The Mature Ego: “Postautonomous Ego Development” by Susanne Cook-Greuter (Book Summary)

This is a book summary of Postautonomous Ego Development: A Study of Its Nature and Measurement by Susanne Cook-Greuter (Amazon).

Premium members get access to the full book summary with stage characteristic breakdowns: 🔒How to Develop a Mature Ego with “Postautonomous Ego Development” by Susanne Cook-Greuter

Quick Housekeeping:

• All content in “quotation marks” is from the author (otherwise it’s minimally paraphrased).
• All content is organized into my own themes (not the author’s chapters).
• Emphasis has been added in bold for readability/skimmability.

Book Summary Contents:

• Intro to the Book
• The Ego & Ego Development Theory
• Conventional Developmental Stages
• Postconventional Developmental Stages
• Postautonomous Developmental Stages
• Transcendent Developmental Stage(s)

The Mature Ego: Postautonomous Ego Development by Susanne Cook-Greuter (Book Summary)

Intro to Postautonomous Ego Development

“The sense of exhilaration and déja-vu I felt when I first encountered (Loevinger’s) ego development theory was extraordinary. Finally, there was a theory that explained the world to me in a way that made more coherent sense of more human behavior than any other I had encountered. In many ways, it helped me to map my own perceptions, reactions, feelings, and thoughts.”

About the study/thesis:

• “This study makes both a theoretical and a practical contribu­tion to positive adult psychology by mapping and clarifying mature, postautonomous personality development and by providing stage distinctions and thematic categories to assess it. Moreover, these criteria may be useful in evaluating reality perspectives of mature individuals in other discourse contexts and other cultures.”
• “In this thesis, I explored the rare phenomenon of postautonomous ego development in order to create more adequate theory and measurement of this little understood area of adult development. My goal was to provide an alternative to Loevinger’s conception (1976) of high-end ego development.”
• “What I can say with some certainty is that my version of ego development theory is more or less convergent with Loevinger’s up to the Conscientious  stage. At the Conscientious stage, however, the theories start to differ.”

Bridging East & West:

• “Both constructivist developmental theorists and researchers studying Eastern paths to maturity suggest that people can develop a stance towards reality that goes beyond the Western rational confines towards ego-transcendence.”
• “This thesis begins to bridge Western conceptions of psychological growth as increasing individuation and self-integration with Eastern notions of the permanent self as a transitional phenomenon that may be recognized as a guiding fiction and transcended.”
• “It is based on empirical evidence and leads readily from a Western conception of development to Eastern models. It begins to bridge ‘bottom-up’ conceptions of mature development as increasingly complex self-differentiations and integrations with the top-down conceptions of the permanent self as a transitional phenomenon that may be recognized as an illusion and potentially transcended.”

The Ego & Ego Development Theory

“I am fascinated with how we interpret our experience, how we make sense of these existential dilemmas, and how much awareness we have about our own meaning-making. Thus, I naturally gravitated towards constructivist developmental psychology, a branch of psychology that elevates meaning-making and the differences among people in this vital activity to a central position.”

“Ego development theory seems to resonate with many people, especially its description of the phenomenon of the search for identity and the many changing forms it takes. It has a quality of verisimilitude or lebensnähe (closeness to life).”

The Ego:

Who I am: Ego as underlying construct is said to reveal the current synthesis of ‘who I am.’ In general, we can say that human beings try to navigate life by searching for ever-more adequate representations of ‘who they are’ and what the world looks like.

• The underlying principle/central processing unit in personality organization that orchestrates how we perceive reality and strives for coherent meaning: The ego represents the striving of human beings to understand themselves and the world they live in by fitting new experiences into their current meaning system. The ego is said to orchestrate how we perceive inner and outer reality and to coordinate affect, thought, and action.

• Psychic organizing function/synthetic principle at the very core of meaning-making: The ego’s main function is to generate coherent meaning—meaning-making as a central, synthesizing activity. That faculty which synthesizes experience from all sources into a coherent whole. Constantly integrating and absorbing experience, and classifying and finding order, in everything that touches the individual both externally and internally.

• Two main dimensions (ego as process & ego as representation): The function of the ego as process is to organize, synthesize and integrate experience from both external and internal sources and to mediate among them (the central processing unit within the rational, personal, symbol-mediated realm of experience). The ego as representation—the I and the me as one’s identity—can be understood as the result of this effort at integration (the created identity thus changes with the changing levels of integration).

