In Part 1, we explored how human development follows predictable patterns and by mapping those to college we can live with greater success, happiness, and love.

We started with the Tier 1 stages of college ego development—the phases where you learn how to belong, succeed, and author a coherent self. But if you stay there long enough, something strange happens. The life you built starts to feel tight. The rules you mastered start to feel arbitrary. And the self you worked so hard to become begins to feel like it’s in the way.

In this part, we explore the Tier 2 Stages: The Cosmic Systematist and Cosmic Wizard—the stages where the self is no longer just built, but gently taken apart. Tier 2 is where you realize the character sheet you've been building is part of a meta-systemic game. More and more emphasis is put on understanding the self at a meta-systemic level both individually and collectively, how it shapes reality, and how we can influence it for human development.

Let's boogy.

Stage 4: Cosmic Systematist

Summary: The Cosmic systematist is the first stage aware of the other stages with their new 4th person perspective taking and starting to see college and reality as a web of perspectives, systems, and developmental contexts. They no longer seek a single “right” worldview, but instead study how worldviews themselves are constructed. They transcend self-improvement opening college as a dance for self-actualization, systemic meta-thinking, relational depth, and the early stirrings of spirituality. Past and future are deemed as important but a new fascination is found in the present and the nature of relativism. Often, however, this new stage is met with groundlessness, impracticality, and a residual judgment of earlier stages. There is still not enough appreciation and depth for the profound degree one's self shapes college reality.

Potential Examples:

• Club president focusing on education reform and DEI initiatives
• Student realizing that how a syllabus is structured reflects implicit values about knowledge, authority, and success
• Realizing “good studying” is not universal, but shaped by discipline, incentives, culture, and personality

Self-Other Boundary: Self is capable of taking a 4th person perspective on 1st, 2nd, and 3rd persons, allowing them to begin analyzing, evaluating, and creating models for meta-systemic societal structures across internal individual and collective life as well as external.

Light Side:

• Beginnings of systems thinking, nuance, and multiplicity of perspectives
• High empathy and capacity to understand others’ inner worlds
• Values collaboration, dialogue, and collective flourishing
• Begins integrating mind, heart, body, and meaning
• Predominantly positively motivated
• Able to fulfill most of needs from one's own self
• Deconstructs old external and even intrinsic values of success and starts authoring own

Shadow Side:

• Can become overly relativistic, ungrounded, and nihilistic
• Impractical, hippy, and overly anti-traditional work
• Can overvalue the heart over the mind
• Holds too rigidly to maps instead of territories
• Difficulty committing to concrete action or decisions
• Overvalues care, fairness, and liberty
• Paralysis from too many perspectives
• Subtle disdain for “less complex” stages
• May over-intellectualize spirituality or embodiment

Questions They’re Asking:

• How do the systems, relationships, and language we use shape our perspective?
• How can I escape traditional modes of success so I can pursue what's right for me?
• How can I deepen my understanding of epistemology and ontology?
• How can I integrate the parts of me to help me pursue my purpose?
• How can I move from self-improvement into self-actualization and transcendence?
• How do both science and religion hold value in the modern world?
• How can I build deep relationships of character?
• How can I think more systemically and holistically?
• How do I participate in larger systems?
• How can I balance being with doing?
• How do heart and mind connect?
• How can I move from self-improvement into self-actualization and Spirituality?

Needs Development:

• Deeper growing into exploration, love, and purpose but less in a self-improvement sort of manner
• Sometimes neglects deficiency needs a little too much
  • "Look mom, if we transcended Capitalism I wouldn't have to work in the first place!"
• Less reliance on others to get needs met

Physical Development:

• Starting to see the profound interplay between your physical body and your psychology
  • "Ahh, those Cheetos I ate yesterday morning are affecting my thoughts and feelings in this psych discussion"
• Cares about health not just for self-improvement reasons but because of the ways it holistically affects all other areas of your life
  • "I can't help fight climate change unless I get my gym routine in order"
• Much more open to intuition, imagination, visualization, and other more subtle forms of consciousness
• Becoming more interested in mindfulness, meditation, and other reflective and contemplative practices less for their function and more for their actualizing and spiritual dimension

Emotional Development:

• Building emotional vocabulary
  • "Oh my goodness, sadness is not just one thing"
• Harmonizing mind and heart
• Separating event from judgment of event
  • A B doesn't have to speak to something wrong with me"
• More befriending of one's shadow rather than rejection
  • "Those strange kinks actually might be telling me something"
• Sees self as a constellation of parts rather than a single identity
  • "I can want to eat, study, and play video games all at the same time!"
• Exploring feminine and masculine
• Appreciating degree you are made of varying parts with different ways of trying to help you
• Relativization: softening emotional pain by contextualizing everything
• Irony & distancing: holding emotion at arm’s length
• Identity fluidity: avoiding full commitment to avoid hurt
• Meta-awareness as shield: I see the pattern, so it can’t wound me

