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'''THE STAGES OF FAITH'''

'''THE STAGES OF FAITH'''

I already mentioned that Wilber, like Fowler, is a faith-stage theorist.  But Wilber deals with stages in a much broader and more generalized way.  He draws heavily on many specialties within the field of developmental psychology, including Fowler‘s work.  Over the last hundred years there has been a lot of psychological research devoted to the stages of human development. The interesting thing about this research which is coming from many different places and many different angles, is that it all has in common the view that human development unfolds in distinct stages, and these stages occur in a set and predictable order, just as we mentioned with Fowler.  The number of named stages, and the labels assigned them may differ, but in general all follow one scheme which can be simplified to three phases:  egocentric to ethnocentric to world-centric  (it’s all about me, it’s all about my group, it’s all about all of us).  Of course, there can be many identified and named stages in between, but this is the general directional flow—away from ego and toward global identity.  As we said earlier, it is entirely possible to fail to ever grow beyond a given stage.  However, assuming one is progressing, it is impossible to skip around in these stages because each one is necessarily built on the foundation of the previous stage.  So the order of progression never changes.   

I already mentioned that Wilber, like Fowler, is a faith-stage theorist.  But Wilber deals with stages in a much broader and more generalized way.  He draws heavily on many specialties within the field of developmental psychology, including Fowler‘s work.  Over the last hundred years there has been a lot of psychological research devoted to the stages of human development. The interesting thing about this research which is coming from many different places and many different angles, is that it all has in common the view that human development unfolds in distinct stages, and these stages occur in a set and predictable order, just as we mentioned with Fowler.  The number of named stages, and the labels assigned them may differ, but in general all follow one scheme which can be simplified to three phases:  egocentric to ethnocentric to world-centric  (it’s all about me, it’s all about my group, it’s all about all of us).  Of course, there can be many identified and named stages in between, but this is the general directional flow—away from ego and toward global identity.  As we said earlier, it is entirely possible to fail to ever grow beyond a given stage.  However, assuming one is progressing, it is impossible to skip around in these stages because each one is necessarily built on the foundation of the previous stage.  So the order of progression never changes.