The eight zones refer to the eight dimension-perspectives available to all human beings. They are the eight primordial or indigenous perspectives (and ontological
zones) available to sentient beings. Methodologies associated with the eight zones include: Zone 1
(the inside of the Upper-Left): Phenomenology
, introspection, contemplation, and/or meditation
Zone 2
(the outside of the Upper-Left): Developmental structuralism
Zone 3
(the inside of the Lower-Left): Hermeneutics
, collaborative inquiry, and/or participatory epistemology
Zone 4
(the outside of the Lower-Left): Cultural anthropology
, ethnomethodology, culturology, archaeology, and/or genealogy
Zone 5
: (the inside of the Upper-Right): Biological phenomenology, cognitive neurophysiology, cognitive science in general, and/or autopoiesis
Zone 6
(the outside of the Upper-Right): Behaviorism, positivism, and/or empiricism
Zone 7
(the inside of the Lower-Right): Social autopoiesis
and/or game theory
Zone 8
: (the outside of the Lower-Right): Systems theory
, component systems theory, chaos and complexity theories, and/or network science Each of these eight perspectives has an inherent methodology
or mode of inquiry, or ways that sentient beings touch other sentient beings by enacting those zones. In this excerpt from Integral Spirituality: A Deeper Cut
, Dennis Wittrock asks whether there are structural preconditions for the enacting of certain zones, whether zones unfold with respect to increasing cognitive development, whether certain zones were even available at earlier times in history, and whether there are “premodern,” “modern,” and “postmodern
” zones.