I post this with no intention of making a point but to share a new learning for me. Going through the intro material and stumbling on to the 10 stages of ego development, I found the model that I have consciously been striving for since I was a teen. I had met a handful of people like this and I knew in my gut they were different. This is the ALCHEMIST. I make no claims to being an alchemist but my ideal is to have temperate passions, a courageously loving heart, and a curious mind in a quiet and gentle manner. The main goal is to project and be a truly calm and serene presence regardless of circumstances. I would like to know other people’s thoughts but I already knew having used this platform this is not the kind of post that will excite many people. There may be no platform that this would excite responses because it is too prosaic. Hey, maybe that is a part of being an alchemist.
The one statement I like is the Alchemist doesn’t need to read or construct ever increasing sophisticated models of reality anymore. I burned many candles down in many areas of my life and I am currently consciously trying to burn this candle out by overloading myself with a tough reading schedule. Sooner or later the awareness will be born that for all the intellectuals I have read, almost all of them are dead, it was nice sharing their brain but talking to a variety of people on a day to day basis is far more interesting than ponderous tomes about everything under the sun.
For those of you who may have forgotten, here is a definition of Alchemist:
Adult Population: <1%
Growth Into
Differentiation from the prior stage occurs when the Strategist becomes increasingly exhausted by the complexity of their mind and the limitation of being a self that pursues ever-grander goals while constructing realities through mental activity in order to propagate those goals and that self. The Alchemist emerges from a deep knowing that all experience is an ongoing process of mental construction and the self is maintained only through a contradictory process of storytelling.
Summary
A small fraction of adults in the western world evolve to Alchemist consciousness, a shape of mind whose defining characteristic is the ability to see through constructions placed on a mysterious reality–from language to economic systems, from emotional patterning to political discourse–and to do so in nearly real-time (meaning that the Alchemist doesn’t overly-identify with the shifting, phenomenal nature of experience).
For the Alchemist this creates what feels like a paradoxical and irresolvable tension of living authentically amidst a world of ever-reflecting surfaces: even though the Alchemist can see through all of them it still requires constant surrender to the tension of being anybody at all in a world that desperately demands “somebodies” (demanding that everyone play their roles and adopt various guises to satisfy wants and social expectations). Indeed, this becomes a surrender into a near-constant state of presence as the only realm where the illusive play of opposites is resolved without artifice.
As leaders, Alchemists can wield the extraordinary innate power this represents if they are motivated to do so, though they are just as likely to smile politely at the incentives that social systems (corporations, government, unions etc.) have learned to use to motivate earlier shapes of mind. And just as well, as Alchemists might embark on positively-subversive transformation projects that may not nourish how earlier shapes of mind judge goodness and utility; they cognitively inhabit a time-scale (decades, centuries or more), sense of being and breadth of consideration that is foreign to a majority of the adult population. (One prominent developmentalist has told me he has never seen this shape of mind in anyone before their late 30s, and most far later than that.)