[K-list] The Exceptional Human Experience Process #4

[Guest guest]

This will cover # 5: Cognitive dissonance

(See below for the 5 "stages" and 12 "characteristics.)

Stage 1: The Initiating Event/Experience

5: Cognitive dissonance: The EE resides outside of the individual's

everyday life view or belief struture; temporarily (typically from a

few sdeconds to a few hours, rarely more than a day) the EEer shifts

his or her attentional focus away from baseline/steady state of

conscious awareness and the status quo is disrupted.

Stage 2: Search for Reconciliation

5: Cognitive dissonance: The search itself moves beyond the

previously acceptable paradigmatic framework into new

contexts/behaviors that can be threatening, peculiar, bizarre, or

exotic, in efforts to integrate EE into a new, revised life view and

to reset the status quo.

Stage 3: Between Two Worlds

5: Cognitive dissonance: Neither the old restrictive view of the

world nor the new one that loosely accommodates the experiencer and

the experience(s) is satisfactory, yet the experiencer feels that he

or she must choose one or the other and often switches between them.

Stage 4: In the Experiential Paradigm

5: Cognitive dissonance: The search that has brought the EHEer to a

new world pregnant with meaning, metaphor, discovery, and great

vision is not easily conveyed to those left behind in the old world.

Initial spontaneous entry (and often subsequent, early reiterations)

is paradoxically both shocking and desired.

Stage 5: A New Way of Being in the World

5: Cognitive dissonance: Experiential paradigm, transcendent

awareness has revealed an abundance of extensions, branches, worlds

of potential and possibility and inner self-awareness has deepened,

strengthened and coalesced the EHEer to the very core, yet the EHEer

consciously senses (with composed, calm urgency) that he or she must

choose a path and get on the program of life and living in the

world-at-large.

Next to come #7 "Deptentiating activities:

Love, Hillary

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It starts with an outline of 5 developmental stages worked out by Rhea White of the EHE Network:

1. The initiating event/experience

2. Search for reconciliation

3. Between two worlds

4. In the experiential paradigm

5. A new way of being in the world.

Suzanne V. Brown has taken these stages further, saying that "within

each of the stages there are qualitative sets of attributive

characteristics that could be used to distinguish (more or less) one

stage from the others."

So each stage is divided into 12 sets of characteristics, ultimately forming a matrix of 60 cells.

1. Definition

2. Examples

3. Search focus

4. Questions asked

5. Cognitive dissonance

6. Depotentiating activities

7. Results of depotentiation

8. Potentiating activities

9. Results of potentiation

10. Challenges

11. Critical juncture

12. Crossroads to next stage.