There is no such thing as being healthly at a stage you are stuck in

Many views of the world sugarcoat pathology including the integral approach. Few people like to use the word because almost no one likes to label or to be labeled "pathological". The so-called "developmental stages" mentioned in integral and spiral dynamics are, to me, more " stations of stuckness", or places of developmental fixation, or "stations of incremental degrees of working through pathology" than any true developmental scheme or "conveyor belt". Being stuck or fixated at a stage is pathology. You cannot have a healthy version of stuckness, only a less pathological version of it.

This is not to deny that healthy developmental schemes exist. To be healthy at a stage means: 1) you are at the appropriate age range and 2) that you are not stuck, that is, the process of development has not been arrested.

In terms of nations and cultures, just because certain values or views have not become readily available and adopted in that nation or even in the world, does not mean that that nation is not pathologically stuck or that there is a healthy version of that stuckness. (Also, I believe there is a way of proving that ALL values are available at ALL times past, present, and future. I will not go into that at present.)

Many proposed schemes of development have, in spite of their huge contribution to understanding humanity, have not, in my view, dealt correctly with what amounts to "stages of pathological stuckness".

I believe they have also not tackled Wilhelm Reich's concept of "The Emotional Plague" where pathology spreads and gets passed on from generation to generation as one of many an "anti-life", "anti-developmental" processes. (Which I will go into at a later time.)

What Is Real?

What is real is: "*&%$$#*!&%$#". How our sensory perceptual cognitive systems interpret it, make sense of it, isolate it, orient to it, model it, limit and distort it is another story. "Given-ness" is most likely a property of our interpretive systems than a quality of reality (although I wouldn't take that as given). In the ultimate sense "the territory is not the territory". Reality most likely includes an open-endedness on an inconceivable number of dimensions and transcends any definition and anything that integral or anyone else has conceived of (complex or simple.) Perhaps the less distortions, delusions, and read-ins we have, the closer we understand it and are congruent with it. I believe we are "closest" to reality through "resonation processes" (vs emulation processes) which I won't discuss now. Also, it may take vast complexity to be vastly simple.

Read-in-eze

Read-in-eze a major obstacle to seeing reality (what is real). That's the process of reading things in to (or out of) what we see and hear. It is also the process of expecting others to read-in certain thing into what we say. No-one is immune from it. We are all really good at connecting dots that aren't there, creating gestalt of things that don't exist.

We keep projecting the dots that were previously and unconsciously connected at childhood. We fill in the missing dots in the "picture" we are looking at and then we connect them and of course these connections most likely form an image that fits our current view of the world.

Conversely, we are very good at not seeing and not connecting the dots we find painful. Built-in mechanisms protect us from being overwhelmed.

All of this is done in a fraction of a second and is not likely to reach consciousness. We forget that the dot connecting processes largely involuntary and unconscious. We are sailing our boats on a sea of mostly organismic involuntary, unconscious processes. Often our current "mature" cognitive processes are but "puppets" of earlier immature self.

For every conscious process we are aware of, there are hundred of unconscious processes making that possible. To the extent early childhood wounding occurred, pain-laden unconscious processes can produce distorted conscious processes.


One way to catch these processes is in the pre-thought gap (or post-thought gap). The pre-thought gap is the space that is pre-existent to each thought in which a thought can be detected as an object before it takes hold and runs its program. if it runs its program on automatic we are deluded no matter how accurate or high level it is.

Another way is in a deep core primal release that goes all the way to the point where the wounding actually occurred in the part of the brain which, at the time, had not developed well enough to metabolize the wound. This could be called the pre-rational window. It is not just the cortex accessing unconscious memories, but it is the limbic system giving up its full content and pain in full force to the whole organism for complete discharge and assimilation.


What is real?

What is real is "*&%$$#*!&%$#". How our sensory perceptual cognitive systems interpret it, make sense of it, isolate it, orient to it, model it, limit and distort it is another story. "Given-ness" is most likely a property of our interpretive systems than a quality of reality (although I wouldn't take that as given). In the ultimate sense "the territory is not the territory". Reality most likely includes an open-endedness on an inconceivable number of dimensions and transcends any definition and anything that integral or anyone else has conceived of (complex or simple.) Perhaps the less distortions, delusions, and read-ins we have, the closer we understand it. I believe we are "closest" to reality through "resonation processes" (vs emulation process) which I won't discuss now. Also, it may take vast complexity to be vastly simple.