1. Conscious Perception–the ver-ry first stage. Can’t go anywhere w/o seeing things, taking note of them, making basic distinctions.
2. Establishing Empathy and Relevance: making those basic connections that allow the mind (reason, imagination, consciousness) to go/see further ‘into’ things. Connecting the conscious mind to the world around it.
3. Understanding–have to be able to process all that one takes in and sees. Have to think about and mull over things for a period of time. Requires focus, patience, and analysis. Understandings become fuller with time, experience, and education.
4. Genuine Insight and Application–comes with further experience, epiphanies, time passing, perspective, significant connected learning. One must also apply, practise, and live the vision one has of life to establish the worth of such knowledge, insight, and philosophy.
5. Acceptance and Appreciation–the final stage in which the person is very aware of all the positives and negatives/the world’s built-in ambiguity/irony/craziness, but has Keatsian “Negative capability” with all this information, knowledge, insight, and perspective. That is, “…capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason”. (Keats, pictured above) And has sympathetic understanding and values that which is good in life, nature, and people. In that, self-fulfillment and self-actualization of the highest order.