Review:  Human Development and the Spiritual Life: How Consciousness Grows toward Transformation
by Ronald R. Irwin
Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers: New York, etc.  2002
	
Michael Lamport Commons 	Joel Funk
Harvard Medical School	Plymouth State College

	The field of positive adult development began in the mid-1970's but really became an organized field in 1981, with the first symposium on postformal thinking, entitled Beyond Formal Operations.  Despite this apparently long history, the overall field of adult development is only coming to recognize the importance of higher stages of development, whether cognitive, moral, egoic, or spiritual.  One curious characteristic of many individuals who do research on higher stages of development is their strong interest in the growth and development of consciousness and spirituality (e.g.  Miller & Gook-Greuter, 1994 Miller & West, 2000 Sinnott, 2000, 2001.  Wilber's (2000 Miller and Cook-Greuter (1994) Wilber (2000) 
 Journal of Adult Development

									

									

									

									

									

 Wilber (2000)