Dimensions of Human Development

I see four important dimensions against which we can talk about human development:

1. Spiritual
2. Psychological
3. Life Experience
4. Knowledge and Information (Education)

I'm going to suggest that folks sometimes conflate these things and think that progress in one of the four dimensions means progress in all four. I also think folks tend to believe that progress in the spiritual dimension trumps psychological development and life experience. What we thus find is that folks emphasize one dimension over the other two, get really advanced in that dimension (in our case here that would be spirituality), but loose track of the necessity the others, especially psychological development and life experience.

In my humble opinion all four matter, but especially the intersection of spirituality and psychology. I'd like to see more balance being fostered. So....

What do you all think?

What do you mean by spiritual dimension?

What we focus on here, Mumuwu. Mediating, progressing along the spiritual path in various traditions or as spelled out by Kenneth's nine stages.

By the way, this topic is the result of some conversations I've been having with Kenneth.

#3 might need some definition. It seems like the sum of 1,2, and 4.

I wonder what models and methods of psychological development people favor. It seems to me you have to separate the wheat from the chaff, just as in meditation methods. What is a pragmatic approach to psych. development?

I meant #3 to be the sum of the "things" that happen to us. We all have a personal history, right? The sum of all our experiences matters and creates something I've called "life experience" that is not psychology and not spirituality. Maybe it would help to think of a job and what it means to have been in that job for ten years as opposed to having been in that same job for a week. Those two levels of experience are very different. That same kind of difference applies to our lives. It also applies to the differences in our experience - some of us are parents and look at life differently as a result. All of the things that happen in our lives add up to something meaningful and that's what I am trying to get at by using the term "life experience."

Does that help, betawave?

Further - while #3 does sort of seem like the sum of the others, I think it really deserves separate consideration. A person whose life has been lived in a more sheltered way, compared to a person who has been out there, joined the Peace Corps, had a lot of different jobs, served in the military, and so on, will have very different "life experience."

Just trying to better explain my construction

"
What we focus on here, Mumuwu. Mediating, progressing along the spiritual path in various traditions or as spelled out by Kenneth's nine stages.

By the way, this topic is the result of some conversations I've been having with Kenneth.

"

Would contemplative development be a synonym? I'm finding the more I progress on this dimension, the less "spiritual" I'm becoming.

Ah! Got it. #3 is the subjective experience of someone, the actual experience as opposed to something that could be "understood" by reading a text book. So #4 would be intellectual knowledge on how to chop a mortise with a chisel, #3 is whether someone has done that 0 times, 10 times, or 10,000 times as a professional?

Similarly #4 would be "I studied well digging and conflict resolution in college" and #3 would be "Peace Corps sent me to burma to dig wells and I helped two villages negotiate how often and how much they could access the wells"?

Hmm, what about the social dimension? Would that be a subset of psychology?

Say more, nadav. I may have missed that.

"Would contemplative development be a synonym? I'm finding the more I progress on this dimension, the less "spiritual" I'm becoming."

Yes.

"Hmm, what about the social dimension?" - Nadav

"Say more, nadav. I may have missed that." - Cmarti

The construction of 1, 2, 3 and 4 place the emphasis on an individual (the spiritual, psychological doer who lives and learns). As constructed the four dimensions don't include the environment and social network in which human development unfolds. Maybe the list requires a #5. Social/Ecological/Interpersonal.

Betawave, yes to your comments about #3 and #4, too.

Mumuwu, I'm with you on the "spiritual" word front. I think that word has taken on some rather frufru connotations in common use. Maybe I should change it to your word, "contemplative" development.

"The construction of 1, 2, 3 and 4 place the emphasis on an individual (the spiritual, psychological doer who lives and learns)."

That's how this is meant to be processed, Alvaro. It's focused solely on how individuals develop as human beings, not groups or societies. That's a whole other ball of wax, IMHO.

See, I was talking to Kenneth over the past few weeks about developmental issues and it became obvious to both of us that we needed an agreed upon way to communicate with each other over what contemplative development does or does not do for individual practitioners. So this model (and it is a model and thus not the territory) seemed to help in that regard.

I dislike the word "spiritual" because most people I know who describe themselves that way are into astrology, pop psychology, existentialism, fantasizing, mysticism, "magick", beliefs, "energy", "vibes", synchronicity, and a whole host of things that are sometimes interesting but which seem only tangentially related to what I see myself doing, which is just carefully watching sensations.

I used "contemplative" for a little while, but having studied philosophy, it just brings up the thought of Aristotle for me. I love Aristotle, but again, I don't see anything but a tangential connection between what most Western philosophers were doing and what I'm doing.

I mostly think of myself as doing very precise, no-holds-barred phenomenology, on a continuous, moment-to-moment basis. But even phenomenology (as a philosophical tradition) is too intellectual by comparison with this. (I find nothing wrong with being intellectual, by the way. It's just not the same as Buddhist meditation.)

"Mindfulness" is a popular one, but it's both too specific and too general.

I have no answer!

"we needed an agreed upon way to communicate with each other over what contemplative development does or does not do for individual practitioners"

That would be awesome. Though it worries me that the higher one goes up this ladder-of-whatever, the more vague the answers to this question seem to become.

Didn't Bill Hamilton say something like, "I couldn't tell you why, but it's worth doing"?

That's actually right on, Jim - we need to be able to distinguish between types of development and have language that allows us to do so. The argument tends to bifurcate over how much psychological development accompanies contemplative development.

Which one is the heart-shaped box, where compassion and related heart stuff goes?

I dunno, Florian. Where does any emotion fit in the schema? I think emotions probably spread across spirituality/contemplative and psychology - but this was not meant to be a comprehensive map of the human condition. What do you think?

I don't know either, but I'm pretty certain that compassion and other heart openings are a developmental thing.

I don't think it's psychological, and it sure as hell is *not* contemplative, though the kinds of shift the contemplative dimension brings to the mind (breaking down of limits/distinctions and dispelling of special features) are also available to the heart dimension.

Life experience comes closest to the heart stuff, I think, though that depends on what "experience" means to the reader. If it's some remembered intellectual weight or inertia, then no.

Also, I think that development rarely happens on several axes simultaneously. The hot spot of development seems to jump around, and unfold its activity in a localized fashion.

Cheers,
Florian

Yeah. I'm not sure, either, but I know that my practice has brought developmental effects across several of the dimensions, and they do seem to be connected in ways that I don't really understand yet they seem obviously related to me. It reminds me of the econometric studies I do professionally -- there are leads and lags in the effects of things like interest rates on other things like employment, but the causal links can play out over months, even years.

"Leads and lags" is an interesting way of putting it. Would you say there is some kind of tension between them, and in an unbalanced development, these tensions can lead to a feeling of being torn apart or at least being yanked around?

Yes, absolutely, Florian.

One example of that in my mind is that contemplative development often runs smack into and conflicts with habitual behaviors - psychology.