This document discusses the concept of awakening from both ascending (building up complexity) and descending (releasing complexity) perspectives. It proposes that spiritual awakening involves releasing the deepest structures formed in early perceptual development. While ascending practices like meditation are important, there is also a need for shadow work and "cleaning up" through descending practices. True wisdom involves both increasing complexity capacities as well as spiritual clarity gained from releasing complexity. Developing too quickly in either direction alone can be problematic.

1. What is Awakening?
Embodying the Descending Path in
Adult Development
Tom Murray
IEC conference
May, 2023
STAGES International &
Open Way Solutions &
Association for Spiritual Integrity
tommurray.us@gmail.com

2. Conference website: the postmodern 1.0 version of planetary
awakening, we have held the vision of planetary consciousness through
the spiritual awakening of many. Seemingly opposing approaches came
to light as the ascendant and descendant versions of awakening, where
the waking up approach suggests we be retreating meditators while the
waking down approach exercises shamanic and entheogenic eco-
conscious practices…realized that waking up practices like meditation
are not enough…shadow work… In addition to “growing up” and “waking
up,” there is also a need for “cleaning up” and eventually “showing up.”
…
Is collective awakening the sum total of individual awakenings?... Are we
ready to dialogue around a possible Planetary Awakening 2.0 where we
reinterpret the concept…

3. What do we mean by “Awakening” —
even for an individual?
(a trauma-informed developmental perspective…)
? ?
?
?

4. Important Questions
• Spiritual awakening
• Native/Aboriginal Wisdom
• Unethical Gurus
How do these relate to
“adult developmental
theory?”
• Can one wake up or grow up too fast (or too soon)?
• Can hierarchical complexity theory explain ego
development?

5. Foundations of Adult Development
• Piaget, Commons, Fischer, Dawson, Kegan
• Loevinger, Torbert, Cook-Greuter, O’Fallon
Hierarchical
Complexity Theory
Ego
Development

6. Ego Development == Wisdom Skill ==
= Ascending (Vertical) & Descending transformations
= Building up vs. Releasing structure
= Complexity Capacity + Spiritual Clarity

7. What is Vertical Development?
• Building upon
(coordination, operating
upon…)
– (Commons’ axiomatic
“complexity order”)
• Learning as increased
complexity
– (including emergent
“simplicity on the other side”)

8. Emergent Cognitive Complexity
• Differentiate & Integrate
• Subject –to- Object
• Reflective Abstraction
• Levels, Tiers, …

9. “Transcend
and Include”

10. TRANSCEND AND Occludes
• * Human development always TRANSCENDS AND
EXCLUDES (or occludes)
• Each new structure
– Begins with a “good” purpose
– Solidifies & supports what builds upon it
– Eventually builds its own defense system
– Occludes (hides, shades, distorts, limits) prior potential

11. All learning creates shadow
• ..that might not be
apparent as a problem
until later…

12. What gets lost/left behind?
• Receptivity (openness), awe (reverence,
humility), trust in a basic goodness (that
the world is safe, kind..),
joy/playfulness/vibrancy, ease/quiet mind,
intimacy/union with others/nature…

13. What’s Special About
Ego Development?
• Each new level of cognitive complexity is
turned back toward the self to deconstruct a
prior structure ; “letting go,” “healing,”
recovering lost capacities,

14. “Ascending:”
Complexity
Capacity,
Building
“Descending:”
Spiritual
Clarity,
Release
Wisdom Skill
(ego development)
Post-Rational Mind
Rational Mind
Social Mind
Perceptual Mind

15. Learn,
Integrate
Develop…
Release,
Reveal,
Recover
…
Wisdom Skill
Descending path
Unlearning: realizing what is NOT true
Re-member: what I “knew” all along

16. The Spiritual Path is primarily one of
Releasing Conditioning (Descending)
• Unlearning…
• Which can be followed by (Ascending)
movements of INSIGHT, re-integration,
creative meaning-making

17. What is toward the bottom and top?
• Is “Nonduality” or “Source of Being” at
bottom or top?

18. Post-Rational Mind
Rational Mind
Social Mind
Perceptual Mind
Motivations, skills for deepening...
Insight for Integration back into...
diversity
uniqueness
similarity
unity

19. Splits formed in early development
• Future vs. past
• Self vs. world
• Interior vs exterior
• Humans vs. nature
• Us vs. them
• Good vs. bad
• Mine vs. yours
• Pain vs. pleasure
• Home life vs. profession

20. Spiritual Clarity/
Release:
unlearn,
deconstruct,
heal,
see through,
reveal…
Post-Rational Mind
Rational Mind
Social Mind
Perceptual Mind
Philosophy
Psycho-
therapy
Contemplative
practice
-
Release methods:

21. Releasing deep/early structures (1)
Self:
• Bodily self
• Differentiated self: from mother (or others)
• Experiential self: I am my
thoughts/feelings/needs…
• Narrative / historical self; social roles
• Differentiating memory from perception
• Suppression of magical/imaginal mind

