---
domain: harmonism
tags: [harmonism, navigation, life-architecture, systems-comparison, wheel-of-life, maslow, max-neef, integral, plotkin, gene-keys, perennialism, vervaeke, bridge]
content_layer: bridge
doctrinal_status: clear
breadth: full
depth: developed
craft: muddy
published: "2026-05-27"
---
# The Landscape of Navigation Systems

*Part of the philosophical architecture of [[Harmonism]]. See also: [[Wheel of Harmony]], [[The Way of Harmony]], [[Anatomy of the Wheel]], [[Guidance]], [[Guidance and Coaching]]. Sibling landscape articles: [[The Landscape of the Isms]], [[The Landscape of Integration]], [[The Landscape of Political Philosophy]], [[The Landscape of Civilizational Theory]].*

---

Among the many frameworks that engage human life, a small class explicitly claims to articulate the individual-scale architecture under which a person navigates the whole of a life. The Wheel of Harmony belongs to this class. So do the popular coaching instruments, the integral meta-frameworks, the developmental architectures, the contemplative-archetypal systems, the traditionalist worldviews, and the contemporary meaning-crisis recovery frameworks. This article maps the Wheel against the major contemporary alternatives that share its scope.

The Wheel is one of Harmonism's two architectures. Its civilizational counterpart is the [[Architecture of Harmony]] — eleven institutional pillars under Dharma at centre, engaged at its own scale in *The Architecture of Harmony — Design and Comparison*. The two are not one continuous system; they are siblings under [[Glossary of Terms#Logos|Logos]] as common doctrinal ground, each with its own decomposition and its own constraints. This article restricts itself to the individual scale.

---

## The Wheel of Life

The Wheel of Life is the popular face of life-coaching diagnostics — an eight-spoke radar chart on which a coaching client rates current satisfaction across eight life domains (typically: career, finances, health, family, romance, friends, personal growth, recreation), connecting the dots to produce a misshapen polygon that visualizes imbalance at a glance. The framework traces to mid-twentieth-century American motivational literature, was absorbed into the coaching industry through the 1980s and 1990s, and is now the default first exercise in the standard coaching engagement. Its visual form has become so culturally ubiquitous that for many readers the phrase *wheel of life* names the entire genre of life-balance diagnostics.

What the Wheel of Life does well it does in a single move. It makes invisible imbalance visible by placing every domain on equal structural weight. A client who claims everything is fine until shown that family is at three out of ten and career is at nine has been confronted with a fact prior to interpretation. This is real value. It is also the entire value the framework provides.

What the Wheel of Life lacks is everything beneath the surface. There is no metaphysical ground — no account of why these eight domains, in this configuration, constitute a complete picture; the categories are pragmatic conveniences of the American achievement landscape (career and finances appearing as separate spokes is itself a tell), not the irreducible dimensions of conscious existence. There is no epistemology — no answer to how the client should know what they actually feel about *romance* versus what they are willing to admit. There is no centre — the eight spokes meet at a geometric origin point, not a unifying principle; [[Glossary of Terms#Presence|Presence]] is absent, [[Glossary of Terms#Dharma|Dharma]] is absent, Logos is absent. There is no fractality — the spokes do not unfold into sub-wheels with their own architectures, so the framework runs out of resolution the moment the user wants to ask *what within Health* needs attention. There is no causation — the framework assumes domains are independent variables, so a client whose finance score collapses their health score has no language to articulate the chain. There is no path — once the imbalance is named, the practitioner is left alone with self-help generalities or sent to a coach whose continued engagement is the deliverable.

