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.

Guest Blog: Maslow Revisted

By Anna Davis, ARNP, MA

I have long appreciated Maslow's insights on which he based his theory of needs, but I've always had a problem with the idea that the being needs are luxuries. The definition of a need is that without it, an organism is less/not able to grow along its developmental arc, if not survive. An example of this difference is sex, as plenty of people have survived long times without sex, but there is something to an argument that levels intimacy of relationships and the prospect for progeny are severely curtailed without it.

While I was finishing my MA in psychology, I chanced upon an old article written by a man who was then APA president. (Alas, I have been unable to recall his name or find it again.) The article stated that the further in time between the initial urge to meet a need, and when actual physiologic damage happened, the more psychopathology one could find about that need. As an example, he offered the difference between the needs for urination and eating. Both are needs, but damage from urine backing up into the kidneys can happen in about 2 hours, vs starvation takes about 2 weeks. Accordingly, we find very little psychopathology about urination, and so much about food.

I offer that Maslow was correct about his hierarchal arrangement of needs, but what he got wrong was the criteria. I offer that ALL needs are equally needs, and not one is more important than the other, but some are more immediate. The further up the list, the longer it likely takes to meet the needs. Trancendance seems to take the better part of a lifetime, if we get to it even then. (The concept of reincarnation appeals for this---if at first you don't succeed, try, try, again.)

I think Maslow listing them as importance vs immediacy was him reflecting a major value of our culture; the easiest way to control people is to keep them with one or more needs pitted against each other. (Most of us have at one time or another chosen to tolerate some sacrifice of our need for self esteem in the workplace so as not to endanger our ability to provide for food, clothing and shelter.) Double binds such as these have long been seen in psychology as a most toxic source of stress. Research into the effects of the stress hormone cortisol is increasingly showing us that stress not only breaks our bodies down, we can't repair and grow beyond past damage until the coast is clear.

Because our culture makes the being needs seem as luxuries, and most of us are constantly on a treadmill chasing after the deficiency needs, we remain maleable and will sacrifice self-actualization and trancendance that would more likely free us from the yoke.It is no coincidence that each of the few examples of people who have reached trancendance (MLK, Jr, Jesus, Ghandi, etc.,) have been radicals and revolutionaries, and terrifying to those holding power in their age. Our current system is no different and prefers there be as few such leaders as possible, and ones who emerge must hire body guards because their predecessors have tended to get killed for thier trouble.

I would not necessarily ask everyone to lead a nationwide or global movement, but encourage revolution in more subtle ways. As part of my practice as a therapist, I routinely refer clients to "The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook," (Davis, Eshelman, & McKay; New Harbinger Press) which is a collection of exercises designed to help people gain some control over one's own internal experience. (This is not suppress emotions, but be able to not have them take control, allowing wisdom to emerge when rationalism is imformed by the heart.) When people have such skills to call upon at any time, they become confident that they get to make clearheaded choices in life, and they get less vulnerable to external manipulations.

Further, I teach my ideas about Maslow's hierarchy and that yes, we all will still have to juggle varying priorities as needs emerge and are sated on different time scales, (much like the old image of a Vaudeville plate spinner.) But, if we know that ALL of our needs should get to included on the list, we can keep an eye to the longer term ones in the quieter moments between meals, chores, bills, homework and the distraction of entertainment. Having all the needs on the list allows us to make clearer choices about what we really need in the long run, and avoid the trap of functioning in crisis mode all the time.

I believe that as more people change thier perspectives as I have offered, there will be a critical mass effect that will change our broader culture in profound ways. I am not a visionary who can offer strategies of how it will all work out. But I am hopeful that these changes are for the better. I believe that if all people were freer, calmer, and more aware of thier own needs, it would make for deeper and richer communication, which might lead to more efficient means of everyone getting all thier needs met, at least eventually. I continue to wait and see while I work to subvert the dominant paradigm. Viva la revolucion!

© 2007 Anna Davis, ARNP, MA. All rights reserved. Used with permission.