In Over Our Heads: Robert Kegan and Spiritual Development

Dr. Robert Kegan, the Meehan Professor of Adult Learning and Professional Development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is a developmental psychologist interested in stages the development of adult structures of consciousness. He has identified six distinct stages. Three of these are important to any discussion of higher spiritual development. The stages of development reflect the ways in which people interpret their experience and construct the meaning of the experiences.

We pick up with the cognitive development of pre-teens. Typically just before adolescence, children have mastered what Piaget referred to as concrete operational thinking. They are able to identify specific instances of wide ranges of things (what Kegan refers to as the ability to recognize “durable categories”). They understand their roles and they tend to recognize enduring needs and have developed impulse control. This is all reflective of second order consciousness.

As people move into third order consciousness, they become able to think abstractly and recognize and intelligently interact with cross-categorical ideas. They are able to create maps of their ideas of how life should be lived and begin to conform their behavior to these maps. A large part of this process involves the socialization to adult structures necessary to get along in our culture. We become who our society expects us to be by interacting within the structures of that society. People begin to understand interpersonal realities, can identify their own inner states and recognize inter-subjective states of other people and groups. These skills allow people to function in the modern society and are essential to holding a job, parenting, partnering and simply getting along in life. According to Kegan, the vast majority of adults in American society function at this level of consciousness.

There are however, two orders that transcend and include these lower structures. The Fourth Order of Consciousness involves the ability to think in high level abstractions about the abstractions one has created in the Third Order. In our post-modern world, there is not one monolithic society – we are exposed to a wide range of possibilities and competing demands for time, money, loyalty, focus and so on. If these rise to a sufficiently complex level and we are paying attention, we make the leap to Fourth Order Consciousness. We are no longer pushed around by cultural forces but become “self-authoring”. Very few people reach this stage before the age of 40. When they do, they are no longer subject to the scripts of abstraction that they developed earlier in life but are able to chose between multiple abstractions and chose to operate out of meta-ethical frameworks. They are no longer bound by maps of behavior but have become autonomous individuals who are consciously picking and choosing the cognitive structures that they chose to operate within. They are rarely ideologically dogmatic and find they can adopt great plasticity in the ways they function and move within the world and various social groups. They are marching to their own drummer based on their own cognitive map of the world.

The Fifth Order of Consciousness starts getting very interesting from the point of view of spiritual development. According to Kegan, only a small fraction of people ever make this jump. This stage is referred to as the “self-transforming self”. It is brought on by the inherent limitations of self-authoring by coming face to face with the inconsistencies of created by the systems developed at the Fourth Order. The person recognizes that all of the ways of constructing meaning or making sense of experience are, in the end, wholly partial and incomplete. They leave things out. Their system, while very holistic and encompassing, is incapable of making any fundamental sense of their lives. The hallmark of this phase would be things like the "existential crisis" or the "dark night of the soul". This profound doubt - and sometimes downright ontological and epistemological despair - forces the self to move into dialectical transcendence of ideologies to the point where there is no longer an ego to support or defend. Reality becomes perceived as truly transpersonal and the notion of individuality looses any sense of ultimate meaning. The egoic self clearly still exists, but it exists solely as an object of observation. When this happens, life is seen holistically and what maps are useful are maps that tie disparate realities together and show the relationships between things that, on their surface appear contradictory.

Kegan has used Alan Watts’ comment that his baby was fully enlightened because he was one with his experience as a foil for discussing this stage. He says Watts got it absolutely wrong. According to Kegan, a baby is, developmentally, pure subject – the baby no distinct sense of distinct self as object of observation or experience. In all other stages, a portion of the self (from the lower order of consciousness) is seen as an object by the subject of the next stage. (Thus the Fourth Order clearly sees and understands the structures at work in the 3rd order but is oblivious to those structures of its present order – i.e. they are purely subjective). At the Fifth Order (and above), the individual becomes pure object – unlike the baby, there is no “subject”. This fundamental recognition of the contingency of self – its fundamentally illusory nature – is awfully close to the mystic realizations found in many world religions. It is not that self no longer exists but rather than self is pure object of a transcendent witness. This type of experience is deeply reminiscent of experiences spoken of by Sri Aurobindo, Ramana Maharshi, Nagarjuna, Meister Eckhart, and hundreds of other saints and sages from times past.

To my way of thinking, Kegan’s work points to the a human developmental model that both supports and gives structure to spiritual development. It provides a teleological understanding of the development of human psychology and grounds mystical experience in psychological development. That grounding is important in a number of ways, particularly people seek to live spiritual lives in a post modern world.

For those who are interested, two of Robert Kegan’s works are In Over Our Heads and The Evolving Self.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

Meditations

Here are a few meditations that I have found particularly useful:

1. Who am I?

Look into yourself and peel away everything that is not "you". Start with your waking life. You almost certainly peel off your roles, your possessions, your mannerisms, your emotions, your thinking. Dismiss anything that is not "you" at the deepest level. When you are ready, move into examining who the "I" is who is dreaming and how that is different from your waking self. Finally, think about deep, dreamless sleep - is there an "I" there and, if so what form does that "I" take. Was there an "I" while you were in deep, dreamless sleep. If so, what was its nature?

2. What am I?

Think of the vast distance bewtween the nucleus of an atom and the first electron (I have heard that if the nucleus was the size of a ping-pong ball, the first electron shell woudl be 8 miles away). In that space is a quantum field of nothingness giving rise to pairs of subatomic particles popping into and out of existence. Now think of these vast spaces of emptiness/fullness within your own body - to what extent is there an inside of you and and outside of you? Where do "you" begin and end? Are you as "solid" as you think you are? Where do "you" physically begin and end?