The Wheel of Life is what remains of a wheel when Logos has been stripped from its centre and content has been stripped from its spokes. It is the empty shell of the same intuition the Wheel of Harmony develops at depth — that human life has multiple irreducible dimensions and that wholeness requires attending to each. The intuition is correct. The framework that carries it lacks every component required to do the work the intuition implies. The Wheel of Harmony carries the same intuition with the architecture intact: eight pillars in 7+1 form with Presence as the central pillar, fractal sub-wheels with their own central principles ([[Glossary of Terms#Monitor|Monitor]] at the centre of Health, Dharma at the centre of Service, Love at the centre of Relationships, and so on through all eight), substantive content under each spoke, metaphysical ground in Logos, and a transmission model — guidance, not coaching — that does not depend on the client's continued need. See [[Guidance and Coaching]] for the transmission-mode dimension.

---

## Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Abraham Maslow's hierarchy — physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, self-actualization, with self-transcendence added in the late work — was articulated as motivational psychology in the 1940s and 1950s and was almost immediately adopted in popular discourse as a roadmap for human flourishing. The pyramid became the dominant late-twentieth-century image of what a human being is structured to need, and the path from physiological-foundation to self-transcendent-apex became the implicit life-architecture of countless self-help and organizational-development frameworks. Whether Maslow himself intended the pyramid as a life-architecture or as motivational diagnosis, the framework has functioned as life-architecture in practice — and it can be engaged on that basis.

The pyramid as life-architecture has not aged well. Empirically the hierarchy is wrong. Human beings sacrifice physiological needs for love (the parent who feeds the child before themselves), for esteem (the warrior who dies for honour), for meaning (the ascetic who fasts toward Logos). Cultures organize the strata in radically different sequences. The assumption that lower needs must be met before higher can become motivating is contradicted by every contemplative tradition's record of practitioners who pursued spiritual development from material poverty. Structurally the pyramid is materialist in its foundations — physiological needs at the bottom, self-actualization at the top — encoding the assumption that the body is *prior* to and *more fundamental than* the spirit. The Wheel of Harmony inverts this. The body is not the foundation on which the spirit is later constructed; both are real, both are present from the beginning, both require cultivation, and Health serves Presence rather than supporting it from below. The Wheel is not a hierarchy. It is a circle. Every pillar is structurally equal. Presence at the centre is not above Health but within it. The [[The Way of Harmony|Way of Harmony]] spiral that walks the pillars in sequence is a developmental architecture, not a hierarchical one — each pass through the spiral operates at a higher register, the same pillars revisited with deepened resolution.

Maslow named the need for self-transcendence and could not say what it was, where it came from, or how to satisfy it. The [[Wheel of Presence]] — Meditation at the centre, surrounded by Breath, Sound and Silence, Energy, Intention, Reflection, Virtue, and Entheogens — is the architectural answer Maslow could not provide.

---

## Max-Neef's Fundamental Human Needs

Manfred Max-Neef's *Human Scale Development* — articulated through the late 1980s with Antonio Elizalde and Martín Hopenhayn from a Latin American community-development context, published in Spanish in 1986 and in English through the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in 1989 — is the most structurally sophisticated alternative to Maslow the needs-architecture tradition produced. Where Maslow stacked needs into a hierarchy, Max-Neef rejected the hierarchy entirely (only subsistence is provisionally prior — *to stay alive*) and articulated nine fundamental human needs as non-hierarchically interrelated: Subsistence, Protection, Affection, Understanding, Participation, Idleness, Creation, Identity, Freedom. Each need is cross-cut by four existential categories (Being, Having, Doing, Interacting), generating a matrix in which a single satisfier — a family, a school, an institution, a practice — can address multiple needs simultaneously, and a single need can require multiple satisfiers. The needs are held as finite, universal, and constant across cultures; what varies is the satisfiers cultures construct to meet them.

