Michael Washburn's is one, Ken WIlber is the other

In his personal thread, Derek mentioned two models that link psychology and awakening, Washburn and Wilber, and he lent me Washburn's book. I'm kinda struggling to get through it due to the writing style, but the general model is interesting. Frankly, Washburn and Wilber's model are pretty similar.

In my own words, they both basically say that raw experience is too strong to fully experience as a child, so we develop a way to relate to experience that is conceptual. The from of conceptionality is partially biological determined (childhood and adult development stages) and is partially personal (one's own flavors of trauma and reaction formation). But over time, there is a seeing of the limitation of a conceptual relationship to experience (oh that experience means X and I relate to X by doing Y), it's very slow and formulaic.

So in adulthood, there is the dismantling of conceptualilty and more and more direct experience of life itself.

This eventually moves into so-called spiritual experiences, which dismantle the basic mental construct that there is a subject self that experiences the objective world. It could be describes as a merging with experience itself. Eventually, the conceptual nature of self is seen.

What is interesting about these models is that even after stages of awakening to the conceptual nature of self, there are still "blobs" of one's mental patterns that are still in the conceptual mode of experiencing. So the ongoing challenge is to keep dismantling these remaining habitual ways of seeing/relating to patterns of experience.

Anyway, with all the recent thread(s) on "is there suffering post awakening or not?", it seems like an answer could be: "mostly no, but sometimes yes, and in which case, having seen it, even less."

Or not.

Conceptual was my attempt at a word that would cut across all mental frameworks in the psychological and awakening stages of development. I'll skim the book to see the extent to which DO is addressed specifically. That's a good question.

So... No D.O. that I can find in the book. Again, good question.

And what jumps out, more and more, is the author's willingness to posit metaphysical entities that are causal in his psychological model: "The Original Source" , the non-egoic pole, the Primordial Self, the Sovereign Spirit, etc. I don't mind the map making, but it does come off as academic, especially the language used to attempt to describe the higher levels of development.

"adding valence" - good turn of phrase!