Quotes

Clare Graves on the Spiral Process of psycho-spiritual development

“Briefly what I am proposing is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiralling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower order behavioural systems to newer, higher-order systems as an individual’s existential problems change. Each successive stage, wave, or level of existence is a state through which people pass on their way to other stages of being. When the human is centralized in one state of existence, he or she has a psychology which is particular to that state. His or her feelings, motivations, ethics and values, biochemistry, degree of neurological activation, learning system, belief system, conception of mental health, ideas to what mental illness is and how it should be treated, conceptions of and preferences for management, education, economics, political theory and practice are all appropriate to that stage”

— Clare Graves [1]

The “Emergent, Cyclical, Double-Helix Model of Adult BioPsychoSocial Systems Development”.

“I am not saying in this conception of adult behaviour that one style of being, one form of human existence is inevitably and in all circumstances superior to or better than another form of human existence, another style of being.

What I am saying is that when one form of being is more congruent with the realities of existence, then it is the better form of living, for those realities. And what I am saying is that when one form of existence ceases to be functional for the realities of existence then some other form, either higher or lower in the hierarchy, is the better style of living.

I do suggest, however, and this I deeply believe is so, that for the overall welfare of total man’s existence in the world, over the long run of time, higher levels are better than lower levels, and that the prime good of any society’s governing figures should be to promote human movement up the levels of human existence.”

- Dr Clare W Graves [2]

Publications

* Book: The Never Ending Quest. By Clare Graves.

URL = https://spiraldynamics.org/resources/books/

"The book which Clare W. Grave was working on when his health failed and he was forced to curtail writing. We are making the chapters he had completed on the theory, his research, verification, and implications available for study. In addition, the editors (Christopher Cowan and Natasha Todorovic) have reconstructed the missing middle section covering details of the levels of existence from Dr. Graves's other writings and from audio recordings of him discussing the work in presentations and seminars."

* Book: Clare W. Graves: Levels of Human Existence.

URL = https://spiraldynamics.org/resources/books/

" ... a new transcription of recorded notes by William R. Lee from Dr. Graves's presentation at the Washington School of Psychiatry, 1971, with handout materials, diagrams, and data summary. Also, an authorized reprint of the classic 1970 Journal of Humanistic Psychology article, "Levels of Existence: An Open Systems Theory of Values" (not available electronically)."

More at : Clare Graves on his Levels of Existence Psychology ; Graves’s Double Helix Theory