Motivational Development:

• Fully immersing oneself more in white hat right brain (agentic intrinsic motivation) over black hat left brain (non-agentic extrinsic motivation)
• CD1 (Epic Meaning & Calling): Cares about holistically helping humanity in some way
• CD2 (Development & Accomplishment): Cares deeply about development toward one's purpose and skills necessary to actualize it
• CD3 (Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback): Seeks to create things which can unveil their inner landscape and help build humanity up
• CD5 (Social Influence & Relatedness): Cares about developing deep relationships of character and win win win collaboration

Cognitive Development:

• Arcs 1-8: Moving from formal analysis and evaluation, to more systemic, internal, and relativistic creation, teaching, and reflection
  • Starting to appreciate the profound degree knowledge changes who you are, not just what you know
• Truth Compass: Less attached to scientific, logical, rational modes of thinking and starting to think meta-rationally
  • "No dad, I'm not becoming a Witch because I'm into experiential knowing"
• Meta-Hexagon: Solidifying meta-thinking around defining and reflecting on frames. Beginning to evaluate, compare, and change frames more often
• Early adopting and building of meta-cognition and meta-frameworks
  • "My new favorite form of procrastination is called going meta"
• Beginning appreciation of sociocultural and epistemological relativism
  • "I started calling my dorm a mansion so it would feel more spacious"
• Less strict belief in an objective, external, material world
• Seeing the limits of science alongside religion
  • "Can we stop the culture wars, please?"
• Starting to become aware of and appreciate the other stages of ego development

Social Development:

• Win win win collaboration
• Seeks mutual growth and shared meaning
  • "Don't look at me strange if I ask what your life purpose is in our first convo"
• Can navigate conflict more with curiosity rather than defensiveness

Moral Development:

• Worldcentric (Including evil people and animals)
• Sees harm as arising from conditioning rather than inherent badness
  • "Look if you were a computer science major, you would understand true suffering too"
• Oriented toward systemic justice and rehabilitation rather than blame

Aesthetic Development:

• Aesthetically oriented not just towards function and self-expression, but collective expression, and more subtle forms of spiritual art
• Fascinated by how art can make you become someone different
• Art and beauty as vehicles for collective meaning-making
• Aesthetics increasingly contemplative rather than performative

Spiritual Development:

• Shifts from building the self to gently deconstructing it
• Drawn to contemplative traditions, non-duality, and inner inquiry
• Begins recognizing the self as a process rather than an object
• Spirituality becomes something of importance
• Peak experiences are more and more common and glimpses of subtle states

Stage 5: Cosmic Wizard

Summary: The Cosmic Wizard is the first stage to truly appreciate and love all of the stages below it while still having relativistic evaluations of some as better than others for a certain context and goal. They have a more holistic 4th person perspective able to understand and embody how worldviews come into being, are now, and will be in the future. They deeply appreciate individual growth and systemic meta-thinking and are driven to work towards growing the entirety of the world up the stages of ego development. They immerse the deepest in self-actualization out of any stage and are getting deeper and deeper into self-transcendence and spirituality. What holds them back the most is the few shadows they still carry and a lack of skills in fully actualizing their vision for improving the world. Perhaps more than any other stage they struggle with the gap between who they are and who they could be.

Potential Examples:

• A professor who teaches content and developmental context: (e.g. explicitly names how students at different stages will hear the same material differently)
• Faculty designing courses around transformation, not coverage: integrating reflection, systems thinking, ethics, and meaning—not just information
• Interdisciplinary researchers: bridging science, humanities, ethics, and spirituality without collapsing into relativism

Self-Other Boundary: Self is capable of taking a holistic 4th person perspective on 1st, 2nd, and 3rd persons, allowing them to create, teach, and reflect meta-systemically for themselves and others. They are beginning to appreciate the profound degree the self impacts one's meaning of college and reality as a whole and work tirelessly to understand their own self because of it.

Light Side:

• Deep appreciation of the need for all the ego development stages without collapsing into relativism
• Deeply shadow aware and take radical responsibility of their life
• Able to talk to other stages of ego development with grace so they can move up
• Able to grow even in areas of college they feel are "beneath" their stage of development

Shadow Side:

• Lone wolf isolationist
• Find ordinary aspects of life like making a living, logistics, and travel stifling and boring
• Depressed over their inability to actualize their vision
• Want to see the world as beautiful and perfect, but not yet conscious enough to love everything
• Judgmental over lower stages inability to grow
• Can have an inflated sense of self-growth and wisdom
• Over reliant on their meta-models for explaining reality
• Struggle with the duality between being and doing

Questions They’re Asking:

• How can I help other students grow up the stages of ego development?
• What about me must still grow to actualize my vision?
• How can I integrate my shadows?
• How can I create a foundation for the last of my deficiency needs that will help me actualize my vision?
• How can I create deeper and deeper meta-models that can help me understand myself and society?
• How can I find and build deep relationships of character that will help me actualize my vision?
• How can I immerse myself deeper in self-actualization, self-transcendence and spirituality?
• How can I grow myself and others toward their True Self?
• How can I change my college information diet of classes, content creators, and more to be more aligned with Truth?

