when you were born, you had no distinction between what was 'inside' and what was 'outside'. you could not tell yourself apart from the world or think of the world as having parts. you lived in the territory with no map. but somewhere around 6 months after birth you began to see a split between yourself and other things. you went from being the world to being part of the world. you became the subject of your thoughts and made the rest of the world object. you developed an inside apart from the outside. you separated the map from the territory.
let's call this stage of differentiation the first balance in your evolution of meaning and the precursor stage of nondifferentiation the zeroth balance. transitioning from the zeroth balance to the first gave you the ability to make meaning where previously you could not, because meaning is what we call the process that bridges the gap between inside and out. it is the way that sense is made and why stuff matters. it's how we connect the map to the territory.
from there you began a process of transitioning thought patterns from inside to out. when you were a child in the first balance, you made 'mistakes' like thinking that a far away big thing is small or that the way the world is now is the way it has always been and always will be. but slowly that changed, and by the time you were 8 years old you could tell that a big thing that is far away is still big and knew that the past and the future are not just like the present. you learned how to separate your experience of reality from reality itself. this stage of placing experience outside yourself is the second evolutionary balance in meaning.
it can be hard to remember, but there was a process you went through to go from the first to the second balance. in that process you so reorganized your thinking that old ways of thought probably seemed foreign to you after. if you had an imaginary friend, it's probably hard to think of them now as anything more than a pretend friend, but children with imaginary friends play with them as if they are as real as anyone else in their lives. to them their 'imaginary' friend is part of reality. it's only as they get older and enter the second balance where they can think of their experiences as object that they tend to lose interest because they realize their imaginary friend is just that—imaginary—and shift to more real forms of play.
but maybe you never had an imaginary friend. then consider this stylized story:
suppose you spent your life looking at the ground. you never looked above the horizontal plane, but you could see that sometimes the ground got darker or lighter. sometimes it changed based on where you were standing, sometimes based on time of day, and sometimes based on nothing at all. without being able to look up and see the things creating shade you could only see the shadows. you knew something was going on but for you the shadows, the effects, were all that was real. it's not until you figure out how to look up that you can begin to understand where the shadows come from.
looking up in the story is like being able to consider something object, to move it outside yourself. by looking up you find out that the shadows are not the world, but something that is part of a bigger world. this broadening of perspective to include more things, supported by an ability to shift a key component of thought from inside to outside, from subject to object, is the pattern of mental growth we saw when you shifted from the first to the second balance and will see again when we consider your shift from the second to the third balance.
around the age of 12 you entered adolescence, literally 'growth to maturity', and the start of your transition to a third balance. until now your behavior was mostly not separated from your desires. if you wanted to do something then you probably did it, or at least had to work very hard not to do it. you can probably think of a time when, as a child, an adult told you not to touch something fragile like a vase, but you really wanted to touch it. you had to actively stop yourself from touching the vase by distracting yourself or just getting away from the vase. if no one was watching and you thought you could get away with it, you touched the vase! this act of forcing yourself to behave in a certain way was the beginning of your transition to the third balance where preferences move outside and become an object of your thoughts.
the third balance is the traditional balance of adulthood and most people reach it fully in their late teens or early twenties. in the third balance you can consider and manipulate your preferences to determine your behavior in order to achieve the things you want. it becomes possible to endure boring dinner parties and work hard when you would rather be relaxing on a beach, and this ability is what separates children from adults. when a child doesn't do their chores because they want to play adults might get upset, but when an adult doesn't work because they want to goof-off instead other adults assign such a person low status. in effect the ability to control one's preferences moment-to-moment is what separates children from adults.
reaching each of these three balances required pressure to broaden your way of meaning making. by existing and having an awareness of being you were pushed from the zeroth balance to the first. as you faced mistakes you made in understanding the world in the first balance you moved into the second. and as you grew older, other people and your culture made demands on your behavior that led you toward the third balance. but that is not the end of human psychological development, although it would be easy to think it is.
entering the third balance is predicated on your community and culture expecting certain things of you. if you have only one community and one culture then there is no need for further development. if you fit and conform to your culture's norms you'll need nothing more. to move more of your thoughts outside yourself, to make them the object of your thoughts, you first need some reason to do that. and so the fourth balance opens up to us when, having reached the third balance, we find ourselves faced with the pressures of a society with multiple cultures that interact and force you to accept and understand the expectations placed on people by different cultures.
the fourth balance is where you learn to put your self-perceptions and others' perceptions of you, often guided by the lens of culture, outside yourself. you develop the ability to examine and choose how others will perceive you and how you will think about yourself. you gain the ability to actively choose identity rather than have it placed upon you, because entering the fourth balance is the first step towards true agency.
sharing the way of developing this kind of agency is part of why i started this blog. so far we've explored mapmaking and wayfinding, the mental processes you made object in the second and third balances, respectively. those were merely the necessary precursors to where we are going next. we'll start our study of agency with the skill of directing, the mental processes for metaperceptions that you make object in the fourth balance, and later continue it by looking at what lies beyond the fourth balance for the evolving self.