What is beyond the Unitive stage? (Susanne R. Cook-Greuter)

[TruthSoldier]

In Leo's 3 part series on ego development, he ends with the Unitive stage. He then says there are many stages beyond the unitive stage, but that is not the focus of Susannes' work. He says in order to understand those you need to study to most amazing humans on the planet, like one in a million. These are Leo's words. Of course I am paraphrasing.

I am just wondering where I might find literature or anything on these more advanced stages? Just for research and curiosity. I am continuing to work on my own path entering construct aware, but I fascinated by these beyond unitive stages that leo touches on. Any info would be appreciated. Thanks guys!

[TruthSoldier]

Bump

[TruthSoldier]

b

[puporing]

@TruthSoldier Are you referring to Tier 3?? Saw this the other day may be what you're looking for.

 

[TruthSoldier]

Stage 6 - Unitive,
Susanna R. Cook Greuter

It's a post-post conventional stage, that rests in the 1% transcendent category.


Leo has said there are stages beyond this, but they are not the scope of that video series (9 stages of ego development)

I am just curious what's past unitive and where its literature may be found.

Edited March 2, 2022 by TruthSoldier

[gettoefl]

path is bad me good me no me all me ... unitive is good me namely there is no bad no duality any longer, one is living one's true self with ego in check

for no me all me google bernadette roberts all her books free online

[Loba]

Quote

 

Notes:

Coral is considered a final stage which can be talked about in two different ways - there is a scarcity in data, and so there is some speculation.

These are largely hypothetical stages, but it is possible to possibly explore some of these higher stages because as states, everyone can and might have experienced or had some access to some attributes, some aspects of these higher stages as states, so that does allow us to make some educated guesses.

Certain saints and sages have spoken of these qualities and you can access them at any stage and interpret them from the stage you are at, but there is valid reason to believe that these stages are real and they are forming at the frothy edge of humanity.

Nobody really knows precise information about these stages.

Once we get to stages beyond turquoise there are a couple of ways we can look at them.

When we speak of stages above turquoise, they are called the third tier.

We can speak about these third tier stages as sort of one indigo realm, or one coral realm as a catch all or as Aurobindo and Wilber has taught we can also break four different stages in the third tier.

The higher stages are called unitive stages.

Individuals at this level are now able to witness the whole song and dance of prior ways of understanding and meaning making with compassion and equanimity. 

They understand the need of the personal ego to ensure a sense of permanence and sustainability while at the same time recognizing the illusion of the desire for permanence. 

The previous ways of viewing reality solely from the self's perspective and through the medium of language is transformed. 

The new paradigm has a universal or cosmic perspective as an organizing principal and has a steady place from which meaning is derived.  It is non-centered in the ego, although the ego is available as a perspective when useful. 

Unlike state experiences that gave people glimpses of mystical or unitive experiences, now these are steadily available in the witnessing stance. 

This is a defining characteristic of third tier is that what we had access to, what we have access to as states are now readily available as traits. 

Unitive individuals experience themselves and others as a part of ongoing humanity embedded in the creative ground, fulfilling the destiny of evolution/involution.

The two sides of the Paciolian paradox are integrated.  Feelings of belonging and feeling of one's separateness and uniqueness are experienced without undue tension, they are simply changing perceptions of the unending possibilities of being. 

At this level of integration, adults can look at themselves and other beings in terms of the passing of ages, near and far in geographical, social, cultural, historical, intellectual and developmental dimensions.

They can take multiple points of view and shift focus effortlessly among many states of awareness; they feel embedded in nature - birth, growth and death, joy and pain are seen as natural occurrences, patterns of change in the flux of time.

In contract to other stages, unitive individuals have intense non demanding relationships with people regardless of their development, age, gender or any other identifications.

They see the dignity in all manifestations of life, others feel worthy and whole in their presence.  

This sounds like green, but in contrast to green, coral individuals feel interconnected with others as all sentient beings struggle to survive and make sense of their existence.

Person of the unitive stage feel tolerance, compassion and an affiliation with all manifestation of life which is not true for green.

To summarize - unitive adults are more likely to have a balanced integrated sense of their belonginess and separateness as individuals because they feel part of the ongoing evolution of the universe in all its aspects and cycles, creation, destruction and recreation.

Second tier is still cognizing and conceptualizing ultimate reality or absolute truth, the ultimate meaning of life and even that is sporadic at best.

Third tier is embodying and living it, the level of liberation from the ego - a strong and actual liberation from the ego and it is now integral to one's entire being.

