: “The difference between my two self-states was that the ‘bad’ girl was more or less indulging in a self-indulgent expression of autonomy, and just doing what was natural, while the ‘good’ girl was adapting to the state from which she would be judged. “ Also in economics, as in Henry Mintzberg’s Structures in Fives, it is pointed out how awareness, the soul of companies, in terms of the particular self-control architecture, seems to appear in always the same forms, combining always unchanging elements to construct itself. Often people find images to illustrate these patterns as shown below — this is not specifically about the content of the images but merely to let the forms affect you.
Alexander Lowen in The Language of the Body provides a different kind of patterning, namely body types, and suggests how the emotional state that always resonates in the background of the 3.1 Stage, namely fear, as an affect of conformity — such as not being perfect enough — may prevent change. In this regard, he writes that “it is good practice to point out to the patient that while his sincere desire for change is believed, there are always elements in the character structure that suggest that a negative attitude is present at the same time”; fear, distrust, doubt, dejection are stumbling blocks in this first quarter of the 3.2 Stage that set one back. Thus Erich Fromm also writes about the Fear of Freedom — a freedom that is “a characteristic feature of human existence and whose meaning changes according to the degree to which man is aware of himself as an independent and separate being and conceives of himself as such” — and with the Dynamic Mind there comes in a sense a culmination in which man grasps his separateness: he is now the agent of the mental sphere, an independent and free spiritual being, and thus directly confronts his fear in it and of it. As Kierkegaard and Sartre write, however, fear itself is soon seen as an expression of freedom, a positive indicator that one is able to change without ever being able to know where that will lead one — a sense of the consequences of one’s choices and the value of those choices as “responsibilities” and modes of dominating the mind reflected in them.
The Inside-View sees fewer of these patterns viewed from the outside, yet one naturally finds descriptions of one’s own patterns especially in the beginning of the second half of the stage, when the 3.2 Stage begins to look at itself — there, for example, C.G. Jung designs his theory of types as the interaction of different identities with their inversions, such as extroverted and introverted or judging and perceiving, or Robert Kegan describes his spectrum of stages as interactions of subject and object, i.e., two opposites, which are related to each other and produce again and again new equilibria, that is, new stages. At the beginning of the stage, however, rather a single aspect of the dialectic is considered. For example, Daniel Goleman looks at Emotional Intelligence and contrasts it with IQ — thus, on the one hand, he delineates the existence of these two dimensions — an identity, e.g., the IQ, and an inversion, e.g. the EQ, on the other hand, he observes the dynamics between emotional intelligence and our salvation, happiness in life, success, and satisfaction with what we achieve, and sums up, “There is ample evidence that people who are emotionally adaptable-that is, who know and manage their emotions, and can efficiently read and work around the emotions of others-have an advantage in every area of life, whether it’s romantic or intimate relationships or recognizing unspoken laws that condition success in organizational contexts.” Notwithstanding this criticism, Alfred Binet’s concept of intelligence, now critiqued by Goleman, had been designed, as it were, at the 3.2 Stage itself as an inversion of the common orientation to imbecility, and as a struggle against the inability of his colleagues to arrive at a unified construct of intelligence — the juxtapositions that happen at the 3.2 Stage need not, accordingly, be related to 3.1 Models, but any object, understood or misunderstood, earlier or later, simpler or more complex, can become a “bogeyman.”
Plato, on the other hand, in Gorgias, a dialogue, i.e. the basic form of narrative corresponding to the 3.2 Inside-View, about the beautiful speech and the art of speech, examines the existence of the soul and how one’s own identity is imprinted in it from good or bad intentions, from virtues and vices, as an inversion of these intentions, and thus considers less the effects on life success of “normatively correct behavior” as Goleman. Plato compares the soul to a naked body, in which one sees how it has been treated in life, if it is wrinkled and scarred, or still even and untouched in old age — and so he writes:
“The same thing seems to me to happen to the soul. Everything is visible in the soul when it is stripped of the body, whether it occurred to it by nature or the changes that man has brought about in the soul through his efforts for this and that. If we now come before the judge, namely those from Asia before Rhadamanthys, Rhadamanthys places them before him and looks at each soul without knowing whose it is: Thus it happens that often when he has the great king before him, or other kings or princes, he finds nothing wholesome in the soul, but whipped through and full of calluses of perjury and injustice, just as each one’s manner of acting has become marked in the soul, and finds everything dislocated by lies and arrogance, and nothing straight about it, because it has grown up without truth, but before all violence and softness, wantonness and intemperance in acting, the soul also shows itself full of disproportion and ugliness.“
This kind of correspondence of the exterior identity at the 3.1 Stage in the inside or soul at the 3.2 Stage seems to form the basis for the moral consciousness of the inside perspective at this level and also appears to be the basis for the Christian doctrine of sin as produced by the Dynamic Mind — in which our own inner inaction and irresponsibility makes us evil and sin is not something given to us from the outside, as Gregory of Nyssa writes: “So God has no responsibility for evil, he who is the author of what exists, but by no means of what does not exist, who formed sight, not blindness, who created virtue, not its deprivation, who puts before those who walk according to virtue the honorary gift of great goods as the prize of struggle for free will, but does not subjugate human nature under his will with coercive force, drawing men willy-nilly to the good like an inanimate device.” — one basically understands the power that one constructs oneself!
