Old School
Collective developmental levels
Stone age, Bronze Age and Iron Age is a popular yet crude example of developmental stages of culture
Individual developmental levels
Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Here is Abraham Maslows pioneering model, in its day it was hugely controversial, it is still taught in colleges and businesses. in the 1950s as Abraham Maslow presented his model he was shocked at the backlash he got from the psychological community.
New School
The self is interconnected to The collective and the planet.
The individual develops throughout their life in stages, this developmental process is a mirror reflection, a fuzzy fractal of the whole story of human evolution and the cultural stages that emerge with it. The process is a movement towards greater complexity and interconnection with more of life.
What is the Integral Approach?
Ken Wilber
"The integral approach is an attempt to be as comprehensive and as inclusive approach as is possible to reality that means a comprehensive and inclusive approach to every known human discipline…(paraphrasing Ken Wilber)
based on multiple perspectives and multiple dimensions of all human beings, it is cross cultural and applicable to any situation that arises and is a fundamental attempt to get out of the partial and fragmented views and replace or supplement them with this more inclusive approach"
Dr Clare Graves
"The psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiraling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems as man's existential problems change".
"I am not saying in this conception of adult behavior that one style of being, one form of human existence is inevitably and in all circumstances superior to or better than another form of human existence, another style of being. What I am saying is that when one form of being is more congruent with the realities of existence, then it is the better form of living for those realities. And what I am saying is that when one form of existence ceases to be functional for the realities of existence then some other form, either higher or lower in the hierarchy, is the better form of living. I do suggest, however, and this I deeply believe is so, that for the overall welfare of total man's existence in this world, over the long run of time, higher levels are better than lower levels and that the prime good of any society's governing figures should be to promote human movement up the levels of human existence."
Dr. Clare W. Graves
A map of Ken Wilbers
Spectrum of Consciousness
Wikipedia
Integral Theory is an area of discourse emerging from the theoretical psychology and philosophy of Ken Wilber, a body of work that has evolved in phases from a transpersonal psychology synthesizing Western and non-Western understandings of consciousness with notions of cosmic, biological, human, and divine evolution into an emerging field of scholarly research focused on the complex interactions of ontology, epistemology, and methodology. It has been claimed to offer a Theory of Everything
Integral Theory, or integral approach, consciousness, paradigm, philosophy, society, or worldview has been applied in a variety of different domains: Integral Art, Integral Ecology, Integral Economics, Integral Politics, Integral Psychology, Integral Spirituality, and others. The first interdisciplinary academic conference on Integral Theory took place in 2008. Integral Theory is said to be situated within Integral studies, described as an emerging interdisciplinary field of discourse
Developmental psychology, also known as human development, is the scientific study of systematic psychological changes that occur in human beings over the course of their life span. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult development, aging, and the entire life span.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_stage_theories
Memetic Engineering from Disinformation here
My Integral Statement
The agenda of Integral perspective is to keep continuously integrating more of human reality into an over arching map of evolution and existence, the fundamental truth of this being that the quest is never over. Life is always one step ahead of any map.
The Integral movement has come into being through the efforts of many people, Ken Wilber though has probably done more than any other person to create the ground for what is an ongoing dialogue.
Around Ken Wilber’s pioneering efforts have gathered a mindset that is called the Integral movement.
My position in regards to this movement is that through its efforts to seek legitimacy it is disavowing, disregarding, dismissing and not even looking at, nor understanding a vast reservoir of human experience, perspective and data available.
The emergence of rationality and reductionist thinking that enabled the industrial and scientific revolutions and material progress was illegitimate to the institution of the church. In other words seeking legitimacy with the dominant and existent paradigm is not necessarily the right thing to do, I would suggest that to be especially true now at a time of fundamental change.
Many of those within the Integral movement are too wary of being laughed if they even mention certain subjects; there is an insidious peer group pressure. The dialogue within integral forums from my experience is so heavily scripted.
The subjects, the paradigms which I report upon here on Mystic Cyber Crow are considered alternative and attract a wide range of types of people and a divergence of mindsets.
The Integral Movement in general labels these areas of human experience and research endeavor as belonging exclusively to a post modern, Green Neptune Enchantment/Green vMeme/New Age collective—firstly this is grossly inaccurate, there is more than one level of perspective and perception within the terrains I look at here on the Crow. Secondly the evaluation by Integral Players of anything New Age is also far too simplistic and heavy handed.
