I have for a long time been intrigued with the relationship between cognitive and spiritual development. Ken Wilber’s framework basically uses the ladder metaphor, where there is one sequence of several stages to pass through. Different dimensions of development may be "out of step" in this climbing process, but the metaphor suggests that this is something of an aberration from the "normal" pattern. I guess the piagetian notion of equilibrium is active here: the idea that a cognitive system (or here even broader: a self system) strives for coherence. I believe there is such an equilibrating tendency, but I believe it is relatively weak. I do believe that a person can feel very stable and coherent in a self combining, for example, a conformist mode of reasoning with a self-sense that has transcended embeddedness in an ego identity.

I have tried to make a sketch of possible combinations of spiritual and cognitive stages in the table below. The table is extremely simplified, its purpose is to show some possibilities rather than to represent reality. The vertical axis distinguishes just two structures of self-sense, embeddedness in an ego structure versus a self-sense anchored in a stable identification with pure, non-personal awareness. The horizontal axis condenses at least six stages of ego development (mainly following the Loevinger/Cook-Greuter/Torbert conceptualization, which emphasizes cognitive development) into three stages: Conformist, Rational, and Metarational (=vision-logic). I called this axis "Interpretation" in order to emphasize that how we make sense of the world around us and of ourselves must be differentiated from our basic felt self-sense. The former dimension is primarily related to cognition, the latter to feeling-experience. There are interdependency relationships between the two dimensions, but I have still to see an analysis of just what they look like.

The point I want to make (and this is not the first effort to make it) is that both dimensions are important. An exclusive focus on either self-transcendence or cognitive development will fail to address something essential, and may result in some important potentials being left unattended.