22. Releasing deep/early structures (2)
• Language categories
• Differentiation of the senses (e.g. synesthesia)
• Location and orientation in space
• Time-sense > timelessness
• Spatiality > boundlessness
• Object recognition

23. Proposal:
Higher levels of
wisdom/ego development
require DEEPER
deconstruction/release

24. Wisdom as “Volume”
(vs. “Altitude’)
Width (health / breadth)
Altitude (CC)
+
Depth (SC)
Volume

25. What is Awakening? (a proposal)
• … the release of the
deepest structures in
the perceptual strata of
the psyche
– Beginning as State
experiences
– Stabilizing into Stage
capacities with
practice

26. Spiritual Development models often conflate
– Developmental growth w. Structural Release
– (Ascending w. Descending)
– (Learning w. Unlearning)
– (Construction w. Deconstruction)

27. Releasing the earliest structures
does NOT:
• Guaranty releasing later
structures (so shadow
can remain at other
levels)
• Guarantee complexity
capacity, e.g.
systems/ecological
thinking, construct-
aware, post-
conventional
perspective-taking…

28. Too fast in either direction…
• Ascend too fast: leave too much behind in
shadow; altitude without width/health
• Release too fast: destabilizing and fragile;
need to make higher structures more robust
and flexible.

29. What does the world need most?
• Development (more complexity)?
• Shadow work (releasing complexity)?

30. The VUCA Narrative
We live in a complex and fast-changing world…
We have to increase the complexity of our thinking

31. Awakening (release) - is not enough
Developmental Altitude – is not
enough
Wisdom required BOTH
Needs:
Intergenerational Trauma 1.0

32. Unpublished draft available:
Wisdom, Complexity, and Transcendence: A
developmental frame
(Chapter to appear in The Oxford Handbook of Adult
Development and Wisdom, Kallio & Stevens-Long, Eds)
tommurray.us@gmail.com

33. Thank
You!
art: Harri Aalto

34. EXTRA SLIDES

35. What do you call someone
who has Released:
• …fear of death (unshakable sense of safety and
continuity)
• … fear of social judgement (not care what others
think or project)
• … avoidance of pain
• …any self-doubt (complete confidence & clarity)
….???....
• >> Enlightened OR a megalomaniac/psychopath

36. Origins: 2009 IR journal paper
Do Heart and Ego Develop Through
Hierarchical Integration?
Intuiting the Cognitive Line in Developmental Assessment

37. “Spiritual” truths
are about re-membering
• We are All one
• Our stories are constructed
• Words can’t capture reality
• You are safe
• The self is an illusion
• Everything is perfect
• There are no boundaries
• One taste
• Interior is exterior
• All is one
• Universe on a grain of sand
• Love is all there is
• We create our own reality
• …

38. Conditions for productive Release
1. Is there a problem here? Is something
prohibiting needed growth? (Don’t fix what ain’t
broke)
2. Sufficient complexity capacity to cope with the
chaos
3. Healthy “catching” structures below the one
being deconstructed.
1. E.g. self-love; basic trust
2. The occlusion may be protecting you from a memory
you are not ready to integrate

39. Growing too fast?
• What does the method deconstruct?
• WHY would one need to deconstruct that?
• What are the dangers of deconstructing that?
• Development in response to real needs
• Need enough complexity to untie the knot, but
then drop it.
• Sometimes people are “OK where they are at”

40. E.g. Learned Structures
Shadow beliefs
In the Social
strata
Perceptual
strata
• Tall people can’t be trusted
• I am a looser
• The Bible gives God’s
commands
• Receiving [toys/things] is how
I know you love me
• Self as a physical body
• Self as my stream of thoughts
• Sense of time and space
• Differentiation of interior vs
exterior perceptions

41. What can get left behind?
• At 2nd PP Conventional: Playfulness, awe, creativity,
physicality, naive trust, …
• At 3rd PP Modern: Loyalty to tribe and ideologies,
concrete communities and rituals…
• At 4th PP Pluralist: solid identity, confidence in
rationality, …
`
• From infancy:
Oneness, timelessness, space-lessness, subject-
object nonduality, synesthesia,
fullness/abundance, selflessness ....

42. Growing critiques of misuse
of developmental theories
• Fetishization of vertical growth, esp. in
practice communities
• Growth to goodness fallacy, that higher/later
development is
– better,
– happier,
– more ethical,
– most needed,
– …

43. Increasing Complexity – Good 
• Understand more complex situations
• More depth of understanding (incl. self-
understanding)
• More effectiveness for changing the world

44. Increasing Complexity – Bad 
• Bureaucracy, rules upon rules, analysis paralysis,
…
• Abstraction from the realities of people and earth
• Predation, extraction, domination…
• Sophisticated rationalization and defenses
• Not (necessarily) a growth to:
– Goodness, happiness, morality….

