Credit goes to Steve (steve@powersupply.net) for inspiring today's blog entry.  We've had an exchange (verbose on my part) below in Comments regarding Achievement-Affiliative states of consciousness, and their interactions.  I'll give an overview here; *WARNING* not brief, probably boring to many folks.

[Bear with me, I need to figure out how to add a pic to this blog; would like to show everyone Professor Wade's diagram of consciousness evolution, so you can make more sense of the schism we've been discussing.  If you see a pic here at a later date, you know I figured it out!  If you have short and sweet, push-the-button-dummy instructions on how to insert a pic, feel free to leave it in the comments, thanks!]

Anyhow, Wade's book, Changes of Mind (see link downthread), identifies different evolutionary states of human consciousness as:

pre- and perinatal; reactive; naive; egocentric; conformist; achievement; affiliative; authentic; transcendant; unity; after death. 

Theoretically, humans tend to evolve/emerge as they mature through these states of consciousness, although most functional adults do not evolve through to authentic consciousness.  Most humans move directly to post-life consciousness without experiencing states authentic through unity.  (It could be that our next evolutionary phase in human development may be the accessing of authentic and then unity consciousness, without having to become yogis or shamans or other expert practitioner of meditative methods.  I recommend reading both Wade's book Changes of Mind and Ken Wilber's work in pursuit of more theory in this area.)

My personal observation: the majority of functional adults in first and second worlds tend to exist in either Achievement or Affiliative states of consciousness (with less than 40% of adults spread across egocentric, conformist and authentic states).  Although masulinity and femininity are traits on a sliding scale, there appears to be a higher concentration of males in Achievement consciousness, and females in Affiliative consciousness.  By reason of differentiation in conscious states, males and females tend to be at odds with each other.  (This is a generalization, not an absolute.)

Compare some of Wade's characteristics of Achievement state against Affiliation state of conscious - perhaps you'll come away in agreement:

Again, this is only some of the characteristics that Wade outlines in her text; I’m sure you get the idea from these few traits, though.  (Which one of these do you identify with?  I’m on the fence any given day of the week.)

John Gray's work (you know, the ubiquitous Venus and Mars stuff) unconsciously acknowledges this difference along gender lines.  He consciously is aware of differences between men and women, but does not explicitly address different states of consciousness.  The challenge for Gray is the generalization; the fact that males can also be Affiliative and females Achievement means that for some portion of the population, the Venus/Mars "solutions" will be flipped or not work at all.

What would be nice here at this point is to hear from those who identify as Affiliative -- what is it like on your side of the fence, when you get home, and why do you need to vent? what is it that bugs you about the Achiever in your life?  what do you need from them?  Please leave comments - I'll be watching for them, thanks.  [Achievers, feel free to comment as well, but Steve may have you covered in comments downthread.]  I have my own theories, Professor Wade has identified a primary challenge for each conscious state, and other folks like Ken Wilber have their own ideas.  Might be nice to connect the dots.

Of course, if no one besides Steve is reading this, guess it’s going to be a short discussion.  And maybe by now I’ve lost Steve as a participant and I’m whistling in an empty room.

Won’t be the first time…

8:51:36 PM    comment []