The framework is honest about what most navigation systems gloss. The needs/satisfiers distinction is its central insight, and the taxonomy of satisfier-types is sharper still. *Synergistic* satisfiers serve one need and incidentally serve others. *Violators* attempt to satisfy one need while destroying the capacity to satisfy others — arms races, bureaucracy, censorship. *Pseudo-satisfiers* momentarily address a need while structurally hollowing it — advertising, fashion trends, chauvinistic stereotypes. *Inhibiting satisfiers* over-satisfy one need while suppressing others — paternalistic education over-satisfying protection while suppressing understanding and freedom. *Singular satisfiers* address one need only and generate no carry-over — organized tourism, sporting spectacles. Harmonism's diagnosis of modernity makes structurally identical moves in scattered places — advertising as severance-amplifier, bureaucracy as violation, status-consumption as pseudo-satisfaction. Max-Neef's taxonomy is the cleanest articulation of that diagnostic logic the needs-tradition has produced, and Harmonism owes the framework genuine recognition for it.

Where Max-Neef stops is where the Wheel begins. The matrix is analytical — it lets a community examine how present satisfiers serve fundamental needs and how exogenous impositions (state, market, ideology) violate or hollow those satisfactions — but it does not provide a path. There is no centre; Max-Neef explicitly rejects hierarchy and in doing so refuses any unifying principle that holds the nine needs as expressions of a deeper single reality. There is no metaphysical ground; Logos is absent, Dharma is absent, the human being is articulated as a creature with needs to be satisfied rather than as a microcosm of cosmic order whose alignment with Logos is what makes any satisfaction coherent in the first place. There is no fractal architecture — the matrix does not unfold into sub-matrices at higher resolution. There is no transmission model — the framework is an analytical instrument for community development, not a navigational architecture for a life.

The convergence is real. Max-Neef's matrix is the closest structural sibling to the Wheel on the needs-architecture axis — non-hierarchical, taxonomically careful, diagnostically sharp about the difference between genuine satisfaction and modernity's substitutes, built around a small finite set of universal categories that resist both reductive collapse and combinatorial explosion. The Wheel of Harmony is what Max-Neef's framework would have become had it descended from analytical matrix into navigational architecture, with Presence at the centre and Logos as the ground that holds the pillars as expressions of one cosmic order rather than as a finite-but-floating set of needs awaiting culturally-variable satisfiers.

---

## Wilber's Integral Theory

Ken Wilber's AQAL framework — All Quadrants, All Levels, All Lines, All States, All Types — is the most ambitious meta-framework produced in the late twentieth century. The four quadrants (interior-individual, exterior-individual, interior-collective, exterior-collective) honour the irreducible perspectives from which any phenomenon can be viewed. The developmental holarchy — consciousness unfolds through stages, each transcending and including its predecessors — honours something real about how human beings grow. Harmonism stands in serious convergence with the integral impulse and engages it at length in [[Integral Philosophy and Harmonism]].

The summary of the divergence, articulated there in full: AQAL is a coordinate system for organizing other frameworks, not an articulation of reality's structure. It tells the reader that every phenomenon has four quadrants and multiple developmental lines; it does not tell them what to eat for breakfast, how to structure their sleep architecture, what constitutes a sound vocation, or how to move through a crisis of meaning. The map is comprehensive; the territory of an actual life remains uncharted within it. The proliferation of categories (quadrants × levels × lines × states × types) produces a combinatorial space so vast that the framework can accommodate anything and guides nothing. The body in AQAL is the upper-right quadrant; in the Wheel of Harmony the body is the temple, and the [[Wheel of Health]] devotes the same architectural seriousness to sleep, purification, and supplementation that the Wheel of Presence devotes to meditation and breath. Wilber's post-metaphysical move — grounding validity in communities of practice rather than in reality's structure — risks dissolving the very ground on which integration depends. If the traditions converge only because their communities co-validate, the convergence is sociological. [[Harmonic Realism]] takes the opposite stance. The traditions converge because they are mapping something real.

