Integral Naked 06.11.07 - Telling the Story of Development. Part 2. Where We Are Today, Who We Might Be Tomorrow.

Telling the Story of Development. Part 2. Where We Are Today, Who We Might Be Tomorrow. (41:00)
Susanne Cook-Greuter and Ken Wilber

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One of the most important developmental psychologists working today shares her thoughts on the current state of academia and the culture at large, and why it’s so important to encourage flourishing at every stage of development alongside the invitation to keep growing.

Who: Dr. Susanne Cook-Greuter, founding member of I-I and Harvard Graduate School of Education graduate who has taken the pioneering developmental work of Jane Loevinger to important new heights, and Ken Wilber, author of Integral Psychology and Integral Spirituality, two seminal texts exploring the finer points of truly Integral human development.

Relevance: One of the concepts that make an Integral Approach more than a merely two-dimensional map of reality is its deep understanding of the developmental nature of human growth and unfolding. Failing to take into account the developmental aspect of interior growth is to guarantee a profoundly inadequate mode of relating to your fellow man and woman. Susanne is at the leading tip of scholars and researchers actively exploring and documenting this crucial dimension of human experience.

Summary: Susanne has dedicated her life to documenting and understanding how stages of self-identification and growth unfold in individuals, with an eye particularly on the least-understood and least-studied realms of the higher levels of adult development. Expanding upon the work of her mentor and teacher Jane Loevinger, Susanne has empirically demonstrated that there are legitimate stages of development beyond the "Integrated" stage that was the uppermost possibility in Loevinger’s work. Reaching the "Integrated" or, as Susanne calls it, the "Construct-aware" stage is no small feat—and is comparable to other integral and second-tier levels in other systems—but the remarkable fact is that there are even more integral levels than that—levels that begin to take on a distinctly transpersonal or spiritual tenor, transcending and including all that has come before in the development-that-is-envelopment pattern of evolution itself.

Clearly, Susanne’s work is an extremely important facet of both the theoria and praxis of a more Integral Approach to the human condition. In addition to the fascinating details regarding the practical experience of charting these new waters, Susanne and Ken talk about how the heavily postmodern climate of academia and society at large has influenced this work. The truths revealed by a pluralistic and postmodern view are of utmost importance in terms of how we understand the world today, but far too often those views degenerate into boomeritis, pluralitis, and the mean-green-meme—all different names for what is essentially postmodern imperialism and dogmatism, whereby no truths that question a postmodern approach will be tolerated. Indeed, Susanne tells us about the tricky task of explaining to her academic superiors that their postmodern approach was merely a stepping stone to yet further levels of development. But however difficult the going may get, there are definitely pockets of integral and developmental consciousness present—and emerging—in academia, from colleagues at HGSE, to the two graduate-degree programs offered through John F. Kennedy University and the Fielding Graduate University.

Further topics include the difference between "talk" and "walk" (or simply "levels and lines"), why states are exclusionary and stages are inclusionary, why it’s so important to encourage flourishing at every stage of development alongside the invitation to keep growing, how different stages of development responded to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and why computerizing the Sentence Completion Test (created by Loevinger, and expanded by Susanne) might be the next big step in learning ever-more about the ways we learn and grow.

keywords: Sentence Completion Test (SCT), Postautonomous Ego Development: A Study Of Its Nature And Measurement, Transcendence and Mature Thought in Adulthood, Creativity, Spirituality, and Transcendence, states and stages, developmental studies, Wilber-Combs Lattice, levels and lines, Skip Alexander, Transcendental Meditation, Integral Spirituality, Jane Loevinger, Erik Erikson, Clare Graves, "What Is Spiral Dynamics?," Robert Kegan, Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, GWF Hegel, Sri Aurobindo, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind, Overmind, Supermind, Michael Commons, Francis Richards, cognitive development, postmodernism, boomeritis, pluralitis, mean-green-meme, states of consciousness (gross waking, subtle dreaming, causal deep-sleep, ever-present nondual), Loevinger’s stages of ego development (symbiotic, impulsive, self-protective, conformist, conscientious, individualistic, autonomous, integrated—with Susanne "adding on" construct-aware, ego-aware, transpersonal), Genpo Roshi, AQAL (All Quadrants, Levels, Lines, States, and Types), JFK University, Fielding Graduate University, altitude of consciousness (magenta, red, amber, orange, green, teal, turquoise, indigo, violet, ultraviolet), 9/11, Bill Torbert, cognitive neuroscience, The Many Faces of Terrorism (forthcoming), "What Is Integral?," A Theory of Everything.

most memorable moment:"The whole climate of postmodernism, with its rabid anti-ranking of any sort, made sure they got rid of all hierarchies—and when they did, they also got rid of all growth…."

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