• Labors mightily for coherence & defense: To create and maintain coherence and vigorously defends against dissonant stimuli.

• An abstract/constructed object: All manner of objects are human inventions or constructs including such abstract notions as the ego (the ego is an overarching, multifaceted construct).

Ego Development Theory:

The raison d’être (reason for being) of ego development theory is to provide a plausible model of how adults differ from each other in a systematic fashion. If we are interested in what it means to be a human being, we want to be able to account for the many ways human beings differ in how they make sense of their lived experience. ‘Ego development’ is the term for the common element in the stage sequence and the corresponding dimension of individual differences.

Overview:

• Ego development theory is a constructivist developmental stage theory: The bedrock of the constructivist perspective is the focus on the active interpretation of reality & construction of meaning. It seems undeniable that most individuals try to organize experience into some coherent, unified view of reality. Humans have a need for orientation and coherent meaning. We perceive, organize, judge, and synthesize input from all sources that reach our awareness in order to orient ourselves and create coherent meaning in life. We tend to coordinate the many inputs into larger systems of meaning that are internally consistent, and that we do so through a series of increasingly complex and exhaustive reinterpretations of what constitutes reality. Developmental theories share a belief that the need for meaning and communication drives people to integrate into their existing conceptual frames of reference every difference that enters their awareness, by either labeling it or filtering it out. In the most global sense, ‘development’ can be described as the gradual unfolding of people’s capacity to embrace ever-vaster mental horizons and to plumb ever-greater depths of the heart. It is non-domain specific because it posits the multifaceted construct of ego as the central processing and synthesizing faculty.

• Assumes that language is constitutive of reality: What we say and how we say it indicates how we frame reality. The content and the structure of people’s language reveals their conceptual frame of reference, underlying self-theory, and conception of reality (Weltanschauung). Based on the idea that language is interpretable, meaningful behavior that mirrors people’s ways of responding to life. If we accept that spoken and written language is behavior, we can then say that differences in verbal expression are interpretable as differences in psychic life or, to extrapolate further, as differences in meaning-making. Posits that subtle differences in wording reflect salient differences in understanding. Through our utterances, we reveal what we know that we know and notice, as well as what we choose to ignore or unconsciously leave out (and most interestingly, what is missing because it is outside our conceptual framework, what does not appear on our mental screen at all, what is not in our conception of the world, what we do not know we do not know, etc). Some material may be filtered out defensively because it is threatening to one’s current self-system. But more often, distinctions don’t appear because they don’t register at all in that person’s range of awareness. A mindful appreciation of the place of language in our experience is an important clue to mature ego development because language permeates all facets of life and intellectual inquiry. Knowing how language influences what we notice or ignore, what we hold dear or abhor, and what we take for real or deem outside the outer limits of relevant possibilities, adds an important dimension to our understanding of ourselves and of the human condition. Determining the level of awareness people have in regards to the function of language in meaning-making, may itself be one of the indices of their level of cognitive development.

• Focuses on real transformations in meaning-making: What makes people ‘tick’ and what matters to individuals (what they are able to perceive and conceive of, and what is outside their ‘radar screen,’ and how conscious they are of their own meaning-making activity and its limits). Explains how people form systems of coherent meaning and how they move from one interpretation of reality to the next by tracking the changes between the stages (the overall course of development from its early, undifferentiated modes to the most mature and rare ways of meaning-making observed). Explains in what way they develop increasingly complex maps of meaning, what they choose to focus on or deal with at each stage, and how they reason their positions.

• A psychological system with at least three different but interrelated dimensions that coexist at all times (cognitive, affective, behavioral): The cognitive dimension addresses the question of how a person learns, reasons, and knows about himself or herself and the world. The affective dimension deals with emotions and the experience of being in this world. The operative dimension looks at what people see as the purpose of life, what needs they act upon, and what ends they are moving towards. These three dimensions of experience have correlates in all human cultures and represent epistemological, ontological, and teleological concerns. Developing through the full range of ego stages and the concomitant cognitive, affective and behavioral transformations may be regarded as an inevitable, legitimate, and nonmeditative path through the gates of rationality onto the path of higher, postsymbolic consciousness.

