August 2026 — Joe Perez
Two nine-fold schemes for the human interior, separated by two thousand years and every conceivable difference of method and intent, agree far more often than they have any business agreeing. And the place where you would most expect them to part company — the one objection that ought to end the conversation before it starts — turns out to be the place they converge hardest.
I did not go looking for this. I want to lay out what I found, concede what has to be conceded, and then spend the bulk of this piece on the part that interests me most, which is what the resemblance makes visible in both directions.
(Quotations from the Taixuanjing below follow the rendering I have been working from, with Americanized spelling.)
The two texts
The Taixuanjing 太玄經 — the Canon of Supreme Mystery — was composed by Yang Xiong 揚雄 (53 BCE – 18 CE) around 2 BCE as a deliberate counterpart to the Yijing. Where the Yijing uses binary lines, Yang Xiong uses ternary ones: unbroken, once-broken, twice-broken. Four positions, three states each, giving 3⁴ = 81 figures — tetragrams — rather than 64 hexagrams. Each tetragram carries a head text and nine appraisals. Seven hundred and twenty-nine appraisals, plus two supernumerary ones, map onto the days and nights of the solar year. Michael Nylan’s The Canon of Supreme Mystery (SUNY, 1993) is the complete scholarly rendering.
Crucially, the 81 nest. The four positions are named region 方, province 州, department 部, family 家 — three regions of twenty-seven, nine provinces of nine, twenty-seven departments of three. The text therefore contains a natural division into nine groups of nine, fixed by the first two lines. This is not an editorial convenience. It is the architecture. (The technical term is province; in my own rendering I call these groups provinces, and I will use that word below.)
Susanne Cook-Greuter’s Leadership Maturity Framework extends Jane Loevinger’s empirical work on the sentence-completion test into the post-conventional range. It maps nine levels of increasing embrace, each a qualitatively distinct and more complex view of self and reality: Impulsive, Self-protective (Opportunist), Conformist (Diplomat), Self-conscious (Expert), Conscientious (Achiever), Individualistic (Pluralist), Autonomous (Strategist), Construct-aware (Alchemist), Unitive. It rests on a database of more than ten thousand scored protocols and is the backbone of much of what gets called Integral or metatheoretical developmental work.
One text is a divinatory cosmology built on ternary combinatorics and the solar calendar. The other is a psychometric instrument’s output, refined over four decades of coding adult protocols. They share a number, and by rights that should be all they share.
The alignment
I came at this sideways. I have been working on a reimagining of the Taixuanjing for practicing diviners and for literature rather than for scholars, and part of that work meant giving each province an English name that caught what its nine figures do together. The names came out:
Hidden, Unstraight, Peopled, Strong, Bright, Measured, Shutting, Dark, Cold.
| Province | Cook-Greuter | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hidden | Impulsive |
| 2 | Unstraight | Opportunist |
| 3 | Peopled | Diplomat |
| 4 | Strong | Expert |
| 5 | Bright | Achiever |
| 6 | Measured | Pluralist |
| 7 | Shutting | Strategist |
| 8 | Dark | Alchemist |
| 9 | Cold | Unitive |
Several of these land on the language, not merely on the ordering.
One. Tetragram 1, Center: Kunlun spreads without edge or seam, and nothing in it has yet been named. The Impulsive stage is defined by the absence of a stable boundary between self and world. Both describe a condition that cannot be described from the inside.
Three. The province opens with Following — “things stand on tiptoe to go after it” — and things “come out in throngs.” Levelling sits at its middle: “things come level.” It closes in offices, litigation, and each thing spending its own strength according to its due. The Diplomat is the self that discovers it is one among many and organizes itself by belonging, rank, and rule. This is less a correspondence than a translation.
Five. The Achiever runs on internalized standards and self-evaluation against criteria. Province five contains Law: the yang hangs its law up high, things look up at the marking-line, and nothing escapes the rule. The summer solstice — the year’s noon — falls at tetragram 41, The Answer, the exact midpoint of the book. The Achiever’s founding conviction is that there is an answer and that competence reaches it. That the calendrical noon and the modal ceiling of professional culture land on the same figure is the single most arresting hit in the scheme. The province’s own opener adds the sting: being seen entirely is also the moment a thing stops growing.
Six. This one I noticed late, and it may be the most interesting of the set. Province six is the season of made things — pattern, rite, measure, constancy — and my opener for it says they are made precisely because the natural support is going. Pattern and substance stand side by side; rites appear between upper and lower; the yang slips away in secret while the forms hold. The Pluralist is the stage at which frameworks become visible as frameworks — where the person discovers that the norms they had been living inside are constructed, contingent, and multiple. A season whose whole content is the visible manufacture of form, arriving exactly when the given support withdraws, is a remarkably exact figure for that discovery.
Eight. Cook-Greuter is unusually candid that construct-awareness costs something: greater awareness brings greater awareness of unresolvable paradox, and this is the stage at which the self finally sees through the ego’s attempts to codify reality. Province eight: the inside empties and the outside comes in, the ten thousand things are finished, things lose the straightness of their light, the yang has nowhere left. It even carries the characteristic failure mode. The province closes on Hardness — “things compete at being hard” — which is a precise portrait of the construct-aware person who calcifies into knowing cynicism instead of passing through.
Nine. Tetragram 77, Compliance: the yin breath goes along with everything, a mixed dark with no edge to it, and nobody sees where it is rooted. If you had to define the Unitive stage in a line of verse, you would struggle to improve on that.
The objection that should destroy it
Anyone holding both texts reaches for the same decisive objection, and it looks unanswerable.
Developmental theory ascends. Each action-logic takes in more than the last; that is what makes it development. The Taixuanjing‘s nine provinces are a year. Province five is noon, and everything after it wanes. So the correspondence can only hold if you are willing to say that post-conventional development is a species of dying — which would be a very odd thing for Western stage theory to accept.
Except that Cook-Greuter’s trajectory is not a staircase, and she is emphatic on the point. On her account, growth toward ego maturity is best pictured as an arc, an inverted U — explicitly not the usual Western onward-and-upward movement, and she names this as a significant difference between Ego Development Theory and other developmental models. She is equally clear that the shape emerged from the data rather than from a philosophical preference.
An arc. An inverted U. Waxing to a peak, then waning.
That is the shape of the Taixuanjing‘s year, drawn by a Harvard-trained psychometrician out of thousands of sentence-completion tests.
And the descent means the same thing in both. Her working diagrams pair differentiation and assimilation with construction and deconstruction: the ego is built up through the conventional range and then progressively taken apart. Yang Xiong’s waning half is a dissolution of exactly that kind, form loosening back toward the undifferentiated. What reads as decline in one scheme and as ascent in the other is the same gesture under two descriptions.
Two further items land in the same place. Cook-Greuter, following Loevinger, insists that later is not necessarily better and that wellbeing is a matter of fit with one’s environment — which is nearly a paraphrase of the Taixuanjing‘s own rule that a day position is not reliably favorable nor a night position reliably ill, since what governs is fit with the hour. And her account of development as repeating cycles of differentiation and integration into ever larger systems has a structural counterpart in the text’s strict alternation of yang-house and yin-house figures, and of day and night appraisals, through all 81.
What I have to concede
Nine is a small number. Both sequences are ordered, both have a middle, both have an end, and the human mind is a correspondence engine that will find a rhyme between any two such things. Neither nine is even load-bearing in the way the parallel would want: Yang Xiong’s falls out of the combinatorics, and Cook-Greuter’s is partly an artifact of instrument design — the range the sentence-completion test can reliably discriminate, with the count varying across the literature depending on whether a symbiotic floor or a further ceiling is included.
Then there is the naming. Someone who titles nine sections and then discovers his titles rhyme with a developmental ladder has not found a correspondence; he has found his own hand. Here the provenance matters and I want to state it exactly. I did not write those nine names. They were drafted by an AI collaborator working province by province through the seasonal content of the text, with no developmental comparison in view and no instruction pointing that way. I noticed the parallel afterward.
That removes the specific failure mode — the author who has read Loevinger quietly naming things to fit — but it does not remove contamination, and I would not want anyone to think it does. A language model has read Cook-Greuter too, probably more thoroughly than I have. What changes is that the risk moves from a place where nothing can be checked, my own introspection, to a place where something can: every name is auditable against the passage it summarizes. “Peopled” comes from things stand on tiptoe to follow it and they come out in throngs, which is Yang Xiong. “Shutting” comes from every one of the ten thousand things shuts its mouth, which is also Yang Xiong. Anyone who wants to attack the correspondence should attack it there, name by name, and that is a real argument rather than an unfalsifiable suspicion about motives.
And the categories differ in a way nobody has resolved: the provinces are stations of the qi, while the stages are structures of a person. A querent lands in province nine on Tuesday and province two on Thursday; a center of gravity does not move like that.
The second architecture
Here is the thing that made me keep going, and it is better than anything above.
Yang Xiong already has a nine-fold developmental scheme of the human person, and it is not the provinces. It is the nine appraisal positions, keyed to ages by decade, and nested inside every one of the 81 figures:
One — the lowest, thought at its faintest, planning, age ten, the hands and feet. Two — the common person, thought at its middle, something blocked, age twenty. Three — one who advances, thought at its height, self-possession, age thirty, the limbs. Four — the lower salary, fortune finding its resource, what faces outward, age forty, the waist. Five — the middle salary, centered harmony, the center of the whole book, age fifty, the belly. Six — the upper salary, fortune at its height, abundance, age sixty, the shoulders. Seven — purpose lost, the stair down into disaster, waning, age seventy. Eight — sickness, wasting, age eighty, the face. Nine — the extremity, disaster at its end, exhaustion, age ninety, the forehead.