Needs Development:

• Deepening growth needs to be more self-transcendent and spiritually oriented
• Doesn't need anyone else to fulfill needs for them
• Radical self responsibility

Physical Development:

• Sees body as deeply integrated with rest of reality affecting vision, relationships, and the very perception of reality
  • Noticing how sleep posture and diet directly alter perception of Truth
• Seeks embodiment of ideas, not just conceptual understanding
• Deepening integration of being and doing

Emotional Development:

• Inner processes are fascinating, complex and demanding to explore
• Emotions welcomed as mirrors to what must be learned
• Integrating all parts toward pursuing vision
• Can draw wisdom from almost any experience including dreams, imagination, and non-ordinary consciousness states
  • "If someone saw my journaling without knowing me they would probably assume I'm an alien"
• Able to use non-hostile existential humor during tense situations
  • "Look, we're all bags of meat floating on a rock in space—so how about we stop arguing and get this group project done"
• Comfortable holding both negative and positive emotions, of oneself and others
• Humor defense: Using humor to lighten the pain and seriousness of something
  • "Nothing like having $300,000 in student death to remind you to cherish life am I right"
• Positive re-framing: reframing pain as growth fuel
• Detachment through vision: distancing from present pain via purpose
• Spiritual rationalizing: Validating suffering as helping your spiritual growth
  • "I didn't want to get hit by that car while jaywalking, but now that I did, I can use it to build empathy for others who suffer"
• Lonely self-containment: I’ll carry this myself

Motivational Development:

• CD1 (Meaning): Oriented toward collective awakening and well-being
• CD2 (Development): Growth framed as service, not self-improvement
• CD3 (Empowerment): Builds systems, curricula, communities, or culture
• CD5 (Social Influence): Values deep alliances and co-creation
• Motivation increasingly quiet, stable, and intrinsic

Cognitive Development:

• Spiral Knowing: Deep immersion in Arcs 1-8 and beginning depth with Arc 9
• Truth Compass: Deeper appreciation of sociocultural and epistemological relativism and beginning appreciation of ontological relativism—has honed their information diet to include high quality Truth sources
• Meta-Hexagon: Solidifying meta-thinking around evaluating, comparing, and changing frames and starting to dive deep into creating frames
• Can fluidly move between reasonableness, rationality, and meta-rationality depending on the context and goal
• Fluent across developmental, epistemic, and systems frameworks
• Understands paradox, circular reasoning, strange loops
• Thinks in time horizons: personal, generational, civilizational
• Uses models lightly, aware they are maps not territory
• Can translate complexity into simple, actionable guidance
• Language is a complex, flexible syntax; with a wide array of topics and concerns to try and appreciate colleges complexity

Social Development:

• Try very hard to keep their act together and to come across as reasonable, mature, and wise so as to help others develop
  • "I forgot to eat lunch, but I'm going to pretend I did so I can focus on helping this person develop"
• Can sometimes have a bit of an inflated sense of self-growth and wisdom
• Prioritizes relationships of character over convenience or status
• Able to coach and mentor with extreme precision to the individuals development
  • "How did I know that about you? Patterns my friend."
• Able to lead without dominating
• Invites collaboration rather than compliance
• Practices deep listening and presence

Moral Development:

• Beginning to move toward cosmic compassion
• Genuinely feel principled anger and righteous indignation towards the injustices of the world while trying to minimize judgment or blame for it being that way
• Holds even “harmful” individuals within a developmental frame
• Ethics grounded in care, responsibility, and long-term consequences
• Chooses responses based on wisdom, not ideology

Aesthetic Development:

• Starting to find beauty in the whole world, even the bad things
• Appreciates beauty of lower stages even if they don’t resonate with it
• Finds beauty in places you wouldn’t think of as finding beauty like systems that work

Spiritual Development:

• Spirituality becoming more lived, not sought
• Spirituality expressed through service, love, and presence
• Less interest in just peak experiences; more in integration
• Moving into causal state grounding but not yet in non-dual

Wrapping Up Tier 2

Tier 2 doesn’t give you a new identity. It takes away your certainty that identity was ever the point. You start seeing systems instead of ladders, conditioning instead of villains, and meaning as something co-created rather than achieved. It’s liberating, destabilizing, and often lonely.

And it’s not the end.

In Part 3, we move beyond self-deconstruction into the self-transcendent stages—where college stops being about meta-systemic thinking, and meaning-making, but how your very self creates your entire sense of reality, and what college would look like if you transcended it.

👇Check out part 3 here.

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