The status of states round 2

Alderman's Integral Stages has produced another video on the topic here. I'm guessing Murray discussed the following from his IR article in one or both of the videos. It's something I explored years ago and in depth in this Ning thread.

"Human wisdom can be understood in terms of two processes: complexity capacity and spiritual clarity. [...] 'Spiritual clarity' is our term for the incremental results of this unlearning, healing, deconstruction, or 'shadow work.' [...] One can visit earlier states in a controlled fashion without fully 'regressing' to them. For example, in psychotherapy one might be flooded with the memories and feelings of a difficult moment in childhood. One can maintain an adult meta-cognition that allows for a re-interpretation of the memory and a re-integration of suppressed feelings, without fully regressing to the earlier age and action logic. Multiple action-logics can be 'on line' in consciousness simultaneously, though one's mental focus and performance seem to be oriented to one mode in any given moment."

"Putting all of this together, we can understand spiritually 'advanced' states or realizations of timelessness, spacelessness, and egolessness in terms of one's awareness gaining access to developmentally primitive states of being. Such access is possible when the neurological connections that constitute our constructed experiences of time, space, or ego, are released, seen through, or bypassed to reveal early states of undifferentiated perception. Thus, the growth of wisdom includes both movements of increasing complexity (in understanding interiors and exteriors), and movements of, as Bonnitta Roy calls it, releasing complexity."

"But even though the insights may feel sublime and profound, from a post-metaphysical perspective, one still does not have license to transform the experience of undifferentiated infant consciousness into a claim about how time and space do not really exist as such in objective reality (we can leave that claim to the scientists). Likewise, one who experiences the, sometimes ecstatically blissful, infant state of undifferentiated merger, might find insights about the nature of self (and about interpersonal realities), but such experiences alone to not give license to claim that one has discovered that the universe is nothing but love (or pure consciousness, etc.). Mystical experiences can thus be understood differently: not as solely 'high' states achieved through access to a metaphysical or spiritual realm, but as access to developmentally early states, closer to the animal world than the adult world, which are then interpreted by the adult mind to reveal meaningful insights."