Some of the big leaps is that in third tier we are really entering higher and higher spiritual realms as stable traits beyond mere temporary peaks states and anyone could have access to, and then interpret from the stage they were at.  Coral, indigo and beyond, seeing lesser and lesser degrees of the ego.

The ego is more and more ephemeral, it's grasping is more exponentially fleeting and perhaps none at all.

to truly embody the transpersonal beyond world centric to include all of it - their tier is kosmocentric.  

The first of these four stages are called paramind or coral/indigo are called "illuminated mind". 

The second is metamind/"intuitive mind", which is violet.

The third and fourth are called overmind and supermind - overmind is ultraviolet and supermind is clear light.

Those common characteristics that they share in the higher stages is that they each have a transpersonal component or aspect, they recognize their higher self beyond the relative personality, they inhabit the transpersonal.

They experience or perceive a direct embodied sense of wholeness, in other words the paramind/indigo/coral is said to be able to see wholes and the metamind is able to feel wholes, the overmind can witness wholes and the supermind is being whole.

The third characteristic that is common is that they embody and awareness of awareness as an almost constant sense of awareness, the state of any other tier is now a trait.

So it isn't so much that one is aware of awareness, instead that this unitive space, there is no I.  There is very little of the I, instead there is awareness as a merged embodied, experienced, and that sense of awareness itself is aware of awareness and consciousness.

Another aspect of third tier is it is marked by a type of emerging of a state and a structure stage.

Every experience is a combination of a state and a stage, like a dance between them.

Third tier, each of those identified four stages has a particular state that is intrinsic to that particular structure, so the indigo, coral paramind structure is the union with the grow state.

The violet metamind intuitive mind is the union or merging with the subtle state.

The ultraviolet overmind with causal witnessing state.

Clearlight supermind is one with the nondual state.

How to perceive these higher levels of development: higher levels of development are not easy to separate into granular levels.  Towards the end of Maslow's life he separated out his highest stage of self actualization into two stages of self actualization and self transcendence.  He creates a six stage model instead of a 5 stage model.

The more data we get will lead to a division of stages.

Another way to approach this is: you can theorize based on what you have already seen and extend that concept further, so in mathematics will be called analytic continuation.

A formula produces a pattern, but it is incomplete, and you take what you expect based on the existing pattern to be so and so.  Creates effective solutions in math and in life.

Sri Aurobindo approaches this process of developmental stages from a more conceptual level, so basically says if reality exists, then given the fact that we can experience oneness, then oneness should be one pole and the other pole we should have the experience of separation as an individual and then levels of development should be plotted between those two poles, so then we can say the increasing levels of ego transcendence lead within that framework naturally to unity awareness and that is also what we would say even though our sample size is small in the unitive stage, the pathway that we've been seeing throughout all these previous levels of development suggest that's the way it is moving forward.

Increasing levels of complexity and self transcendence. 

Speaking about the differentiation between the levels of development, look at the state experience and then see how they are representative of stages of development because if we work to maintain and develop states over a prolonged period of time they become traits.

These states theoretically must refer to stages of higher development.

The way to these higher stages is through the states, so the more we experience and educate ourselves of these states that resemble these traits, will  perhaps give us a little bit of insight and vision into what that might be like.

There are practical things we can do: we want to do as much shadow work as possible.  Shadow and trauma work, because at these higher stages, as we evolve stage by stage, they include and they transcend and they are very fluid, these are not wrings in a ladder.

The potentiality for even more unknown aspects, or long forgotten aspects of ourselves is high.

We cannot speak intelligently on shadow at these higher stages.

There could be a psychotic depersonalization, a sense of being so merged that one can be really moving into dissociation.

The supermind awareness is like this electric sense of awareness, where the way that it shows up is in a state of coincidencia oppositorum.  All opposites are in union.  

To see how we can see the value of what we see as this or that, to turn it into this and that.

Some of this is koan work - zen koans - finding a community that works with koans, it is important to do this work with community somehow.

If we are in a state we need someone who can check it.

In relation to the overmind - meditation can strike you like a thunderbolt, a disturbing reality that one has to really question and contemplate on, like a koan.

Ramana said, "That which is not present in deep dreamless sleep is not real."  Sit with that.

What is not present in deep dreamless sleep?  Nothing.  Your entire world is absent in deep dreamless sleep so that means that whatever we consider is our entire world is not real.  That is a scary realization. 

A lot of meditators if they stick with it encounter that and so the return from that is when you can feel really transformed by that.  So work with that kind of contemplation, work, give yourself fully to working with those types of koans.

