Compare how different people describe the same kind of state

Read or listen to several descriptions of a similar experience and notice how the vocabulary changes with the person’s way of seeing.

Pourquoi ça marche

O’Fallon (2020) reports word studies of sentence completions — first 275,000 words, then 1.1 million — in which particular state words appeared consistently at particular stages: "focus" and "concentration" at one, "aware" at the next, "aware of aware" after that, and "timeless and boundless" at the latest. Whatever their final status, the observation that the language for states shifts with stage gives a reason to treat differing descriptions as different lenses rather than necessarily different experiences.

Comment faire

1. Collect three or four descriptions of a similar experience — from friends, a book, a podcast, or your own journal from years ago.
2. Underline the key words each one uses: focus, presence, God, energy, awareness, nothing, everything.
3. Ask what each person seems to be treating as the most real thing in the description.
4. Notice which description you instinctively rank as more advanced, and ask what that ranking says about your own lens.

Données probantes

The word studies are reported in O’Fallon (2020) from the STAGES research database; she reports that common state words and their synonyms consistently arise at particular stages. The studies are summarized in the paper rather than published in full, and the comparison exercise is untested. (mechanistic)

The word studies come from the model’s author, who is a partner in a company built on the model, and their methods are only briefly described. Vocabulary also reflects culture, religion and education, not only stage.

Sources

• O’Fallon, T. (2020). States and STAGES: Waking up Developmentally. Integral Review, 16(1).

Erreur fréquente

Using the vocabulary to rank people. Someone who says "God" and someone who says "awareness" may differ in background far more than in development.