Levels of Human Existence is a new and developing conception of how man behaves. It developed in order to explain some recent research findings which have not meshed well with earlier explanations of the behavior of man. It proposes that mature psychological man varies on more than a quantitative scale over the mature years of his biological life. 

The Levels of Existence conception of man’s nature proposes that the human mind cannot be likened to a computer. It asserts that the mind of the mature biological organism is not a system in which the data processing aspects change only quantitatively with time. It does not see the mind as a system in which the changes that occur are changes in complexity of programming. The conception asserts that if one is to view the mind through a computer analogy, it must be viewed as a computer that changes it’s programming in a regular and orderly way, as well as a computer that changes and re-orders the data in its memory bank. Within this conception of how man behaves, we see him continuously destined to metamorphize a new form, a new quality, a new shape, if and when the conditions of his existence change. And these changes in his psychology are seen to be of an ordered, hierarchial nature. Like the moth to the larvae to the egg, each new psychological form of mind is contiguous with the old stage but is qualitatively different from what existed before. Thus, the biologically mature human organism is seen as a psychological person in transit from a beginning point, the lowest level of behavioral organization of homo sapiens to some unknown destination. A psychological person who, if the conditions of his existence are right, will move through a hierarchially ordered series of systems to some equifinal end, or will travel infinitely on, infinitely showing newly emergent behavioral manifestations. Limited research to date suggests we can now delineate some nine of these Levels of Existence, nine levels of hierarchially ordered change from which we can determine where a person, a society, a culture, an organization is and from which we can see where each would move next if proper conditions came to be. These nine systems are designated in turn as the Animalistic Existence, the Animistic Existence, the Frightened Existence, the Energetic Existence, the Sociocentric Existence, the Personalistic Existence, the Seeking Existence, the Comprehending Existence, and the Appreciating Existence.

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