• Terminus or no terminus?: Ego development theory is open to further revision and refinement and to other kinds of parsing within the personal realm or the first three tiers of development (no terminus). This view is consistent with the semantic argument that all thoughts and all theories are constructs, useful maps for orientation but constructs nonetheless and therefore alterable to fit new insights. Ego development theory has a terminus if one looks at the increasing perspective on the self and takes it to its logical conclusion. Ego development ends at the point where ego as process becomes aware of its own need for self-perpetuation through self-representation, that is, when it becomes transparent to itself.

Main patterns:

• Regularly expanding perspective on the self: The underlying logic/construct/scaffold that explains the dynamic unfolding of the self, provides a test of whether a stage is qualitatively different from a previous one, and serves as a predictor. The level of perspective increases at each stage (quantitative aspect of change) and, in turn, greater perspective allows for a different understanding of what is looked at (qualitative nature of change). Movement from a simple, undifferentiated self-state to ever more complex and structurally different self-identifications. Concerns with identity (self-assessment) appear at all stages and at all levels of differentiation.

• Both autonomy (increasing differentiation, separation, individuation, independence, mastery) and homonomy (greater integration, connection, communion, participation, belonging, relatedness): Continuous renegotiation of the balance between differentiation and integration at each stage. The concepts of the self and of reality evolve together in such a way that a sequence of clearly observable stages of increasing differentiation and integration can be drawn. Ego stages alternate in their overall emphasis and balance between stages of differentiation and stages of integration (what one is separating from and what one is integrating toward). Mental growth can generally be described as a process of continuous differentiation and elaboration as well as of higher order abstraction and integration (the continuous acquisition of subtler distinctions among concepts, their clustering into complex matrices, and their ordering into hierarchical systems of meaning). When individuals grow beyond the confines of a particular stage, they may redefine themselves within the new frame of reference of the next stage (these redefinitions seem to alternate in a regular fashion between stages of differentiation and integration). The more evolved and differentiated individuals become, the more elements from more diverse sources and at higher orders of synthesis they can simultaneously process and integrate into a coherent system of meaning.

• Both increasing complexity and increasing awareness of the constructed nature of reality: Both complexification of their reality perception and continuous deconstruction of prior assumptions at ever deeper levels of recognition. People do not just continue to complexify the way they make sense of reality—they also become ever more conscious of previously unexamined assumptions, defensive maneuvers to safeguard the psychic status quo, and the depth of their cultural and linguistic programming. With increasing ego development and understanding, people seem to feel a greater need to express themselves comprehensively (symptomatic of a kind of internal complexity that calls for attention and expression).

Stage characteristics:

• Ego stage/center of gravity: By definition, an ‘ego stage’ is that frame of reference or view of reality that a person most automatically and routinely uses in everyday situations (one’s ‘center of gravity’ reflects a person’s most ego-syntonic and habitual frame of reference or preferred mode of responding to life). Stages are coherent systems of meaning-making, or transformations in ways of interpreting reality. Individuals function at the level that explains the world best to themselves in areas that are relevant to their lives. Although there is some spread around the center of gravity, one cannot fully understand reasoning beyond one’s own (reasoning from earlier stages, because it is part of one’s own past experience, is to some degree still available).

• Horizontal growth & vertical growth: Horizontal growth adds new information or content to the existing worldview, while vertical growth transforms or reorganizes the current meaning system into a higher order integration. Most growth in adulthood seems to occur horizontally within a given stage by adding more information to what one already knows (the current way of viewing reality is refined, enriched, and modified to include more diverse domains, more contexts and detail, and to establish more connections among them—the higher the stage, the more room for such horizontal expansion seems to exist). The need for meaning and communication drives people to integrate into their lives every difference that enters awareness, by either labeling it or filtering it out. On rare occasions, a transformation or vertical change occurs in response to persistent discrepancies that cannot be accommodated through horizontal integration and/or defensive mechanisms—a restructuring of the previous framework (Weltanschauung) into a new coherent whole (the whole previous meaning system may be transformed and restructured into a new, more expansive, and inclusive theory). Ego development theory attempts to account for the transformational changes in perspective by proposing a sequence of ego stages.

• Development is unidirectional (lower to higher): Persons progress from lower to higher without skipping any stages. Development is unidirectional because the sequence of stages is posited to be the same for all people. It evolves from the least differentiated to ever more differentiated ways of knowing and relating to the world. It moves from simple to complex in regard to all possible contents.