45. “Shadow” structures
• Complexity can be good or bad for us
• All learning (increased complexity) came from
an intelligent response to a context
• Shadow: Anything we learned can eventually
be found to be a problem—to not fit the
needs of the current context
• …then it calls to be released
• We often can’t judge good/bad until we have
experiences/lessons

46. Wisdom (vs. hierarchical complexity)
Includes:
• Humility (knowing that we don’t know)
• Shadow work – releasing biases and ego
attachments
• Care and empathy
• Personal depth (ensoulment)

48. • Growing in “ego development” and
wisdom necessitates a self-
deconstruction move (of something
different for each level)

49. Critiques of the “spiritual” narrative
• Mental health: Meditation can be harmful
• Critical theory: Contemplative practice may
lead to self-focused spiritual bypassing,
happy-but-stupid citizens in denial of greater
tragedies
• Ethics: Spiritually “awake” teachers revealed
to have shadows and unethical practices

50. Release can feel
• Expansive/blissful
• Unifying/totalizing/integrated
• Insightful/illuminating
• Profoundly Truthy/Powerful
• Disorienting/overwhelming
• Terrifying/dissociative

51. Conclusions
• An integrated ascending/descending model helps
clean up growth to goodness assumptions about:
Development and Awakening
– And confusions about “transcend and include” and
top vs. bottom of the developmental stack
• Helps clarify :
1. for interventions: are we talking about growing or
releasing complexity (or both)
2. WHEN is it good (and not) to develop vertically?
3. WHEN is it good (and not) to release into spiritual
clarity toward awakening?

52. Common Issues in using
developmental models
• Reification (confusing the map for the territory)
• Pigeonholing people (over-simplification,
caricatures, objectification)
• Growth to goodness fallacy (higher is better,
happier, more ethical…)
• Push to the top (neglecting horizontal health,
robustness, depth)
– Cogntive complexity version
– Spiritual attainment version
• Conflating wisdom with complexity
• Sloppy extensions of individual development
research into cultural development

53. Premise #1
(Question Complexity)
• We over-focus on vertical advancement
• Most of the worlds problems are from existing
cognitive structures (not insufficient complexity)
• We need equal focus on releasing complexity
(deconstructing structures)

54. Post-Rational
Mind
4th...6thPP
(MetaModern)
Self-aware,complexsystems,
deeperrealities,tolerancefor
unknowing&paradox
Rational/Modern
Mind
3rdPP Autonomous,logical,abstract,
criticalthinking
Social/Mythical
Mind
2ndPP
(conventional)
Conventionalstories,"meaning,"
socialroles/dynamics,
Perceptual/Magical
Mind
0th,1stPP
(pre-language)
Perception(objects);
emotionalenergy,"being"
A Simple Developmental
Spectrum of Consciousness

55. Layer-cake of consciousness
• Magical/Percep. – perception/objects of
awareness; raw emotion/energy;
immediacy/timelessness
• Mythical/Social – narratives, cause/effect,
right/wrong, sense-making
• Rational – evaluation, moderation of Mythical
and Magical thinking
• Post-Rational - evaluation, moderation of
Rational mind; reintegration of
Magical/Mythical

56. Example: The Scientist at Work
• (3rd PP) Rational thinking:
– Formally validate experimental conclusions;
– Creatively explore novel territory
• (2nd PP) Mythical/Social “meaning
making”/stories
– Community of scientists: belonging, devotion
– Experimental principles, agreements
• (Oth/1st PP) Magical/Perceptual mind
– Awe and reverence for the natural world
– Empiricism: grounds in observation
– How reality presents as objects
– Construction of time and space

57. Layers, cont.
• Each Layer can’t “see” or regulate itself
• Lower layers are closer to life force, immediate
reality
• Have their own wisdom but can also be naïve
and un-wise (impulsive; compliant; narrow)
• Higher layers meta-assess & coordinate but
can also block/hide/bias/distort.

59. Concrete
Subtle
Metaware
Person-Perspective Stage Tier I/C A/P
I
I
I
I
C
C
I
I
C
C
C
C
P
P
A
A
P
P
A
A
P
P
A
A
Receptive
Reciprocl
Active
Receptive
Reciprocl
Active
Interpentr
Receptive
Reciprocl
Active
Interpentr
Interpentr
Int
Ex
t
Int
Ex
t
Int
Ex
t
Int
Ex
t
Int
Ex
t
Int
Ex
t
Int
Ex
t
Int
Ex
Int
Ex
t
Int
Ex
t
Int
Ex
t
Int
Ex
t
AQAL Dims: Ind/Col, Out/Ins, Int/Ext
*
*
*
6.5
6.0
5.5
5.0
4.5
4.0
3.5
3.0
2.5
2.0
1.5
1.0

60. “Operating upon”
>> five sub-operations
of hierarchical complexity
1. Differentiation
2. Composition
3. Generalization
4. Abstraction
5. Integration

61. …Inevitably lead to “demi-realities”
1. Disastrous Differentiation
2. Noxious Composition
3. Vicious Abstraction
4. Pernicious Generalization
5. Tyrannical Integration