Material and animate perceptions
The current New Scientist has an article exploring the human tendency to believe in God and why it has arisen.
It mentions a theory in which there are essentially two modes of perception. One is material perception, whereby we perceive everything as an object, subject to the laws of the universe. In the other we perceive everything to be animate and conscious.
It strikes me, that if true, this represents the oscillation in Graves’ values between ‘I’ and ‘WE’ systems. As the systems develop, the interaction between the two becomes more sophisticated, but still swinging from one viewpoint to the other. ‘I’ being the material viewpoint and ‘We’ being the animate viewpoint.
Tags: EC theory, Spiral Dynamics