I would propose that human society and the human experience of reality in this era we are experiencing now is undergoing a fundamental shift. In simple terms the shift is an enormous leap in complexity, a multiplistic change that includes a transformation of the dominant value system, and by definition a shake up of the power structure.
A change of this magnitude requires a penetrating appraisal of the shadow of the present dominant social system, this includes economics, politics, science, sociology, psychology, communication, relationship--consciousnes. The issues that are being addressed, reviewed and challenged include everything, one of the most important areas is the past history—evolution, in fact the whole story of human origins. The present is constructed from the view we hold of the past which in turn creates the potentials of the future. The present is experienced by an individual and the collective based on the perception we hold.
Here is a quick tour of the alternative realm that deserves acknowledgement if we are to pretend to be integrating human reality.
The Extra-Terrestrial Phenomenon, something very strange is definitely going on in our airspace. My position is the whole ET and UFO phenomena includes visitations from other star systems, inter-dimensional visitors which include tricksters spirits from the astral world, covert human operations and psychological elements—what is more the whole area shakes the foundations of what we call reality for it transgresses the object-subject divide.
This issue of a strange zone of virtualism where things do not fit into the objective/subjective demarcation label opens the door to a lot more.
All of the occulture and cryptozoology of the Fortean Times and such like, oozes fluidity and the tricksy artifact of physicality mixed with the subconscious and unconscious perceptional filters.
As weird and often disturbing this area is, however we should note that it does not conflict with the timeless truths of mysticism, reality is derived from consciousness, consciousness is the ultimate mystery never to be reduced to an equation and consciousness is the source of all reality.
Conspiracy is part of the human condition. The Orange Uranus Enchantment, within us all operates through strategy, the social terrain is inherently competitive we make strategic alliances, often subconsciously. On this level of our being we try to associate with those who will not drag us down and tend to look to associate with those that will help lift us up. In of itself this is not malevolent, it’s an evolutionary imperative.
If the person is emotionally centred in Orange Uranus Enchantment this reduces to a strategy to align with winners not losers. It is well documented within the mainstream that political and economic conspiracies do indeed occur, all the time. If you add the intoxication of power into the mix the strategies are in fact malevolent, even if those who perpetrate them are not fully cognizant of doing wrong. It is hardly a stretch to suggest that in a world that is increasingly interconnected that there would be those who have the power and desire to create large scale global conspiracies.
I would further propose that the conventional system has narrowed down due to the progress and duration of the market economy toward a winner takes all game—which is why we need to shift beyond the power and values of Orange Uranus Enchantment.
To enquire about conspiracy and its brother complicity would seem to me to be an intelligent approach at this time in the world that we live in.
It is well understood that each progressive enchantment is an enormous expansion of the psychological terrain and experience of life, we would expect from the evolutionary evidence of developmental studies that the Green Neptune enchantment would be vastly more diverse, excitingly more interesting than the Orange Uranus Enchantment.
The alternative realm includes those that encounter spiritual beings of all orders, including allegedly time travelers, advanced beings and other species, well why not?
The areas of Astrology, ancient civilizations and what looks like ancient advanced technologies, shamanism, alternative cosmology and multiple timelines, magical manifestations and healings, accelerated or instant genetic mutations and new sciences of light, the electrical and photonic nature of the body, holographic reality and energy fields, crop circles, Big Foot, Loch Ness Monster and so on, have within their field many brilliant researchers, enquiring minds and open explorers who have been triggered into their quests by actual experience.
The nature of reality is being reviewed and most of understand that psychological distortion occurs when we report what we experience, this in itself tells us something about the very nature of existence though, consciousness is the ground of all being. Collective and intimate relationship is based on finding an agreement to create common ground, common ground that we assign the label of reality to.
Reality is being Renegotiated
In an atmosphere of transformation the way forward is through questioning with an open attitude. The answers we get to a question are shaped by the original question; the question creates the context and limits the possible answers. The recognition that the question contains the answer—the nature of the enquiry sets the parameters of the dialogue and outcome—is a quality of complex consciousness.
Although I will often go out on a limb here on the Crow, I do recognize that my process is one of refinement and adjustment, but lets crack the eggs open first before we make the soufflé.