• Development is hierarchical (supercedes & subsumes): Human development is a sequence of increasingly complex and integrated stages. For a stage theory to be hierarchical, the stages have to be distinct and sequential. Each stage builds on the foundation of the prior stage and becomes the basis for the next transformation. Each stage supercedes its predecessors and subsumes earlier development under its new, more comprehensive perspective/system. Each stage hierarchically integrates the previous one as an element into its more inclusive meaning system—a higher-order integration that includes the previous view as content in the new outlook. A higher stage does not merely contain a more complex matrix of the content and structure of the prior stage, but transforms the previous way of looking at reality and offers a broader or deeper, more integrated perspective. Each stage is thus a part/whole: it is a whole in its own right, as well as part of a bigger, more expansive system of understanding. Ego development theory posits that the stages form an invariant sequence and represent hierarchical integrations of greater and greater complexity, cognitive differentiation, and integration. The stages follow each other in a hierarchical sequence (each stage hierarchically integrates the previous way of meaning-making), and the same construct is used to show its transformation throughout the sequence. In each case, the dominant structure of awareness of the lower stage becomes an element in the next stage. First individuals become conscious of their own development. They can look back and describe the transformations over time of their own self-understanding by becoming aware of the mechanics by which they construct meaning and reality.

• Stages are qualitatively different ways of knowing: Ego stages are qualitatively different points along a developmental continuum from lesser to greater complexity, coherence, and higher-order integration. Each stage constitutes a qualitatively different way of how people know who they are, how the world works, and how they know what they know (structural differences in how people view their experience and how they make sense of life, a different epistemology, a different worldview, etc).

• Stages of differentiation/opposition: Each stage of differentiation adds an additional layer of perspective. People emphasize their difference and uniqueness in relation to the previous stage. In each case, they are beholden to that former way of meaning-making by explicitly setting themselves apart from it while they are, at the same time, able to observe it from a new level of perspective. They tend to stress the boundaries, the distinctions, and the differences to the previous way of perceiving themselves and the world. They also tend to affirm their independence although, depending on the stage, at different levels of cognitive complexity and abstraction. Because their basic need for relatedness is not fulfilled, they generally express more negative affect and more tension than persons at the integration/inclusive stages.

• Stages of integration/inclusivity: Each stage of integration expands the self-framework temporally and relationally—emphasize integration at a higher level of complexity both in terms of people’s expanding time frame and relational space (holding environment). Individuals at the integration/inclusive stages make a new social context their mental home base. The integration/inclusive stages tend to express more positive affect because of a growing sense of balance between one’s separateness and one’s sustaining connection with others.

Conventional Developmental Stages

The conventional tier represents the stages most commonly found in adolescents and adults. These are the stages most representative of the conventions (practices, beliefs, norms, and values) of what it means to be an adult in a given culture (hence the label ‘conventional’). Even though ego development theory assumes that all human beings evolve toward greater complexity, coherence, and integration, the social expression of this tendency is likely to vary across cultures and across times especially at the conventional tier.

• Modern meaning-making: Describe forms of meaning-making that seem required for adults to function in the roles of modern societies.

• Unconsciously conditioned/socialized: Describes stages of human mental development from childhood to adulthood, which occur mostly unconsciously and as a result of maturation and pervasive cultural conditioning. Differences in local socialization most likely play the biggest role in individuals’ differing self-perceptions, both within and across cultures.

• Separate, independent, responsible: Think of themselves as separate, independent selves, in control of and responsible for their actions. Actively engaged in orchestrating and controlling the movement of their lives. The human actor in this drama sees himself as a clearly separate self-contained system and other human beings as such systems in their own right.

• Rational analysis/explanations: Conscious analysis of causes and consequences, deliberate choice of methods, rational decision-making, and excellent at finding explanations for any state of affairs. Trusts that a rational, scientific approach will be adequate to answer all questions, and that what appears as a mystery now will turn out to be explainable eventually. At the conventional stages, one is most keenly aware of one’s current explanations for how the world is, for how everything makes sense with little sense of how one’s perspective has changed over the years.

• Life is a task/problem: Quite often look at life itself as a task to be accomplished or a technical problem to be solved.

Postconventional Developmental Stages

Also known as: third tier, postformal, post-Piagetian, constructed, dialectical, interindividual, general systems / unitary, individualistic / autonomous / integrated, systematic / metasystematic / paradigmatic / cross-paradigmatic.

