Regression and Recovery

From TimBomb:

Inspired by some recent posts by Chris, I’ve found myself thinking about the notion that the felt, phenomenological aspect of the shift to an integral perspective is the gradual process of recovery of those earlier developmental stages. They come swimming back into your awareness and you start to recall what it was to be “at” those earlier stages. The need to deny those aspects of the self starts to drop away.

There’s all sorts of dimensions to that recovery, but one I want to dwell on is that maybe (and I say this as a kind of cocktail party theory, based on my own experience, rather than something for which I have any data) one of the curiosities of this process of recovery is that we become transfixed by the stages which got imprinted most weakly - which might look to onlookers like a kind of regression.

So, in my case, if I’d kind of skimmed lightly over that territorial stuff (which, we might speculate, lines roughly up with red altitude in Wilber-V for the I-I faithful, or the red vMeme, for those of you kickin’ it SDi style) - you might notice that I rather suddenly developed an odd interest in martial arts, watching boxing, even paying attention to football for the first time. I’ll leave it to my friends to embarrass me in the comments forum on that matter.

If someone else had skimmed lightly over that rational, scientific stuff (say on their way to a career in the arts), then their unfolding into integral might be characterized by an insistence on evidence and proof, on rational argumentation, on quality of rhetoric. Reintegrating the orange vMeme, perhaps…

Other folk might suddenly get all misty over rules and traditions, and so on. If this stuff is ringing bells for anyone else, I’d love to hear about it.

I'd say (with a similar level of cocktail party proof) that this feels just about right. If we want to talk about imprints, then the much maligned 'green' stage had the strongest effect on me, whilst what we might call orange didn't leave as deep an impression (although I think we should be skeptical of wedding the essential building blocks of argument to a value level).