Below is an introductory piece that sets the scene for understanding the Enchantment emergence
Childhood Developement
Looking at the popular model of Jean Piaget, you can instantly recognize from the language alone that it is disconnected from the magical qualities of children, that is not to say that it is wrong. I propose that Piaget’s model is partially right, it reveals the bare bones of the structural development up from matter.
Preoperational stage: from ages 2 to 7 (magical thinking predominates. Acquisition of motor skills). Egocentrism begins strongly and then weakens. Children cannot conserve or use logical thinking.
Concrete operational stage: from ages 7 to 12 (children begin to think logically but are very concrete in their thinking). Children can now conserve and think logically but only with practical aids. (Saturn Enchantment)
Formal operational stage: from age 12 onwards (development of abstract reasoning). Children develop abstract thought and can easily conserve and think logically in their mind.
From Wikipedia
In contrast to his model, is the wonderful book ‘The philosophical Baby’ by Alison Gopnik.
Alison Gopnik—a leading psychologist and philosopher, as well as a mother—explains the groundbreaking new psychological, neuroscientific, ... of very young children, transforming our understanding of how babies see the world, and in turn promoting a deeper appreciation for the role of parents.
I feel that the book is by necessity perhaps reactionary to Piaget’s model and the approach of old school psychologists, but the integral truth needs to recognize the mysteries of childhood. Piaget and ‘the rest’ suggest that the baby has no real consciousness. My own connection to pregnancy as a dad and to my daughter’s birth and the first few months of her life gave me the sense of her soul’s involution.
What I am suggesting is that Alison Gopnik reveals the effects of the soul’s involution into the body and Piaget reveals the linear evolution and emergence up from matter.
My suggestion therefore validates the developmental approach and yet expands it to include the immanent creativity, imagination and Soul memory of the baby and young child. Although Gopnik does allow for any suggestion of a soul or spiritual dimension, I see that she does inadvertently open the door to this possibility.
To this we must add that the recorded prove of children remembering past lives shows that young children up to about seven years of age come in with consciousness from the soul.(proof such as that documented extensively by the University of Virginia)
Around seven years of age the linear element of time space starts to dominate and we have been increasingly losing our contact with the numinous and astral realms, the invisible friends start to disappear and we take on the cultural conditioning. The astral body is formed and we gain some energetic independence from our mother. The role of the thymus in this process is evident but not fully clear to me as yet. The Thymus shrinks at puberty but is still growing up until then?
I found in my practise that by taking the chi to the thymus level I did indeed transcend the linear time/space matrix and connected to the four dimensional planetary lightbody.
Children Remember
A Lebanese toddler picked up the phone repeatedly and said, "Leila, Leila" -- the name of someone she had never met or heard about. Later she began to describe Leila's family in rich detail.
The child remembered lying in a hospital longing to speak with Leila, the daughter of a Lebanese woman who had died thousands of miles away in Virginia. The child could name all the woman's relatives and recalled wanting to ask her brother to ensure that her daughters received her jewels.
This is only one of thousands of cases Dr. Ian Stevenson, Chester Carlson Professor of Psychiatry and director of the Division of Personality Studies, has investigated, many of which are documented in Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation. Recently reissued by McFarland and Co., the book describes his research for over 30 years in at least 20 countries.
http://www.virginia.edu/insideuva/2001/03/stevenson.html
The Soul takes on the Planetary Mythos in each life as we come in.
The work of Stan Grof documented in ‘The Adventure of Self Discovery’ reveals the extraordinary journey of consciousness into the body. Stan famous for his use of LSD in his sessions has developed a technique called holotropic breathing which similar to rebirthing, ( I found rebirthing profound) can release prenatal and perinatal trauma.
He has worked with many people taking them into the womb from here it emerges there are four stages of birth where the soul is connected to the matrices of life starting with the greater cosmos.
First Basic Perinatal Matrix; The Amniotic universe. This has been intuitive and known by me for a long time, the amniotic fluid is a resonant and holographic representation of the cosmic plasma.The experience is numinous.
Second Basic Perinatal Matrix; Cosmic engulfment and no exit, the vortex of being pulled towards birth as uterine contractions start and my interpretation is the transdimensional soul is being sucked into Earths time space field.
Third Basic Perinatal Matrix; The death-Rebirth Struggle, the cervix is now dilated, and the soul experiences the archetypal dimensions of the death rebirth struggle. The accounts in the book are not for the faint hearted.
Fourth Basic Perinatal Matrix; The death-rebirth Experience, the actual birth, likewise collective mythos is experienced by the incoming soul.