3. When is my self in time?

Where does the past exist? Where does the future exist? What exists other than the present moment? If only the present moment exists, what does that do to your sense of self? How is your self different from the present moment?

4. Where is my self?

Be still and identify where in your body your sense of self abides. (For many Westerners, it is immediately behind the eyes, for most of the rest of us, it is in their heart.) In your mind's eye, move that sense of self to another part of your body (say your heart) and then back to where it came from. Next begin to expand the sense of self until it fills your entire body - allow it to inhabit, fully, your full physical frame. If possible, in your mind's eye extend your sense of self out of your body and begin to explore how far this goes.

5. The Still Lake

This is not, necessarily, a transcendental exercise but it is useful. Lie down and relax. If you have calming music with headphones you can listen to that (I used Pachabel's Canon). Create a lake in your mind's eye, notice if it is calm or filled with waves. Imagine those waves generally reflect the activity of your mind (worry, thoughts, joys, concerns and so on). As you listen to the music, slowly calm "your" lake to the point that it refelcts the sky perfectly - not a ripple on it. Repeat this daily.

6. Big Mind

Do Genpo Roshi's Big Mind meditation on You Tube - start at the beginning and watch all of them. Then start doing this on your own or with a partner.

What meditations have you found useful?

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.

What are We Missing?

As we reflect on the spiritual marketplace in our modern, secularized world, there is no question that something is afoot. This week in Seattle an innovative trust and financial management company that serves families of extreme wealth rented the symphony hall to have alternative medicine expert Andrew Weil speak to its customers, potential customers, and their advisors on aging in one of its “Thought Forums”. Andrew Weil wasn't always so mainstream. In 1971 he first visited Esalen where he participated in then cutting edge seminars on health and human consciousness. His efforts and the efforts of other physicians and healthcare professionals and researchers who largely gathered under the initial aegis and leadership of Esalen brought alternative medicine to the United States and within a few short decades turned it into what is now referred to respectfully as "complimentary medicine."

The stuff that was on the very outer fringes of cultural acceptability only recently is becoming mainstream in some very important ways. Yet we as Unitarian Universalists are missing this cultural sea-change and dooming ourselves to fundamental and, I suspect, quite permanent, irrelevance. We sit back and dismiss these movements out of hand – this hunger people have for something of significance that feeds their souls. We see it as somehow too “woo-woo” or “New Age”. Yet in our complacency, the world is passing us by very, very quickly. The folks who consider themselves “spiritual but not religious”, some of whom are referred to as Cultural Creatives, constitute approximately 20% of our population and probably reflect an even larger percentage of the demographic in more hip, urban and liberal areas where many of our churches exist.

As sophisticated UUs, I have heard us scoff at those who race after chimeric “spiritual” fixes – like The Celestine Prophecy or The Secret or “What the Bleep Do We Know” – and yet people who are seeking comfort in these things, and other ideas that are even stranger, have a deep human longing to become more whole and more loving people whose lives are rooted in something deeper than the shallow materialism of our age. This “pop” spirituality speaks of something much more profound - a human tropism towards the spiritual. It speaks of something that is emerging in our culture that has profoundly ancient antecedents. It runs so deep that it might even be irreducibly embedded in structures of human consciousness or even the fabric of the universe itself. The problem is that these popular forms of spiritual expression are ill-formed, lack depth, and are concocted out of ideas that seem to us rational folk to be patently foolish, confused and magical. In short, a throw-back to pre-rational superstition.

And many of them are. And yet…

While this frothy spirituality oftentimes denies and condemns the deeper wisdom traditions, their ideas are the distant and sometimes barely recognizable relatives of the much deeper truths found in perennial philosophies and the paths of mystics in Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu traditions, among others. While the airy ideas of these facile trends lack depth and discipline, they can serve as gateways for literally millions of people to possibilities of real spiritual depth and profound experience. In talking with many UUs, the story is the same. Plenty of visitors, but few stick. Could part of the reason be because we are so very close to what they are looking for on paper, but fall short of embodying that promise in action, particularly with respect to spirituality?

As a faith that ostensibly draws on these well-grounded and respected traditions, we as Unitarian Universalists have the opportunity to deeply explore and live these truths and thereby offer to the world a path of depth, integrity and real meaning. But this way requires that we take our spiritual calling as seriously as we take our political one. It requires that we truly acknowledge the sources, not just with affirmation, but with incarnation. It requires discipline and study and devotion to spiritual practice.

Our denomination runs the risk of being swept into irrelevance. It continues to shrink in most appreciable ways and it is rapidly aging. We live in deadened humanism and narrow definitions of liberal political orthodoxy that have already been dismissed by our culture as fundamentally irrelevant. At this point, we have no voice that is resonating with those around us. Yet in our Sources we have latent depth and profound messages that, if taken seriously and coupled with spiritual practice, can not only revitalize our congregations but drive a new message of relevant political and social transformation.

Many leaders of cultural thinking point to emerging structures of consciousness that profoundly integrate the spiritual, the psychological, the intellectual and the ethical dimensions of life in ways that shape the soul. While this emerging consciousness is clearly not a panacea, and will raise its own problems, we are on the cusp of a revolution in the way ordinary people construct the meaning of their lives. It would be a shame to sit on the sidelines and only watch when we have the very real potential of dynamically participating in the emergence of a new order of human consciousness.

© 2007. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.