Cook-Greuter’s Work in Ego development theory is fantastic and profound. Must read if you want to do self-actualization or consciousness work. Or even work in good business, philosophy, or whatever interests you.
Learn and master these stages & you’ll be aware of all the traps and pitfalls of yourself. How you lie. How you deceive yourself. Your own shortcomings. How to evolve, what is necessary to evolve.
A basic summary of these stages:
Impulsive is when you’re born. You just react, “you” don’t exist. It’s all unconscious reaction and the boundary between self and other doesn’t exist.
Opportunist is when a little “me” starts forming. Everything is a zero sum game. Either “I” win or “you” win. Now it’s a game of pure survival and growth with no reason, self awareness or ethics.
Diplomat is the level of conformity. The self grows only through community and beliefs. This can be friend groups, families, religions, schools, etc.
Expert is the skill focused stage. The self now wants to work on developing valuable skills and growing itself and it’s own knowledge. The self becomes more conscious of itself here.
Achiever is the stage in which one goes beyond just skill and becomes goal striving. This is now complex survival, the ego survives through growth and becoming bigger and more successful.
The pluralist begins to self-reflect and question its own being. The self becomes more introspective and self-exploring.
The strategist is the self-actualizer. The seeker of enlightenment, growth, truth, maxing their potential. Focused on becoming better in every aspect & deeply growing.
The Magician becomes construct aware & recognizes that everything, including itself is merely a construction of the mind, a sort of strange loop. It recognizes that it is itself because of how it thought of itself. Deeply introspective, many existential crises and deep questions, and lots of deep insights at the level of being.
The Unitive stage is the last stage, where the self becomes transcended and the consciousness is back at unity with being. It achieves union again, but with a more grounded and wise state. The impulsive stage was at union but without the experience of construction and deconstruction of the self, but the unitive stage now has the best of all the stages and lives in union once again.
This is the process of construction and deconstruction. Self actualization and self realization. This is crucial for you to study and understand so that you can recognize yourself and start to introspect and reflect deeply.
Thank you for reading. For further reading, the link here is the full research paper conducted by Susanne Cook-Greuter.
I recommend you print this out and staple it together or put it in a binder to read & take notes. There is timeless value in this paper & anyone looking to actualize and introspect will find their understanding of reality compound on itself as they read.
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Mason
MASON POMEROY 