Wilber's attempt to give AQAL practical descent — Integral Life Practice (ILP) — explicitly inherits from the earlier *Integral Transformative Practice* (ITP) developed by Esalen co-founders George Leonard and Michael Murphy in *The Life We Are Given* (1995), with its five-element practice architecture (Body, Mind, Heart, Soul, Community). Both ILP and ITP honour the recognition that an integral framework must descend into embodied practice. Both stop short of the architectural depth the Wheel carries — five elements without fractal articulation, without metaphysical centre, without the alchemical sequence by which the practices compound. The Wheel of Harmony absorbs the substantive insight that a complete human life requires practice across multiple dimensions while providing the architecture — eight pillars with Presence at the centre, fractal sub-wheels, the Way of Harmony spiral — that ILP and ITP could not generate from within their meta-framework substrate.

The Wheel of Harmony is what AQAL would have become had it descended from coordinate system into navigational architecture. *Full engagement: [[Integral Philosophy and Harmonism]].*

---

## Plotkin's Soulcraft

Bill Plotkin's depth psychology — developed across thirty years at the Animas Valley Institute in Colorado and articulated through *Soulcraft* (2003), *Nature and the Human Soul* (2008), *Wild Mind* (2013), and *The Journey of Soul Initiation* (2021) — is the closest contemporary psychological-developmental framework to Harmonism's Shamanic-cartography-anchored register. Plotkin's eight-stage life-developmental model (Innocent in the Nest, Explorer in the Garden, Thespian at the Oasis, Wanderer in the Cocoon, Soul Apprentice at the Wellspring, Artisan in the Wild Orchard, Master in the Grove of Elders, Sage in the Mountain Cave) anchors each developmental stage in nature-based initiatory practice, with specific wilderness immersion and inner work required for each transition. The framework descends from Jungian depth psychology + indigenous wisdom traditions + Carl Rogers's actualization substrate, with explicit critique of mainstream developmental psychology's culture-centric assumptions — most contemporary adults, on Plotkin's reading, are arrested at the Thespian or Wanderer stage because the dominant culture provides no initiatory architecture for the transitions beyond.

Plotkin's framework is substantively serious and substantially convergent with Harmonism on multiple registers. The Wheel of Nature's *Reverence* centre finds operational form in Plotkin's wilderness-initiation methodology — nature is not background for development but the substrate within which development becomes possible. The Wheel of Learning's healing-arts dimension finds an articulated initiatory architecture in Plotkin's Soul Apprentice and Artisan stages. The Shamanic cartography that Harmonism names as one of the [[The Five Cartographies of the Soul|Five Cartographies]] finds contemporary Western articulation in Plotkin's psychology. The actualization-not-construction posture — the human soul carries its developmental form as inherent potential, the work is to clear the conditions under which the form expresses — is structurally identical to Harmonism's cultivation-not-formation discipline.

The divergences are real but smaller than with most of the other comparators. Plotkin is a developmental architecture without an explicit metaphysical ground — Logos is not named; the soul is articulated psychologically and ecologically without commitment to the cosmic order Harmonism holds. The eight stages map a temporal-developmental trajectory across a life rather than a fractal architecture of life's dimensions held simultaneously — Soulcraft asks *what life-stage am I in?*; the Wheel asks *which of the eight pillars needs attention right now?*. Both questions are real; the Wheel adds the second to the first. What the Wheel adds at Plotkin's own scale is the metaphysical ground (Logos), the fractal-architecture shape that lets all eight pillars be cultivated simultaneously rather than transitioned-through, and the integration of the soul-developmental arc with the full set of pillars (Health, Matter, Service, Relationships, Learning, Nature, Recreation, Presence) rather than the soul-developmental arc as the organizing principle. *The convergence is close enough that Plotkin's institute form — Animas Valley as the dedicated container for the initiatory work — is worth studying as a model for what the embodied-transmission arm of Harmonia could become.*

---

## Gene Keys

Richard Rudd's Gene Keys system maps sixty-four archetypal sequences derived from the I Ching, each containing a *shadow* (defensive wound-pattern), a *gift* (natural endowment), and a *siddhi* (highest-frequency realization). The Gene Keys are presented as a complete contemplative-inquiry system for unlocking human potential — the practitioner inhabits their birth-chart's primary keys through journaling, dialogue, and what Rudd calls *contemplation* in a sustained encounter with each archetype, the work organized through sequenced inquiries (the Activation Sequence, the Venus Sequence, the Pearl Sequence) that propose a full path of human awakening.

