The domains are not just different areas of life. They are wider and wider spheres of operation. And since, in TPS, we are aiming at expanding the person's space and ability to deal with more parts of life, they naturally go hand in hand.
Let me state first that the purpose of TPS is NOT to produce people that always do the right thing and never get into trouble. A person of a given level of ability might very well be able to find a small enough sphere of operation to not get into trouble. Small ability might be perfectly fine if everything is quiet and you don't try to actually do anything.
TPS is about expanding one's playing field in addition to increasing one's ability to deal with the game one is playing. To measure the horsepower of a certain person we need to look at both the size of the game being played and how well it is going. We fully expect people to dive into life and get themselves dirty. What domain of life the person successfully dives into tells us something about the developmental state, or at least the responsibility level, of that person.
These expansion states denote how wide an area in which one is able to demonstrate clarity, flexibility, responsibility, creativity, non-reaction, and an objective feeling sense.
To the trained eye, these states are about as finite as they come. But, they are in no way absolute or beyond argument.
Well, those are pretty much the states that are practical to attain or discuss for now. But we can of course continue with the following domains, even though it becomes somewhat more abstract conjecture what those states will be.
To bring this down to earth, notice that we are still talking about states that one person can be in. So, for example when we talk about Global Clarity, we aren't talking about your body suddenly turning into a planet or anything like that. It is a degree to which one is in tune with all the action within a certain domain.
A person with clarity on the personal domain is in tune with herself and takes responsibility for herself. She might get along with some other people, but might respond negatively to certain dynamic situations with people. But by herself she is always fine, no matter what she thinks about or looks at.
The person who has clarity on the inter-personal domain is then just somebody who can get into more action on a wider scale while still remaining centered and sane. She can deal with any kind of person and still be in tune with both herself and the other person, and be flexible at responding to the actual situation at hand, not falling back to frozen symbolics of what is going on. This person might however not do so well if we add in more people and she suddenly has to deal with a whole group. Then she might run into more action than she can handle and she might operate on fixed ideas to a certain extent.
That is the recurring theme here. How large a domain of dynamic action can the person stay present with without dropping away and resorting to frozen responses. How much commotion does it take before the person starts relying on automated mental guesswork, rather than just perceiving what is there.
The state of Total Clarity is by no means an impossible state to reach. There are people on the planet who have attained it. It is simply a person who always knows what to do, whom things always work out for, who maintains a large safe space under any circumstances and who acts with full certainty no matter what.
Be aware that it is increasing amounts of dynamic action we are talking about. If one overlooks that, one might think one can jump from the first level to the last without covering the ground in-between. You don't go from a state of personal clarity to a state of total clarity simply by sitting down and spacing out and thinking about things. Thinking about things is in the first domain. Anything beyond that involves action, actually interacting with other people and situations. Thinking things over might prepare the way a bit, but sooner or later one has to go out and interact with those domains.
Our main set of tools, semantic processing, applies the most to the first domain and then to a decreasing degree as we expand through the wider domains. We can always sort out the mental and emotional reactions to dealing with the level of action in a wider domain. However, that is only one side of the coin. To balance things out and actually gain ability one needs to go out and do something and live in that domain.
Therefore, you need to point people in that direction. If they only rely on semantic processing, that is, sitting down in a session talking about things, and changing one's mind about what they mean, then they never get any farther than the personal domain.
The focus needs to shift over more and more to people pursuing their own paths out in life, getting into trouble and getting out of it, and learning from it, and developing their abilities. You can supplement that by applying semantic processing to help them transform the semantic reactions that pop up along the way.
You can also be of assistance by providing more action oriented consulting. You can do exercises with clients to help them directly develop the abilities they need in order to deal with wider spheres of life. And you can assist them in actually making the exact things happen they need to continue their journey most successfully out in life.
You can only adequately simulate the first and second domains within the confines of a session. That is, you have the client and her mind there, and since you are another person you can engage in inter-personal dynamics. For anything beyond that, you need to look outward towards the wider domains. Or, you need to walk out and interact with them, whichever way that might be possible.
You as the facilitator need to maintain a sense of whether the client is dealing with a mental model of a domain, or with the actual domain. Dealing with a mental picture of planet Earth is distinctly different from being in rapport with planet Earth herself. There is nothing wrong with working with the mental duplicates at first, just don't mistake them for the real thing. It is perfectly valid to work with the client's personal reactions to the idea of communicating with other people, but don't mistake that for actually having done so successfully.
At first, ALL we do with a client is to work with her own mental/emotional stuff. That is what semantic processing is, we work with the meanings of things, as stored in the mind. The premise is that if we change the way in which something is perceived and thought about, and what meaning is assigned to it, then the phenomenon will naturally transform in real life too.
As we clarify the semantics more and more and bring the client's mind in harmony with her world, we need to gradually change our approach. The mind, as a redundant set of copies of the world, rapidly becomes less important. Basically, as the person achieves personal clarity, the mind and the world will be the same thing, they will match. At least in a state of rest. The only further need for semantic processing arises when certain dynamic situations bring forward latent semantic reactions. In principle, these will only show up when certain levels of activity are experienced.
Each state of clarity signifies sanity when wider domains remain quiet. One gets from one state to the next by actively engaging the dynamics of the next wider domain and dealing with whatever comes up.