That is Cook-Greuter’s object exactly: a human life read as nine structures, each with a characteristic relation to self, others, and capacity. And every reading in the book runs through it.
So the picture is two-storied, and the two stories behave differently.
At the province level, the shape matches. Both are arcs. Waxing to a peak at five, waning after. Construction, then deconstruction.
At the position level, the shape matches and the content diverges. Yang Xiong’s positions seven, eight, and nine are purpose lost, sickness, the extremity — decline read as decline, ending at ninety in exhaustion. Cook-Greuter’s seven, eight, and nine are Autonomous, Construct-aware, Unitive. Both curves come down. One comes down into wasting; the other comes down into transparency.
That is the actual finding. The disagreement was never about direction — they both arc. It is about what the descending limb is made of. Yang Xiong reads the far end of a life through the body: the face, the forehead, the exhaustion of a physical span. Cook-Greuter reads it through meaning-making, where the same dissolution shows up as freedom from the ego’s codifications. Same curve, two different quantities plotted on the vertical axis.
And the text will not settle which. The eighty-first figure is Nourishing, and what it nourishes is the first: Center, unnamed, without edge or seam. The extremity feeds the undifferentiated.
What the resemblance makes visible
Suppose the correspondence is real, or even partly real. What does it let us see?
1. The ladder is not merely incomplete. It mis-locates the difficulty.
There is an existing literature on cyclic versus linear development — Jung on the second half of life, Michael Washburn’s spiral of regression in service of transcendence, various critiques of the Wilberian ascent. I am not pretending to have arrived somewhere unvisited. But the water here is different in two ways worth wading into.
Washburn’s return is therapeutic: a regression undertaken, often in crisis, in order to recover what was repressed. Yang Xiong’s descent is nothing of the sort. It is scheduled. It is equal-weighted with every other season. It is not optional, not pathological, and not a detour. And Cook-Greuter’s arc has a third kind of warrant again — it is neither a therapeutic proposal nor a cosmological axiom but an empirical shape, read off scored protocols by someone who has said plainly that she did not expect it.
Put the three side by side and the ladder metaphor’s real deficiency comes into view. On a ladder, the difficulty is climbing, and every failure mode is a failure to ascend: arrest, plateau, fixation. A seasonal grammar makes a different set of failures nameable, and they are the ones that actually afflict people in the post-conventional range. My opener for province eight says the figures that go worst there are the ones that hurry. The province closes on Hardness, and hardness is not offered as an achievement — things compete at being hard only once the work has lost its thread, and what sets hardest in the cold cracks first when the ground moves. Province seven’s Doubt tells you the matter genuinely is both right and wrong and that you have been demanding a verdict from something that does not contain one.
Hurrying. Hardening. Demanding a verdict. Ladder-talk has no vocabulary for these because on a ladder they are not distinguishable from ordinary striving. A calendar makes them legible as season-specific errors. That, and not any claim about ancient wisdom, is what a seasonal model buys you.
2. Later development is subtraction, and we describe it as acquisition.
Read the stage descriptions in the usual literature and the post-conventional range sounds like accumulation: more perspectives, wider embrace, greater complexity. Read Yang Xiong on the same stretch and it is all removal. Province seven’s counsel, in my rendering, is nearly always subtraction — and querents mishear subtraction as punishment. Storage requires that most of a season’s growth be given up. The small opening the yang keeps is small on purpose.
This is not foreign to Cook-Greuter; construction and deconstruction sit in her own diagrams. But her framework describes deconstruction while her vocabulary keeps promoting. The Taixuanjing supplies what the field is short of: a positive language for loss. Shutting, guarding, storing, the one small opening, the season of accounting when what was made is either kept or lost. If you have ever tried to explain to someone in the Strategist transition why their increased capacity feels like diminishment, you have felt the lack of exactly this vocabulary.
The apophatic traditions have their own version and I do not want to claim novelty for the bare idea. What is new is having it in stage-indexed form — a subtraction assigned to a specific position in a specific sequence, rather than a general spiritual counsel.
3. Two descents, and I am not going to resolve them.
The most tempting move available here is to say that physical aging and ego transparency are the same movement under two descriptions: differentiation, maximal articulation, surrender of articulation. Wasting and transparency as one archetypal gesture.