“Postformal theories emphasize contextual and process-oriented forms of knowing, and increasingly turn attention to people’s inner life. They explore meaning-making not only in terms of its mechanics, but also in terms of its human valence and experience. Some theories distinguish between understanding what is merely rationally defensible and logically consistent from what is perceived as meaningful or wise in mature living. To underline this distinction, I prefer to restrict the term ‘postformal’ to theories of cognition that describe more complex, higher-order forms of logical analysis and reasoning, and to favor the term ‘postconventional’ for theories that also deal with issues of meaning, value and experiential salience.”

• Cognitive watershed that continues greater complexity & differentiation/integration: An overall shift from increasing differentiation to increasing integration marks the transition from conventional to postconventional stages. The first two tiers of development (preconventional & conventional) consist of a movement away from the symbiotic union with mother towards increasing differentiation and separation of the self. The postconventional stages show an overall trend of assimilation and integration toward a new conscious embeddedness in or union with an ultimate reality. The transition from the conventional to the postconventional stages is a cognitive watershed. Beginning with the first postconventional level, one observes a countermovement toward greater simplicity and an overall deconstruction of previously held views. Continues the pattern of alternating stages of differentiation and integration toward greater hierarchical complexity that can accommodate the ever-expanding experiential universe of the self. From one ego stage to the next, people become more individuated and more complex according to the pattern of continuing differentiation-integration begun in infancy.

• Systems view of reality: They postulate that the self is not an isolated entity but part of a system. It is socially constructed and in a dynamic relationship to its contexts. People can investigate the content and cultural assumptions guiding their beliefs at the systems stages. Individuals begin to realize that they interpret what things mean and that their interpretations are both culturally determined and influenced by personal experience. What something means depends on one’s relative position in regard to it (aware of the general relativity of points of view). This change is generally referred to as a ‘systems view’ of reality. Although the objects themselves are still viewed as permanent, what they mean is now seen as constructed. Variables are seen as inevitably interdependent rather than independent, causality experienced as cyclical rather than linear, and boundaries of objects as open and flexible rather than closed depending on one’s definition of what is to be considered within a system or outside. A systems view allows people to recognize their own cultural conditioning and participation in interpreting reality. Things mean what they do because of our experience with them in given personal, cultural, and historical contexts. In a systems view, researchers cannot be ‘objective,’ but are always participants in what is observed. At the most advanced levels, whole systems of human behavior and thought (for instance moral reasoning, physics as a discipline, or language as an automatic habit) are taken as objects of reflection. Individuals can become simultaneously aware of the most concrete and the most ephemeral aspects of their experience. They can recognize the immediate and the infinite in both temporal and spatial terms. In developmental terms, at least a postsystemic perspective is necessary, for a person to look at universal human behaviors like meaning-making as objects to be thought about.

• Aware of acculturation & consciously explore/examine conditioning: Becoming aware of one’s acculturation marks a turning point in development. Once individuals understand that they are interpreters of reality, that they contribute their own meaning to external and internal ‘facts’, and that their insight may differ markedly from generally held definitions of what things mean, their explanatory universe has changed dramatically. They have become aware of the inevitability of cultural conditioning and programming. Seeing through one’s cultural and linguistic conditioning is a logical outcome of paying attention to the processes of meaning-making that can lead one closer and closer to the transcendent realm of intuitive, non-representational ways of knowing. Some adults begin to deliberately and consciously wrestle with culturally programmed responses to life. They begin to examine previously taken-for-granted assumptions and explore the fundamental questions about knowing and reality. Becoming aware of how we automatically acquire our different cultural programs for interpreting reality seems to be a first step towards mature insight. Beyond that, becoming aware of how cultures, in general, depend on natural language to create their respective realities seems to be an additional and important step towards the eventual transcendence of the symbolic mode of reality perception. At least in theory, the decoupling from one’s automatic and exclusive symbolic mediation of experience allows one to reconnect with the underlying reality in a fuller and more direct way.

• Increasing awareness of the constructed nature of reality/knowledge (abstraction & reification): People realize that any abstraction, whether a single element or a complex theory, is always a partial representation of the whole, existing only in relation to what it has been differentiated from by the human perceiver. Individuals come to realize that all objects are human-made constructs, especially such abstract constructs as the ego, three-dimensional space and time. All are based on a reification of the underlying phenomenological flux and on layers upon layers of symbolic abstraction. Can become aware of the deeper bias inherent in the construction and reification of the object world via language (this may include an ever-growing awareness of the processes and mechanisms of thinking and meaning-making themselves).

