[K-list] The Exceptional Human Experience Process #6

[Guest guest]

This will cover # 8: Potentiating activities and #9 Results of potentiation

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

Stage 1: The Initiating Event/Experience

#8: Potentiating activities: Reading authoritative texts, papers;

contacting and communicating with relevant mainstream scientific,

religious, counseling authorities; sharing EE fears and wonders with

significant others; meeting and discussing similar types of EEs with

other experiencers; recording EE and thoughts/feelings about it in a

personal journal and/or submitting an EE account to the EHE Network;

developing new interests in TV shows, documentaries, books, research

papers, World Wide Web to gather information about the EE itself.

#9 Results of Potentiation: The EEer opens to exploration and

investigates EE within the traditional, mainstream world view;

gathers a wide variety of facts about the EE itself.

Stage 2: Search for Reconciliation

#8: Potentiating activities: Exploring a wide variety of

alternatives, assimilating the best of what each has to offer;

maintaining a balance of expansion and discrimination in questioning

practices, tools and practitioners rather than taking them at surface

value. Locating a mentor, practitioner, network, or support group of

fellow experiencers who recognize the process and will provide an

accepting environment without dogma.

#9 Results of Potentiation: A personal shift of life view that

desires knowledge over specific dogmas and the dawning realization

that there may be many roads to truth.

Stage 3: Between Two Worlds

#8 Potentiating activities: Accepting/valuing the experience for

what it was, what it meant, what it shared, where it led, and

entertaining possibilities for where it could lead. Feeling more

comfortable with ambiguity, paradoxes, uncertainty, and carrying this

comfort level back into everyday activities, even when experiencer has

no firm answers. Embracing any additional EEs and especially the

meaningful insights they engender. Thoughtfully and empathetically

sharing experience(s) with others. Striving to maintain a balance in

life and life view.

#9 Results of Potentiation: Experiencer's shift of life view

incorporates the best of both worlds, and accepts, assimilitates, and

integrates all life experience into a coordinated, authentic

collective representation of self.

Stage 4: In the Experiential Paradigm

#8 Potentiating activities: Recognizing, accepting, assimilating, and

integrating additional experiences into life view according to EHEer's

inner criteria for meaningfulness rather than tacit acceptance of

consensual views; recognizing other EHEers and mutuality of shared

path; more easily shifting personality preferences, vocabulary,

actions, social interaction style as circumstances warrant.

Beginning to recognize and follow a "calling."

#9 Results of Potentiation: EHEer realizes that he or she has a

unique contribution to make, purpose to fulfill, is an integral,

dynamic part of the whole, the Universe. Additional EEs to EHEs

intuited as signposts, becoming compass-pointers of life.

Stage 5: A New Way of Being in the World

#8: Potentiating activities: Acknowledging new EEs and transmuting

them into EHEs by questiooning meaningfulness; going inside to

resolve old issues remaining, including long-term aftereffects of

previous EHEs that may have been "lost in the shuffle." Taking

setbacks and doubts in stride and understanding that these are

opportunities to evolve further; learning new skills, meeting new

people and integrating these contributions into the EHEer's way

(personal calling) as perspective shifts and evolves. Recognizing,

respecting, and having compassion for our very humanness, holes and

wholes alike.

#9 Results of potentiation: The EHEer is living, being, fulfilling,

and doing a personal project of transcendence (i.e., has grounded

inner calling into life-worthy projects), and has the flexibility to

shift means, methods, and tools as needed to accomplish it.

Next to come #10 Challenges.

Love, Hillary

******************

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.