“It all starts here.” Mikey - The Goonies

There’s a fascinating area of research I’ve been into for the last few years or so called developmental psychology which has completely reshaped the way I see the world. I’ll attempt to outline the points of interest here while doing my best to reduce academic headiness, so we’ll see how that goes…

The best place to start as any is with levels of development; which outline the various patterns a person goes through starting at birth, given the appropriate life conditions (or fulfillment of certain needs at specific times in his / her development) that would allow for a continuous and healthy growth process to occur. This is also the core of the popular Spiral Dynamics management approach which demonstrates how someone’s value systems can change over time.

I’m going to stress checking out all of the these links, since I plan on referencing this stuff throughout this blog, particularly the Integral approach. Also, click on these graphical representations for the larger versions, which I think are good at transmitting the big picture (thanks to slark on flickr.com):

Cool huh? I think these concepts can go to all sorts of lengths at explaining, to greater degree of depth and accuracy, anything from current events, to politics, religion, art etc. using these color schemes–which get at why people do the things they do. BTW: If you’ve been perceptive enough to notice slight color differences between the spiral and the lines have no fear! It’s the same scale just a little altered for reasons (ie Don Beck and Chris Cowen vs. Ken Wilber respectively) we might get into later, but for practical purposes just equate the coinciding colors. ie: purple = magenta; blue = amber; yellow=teal; and coral=indigo and thats that.

Whew. That might be a lot to swallow at first (unless of course you feel it naturally describes a lot of stuff you’ve already felt to be true already, in which case welcome to the Second Tier as described in those overviews), but now we have a good set of terminology to dialog with.