This piece is meant as an introduction to my Know Thyself Questionnaire. Rather than trying to justify the theory, my intention is to provide a glimpse of the various developmental stages of attentional abilities and point out some of the exemplary mental-emotional experiences which give color and texture to these stages. Along with that glimpse, I’ll explain a little about how the stages and abilities relate to one another. Hopefully, that will help show how I come up with my profiling results.
Each developmental stage and corresponding attentional ability builds upon all previous stages and abilities. As we grow older and hopefully more mature, our brains become more developed and most of us like to think our personalities do as well. For humans, “Capacities are needs,” in the words of Abraham Maslow. As applied here, that means we are driven to experience–you could say we have the capacity and, therefore, the need to experience–a broad range of actions and interactions. More simply, we like to do many things; we’re playful and curious when we’re healthy.
Since we have the capacity for psychological health, when our goodwill, playfulness, and curiosity are squashed, we tend to stagnate ( feeling beaten down and depressed) or agitate (feeling anxious, stressed, unable to concentrate, angry, frustrated, etc.). Or both. As we mature, our psychological needs mature beyond the basics: food, warmth, love, and someone to play with. One thing which helps keep us healthy is a growing, organic self-identity. As our self-identities mature, we require different types of food to feed our souls, and these stages outline a few of those needs in terms of the attentional abilities that help us meet those needs.
Although thinking in terms of “attentional abilities” takes a little getting used to, I have chosen this perspective for a simple reason. My thinking is based on brain growth, social development, and evolutionary psychology. It presents a partial version of spirituality that is post-mythical. By that, I mean I can affirm most spiritual worldviews to a great extent, but I will leave each person to their chosen myths and relegate myself–as much as possible–to a focus on aspects of actualization that can be tested and affirmed. (I am not anti-myth, but my focus is one that comes after the recognition that there are many competing myths in the world.) So whoever you are, and whatever you might believe, you can test these ideas against scientific research if you like; if you are not so interested in the science, you still can criticize, comment, or add based on your own experience. My purpose is to think and communicate in terms that support personal progress, social progress, and mutual understanding. (Ken Wilber deserves a lot of credit for the theoretical background while my own applications and emphases represent my personal history and experience.)
Ready to jump in? The first stage is Creativity. When we’re born, our brains and senses have to rapidly adjust to life in the “outside” world. Our bodies grow at an incredible rate, trying to catch up to the size of our huge heads, and awareness grows just as fast. This stage is exemplified by exposure to the environment, curiosity and wonder, and play. Creativity springs from the exuberance and childlike openness we experience at this point in our lives. The magnitude of our creativity is one of the hallmarks of humanity.
In order for us to develop at this stage, all we really need to do–something which is unavoidable to most or all young minds–is receive. So the primary attentional ability at this stage is reception. I say this is the most important thing that babies do with their attention. While this ability is perhaps the most important one at this stage, being open enough to receive remains important throughout our lives. So while other attentional abilities–or ways of deploying our attention–may be more developed or more advanced, those abilities are not more valuable or more important than taking in information about this world we live in. These stages overlap a great deal even as the abilities are in the midst of development. When we are fully functioning adults, these internal states and stages take their place as qualities of our internal experience. And as we become more able with adjusting our internal states, the more able we are to mix or distill many of these qualities. To say that a little differently, we can become increasingly able to intentionally influence the quality, or qualities, of our awareness.
