Does Consciousness Develop?
By: Gary Niemen
Tags: Personal Development, Enlightenment, Mind, Consciousness, Psychology

I am interested in and passionate about many things — so when people ask me what I am into, it is sometimes difficult to give a quick answer. If I had to choose one overriding theme, I guess it would be consciousness. Or, as I heard somebody say recently: Life and Mind.

I am conscious. That much I know. But what is consciousness? Where does consciousness come from? Where is it going? Does it develop? As in, personal development, spiritual growth, or the quest for enlightenment? Or is consciousness just here and now? An unchanging, ever-present backdrop to our experience.

Here, I am going to discuss: Does consciousness develop? Or is it unchanging and ever-present? And I am going to suggest that the answer is both.

To explain this, it is key to understand the difference between states and stages. (Just to note, I am talking about the human experience here. I am not talking about consciousness as it relates to the evolution of the Universe — of which humans are but a bit-player.)

When I was in my 20s, I had an experience during a meditation retreat that could be called a peak experience. I experienced consciousness directly and felt a joyful feeling of oneness with everything around me. The experience lasted about an hour and then it was gone. Back to my normal self. What I experienced was a state.

As the author, philosopher, and integral theorist Ken Wilber says in the article States, Stages, and the Three Kinds of Self:

States are ever-present, meaning they can be experienced at any time in our lives, and are often accessed through spiritual practices like meditation or prayer; through physical practices like athletics or yoga; through deep intimacy, sexuality, and relationships; through altered or drug-induced states; or even completely spontaneously while walking down the street or taking a shower.

So — on a good day — I can meditate deeply and directly experience the consciousness within me. It is still and silent and alive. It is perfect as it is. It needs nothing. It has no intention. It is simply present-moment awareness. From this perspective, consciousness does not develop. It just is.

According to Wilber, when you experience a state, your experience of it depends on your stage. So let’s talk about stages of consciousness. What are they and do they exist?

As Wilber describes in the same article:

Stages of consciousness represent a measure of our growth and maturity. Stages have been studied in the West by developmental psychologists like Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, Carol Gilligan, Abraham Maslow, and Jean Gebser, all of whom have created sophisticated models of development that can be generically summarized as moving from ego-centric stages, to ethno-centric stages, to world-centric stages, and beyond. These stages are experienced in succession — that is, you have to move through stage 3 of psychological development before you can hit stage 4.

There are many more developmental models including: Eric Ericsson’s stages of psychosocial development, Jane Loevinger’s stages of ego development, Clare Graves’ emergent cyclical theory aspects of which evolved into Don Beck and Christopher Cowan’s Spiral Dynamics, and Ken Wilber’s Developmental Stages of Consciousness. Wilber’s work is particularly impressive as he also includes insights from the East such as from the Vedas (a large body of religious texts originating in ancient India) and Buddhism (which has a strong focus on human psychology).

And I wouldn’t want to exclude Sri Aurobindo’s Theory of Spiritual Evolution and Teilhard de Chardin’s philosophical theories on the development of humans and their continuing evolutionary development of the noosphere (which is: the thinking and conscious layer of his evolutionary model).

So it seems human development is a thing. As I had hoped as a young person captivated by the possibility of following in the footsteps of the Buddha and achieving spiritual enlightenment. Let’s break it down a bit.

First, there is a natural developmental journey as we go from being an infant to being an adult. According to Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, the stages are Sensorimotor (0–2 years), Preoperational (2–6 years), Concrete operational (6–12 years), and Formal operational (12-adult). Most, but not all adults develop to Formal operational.

Beyond this natural development, there seems to be in humans the possibility to develop further (according to the researchers mentioned above and more ). To consciously work on yourself in order to grow. In Ken Wilber’s Developmental Stages of Consciousness, there are 9 stages of human development. In earlier versions of his work, Wilber breaks the 9 stages into: pre-personal, personal, and transpersonal.

Pre-personal tends to correspond to traditional developmental thinkers such as Piaget and Ericsson. Include Freud in this category too. Personal corresponds to the work of ego psychologists such as Loevinger and humanistic psychologists such as Maslow. Jung and Assagioli would belong here too. And transpersonal (going beyond the personal) typically corresponds to the developmental insights of Eastern mystic traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism.