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DRI · UNFOLDING AWARENESS

Unfolding Awareness

This section of the DRI website is dedicated to resources, frameworks, and tools that support the practical application of developmental research, helping individuals, practitioners, and organizations engage with the unfolding of awareness in themselves and the systems they inhabit.

The Model

The STAGES Developmental Model

STAGES is a validated, integral scoring methodology built on the foundation of Jane Loevinger’s ego development research. Developed by Terri O’Fallon, STAGES introduces a three-parameter framework for measuring how individuals make meaning, process experience, and grow across the full developmental spectrum.
Rather than relying solely on examples-based matching, STAGES grounds assessment in three core dimensions of language, enabling greater precision, continuity of scoring, and applicability across diverse populations, including children.

Parameter 1

Is the object of awareness concrete, subtle, or MetAware?

Whether a person’s attention rests on concrete objects, subtle patterns and contexts, or awareness itself (the MetAware tier).

Parameter 2

Is the experience individual or collective?

Whether meaning-making at a given stage centers on the individual perspective or on the collective and relational field.

Parameter 3

Is the experience receptive, active, reciprocal, or interpenetrative?

The four-part sequence a stage moves through, from receptive through active and reciprocal to interpenetrative, recurring as awareness develops.

Table of the STAGES Matrix showing twelve developmental stages, 1.0 Impulsive through 6.5 Illumined, classified by tier, social preference, and learning sequence.
Key Features

What Distinguishes STAGES

A full-spectrum developmental framework, from early concrete stages through subtle, metaware, and beyond

Three-parameter scoring dimensions that capture the structure, not just the content, of meaning-making

A Core Score aggregation method that provides continuous, fractional results and includes a shadow score

Validated across multiple peer-reviewed studies for inter-rater reliability, longitudinal consistency, and convergent validity

Applicable to a wide range of specialty inventories and research domains

The Tool

STAGE Lens

STAGE Lens is an electronic scoring system developed by Tom Murray, built to automate the assessment of sentence completion tests. It has been trained using data scored under Terri O’Fallon’s STAGES model, offering a technology-assisted complement to the manual scorer training and certification process.

The Practice

Integral Polarity Practice

Integral Polarity Practice, developed by John Kesler, is a structured developmental and spiritual practice that works with the natural polarities of human experience. IPP mirrors the STAGES research, and the STAGES research mirrors IPP, offering a practical companion to the theoretical and empirical work of DRI.

Systems thinking: watercolor rendering of an interlocking circular geometric pattern in blue, green, and gold.

Exploring This Work Together

Understanding how awareness unfolds across the lifespan is a shared endeavor. DRI welcomes educational, research, and organizational partners interested in exploring and extending this work.

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