It is tempting because it is nearly true and because it would be beautiful. I am going to leave it standing as a question, for a specific reason: Yang Xiong does not romanticize the body’s descent. His positions seven through nine are disaster, sickness, exhaustion. He read decline as decline. Any synthesis that quietly converts an eighty-year-old’s wasting into an attainment has stopped listening to one of its two sources, and it is precisely the move that has made this kind of comparative work easy to dismiss.
So: same curve, two quantities. What relation holds between them is open. That the Taixuanjing plots the somatic one and Cook-Greuter the structural one, on a curve of identical shape, is the datum. I would rather hold it than dissolve it.
4. The return is a completion, not a regression.
If figure 81 feeds figure 1, then the sequence is recursive: differentiation arises out of the unbounded and eventually feeds it again. Which raises the obvious alarm, and it is Wilber’s own alarm — the pre/trans fallacy, the confusion of pre-personal with trans-personal because both are non-rational. Stage one and stage nine resemble each other and are not the same thing. Anyone who says the Unitive is a recovered relation to what the Impulsive had unconsciously is standing on the exact spot Wilber spent decades marking off.
But look at how Yang Xiong handles it, because the structure of his answer is cleaner than the usual defenses. My opener for province nine says it is the mirror of the Hidden Province and arrives at the same place from the far side. The first nine were a beginning nobody could see; these nine are an ending that turns, without announcement, back into one. And here is the formal point: you cannot reach figure 1 by running backward from 81. There is no reverse path in the book. The only route to the undifferentiated is through all eighty-one figures in order, and what arrives there has the entire year inside it.
That is a genuine answer to pre/trans rather than an evasion of it. The return is not a regression to the origin but a completion that hands on to it. Note also the detail that seems like a scribal curiosity and is not: two appraisals stand outside the count of 729, because the solar year does not come out even. The year does not close. The leftover is where things get born.
I think this is the most philosophically substantial thing in the comparison, and it is available only because the Taixuanjing is a calendar rather than an argument. A calendar cannot help but be recursive. A ladder cannot help but end.
5. Run the traffic the other way.
Almost everything above asks what Yang Xiong can tell us about Cook-Greuter. The traffic also runs the other way, and that direction has a virtue the first one cannot have: what does a developmental question let us see in the Taixuanjing that its commentators have not looked for? Answers to that are checkable against the text. They stand or fall on whether the passages say what I claim they say, which is a kind of discipline the Arc convergence — stronger as a fact, and harder to test — does not offer.
Two candidates.
The nine appraisal positions have been read as divinatory positions, as body correspondences, as a fortune sequence. As far as I can find, no one has read them as a psychology — as nine structures of a person, in the way Loevinger’s clusters are nine structures of a person. That reading is available, it is textually grounded, and it generates a concrete task: the 729 appraisals are already coded by position, so it is possible to ask whether the language of positions one through nine, across all 81 figures, tracks stage-characteristic language — and whether it does so independently of the calendar, which is the confound.
The second is a tension inside Yang Xiong that only a developmental question brings out. His cosmological descent (provinces seven through nine) ends in renewal — the dark that turns, the faint yang putting its back into it in the cold. His anthropological descent (positions seven through nine) ends in exhaustion at ninety. The same author, in the same book, gives the waning half two different endings depending on whether he is describing a year or a life. Nobody asks why, because nobody has been holding the two schemes up against each other with a developmental question in hand. I think that is a real problem in the interpretation of the text, and it did not become visible until Cook-Greuter was in the room.
Also worth noting, since it cuts against the reflex of assuming the ancient text is the one with gaps: Ego Development Theory has no time axis at all. It does not say how long a stage lasts, and Cook-Greuter is careful that stages are not age-locked. The Taixuanjing has structure here that EDT simply lacks — an explicit, evenly divided temporal metric. What it would mean to give each action-logic an equal season is an open question that, as far as I can tell, nobody has tried to answer discursively. I have tried to answer it in fiction, which is where I first put a developmental structure on a calendar; that this has been done in imaginative literature and not in the theoretical literature is itself a datum about where the field’s blind spot sits.
The question left over
None of this is proof of a perennial structure, and I would resist anyone who wanted to read it that way. Two systems can share a shape for reasons as dull as both being organized around a middle.
But notice what happened to the strongest available objection. The obvious way to dismiss the whole comparison — Western development ascends, Chinese cosmology cycles, end of discussion — runs straight into Cook-Greuter’s most distinctive published claim, the one she says came out of the data rather than out of philosophy. When the argument you would use to shut a comparison down is the same argument that opens it, you have stopped pattern-matching and started comparing.
What is left is a question I cannot get rid of. Two people, two thousand years and one civilization apart, one counting figures against the solar year and one counting sentence stems against a scoring manual, drew the same curve. One of them plotted a body on it. The other plotted a self. Neither of them thought they were describing the other’s subject.
I would rather have a good question than a bad synthesis. This is a good question, and it is not mine to close.