The movement away from the awareness of the 3.1 Stage also brings a new dimension and reflection of spiritual states and peak experiences. A central moment here is the disappearance of the constant search, craving and desire directed towards experiences, as towards a material object. Susanne Cook-Greuter speaks mi Chögyam Trungpa of spiritual materialism. On the one hand, as in Doreen Virtue’s confession, this means the satisfaction through life that is still sought in all spirituality, but on the other hand, the never-ending seeking, the arising and passing away of passions, as the basic emotion of firstness and the difficulty of holding an ideal state of mind because one is contained in it, flowing along with and not looking at it — and so in the beginning of the 3.2 Stage one understands that “the more one searches, the further one moves away from the goal, because the more one becomes aware of one’s own psychic powers and the ‘I’ transcending search and is proud of this search, the more clearly one’s own ‘I’ is still in the center,” it makes use of transpersonal episodes in the service of its own glorification, according to Cook-Greuter.
Adi Da Samraj in The Knee of Listening writes at this stage about Narcissus, who was cursed to fall in love with his own image. He stared at his reflection in a pond, eternally unhappy and frustrated that he could not be with the one he adored. He did not realize that his beloved was his own reflection; he assumed it was someone else. Yet he rejected all others in the “real” world and eventually died, lonely and self-absorbed. Adi Da writes that the search for experience itself kept leading to contradictions until he realized that he had always been free. He sketches how his consciousness separated from the stream of events after a spiritual breakthrough — seemingly into the 3.2 Stage — and observed how “he sought the resolution of all inner contradictions, or the various alternatives that condition experience, the patterns of search and conflict” in order to dissolve the separation between the I and Thou, which are actually both the same and get rid of his own Narcissus. Here, however, the contradiction of the first quarter is also apparent. One leaves the search and, as also mentioned before, the fear of the 3.1 Stage, but is now again in Firstness — because in a first quarter — and thus again in the fear and search, which is now, however, consciously observed.
The figure above seeks to clarify this: Secondness now has an identical transformation(magenta circle) transformation and the negative transformation in Firstness dissolves (red cross through the yellow circle), the desire for material goods for the sake of their self and the satisfaction of needs; still, however, one is in the magenta circle, in the identity and not really in the activity of Thirdness; the yellow circle of Secondness in Thirdness is not really there yet and so one is a passive search within oneself — “so it is often experienced as the swallowing of a tsunami, with little warning and little ability to prioritize any of the constructs that one is seeing [a pure seeking]. How does one begin to work with the apprehension of such complex insights along with the experience of losing subtle and concrete parts one used to recognize as ‘oneself’?” as O`Fallon writes in Evolution of the Human Soul
Mihail Csikszentmihalyi in Beyond Boredom and Anxiety appropriately makes the distinction between extrinsic, 2.2 Stage based, and intrinsic motivation, between a materially driven movement and one for quasi-spiritual reasons to experience a state in the 3.1 Stage that is one with the sphere of body and life — in his case he speaks of flow feelings as the basis for a purely mental motivation. He thinks that “in many ways, it could be said that the whole endeavor of humanity throughout the millennia of history has been to capture these fleeting moments of fulfillment and make them a part of daily existence.”
Whether in the form of the Inside-View, as identity and inversion, or in the form of the Outside-View, as consciously held interplay of awareness and world, decentering from the 2.2 Stage, which is now dissolved while it was still central in 3.1, allows for a deepened relationship with people — whether recognized as one’s self or a counterpart. Martin Buber, writing in the first quarter of the stage, of the I and Thou, muses on the present, “by which is meant not the point which in our thinking from time to time indicates only the conclusion of ‘completed’ time, the mere semblance of a conclusion which is fixed and held, but the real, fulfilled present, exists only insofar as actual presence, encounter and relationship exist. The present comes into being only by the YOU becoming present.” Robert Kegan therefore often refers to his fifth stage as the Interpersonal stage, because the other is no longer part of the satisfactory structure of Secondness at the 2.2 Stage of the Opportunist but exists only as part of a reciprocity within Secondness, at the 2.3 Stage; even though in the transition to the second quarter, the other may then be subordinated to the goals of the 3.2 Stage after being explored in the first quarter, the other is no longer made a passive object of gratification, but someone who actively, of his own free will, enters into a rule-oriented relationship — and otherwise normally falls through the social net of a society, because 3.2 Communities generally continue to tie social allowances to rule conformity.