• Stepwise deconstruction of subject-object separation: Postconventional development in the personal realm can be described as a step-by-step deconstruction of the modern rational, analytical mindset (a conscious uncoupling from the conventions that lead to its acquisition as well as the gradual divestiture of absolutizing tendencies as these are part of the reification paradigm). The mental moves that created earlier truths are deconstructed. Stepwise deconstruction of habits of mind, formerly held truths, assumptions underlying conventional views of reality/self, and the clear-cut subject-object boundaries that were established in the process of forming the adult, independent, rational self and the previously unconsciously constructed permanent object world with its closed boundaries, linear causality, and subject-object separation. Disidentification from the culturally supported fiction of the separation between knower and known (a subtle split between knower and known remains as long as one conceives of oneself as ‘doing or becoming this or that’ instead of witnessing one’s ‘being’ as it unfolds).

• Deeper layers of the self: Growth beyond the conventional stages can continue throughout life in a process of discovery of deeper layers of the self through self-reflection and feedback from the environment. Ability to represent the self and reality with increasing accuracy, objectivity, and non-self-defensiveness.

• Broader range of experience: The more developed/evolved/mature a person is, the more realms/territories of experience become available for symbolic representation and cognitive manipulation, that is, the broader the range of experience that can be integrated and made sense of. Thus, fewer and fewer aspects of experience remain hidden, denied, or split off from conscious awareness. One’s knowledge of reality becomes broader, deeper, and more adequate as fewer and fewer of the discrepant stimuli need to be fended off in order to preserve the integrity of the current meaning system.

• More mental flexibility integrating more sources: They can draw multiple kinds of distinctions and connections among stimuli from ever more diverse sources and meaningfully integrate them into a coherent frame of reference for themselves. With increasing postconventional development, the ego has access to and may integrate information from more sources as well as from subtler and more diverse levels of consciousness. Such sources include, but are not limited to, the full range of body sensations and feelings; primary process and secondary ideation; rational deliberation; fantasies, dreams and day dreams; and other altered states of consciousness spontaneously occurring or actively induced in various ways.

• Take responsibility for their life journeys: While they are more aware of their interdependence and vulnerability than persons at conventional stages who also feel they are the masters of their destinies.

Postconventional Stage 5 (Autonomous):

See full stage characteristics: 🔒How to Develop a Mature Ego with “Postautonomous Ego Development” by Susanne Cook-Greuter

Postautonomous Developmental Stages

The essence of postautonomous meaning-making: The idea that ‘each way of knowing is a way of not knowing’.

• Increasing awareness & stepwise deconstruction: Postautonomous stages are stable configurations of distinctively more complex and integrated reality perceptions/world views. Increasing awareness/understanding of the constructed nature of everyday reality, and increasing levels of questioning/deconstruction of the formerly held concept/assumptions of a permanent object world (including the construct of an enduring/objective/permanent self/self-identity).

• Awareness directed toward not what we know but how we go about making sense of the world: As soon as one gazes intently at one’s gazing, one realizes that what appears clear and distinct can be changed by roaming across the field of vision and focusing on different parts of it. The focal area springs into prominence, while the unfocused area becomes dim and indistinct. Thus the subjective, deliberate, and directed aspect of our own attention, thoughts and reactions become evident as does the price to be paid for any choices made.

• Beyond the systems view of reality & superseding the search for self: The formerly important search for an ever-more objective, nondistorted view of reality (including the search for an integrated/enduring/objective self-identity) may be superseded by an understanding of the futility of such a goal (and a more immediate, fluid, and process-oriented self-view). With growing awareness of the reification process in meaning-making, attention turns to how meaning is continuously reconstructed and how all constructs, all concepts (including self-identity) are seen as artifacts of the linguistic codification and reification of experience. It seems that the systemic view can give way to a completely flexible, non-reified notion of self in a rare transformation beyond the systems view of reality. This broader epistemology allows people to see through their tendency to reify reality and the self and to feel most alive and genuine in an indeterminate process of witnessing, and ultimately of being.