Exploring states: think about working on flow states, find practical ways to enter flow states, getting to know what that is, because in a flow state the primitive brain gives us a break so we are not coming from that first, second tier state of fight, flight, freeze, fawn, we are much less identified with the ego.

Psychedelics, but have a trained teacher in a safe community.

Polarity management, that sense of living in a space where opposites are in union, take anything and everything and try to put it through the thesis and antithesis and synthesis. 

First tier is thesis, a lot about constructing the self - we all have to construct an ego.

Second tier is antithesis, the deconstruction phase of ego and self, and so it is going away from all we had constructed and believed in.

How to bring that into the union, the communion of the first and second tier?  The third tier is the synthesis of it all, sacred and profane, heaven and the marketplace that we are fully allowing ourselves to come into synthesizing.    

Ken Wilber excerpt and divine schizophrenia:
 In these stages you become split minded because you have access to both the witness and the ego.  You are actually whole minded, but it sounds like a split because you are aware of the constant witnesser spirit in you and you are also perfectly aware of the movie of life.  The ego and all its ups and downs.  So you still feel pain, suffering and sorrow but they can no longer convince you of their importance.  You are no longer the victim of life, but its witness.  Because you are no longer afraid of your feelings you can engage them with much greater intensity.  The movie of life becomes more vivid and vibrant precisely because you are no longer grasping or avoiding it and thus no longer trying to dull or dilute it.  You no longer turn the volume down, you might even cry harder, laugh louder, jump higher.  Choiceless awareness doesn't mean you cease to feel, it means you feel fully, deeply, feel to infinity itself and laugh and cry and love until it hurts.  Life jumps right off the screen and you are one with all of it because you don't recoil.  If you are having a dream and you think its real it can get very scary, say you are dreaming that you are a tightrope walker - if you fall off you'll plunge to your death, so you are walking slowly and carefully, and suppose you start lucid dreaming and you realize that it is just a dream.  What do you do?
Become more caution and careful?  No, you start jumping up and down, you do flips, you bounce around, you have a ball, precisely because you know it is not real.  When you realize it is a dream you can afford to play, the same thing happens when you realize that ordinary life is just a dream, movie, play - you don't become more cautious, you start jumping up and down and doing flips because it is all a dream, all pure emptiness.
You don't feel less, you feel more because you can afford to and are no longer afraid of dying or living.  You become radical and wild, intense, vivid, shocking and silly, you let it all come pouring through because it is all your dream.  Life then assumes its true intensity, its vivid luminosity, its radical effervescence.  Pain is more painful and happiness is happier.  Joy is more joyous and sorrow even sadder.  It all comes radiantly alive to the mirrormind, the mind that doesn't grasp or avoid, but simply witnesses the play and can afford to play even as it watches.
What would motivate you if you saw everything as the dream of your own higher self, what would actually move you in this playful dream world?  When you see your friends suffering because they think the dream is real, you want to relieve their suffering, you want them to wake up, too.  Watching them suffer is not fun.  And so a deep and powerful compassion arises in the heart of the awakened one, and they seek above all else to awaken others and thus relieve them from the sorrow and pity, torment, pain, terror and the anguish that comes from taking the dreadful seriousness, the passing dream of life.
So you are a divine schizophrenic.  You are split minded in the sense that you simultaneously in touch with both the pure witness and the world of the ego- filled.  You are actually whole minded, because these two worlds are not two.  The ego is just the dream of the witness, the film that the witness creates out of its own infinite plentitude, simply so it will have something to watch at the movies.  At that point the entire play arises within your constant consciousness, no inside or outside, no in here or out there, the nondual universe of one taste arises as a spontaneous gesture of your own true nature.  You can taste the sun and swallow the moon and centuries fit in the palm of your hand.
The pure I-I, the great I-amness breathes to infinity and creates the cosmos as the song if its very self, the oceans of compassion fall as tears from your very own original face.  Lat night I saw the cool refection of the moon in the pond and nothing else happened at all.

There is nothing to say, and that is where we close

 

 

[TruthSoldier]

@Loba Thank you.

[Guru Peter Jordanson]

Remember i listened to a discussion between Bill Harris and Genpo Roshi about this. (That was in 2013 and i cannot find the audio.)

Here is a good summary about it and a quote:

"The experience that we call enlightenment begins at the highest stage of cognitive development - the Unitive stage. This stage can be broken down into three more stages, which will be described here."

https://www.selfcompassioncoaching.com/stages-enlightenment.html

[Loba]

@TruthSoldier You're welcome, I found some more material that explains the different stages as well: