Notice what your attention treats as real objects

Sort a day’s concerns into concrete, subtle, and awareness-level objects to see which tier you mostly live in.

Por que funciona

In the STAGES model the first and most basic parameter is the kind of object a person can hold in awareness: concrete objects (things, bodies, rules), subtle objects (thoughts, feelings, goals, systems, other perspectives), or MetAware objects (awareness itself, constructs as constructs). Each tier repeats the same pattern with a new kind of object. Deliberately sorting what you attend to makes the parameter visible in your own experience instead of leaving it as a diagram.

Como fazer

1. At the end of a day, list ten things that occupied your attention — worries, plans, conversations, decisions.
2. Mark each one C (a concrete thing, event, or rule), S (a thought, feeling, goal, relationship pattern, or system), or M (noticing awareness itself, or seeing a belief as a construction while it is happening).
3. Look at the proportions, without scoring yourself. Notice which kind of object you reach for first when something goes wrong.
4. Repeat for a week and note whether the mix changes with stress, sleep, or setting.

Evidência

The three object types (concrete, subtle, MetAware) are the first of the three parameters O’Fallon uses to define the 12 stages, set out in the 2020 Integral Review special issue. Her 2020 paper describes how each tier repeats the same pattern with a new kind of object. The sorting exercise is a reflective use of that parameter, not a validated measure. (mechanistic)

Self-sorting is not a stage assessment. People can attend to subtle or awareness-level objects in a moment without that being their stable way of making meaning.

Fontes

• O’Fallon, T. (2020). States and STAGES: Waking up Developmentally. Integral Review, 16(1).
• Murray, T., & O’Fallon, T. (2020). A Summary of Research on and with the STAGES Developmental Model. Integral Review, 16(1).

Erro comum

Treating a high share of "M" items as proof of a late stage. Talking about awareness is itself a subtle-tier activity; the model is about what you can reliably hold as object, not what you can describe.