Savanah Gray

“If you want to understand another person in some fundamental way you must know where the person is in his or her evolution...the way in which the person is settling the issue of what is 'self' and what is 'other' essentially defines the underlying logic (or 'psychologic') of the person's meanings.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“The struggle of the sexes to know each other, to see each other, and to communicate deeply - a struggle which may be more a feature of adult life in the West than at any time in the past - may rest in the capacity of men and women to learn the universal language they share, an evolutionary esperanto, the dialectical context in which these two poles are joined. It may rest in their recognition that neither differentiation nor integration is prior, but that each is a part of the reality of being alive.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“Depression characterized by the 'threat-to' orientation lodges itself in one side of the proposition. Doing so does not eliminate doubt, it only places it in the world. The world has become doubtful; what I doubt is my capacity to continue living in such a world. I doubt whether I can make it given how things are. I experience a kind of shrinking, or diminution of my self; but what remains clear - what I am most wanting to hold clear - is who it is that is doing the doubting, who 'I' am. As it seems to 'me,' what 'I' doubt is whether, in the face of the way the world has become, 'I' can keep myself together, my self together. From the point of view of our paradigm, that which 'I' say means: I doubt whether I can keep it together, this balance. What is being doubted, really, from our point of view, is the capacity to continue knowing, which, phenomenologically, from the view of the self, entails the capacity to continue being.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development

“All transitions involve leaving a consolidated self behind before any new self can take its place. At the 4-5 shift this means abandoning - or somehow operating without reliance upon - the form, the group, standard, or convention. For some this leads to feelings of being 'beyond good and evil,' which phenomenologically amounts to looking at that beyondness from the view of the old self, and thus involves strong feelings of evil. Ethical relativism - the belief that there is no (nonarbitrary) basis for considering one thing more right than another - is, on the one hand, the father of tolerance; it stands against the condemning judgment; but it must also stand against the affirming judgment, and so is vulnerable to cynicism. Every transition involves to some extent the killing off of the old self.”
― Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development