At least by the time we enter the “terrible twos”, we are moving into the second stage. Remember: as we move onto the next stage, we retain previous attentional abilities. As that applies to this second stage, that means we retain the ability to receive while sharpening the ability to concentrate. Concentration allows us to persist, so I call this stage Purpose. Toddlers are able to think of and stick to a chosen purpose–such as wanting a cookie. It’s important to make a distinction here. We can say that babies have a purpose in crying. They need food or warmth or something. Crying serves a function, then, if responsive caregivers respond. The baby is active in signaling, but the caregiver completes the function. Toddlers, on the other hand, often communicate what they intend and then are also capable of doing it themselves. They have a purpose and often complete it. The degree of intention and communication are clearly more advanced. (In its most excellent or distilled form, concentration can lead to states such as satori or nirvana, but toddling is something we can all relate to. From a different angle, I’m saying that it is quite possible to be ignorant and selfish yet still experience the highest states known to humankind. This accounts for a great deal of gurus abusing their power.) The experiences that describe this state are: persistence, self-control, certainty, and discipline. When we are in a very focused state, our brainwaves synchronize and we get “into” what we’re doing. Whether a kid is trying to sneak a cookie behind mom’s back or Tiger Woods is sinking the last putt to win a professional tournament, concentration is power.
Based on the abilities to receive information and to concentrate on specifically relevant information and purposes, we develop into the stage of Understanding. While babies and toddlers are already very curious and questioning, this third stage is best seen as ranging through late elementary school years and into high school or later. During this stage, we are learning to communicate in complex languages and thought forms, and if we’re normal and healthy, we develop a deeper empathy with–and understanding of–others. Because the mind-state which most signifies the primary challenge at this state involves the stress (or “cognitive dissonance”) which arises from tolerating ambiguity, the requisite attentional ability is intentional relaxation. Ambiguity, here, comes from holding two ideas (like “I should know my multiplication tables,” but, “I don’t know my multiplication tables) that don’t match up with one another. In order to learn conceptual complexities like multiplication tables and compound sentences, we have to remain focused enough for long enough without becoming too anxious to remember anything. It takes a lot to get through high school unscathed. Most of us get scathed.
Intentional relaxation is different from passively being soothed by someone else (like Mom) or something else (like music or beer). Because our society has universal education, we all advance to the level of Understanding. But because our society has not established intentional relaxation as a common custom, many of us do not learn the attentional ability it takes to move decisively into the next stage. When we “stop” at whichever stage we do, because of our brains’ potential for all sorts of states, we might still have “peak experiences” of higher states without ever establishing our self-identity and actions at those stages. Then, should we get a taste of the better life, we might try to develop more advanced attentional abilities. If that’s the case, though, we’ll feel like we’re stretching or pretending those abilities if we aren’t strong enough with the lower level skills. To look at it from the other direction, we can stress ourselves out by trying to fill shoes that are still too big for us. That stress can be as minimal as simply feeling a little odd or it can become enough to actually drive us crazy. A full understanding of what we’re getting ourselves into can help us side-step a lot of that unnecessary stress.
Moving on... Most people want to live inspired lives, but it isn’t yet common knowledge that consistent inspiration–as opposed to sporadic moments of inspiration–is built upon mindful appreciation. Appreciation is the fourth stage, characterized by: emotional awareness, appreciation of self and others, a sense of being a whole adult (feeling a sense of integrity if not completion), and a degree of equanimity. The attentional ability here is mindfulness, which raises the question, “What happens if I try to learn and practice mindfulness without having learned intentional relaxation?” Chances are that the “mindfulness” practice will be a mix of things. In other words, it will be hard to tell what mindfulness is specifically if one is not familiar with intentional relaxation. In this case, people doing mindfulness practices will probably feel somewhat relaxed by their practice, and they will probably feel a sense of nonattachment to their problems. If the nonattachment aspect is stronger than their sense of integrity, these folks will also feel somewhat fragmented in who they are or depersonalized at times. Also, if they sharpen their awareness but lack the ability to relax, they can increase the likelihood of anxiety problems. Again, mindfulness is the basis of consistent inspiration, but relaxation is a good thing. A tool for every job, and every tool in its place.