The framework is poetic, philosophically serious within its register, and honours the contemplative tradition of the I Ching from which it derives. It belongs to a small set of contemporary archetype systems that take their material seriously enough to demand patient inquiry rather than fast-food typology. As a claimed life-architecture it stops short of what it claims. Gene Keys floats in the informational-archetypal register without grounding in body, in material stewardship, in civic service, in relational practice, in ecological reality. A practitioner who has spent three years working their Gene Keys profile may carry considerable archetypal self-knowledge and almost no clarity about their sleep architecture, their financial stewardship, their dharmic vocation in concrete form, or their relational competence. The frequency-meditation framing — the notion that holding a Gene Key in attention shifts its expression from shadow to gift to siddhi — operates on intuition without a stable account of the mechanism by which contemplative attention actually transforms embodied life.

The Gene Keys also create an interpretive dependency on the system's author. The body of knowledge is presented as Rudd's contemplative reception of the I Ching; later practitioners stand inside Rudd's interpretive lineage. Harmonism's posture is the opposite — the Wheel is articulated as a discoverable architecture downstream of Logos, available to anyone who learns to read it, not requiring deference to a particular interpreter's authority. *The convergence between the I Ching's sixty-four-hexagram architecture and the Harmonist account of fractal pattern warrants a dedicated treatment — currently absent — comparable to [[Harmonism and Sanatana Dharma]] or [[Buddhism and Harmonism]] at the per-tradition register.*

---

## The Perennial Philosophy

The perennial philosophy — articulated by Aldous Huxley in the mid-twentieth century, deepened by René Guénon's metaphysical traditionalism, Frithjof Schuon's transcendent unity of religions, Huston Smith's comparative work, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr's contemporary Islamic articulation — holds that beneath the exoteric forms of the world's religious and philosophical traditions lies a single underlying metaphysical reality discoverable by anyone who looks deeply enough through any of them. As life-architecture, the perennial philosophy operates by worldview: the path is to align with the One that the traditions point at, through the contemplative method appropriate to whichever tradition the practitioner enters. Harmonism honours the perennial impulse and converges with it on the basic recognition that the traditions point at a real territory that exceeds any one of them. Harmonic Realism is, in one register, the explicit articulation of what the perennial tradition glimpses.

Where the perennial philosophy is incomplete as life-architecture is in three structural directions. It is *backward-looking*: for Guénon and the strict traditionalists, the Kali Yuga has darkened the modern world beyond recovery, and the work of the contemporary seeker is to find shelter in surviving traditional forms rather than to articulate a forward path. Harmonism is forward-looking — toward the Integral Age, toward [[The Harmonic Civilization]], toward an architecture not yet built. The perennial philosophy is *esoteric in orientation*: the inner core is for the few, the masses receive the exoteric form. Harmonism is structurally democratic — the Wheel is universal architecture available to any practitioner who chooses to walk it. And the perennial philosophy is *diagnostic without being constructive*: it names what was lost and what remains, but it does not build. Harmonism builds — the Wheel, the practical pillars from sleep architecture to civic governance, the embodied practice through which the perennial truths become flesh.