• Fascinated with one’s own mind & sensemaking: Begin to be fascinated with questions of how their minds works and how they make sense of reality through ever more complex theories, rational maneuvers, and interpretations. They become especially concerned with the many automatic mental habits that they unconsciously metabolized through a lifetime of cultural conditioning (discovery of our universal linguistic habituation). Of these, the language habits of dualistic splitting and reification are probably the most intractable and the last ones to be recognized (grappling with one’s need to make order out of chaos by abstraction, classification, and reification).

• Mind & language acknowledged as critical tools: Since they are already autonomous and familiar with the possibility of self-deception and defensive maneuvers, they do not need to deny the value of the concept of the self and of rational behavior once they recognize their limitations. Instead, human mental activity and language are acknowledged as critical tools for human adaptation and interaction, but no longer unexamined and taken for granted as they were earlier.

• Increasing awareness of the power/dangers of language and concerned with realizing that ‘biases’ are universally embedded in the way we create meaning via language: Adults start to understand fully that every concept and every theory is based on an arbitrary but useful anthropocentric segmentation of the underlying unified field or Creative Ground.

• Concerned with dealing with the fundamental paradoxes & polarities in human nature: Some form of recognition of the constructed nature of reality and of the inevitable problems created by our dependence on symbolic representations. In the representational realm, we humans always create paradoxes. By labeling, comparing, measuring, analyzing, and predicting, attention is inevitably taken away from what really is, to what we presume there is. An appreciation of inevitable paradox in the rational realm and the complementarity of polar opposites. It recognizes the dynamic interrelationship of foreground and background, or viewed from a slightly different angle, between polar opposites.

• Questions control: No longer sure that it is (and wants to be) in control. It sees itself trapped by automatic mental habits which, on a deeper level, it has found inadequate.

• Deeper tolerance of others: They realize that learning and knowing more about themselves and about reality in the rational mode does not lead to greater insight and wisdom for themselves. Nevertheless, because they know that striving for more self-knowledge is part of the human condition, they truly appreciate others’ need to make sense of their lives within their own means. They therefore have a deeper tolerance for others’ solutions to life without being blind to their obvious shortcomings or ignoring the profound differences among people as those at the Autonomous stage tend to do. Sometimes they express a sense of envy at the simplicity or innocence (not-knowing) of those less aware because the burden of knowledge and insight may weigh heavily on them.

• View/experience reality as an undifferentiated phenomenological continuum: Tend to experience and view reality as an undifferentiated phenomenological continuum, as Unity consciousness, the creative Ground, ‘das All’, the Tao, or whatever other terms human beings have coined to express their intimation of the underlying unity.

• Deeper experience/understanding of interdependence & insignificance: Another characteristic of highly evolved people is the depth at which they experience and understand the interdependence of self and others and the complexity of thoughts, experiences, feelings, and memories at play. May wonder about their own hubris. Often reject the self-centeredness and self-importance of the previous stage as they realize their relative personal insignificance in terms of the totality of human experience.

• Disheartened about ego attachment & yearn for ego transcendence: They may become disheartened about the depth of their ego attachment and the seeming impossibility to go beyond it through effort and vigilance. They yearn to transcend their own ever-watchful, conscious egos. From past encounters they have come to know of a state of being (‘peak experiences’) which is fundamentally different from all previous ways of knowing, and it seems to contain the answer to their yearnings. It seems plausible that the higher the ego stage in the personal realm, the less likely transcendent experiences are distorted to enhance the ego (beginning with the Construct-Aware stage, such tendencies would actually be anticipated, unearthed, and ‘jousted with’).

Postautontomous Stage 5/6 (Construct-Aware):

See full stage characteristics: 🔒How to Develop a Mature Ego with “Postautonomous Ego Development” by Susanne Cook-Greuter

Transcendent Developmental Stage(s)

Also known as: fourth tier, postpostconventional, postrepresentational, postsymbolic, metarational, metaphysical, transpersonal, ego-transcendent.

An autonomous, well-integrated ego is the prerequisite for the development to unitive forms of self-cognition. Full ego development in the personal realm may open the portal to ego transcendence as described in the literature on human insight potential of both transpersonal psychology and the ‘received’ schools of ancient knowledge. Transpersonal psychology has long advocated a dereified, dematerialized view of reality as the goal of development.

Postautonomous/Transcendent Stage 6 (Unitive):

See full stage characteristics: 🔒How to Develop a Mature Ego with “Postautonomous Ego Development” by Susanne Cook-Greuter

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