It's a fine line

Before laying out stages of spiritual growth, which is actually only a small part of the "Integral Operating System" or IOS, which is the term used to describe this philosophy, it is important to talk about lines of development.

Everyone is good at some things and not at others. Moreover, you have skill sets that you can practice, or forget. Your skill sets are not just manual labor things, or computer things, but also personal things, like your skill with relating to other people, for instance. You also have things that you develop over your life that aren't exactly skill sets, like your morality and sexuality.

All of these things progress through stages. Each of these skill sets or abilities is referred to as a line. For example, if you can read this, you have skill in reading, but you did not always. Your reading skill went through stages. As a child, you learned to recognize letters and recite the alphabet. In elementary school, you learned to sound out the letters and make words. By the time you hit third grade, you were reading easy paragraphs. By high school, you were able to read just about anything, though understanding it all was another matter. Even today, as you read more, you experience more words and learn more things, which make understanding easier.

Your reading stages were probably defined by "grade level". Stages are given names by people who create systems to name them. However, in reality they are all arbitrarily defined.

Nevertheless, the stages are there, and any skill or ability line you can think of has stages. Of particular interest are the lines in morality, cognitive skill, interpersonal relations, emotional maturity, and psychosexual development. Everybody is at different stages in each one. You may be at Stage 2 morality, Stage 3 cognitive, Stage 1 interpersonal, Stage 1 emotional, and Stage 3 psychosexual, for example. A person like that would be extremely rational or intellectually developed, but not too understanding of matters outside their own emotions or personal internal relationship... though for some reason they'd be a pistol in bed.

The number of stages, as I said, is arbitrary. One way to look at it is to use a 3-stage system. Take morality for example. Stage 1 morality would be the egocentric stage, or "me" stage. Your concern would center around fulfilling your own personal physical needs above anything else. In stage 2, you would progress to the "us" stage, where you are now ethnocentric. You realize that there is benefit to fulfilling the needs of yourself AND the people immediately around you in your own family, clan, tribe, or what have you. Upon reaching stage three, you would be at the "all of us" stage, where you are now world-centric. You realize that your tribe is connected to many others, and that all of them are dependent on each other in some way. Your primary concern would be doing what's best for all groups, tribes, clans, etc.

There are, of course, other ways to define those particular moral stages. IOS literature does not tell you what stages to use, only that there are stages, and it suggests some possible stages you could use, based on decades of psychology research.

Now, think of a line for spiritual development.... What stages do you think it would have?