*Full engagement: [[The Perennial Philosophy Revisited]].*

---

## Vervaeke's Ecologies of Practice

John Vervaeke's *Awakening from the Meaning Crisis* — a fifty-hour lecture series delivered in 2019, the broader *Vervaeke Foundation* and *Awakening Project* work that has developed from it — is the most substantive contemporary articulation of the diagnosis that the West is in a structural meaning crisis, and of the cognitive-scientific and contemplative-philosophical recovery path that might address it. Vervaeke, a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto, integrates four streams that rarely combine in one body of work: cognitive-scientific accounts of relevance realization, contemplative practice (Buddhist and Neoplatonic), philosophical genealogy of the meaning crisis, and what he names *religio* — re-binding, the recovery of the meaning-making faculty distinct from religion as institutional form. Vervaeke's *four ways of knowing* — propositional, procedural, perspectival, participatory — is the framework's most useful diagnostic instrument. Modernity, on Vervaeke's reading, has hypertrophied propositional knowing while atrophying the other three; recovery requires deliberately cultivating perspectival and participatory knowing through contemplative practice, organized as *ecologies of practice* — clusters of mutually-reinforcing disciplines forming the life-architecture for meaning-crisis recovery.

The substantive convergence with Harmonism is real. Vervaeke names severance from meaning as the civilizational pathology Harmonism names as severance from Logos. He recovers the contemplative-cognitive faculties Harmonism articulates through the Wheel of Presence. He honours the Neoplatonic tradition (Plotinus, Iamblichus) that Harmonism names as part of the Greek cartography. The ecologies-of-practice framing is structurally close to what the Wheel articulates as integrated cultivation across multiple pillars.

Where Vervaeke and Harmonism diverge is at the metaphysical commitment. Vervaeke stays methodologically agnostic — *religio* is articulated as a functional re-binding of cognitive faculties that produces meaning, not as the alignment of consciousness with an inherent cosmic order that *is* meaning prior to the human discovery of it. The four ways of knowing are mapped as cognitive structures the mind realizes; they are not mapped as participation in a Logos that orders reality independently of whether human cognition realizes it or not. This is the Harmonic Realism move Vervaeke does not make. The consequence is structural — Vervaeke's recovery project depends on enough people doing enough contemplative practice to re-cultivate the atrophied faculties; Harmonism's recovery rests on the recognition that the order is already there, the faculties are already there, and the work is the clearing of severance rather than the construction of meaning. Both projects converge on substantially the same practices. The metaphysics determines whether those practices are *recovering versus constructing* — and that distinction is load-bearing for what the practitioner is doing when they sit. *Vervaeke warrants a dedicated *Reading the Argument* engagement; the Landscape engagement here is map-level recognition.*

---

## Where the Wheel Stands

The pattern across the comparators is consistent. The Wheel of Life surfaces the question of whole-life balance and provides nothing beneath the surface. Maslow names multi-level human motivation and stacks the levels into a pyramid that gets the architecture wrong. Max-Neef corrects the hierarchy from within the needs-tradition and produces the cleanest satisfier-taxonomy the tradition has, but stops at analytical matrix without metaphysical centre or practical path. Wilber's AQAL produces a coordinate system that maps everything and guides nothing; ILP and ITP attempt the practical descent and stop at five elements without fractal articulation. Plotkin's Soulcraft articulates the closest contemporary developmental architecture from the Shamanic cartography and stops at the temporal-developmental shape without the fractal architecture of pillars-held-simultaneously. Gene Keys articulates a complete contemplative-inquiry system and floats above embodiment. The perennial philosophy articulates the underlying reality but is backward-looking, esoteric, and diagnostic-without-being-constructive. Vervaeke articulates ecologies of practice for meaning-crisis recovery and stops at functional religio without the metaphysical commitment that Logos *is* the order being recovered.

What the diagnostic literature beyond this map adds is convergence. Vervaeke names the wound as the meaning crisis. Hartmut Rosa names it as resonance-deficit. Iain McGilchrist names it as the left hemisphere's hijack of consciousness from the right. Charles Taylor names it as the transition from the *porous* to the *buffered* self. Each names a face of the same wound that Harmonism articulates as severance from Logos. None carries the metaphysical commitment to articulate what is *positively the case* about the cosmos such that the wound has a recovery; each operates as diagnosis without architecture. What the recovery-architectures in this map share with them is the diagnosis. What the Wheel adds beyond either is the metaphysical commitment, the fractal architecture, and the practical descent into eight pillars under Presence.

