These are the kind of people who learn from survival. They limit their knowledge on the survival aspects of life i.e. experiences that are limited to them. They live a life either guided by society, relationships, attachments, or certain conditioned perspectives by the likes of religion or a leader. They believe in authority. They lack questioning and hence they are manipulated easily during the times of crisis either by other people or their own mind.
At this stage, an individual makes itself sensitive to the knowledge he gained through Survival. He is now sensitive to himself, internally and to the world, externally. Sensitivity in its actual definition means detection or response. A sensitive person starts detecting the elements of survival and how they impact itself internally. This identification brings more clarity in the individuals mind about the influence of external factors of life. With Sensitivity comes Identification through which, a person is now able to move to the stage of Experience where he is willing to unlearn the conditioning and gain knowledge from first hand experiences.
These are the kind of people who have crossed the survival stage and now learn from the experiences they witness. They realised that living in the survival stage was making them too dependent and they did not have control over their life. Hence, the deny institutions and rely on their own experience. They question the authorities and believe that their experiences are the true knowledge and then they focus on gaining experiences which becomes a purpose of their lives. These experiences can be both, of their own, or someone else’s that they witness. They are prone to ignorance as they tend to become self centered as they are subjectively experiencing the world and thinking it to be the truth but have not investigated their perception of experience. They do take into the possibility of the unknown but they believe it is not worth lamenting over until they experience it.
After having multiple experiences both first hand and derived by witnessing someone else's experience, an individual, when it starts the process of introspection, and begins to observe, he realises that his experiences may not be the norm or the reality of the world. He observes and realises the possibility of having an exclusive experience which may not happen with everyone and hence it may not be the eternal reality but something that is just circumstantial. They realise that there could be more to the reality than how they experience it and how they are perceiving their own experience might also not necessarily be the reality, maybe their perception has developed out of certain biases they possess. Hence, they now seek information to know more. With the little information that they begin to gather not necessarily externally but also observing themselves and gathering knowledge of the self, they are in the stage of Observation, a step towards the Information stage.
These are the kind of people who are curious about the information that is accessible. They have crossed the “Experience” stage and realised that it was limiting their curiosity and even their experiences. They realised that they were only looking from one lens but the reality exists out of the lens as well. Now they see information and knowledge even out of experiences. For them, every information is knowledge and they try to seek more and more of it. There desire for information may lead them to believe in an institution which is a source of knowledge that makes sense to them or follow no institution at all and rather gather information from all institution and make sense out of it. They also tend to doubt themselves as the more information they seek, the more they realise that there is so much that they do not know. At times they may also feel highly of themselves when they meet an “Experience” or “Survival” person because of the knowledge they have attained. They seek truth by connecting the dots of information.
When Information is perceived with Awareness, the individual acquires Intelligence. A constant struggle that people at the information stage face is the ability to apply the information that they have acquired. It is difficult. It is difficult to do that instinctually when they are at the stage of information as their mind is working on gathering and synthesising the information. But they realise that this information that they have acquired is of no use if they are not able to see the practicality of it. With this zeal to find out a way to apply this information, when an individual attempts to be aware about the information he has, he understands the information in a much better, clearer and different way than they were before. This is the stage of Intelligence. Intelligence is the path where an individual is able to differentiate between the information that is useful and the information that is not. The information that is acquired to feed their ego and the information that is a product of genuine curiosity. The information which is perceived on the basis of their personal biases and the information which is perceived after an objective understanding. This is the final step towards Complete Awareness.