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Get Full Access For $1 (30 days)* Or explore all membership plans → * Trial price for the first 30 days, then $20/month. Cancel or switch plans in 2 minutes at any time.Terri O’Fallon and Keith Martin-Smith dive into a deeper and more detailed exploration of her STAGES model. If you missed their first discussion, you can find it here. We highly recommend that you check that out before moving on to this discussion.
Terri and Keith focus on a smaller section of Terri’s model, stages 3.0 – 6.0 (roughly Amber/Orange to Turquoise/Indigo). Terri outlines what makes each level of her model unique from the last, what causes people to shift from one level to another, as well as what the mature expressions look like for 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0 stages.
She goes on to explain how people can use the model’s parameters to determine the developmental expression of others in coaching, psychotherapy, parenting, teaching, negotiating, etc., and how the STAGES model’s perspectival parameters can be a tool for generating more empathy and compassion.
In the STAGES model, structure-stages (Amber, Orange, Green, Teal, etc.) and state-stages (Gross, Subtle Causal, Witness, Nondual) begin to merge and stabilize. Terri explains exactly how this happens, and how both states and stages underlie the developmental process.
Finally, Terri explores her idea of developmental bypassing, and why we need spiritual work, shadow work, and developmental guidance to all in order to produce an integrated human experience.
Keith Martin-Smith’s When The Buddha Needs Therapy is now shipping!
It is possible to be liberated from the suffering of this world, but the path is a paradoxical one of embracing your ego even as you let it go. If you seek true liberation and freedom from the seemingly endless strife of life, you’re in the right place.
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About Terri O'Fallon
Terri O’Fallon, PhD is an Integral scholar whose research spans 40 years, including eleven research studies conducted in various colleges, public schools, and private research venues. Her most recent theory, and the culmination of a lifetime of work, is the STAGES model of human development. STAGES integrates several developmental models and is informed by Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory and Terri’s own research, to form a robust and predictive map that is being used by numerous scholars, practitioners, and leaders throughout the world.
About Keith Martin-Smith
Keith Martin-Smith is an award-winning author, writing coach, and Zen priest. He is passionate about human connection, creativity, and evolution. His books include "The Mysterious Divination of Tea Leaves", "A Heart Blown Open", and "The Heart of Zen". His most recent book is his first novel, "Only Everything", a novel that explores the promise and the pain of following an artist's path.
I do not think so. Knowledge without application is only Theory. Theory is the opposite of Integration. I encounter people all the time who may know a thing but completely fail to practice it, and this has only increased in the age of Youtube videos where you can watch a 30-60 min video on any subject and believe you know it but then never actually do it. As an example, there is a Youtuber I like who explains stoicism and I think he does live according to those principles. But the thousands of people watching his videos and gaining knowledge probably are not. Stoicism and other practices requires maybe 1,000 hours of practice per hour of knowledge obtained through watching a video. Any other Consciousness development is the same. It’s the daily practice over several years that produces the changes, not watching a 1 hour video.
This is obvious in fitness or any other skill but for some reason academics think they can bypass this with “waking up”. But just as you can’t become an NBA star by reading a book about it or a fitness beast just by purchasing a program and setting it on the shelf, You can’t wake up by just reading a book or attending a retreat unless you also put in the thousands of hours of follow on integration.
This brings to mind an aspect that I think I’ve never heard or read in Integral - does anyone consider what % of your day or week do you live at a certain level, or do people consider it like a hurdle and once you have one waking up event you can’t go backwards - which I don’t believe to be true at all.
My example I’ll give in this is Jordan Peterson, who is an expert on Jungian Psychology and at one time seemed fairly reasonable and said things that made sense from a certain rational point of view> But over the past 10 years he has become so increasingly possessed by his own shadow archetypes that he is sliding down a slope to being an out of control nut.
Your “language of training” and “language of explanation” terminologies sound akin to the integral concepts of transformation and translation, respectively.
I like that you speak of “Eastern, Western, and indigenous cultures.” I’ve noticed others starting to include indigenous approaches/ways in their references to spiritual traditions; a good move.
I like reading different perspectives on history. There is what happened, and there are many different lenses to view each event through.
But my financial background drummed into me “past performance does not guarantee future returns”.
I don’t think we can evaluate the future in terms of East and West - those are terms left over from a prior epoch when the world was flat. The next step in evolution or invention is always unimaginable to the previous step. The “best of breed” of the future will be a quality we cannot currently conceive.
On the topic of Indigenous, I might bring up the Hawaiians - who are going in the opposite direction, and I feel in a good way. They are opening up schools for all children to teach anyone who wants their children to receive their culture, and encouraging the parents of those children to also learn with their children. More and more I see blond haired blue eyed parents teaching their children Hawaiian language and culture. This was a conscious decision by the Hawaiian community after discussions, disagreements and power struggles over many decades, and yes some still oppose it. But the momentum is headed in that direction. My personal opinion is that there is actually something Metaphysically different about each Island in the Island chain, but that’s woo-woo talk, lol.
Yeah. I’m pretty skeptical about long range projections about the trajectory of history. But, we have serious matters to attend to right now (climate, war, pandemic, poverty), so “best of breed” to get things done in the short- to intermediate-term - what other choice is there? My interest in the indigenous is specifically on the matter of climate. We need an approach that involves circular economic flows and co-participation with nature. My perspectival view is “we are all indigenous” to this planet. To make that stick however, now comes the hard work of realizing what that means procedurally and propositionally.
Yes, the 1960-70’s sci fi Oddesey of colonizing the Solar System is now obviusly not going to happen in 2001. I completely agree with the need to find a new economic system.