CONCEPT
The Self-Transforming Mind (Fifth Order)
Kegan's fifth and rarest order of consciousness — holding one's own self-authored identity as
object, capable of integrating contradictory perspectives without collapsing into either — achieved by fewer than one percent of adults.
The self-transforming mind is Robert Kegan's term for the fifth order of
consciousness, a developmental achievement so rare that his research found fewer than one percent of adults operating at this level. Where the
self-authoring mind constructs an internal system of values and holds that system as truth, the self-transforming mind can take the system itself as
object — visible, examinable, one perspective among many. The person is no longer defined by her ideology, her commitments, or her self-authored identity. She
has these things, and she holds them with what might be called a lighter grip — committed but aware of the commitment as a construction rather than as reality. This does not produce relativism or detachment. It produces the capacity to hold contradictory truths simultaneously, to find the dialectical relationship
between opposing positions, and to revise one's most fundamental commitments without experiencing the revision as self-betrayal. The self-transforming mind is the only order capable of what Segal