The transmission-mode dimension differentiates the Wheel from every comparator. Each of the systems above gets delivered through coaching, training, certification, ongoing membership, or initiatic dependency on a particular author's interpretive lineage. The relational form is constitutive — *how* the system gets transmitted is part of what the system *is*. The Wheel of Harmony is articulated through [[Guidance]] in its self-liquidating form; see [[Guidance and Coaching]] for the dimension this article does not develop.

What the Wheel adds is the metaphysical commitment to Logos as inherent reality, the fractal architecture (7+1 individual-scale pillars with Presence at centre) that lets each pillar unfold into its own sub-wheel, and the self-liquidating transmission model that returns the practitioner to their own sovereignty rather than to deeper dependence on the framework. None of the comparators carries all three. Each contributes something the Wheel honours; none reaches what the Wheel articulates as the integrating individual-scale architecture grounded in Logos. The Architecture of Harmony at the civilizational scale does parallel work in its own decomposition (11+1 institutional pillars under Dharma), engaged separately as the sibling architecture under the same doctrinal ground.

---

## Adjacent Systems

The personal-development discourse contains many systems that get treated as life-architectures by their users but do not aim at that scope themselves.

Personality typologies — the Enneagram, the Big Five and the broader OCEAN tradition, MBTI, HEXACO, Hogan, DISC — are domain-scoped instruments for mapping personality structure. The most sophisticated among them are incorporated into the [[Harmonic Profile]] at the personality layer.

Constitutional medicines — Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Tibetan Sowa Rigpa, Andean curanderismo — are domain-scoped systems for mapping human constitution and treating illness. The most sophisticated of them are incorporated into the [[Wheel of Health]] and into the Profile's constitutional layer.

Adult developmental psychologies — Robert Kegan's subject-object theory, the Stages International extension of his work, the developmental-psychology tradition more broadly — describe how the structure of consciousness matures across adulthood. Useful as diagnostic instruments within any of the Wheel's pillars.

Sociological and cognitive-scientific diagnoses — Hartmut Rosa's resonance theory, Charles Taylor's buffered-self analysis, Iain McGilchrist's hemispheric theory, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's Flow, Martin Seligman's PERMA — diagnose dimensions of the modern condition or aspects of consciousness without claiming to be life-navigation architectures.

Mythic-pattern systems — Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, the broader monomyth tradition, Christopher Vogler's screenwriting application, Robert Bly's mythopoetic men's movement — are pattern-recognition templates for narrative arc, not life-navigation architectures.

Each of these warrants its own engagement. *Personality Typology and the Harmonic Profile* will engage the typology tradition broadly. *Ayurveda and the Wheel of Health* and *Traditional Chinese Medicine and Harmonism* will engage the constitutional-medicine traditions. The diagnostic literature converges on the severance Harmonism articulates and is engaged in dedicated *Reading the Argument* pieces (McGilchrist, Vervaeke) and *Convergences* pieces (Taylor, Rosa, the broader meaning-crisis literature). The mythic-pattern systems warrant engagement when the writing toward storytelling and mythopoetics is taken up.

The systems mapped in this article are those that share the Wheel's scope and claim. They are the comparators against which the Wheel can fairly be measured as integral individual-scale life-navigation architecture. Each contributes something the Wheel honours; none reaches what the Wheel articulates as one architecture grounded in Logos.

---

*See also — dedicated treatments: [[Integral Philosophy and Harmonism]], [[The Perennial Philosophy Revisited]], [[Harmonism and Sanatana Dharma]], [[The Five Cartographies of the Soul]], [[Wheel of Harmony]], [[Anatomy of the Wheel]], [[Guidance]], [[Guidance and Coaching]], [[Architecture of Harmony]]. Sibling landscape articles: [[The Landscape of the Isms]], [[The Landscape of Integration]], [[The Landscape of Political Philosophy]], [[The Landscape of Civilizational Theory]].*