A sense of integrity or fit, being able to include the successive abilities, is important. People who deny the value of the lower abilities usually tend towards being idealistic, sometimes a little “unreal”, and often arrogant. When mindful appreciation is applied within an adequate understanding, it counteracts or removes arrogance. What happens when people deny the attentional abilities of stages higher than where they are? They tend to come across as reductionistic and sometimes petty or rigid, unless we are just as reductionistic and share their oversimplified or overly localized view of life. When we deny our own potential, we suffer for it. When we don’t learn these abilities and move on, we feel stuck. As long as our society does not embrace and communicate intentional relaxation and mindful appreciation, we will remain largely unsatisfied–with resentment, laziness, divisiveness, distraction, and overambition plaguing our culture.
When we apply mindfulness, mindful appreciation functions as the basis for consistent inspiration but not necessarily continuous inspiration. I’ve met some people who doubt the value of their meditation and of spiritual experiences if they aren’t magically somehow transported beyond suffering forever and always. I’ve also met people who describe enlightenment as a thing that one can be said to “have” or “not have”. The doubt and the bragging are not so much due to ignorance or arrogance as they are simply unnecessary and unhelpful. If you’ve had amazing experiences of insight and ecstacy but you still get angry or feel lazy or whatever, you’re normal. Just keep going. We tend to feel inspiration in cycles, at moments, in the beginning. Just as we only feel relaxed at moments while we're working on relaxation. But we improve. And as we improve with mindfulness and passing moments of inspiration, as our inspiration itself matures and we begin to expect and craft it, the quality of mental and emotional-spiritual clarity stands out. The inspiration still mostly comes and goes cyclically, but the clarity tends to remain.
As a caveat, it is possible to move into inspiration and clarity without an explicit focus on mindfulness, but what we lack in mindfulness, we must make up for in appreciation. When mindfulness and appreciation are involved, our progress becomes steadier and more resilient in the face of challenges. Which means our inspiration will be more consistent in more intense moments and also in less intense moments. When mindfulness is involved, I call the next stage Clarity. I emphasize the clarity because the clarity can remain when we feel intense and when we feel relaxed. Many people confuse inspiration with ecstasy, and I hope that emphasizing the centrality of clarity will help sort out that particular misunderstanding. At this stage, high energy moments feel like inspiration or ecstasy, as I mentioned. Low energy moments feel light, clear, blissful (in my usage, bliss is a little more subtle in texture than ecstasy). The sense of integrity or wholeness which mindful appreciation has developed begins to expand beyond the individual.
The tortured artist type who is sensitive to beauty but tragically feels comparative callousness in the rest of humanity is an example of someone who can regularly experience inspired states but who has not fully established the integration which is possible between the carefree playfulness of Creativity, the certainty and persistence of Purpose, the intentional relaxation and ability to communicate in Understanding, and the mindfulness involved with Appreciation. Many such creative souls can neither give up their inspiration, their vision, nor can they reconcile the beauty of what they experience with the harsh realities. Rather than remaining stuck on the horns of that dilemma or choosing one side over the other, I suggest filling in the gaps. While there is something lacking in a society that ignores its artists, there are more effective actions to be taken than complaining or wishing. As many spiritual teachers of the past have emphasized, start with yourself, remove your problems and fill in what you lack--then the progress tends to spread.
Most cultures and groups mistakenly value some of these stages as more important than others. It is best to be very good with the abilities of each stage. You can’t raise a healthy child only on good logic, and you probably won’t be a happy adult without including play in your life. With advanced stages or elementary, good is better than bad. (And, as a general guideline, good--at whatever level is fitting--is better than high.) I believe that wisdom means embracing the good and responding with what fits more than in trying to push people to do more than they can. Striving for inspiration is every person’s birthright. If they refuse it, so be it. Most people don’t refuse it though; we simply don’t know–as a society–how to do it. But once you know, inspiration is a skill, not just something that surprisingly falls out of the sky when the gods are happy.
The stages of Nonconceptuality and Abiding might include further aspirations and subtler experiences, but everyone is capable of inspiration. The key for individuals is to build in a sense of resilience and aspiration. We all have many suggestions for how to improve as a global society, and we’ll be most likely to do so if we share in wisdom, appreciation, and inspiration.