Unusual before midlife, Stage 5 knows intimately the sacrament of defeat and the reality of irrevocable commitments and acts.  Its emergent strength is the ability to live with paradox and to develop a sense of responsibility for the world which spans beyond the attainables of one’s lifetime.

Stage 5 Personal Values

Stage 5 involves going beyond the rational systems and clear boundaries of Stage 4 to include our unconscious processes.  In this stage we must come to terms with the fact that the conscious ego is not master in its own house.  Stage 5 understands that the content of faith, as well as the symbols and stories used to understand and share faith, are all shaped by unconscious processes.

The disrupting trends of our unconscious processes are one of the great problems of religious life.  If we fail to consciously establish a uniting center of values, relative to which we attempt to relate all of the processes of our inner lives -- including our unconscious needs and desires -- the result can be an uncomfortable failure of personality integration.

 

By this I mean that we find ourselves functioning relative to different sets of values in different social settings.  We have failed to integrate our personality relative to a central core of values.  The establishment of such a central core of values results in an orientation of personality  which persists across our participation in various social contexts.  Achieving this degree of personality integration is a crucial precursor to Adjuster fusion.  It is a necessary achievement for the attainment of a functional level of cosmic citizenship. 

Moral judgment in stage 5 reaches beyond the interests of the self and one's community and seeks higher principles which are universal in nature.

There is a deepened sense of self as both individual and an integral part of the human community.  There is a recognition of oneself as paradox: both gifted and flawed, strong and weak.  There may be a revival and expansion of earlier perceptions of the self as defined by a role played in a metaphysical drama.

The tasks of this stage are:

1. The recognition and acceptance of life as having contradictory or inconsistent qualities.
2. A reworking of the image of self and world integrating symbol, story and scientific/philosophic understanding. 
3. An understanding that “truth” is found within numerous stories and interpretations, not exclusively within one’s own.
4. A claiming and reworking of the meaning and value of one’s own life, past and present.

Stage 5 Social Values

The boundary of social consciousness now seeks to become more universal in nature.  There is a deepened interest in the values of groups, social classes and traditions other than one's own.

There is an integration of our judgments and experiences with reflection on claims made by others and of various expressions of cumulative human wisdom.  We begin to function in more consciously effective liason with the Adjuster in the choosing of the values relative to which we make our decisions. 

Symbolic thinking regains equal value with critical and reflective thinking.  The power and logic of the rational intellect is increasingly utilitzed to identify and integrate unconscious processes.  Old symbols acquire a new richness of meaning and value.  There is a growing recognition that all “knowing” is metaphoric; there is a readiness for participation in the reality expressed in symbol and myth.

Our world view is becomes that of the universe as a living organism of which the self is a living, contributing part.  This is not merely an intellectual assent to an idea.  Rather does this concept of the universe as a living organism become the central point of value relative to which we choose the moral and spiritual values which are implemented into our behaviors and decision-making processes.

Stage 5 Supportive Stories

At Stage 5, self-selected supportive stories provide symbolic representations of the infinite.  There is an openness to meanings and values which might be derived from other stories.  There is a recognition that the purpose of stories is to facilitate the choosing of higher meanings and values rather than to authoritatively represent actual reality.

Stage 5 Faith Experience

In the domain of faith there is an increasing effort to live relative to one’s best understanding of God’s purposes.  There is a sense that we are participants in a created, ordered universe; that the Creator is ultimately in control; that our existence contains meaning and is of value in the universe.

Belief at this stage includes a realization and acceptance of the fact that all human ideas and understandings are fallible and destined to change.  There is an understanding that God alone is infallible and changeless.  A genuine openness to the truths of traditions and communities other than one’s own appears.

Stage 5 Faith Challenges

Stage 4 is satisfied with an “either/or”, “black and white” view of reality in which concepts are well-defined by rigorous logical thinking.  Stage 5 sees both (or the many) sides of an issue simultaneously and suspects that things are organically related to each other.

Stage 5 understands that truth is more multidimensional and organically interdependent than most theories or accounts of truth can grasp.  Stage 5 also sees that the relativity of religious traditions which matters is not their relativity to each other, but their relativity to the reality to which they mediate relationship.  Stage 5's radical openness to the truth of other traditions is not mere tolerance; it stems from the awareness that the reality of the infinite is greater than any medium of expression.

The new strength of this stage is a capacity to fully accept the most powerful meanings of our personal experience or of our social group, while simultaneously recognizing that these values are relative, partial and inevitably distorting apprehensions of transcendent reality.  The danger of this stage lies in the direction of a paralyzing complacency or cynical withdrawal, due to its paradoxical understanding of truth.

1138:5  103:7.7 "What both developing science and religion need is more searching and fearless self-criticism, a greater awareness of incompleteness in evolutionary status. The teachers of both science and religion are often altogether too self-confident and dogmatic. Science and religion can only be self-critical of their facts. The moment departure is made from the stage of facts, reason abdicates or else rapidly degenerates into a consort of false logic."

Stage 5 involves a critical recognition of our social unconscious–the myths, ideal images and prejudices built deeply into the self-system by virtue of our nurture within a particular social class, religious tradition, ethnic group or the like.

Crisis leading from Stage 5 to Stage 6

The crisis leading to Stage 6 is the recognition that loyalty to emerging new meanings and values may require sacrifice -- of our lifestyle, social position, or in some cases, of life itself.