Numinous Nonsense

I recently made my way through two very interesting books, one by the Christian mystic Bernadette Roberts, What is Self? and the other by developmental psychologist Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads. Bernadette Roberts explores the path towards the culmination of what she calls no-self, which begins with an identification with ego at the center of self, the dropping away of ego (or the experience of no-ego), into the unitive state, and finally the dropping away of even the unitive state (no-self). In many ways this is a classic description of the spiritual path, although her background in Christianity gives it a particular flavor (one I’m less familiar with having studied and practiced primarily in the Buddhist tradition).

On the other hand, Robert Kegan describes the development of the complexity that an individual goes through, each stage going beyond the one before it, through 5 orders of complexity. The 5th order, what he calls “reconstructive postmodernism”, is a stage in which any one larger set of theories or beliefs are subsumed into a larger meta-framework. Kegan describes the reconstructive postmodernism in this way:

the possibility of a reconstructive postmodernism suggests that one could in fact advocate identification with a theory, a stand, or a way, and that such advocacy need not necessarily be a backsliding reification of one kind of modernist authority or another. An example would be a theory that was really a theory about theory-making, a theory that was mindful of the tendency of any intellectual system to reify itself, to identify internal consistency with validity, to call its fourth order brand of subjectivity “objectivity.” The expression of such a theory’s “maturity” would not be the modernist capacity to defend itself against all challenges, to demonstrate how all data gathered to it can find a place within it, but to assume its incompleteness and seek out contradiction by which to nourish the ongoing process of its reconstruction.

I have a deep passion for both the deepening spiritual maturity that Bernadette describes as no-self as well as the full maturity of the self that Kegan describes in the 5th order. On the surface they sound at odds, and while I myself don’t want to try and unify them theoretically (I’ll leave that up to people who want to make such distinctions as structure-stages and state-stages) I do know that from first hand experience each path can support the other. One is the path of waking up, and the other is the path of growing up. Why not do both?