Stans book can be disturbing but what I would add to this is the fact that to some extent the soul is protected as my connection to involution is that it has revealed itself to me as a process of falling into a dream from a dream and so on. Wheras the subjects were accessing the prebirth experience with the addition of the conscious adult mind, ooof.
The film Inception, a brilliant and mind expanding experience that had me smiling all the way through it, presents the reality of a dreamer going into another persons subconscious and diving from the dream into a dream within the dream—brilliant.
Although the film is not intended to show involution it does in fact reflect in reverse the involutionary process. Read more here
Evolution and Involution
Delighted to find someone else making the same observations about evolution and involution here;
Aurobindo, this process proceeds not only as a movement of upward unfolding but also as a downward 'descent of the Supermind'. The same idea is expressed by the transpersonalist Roberto Assagioli:
[T]his archetypal dialectic was often experienced simultaneously on both an individual level and, often more powerfully, a collective level, so that the movement from primordial unity through alienation to liberating resolution was experienced in terms of the evolution of an entire culture, for example, or of humankind as a whole — the birth of homosapiens out of nature no less than the birth of the individual child from the mother. Here personal and transpersonal were equally present, inextricably fused, so that ontogeny not only recapitulated phylogeny but in some sense opened into it (my italics). (p.429).
http://www.islandastrology.net/Chapter3.htm
The Awakening of Immanence
So what we have is the journey of the soul being drawn, seduced to Earth and towards the emergent ego personality that is connected by a ‘thread’ to—and reflects aspects— of the soul. The divine and the evolving animal are being drawn together during the great adventure of the Enchantments.
It is not until Chiron Enchantment and the centauric consciousness awakens that the full connection is made, even then there no full closure and complete union, the crack that lets the light in is still present.
Astrology as an Integral Study?
Many of the researchers I respect often make derogatory remarks about astrology; this requires me to begin to state a case on why astrology can be used to gain an understanding of the systemic nature of reality.
The antipathy towards astrology in many intellectuals, not all, has a relatively short history it has arisen largely with the development of the rational mind and the ‘age of enlightenment’
Astrology columns in the newspapers are by necessity gross generalizations so will appear as silly and vague. However many people I meet, who are non astrologers have an incredible ability to recognize the qualities of the Sun sign in an individual. The astrology chart is based on astronomical map, it is the interpretation of that map that is astrology, and the birth chart includes a multitude of planets and asteroids, the angles between them and their position in the sky not just the Sun and its Zodiac sign.
The more committed interest in astrology by the astrological community is an evolving group of people with a keen sense of enquiry, which is not to say that there are no elements of superstition, projection or wooly thinking. Astrology is the most complex of studies and one is forever a student, even as you reach a high level of accomplishment. Astrology is such a vast study that is encompasses all manner of specialization from relationship, business, world affairs, individual and transpersonal psychology, prediction to name but some areas that have their own experts and researchers. Astrology also has a number of highly intelligent, questioning and committed researchers.
Astrology maps the quality of the moment from the perspective of the holographic level of reality, its language is the language of forces, dynamics, archetypes and symbols that are inherent within a multi dimensional reality.
The astrology I do encompasses the macro and micro scales as I have been working with individuals for nearly 20 years as my research in all other fields of astrology have been developing simultaneously, this research has been full time, not a hobby.
In the last 13 years the different areas of astrological research have been increasingly synthesizing in my studies to reveal to me that astrology has the capacity to map conscious living systems. The way astrology reveals the truth of any person or situation forever astounds one. The basis for the extraordinary reality of astrology is still a mystery. However the alternative cosmologies of the electric universe, the toroidal universe, the significance of electro dynamic fields and their symbiotic relationship with plasma, points to the new sciences that encompass fractals, holographics, complex living systems, morphogenic fields and such like.
We live in a interconnected cosmos, a living creation, a conscious universe that is structured with different frequencies and holons of existence. As above so below, so within, so with out, every moment has a unique quality that expresses itself through the diversity of life whilst retaining the essential integrity of the moment.
If you are scientific, then stay open to astrology because it only reveals itself to a sustained inquiry, to open minded explorative testing and the quality of the results from any study depend upon the consciousness that is exploring, this most mysterious discipline and art form. To test astrology one has to know its language, you can’t prove nor disprove quantum mechanics or any other field of research without taking it upon oneself to become educated in the field.
