bmcnicho

@halfknots You think I wasn’t actually asleep? That’s possible, but there was a solid 3 hours that I have no memory of. I guess I remember having no ego and my ego coming back, but I don’t remember an experience of losing or transcending it

All the political stuff going on is nonsense. People seem like soulless grifters these days. The sheer level of incompetence and aggressive ignorance on so many topics is astounding. It’s like people are waging a war on truth and on goodness and on any kind of competence or direction The future? Doesn’t matter. Sure all our grandchildren will probably die and suffer horribly when they’re like 8 or 9 or 10 or 11 or 12 years old, but it’s not literally happening right now so who cares. Let’s find some nonsensical bullshit to pay attention to instead All this spirituality and meditation stuff is kind of nonsense too to be honest. I have followed Leo for many years and have found a lot of value in what he has to say, but ultimately using various techniques to destroy the mind’s ability to feel negative emotions isn’t some kind of “enlightenment” Truth is pain. The more pain one can bare, the more truth one can see. Happiness can always only come from ignorance and delusion. Maybe that’s why people are so delusional. Maybe there is only hedonism and all truth and meaning is a lie Anyways, I guess it’ll be fun to watch this nonsense called civilization finally crumble. It will be painful, but in the end it will all be over soon enough Edit: Merry Christmas, Motherfuckers!

We've only been dating a few weeks and she's already shared a lot of heavy personal stuff with me. She has pretty severe anxiety and depression, and she worries a lot that I'm gonna break up with her, even though I give her lots of positive attention and compliments. I found out that she self harmed today. She refuses to get help and is upset when I say she should. She's already very attached to me, and some of the things she says make me uncomfortable, but it makes her sad when I suggest that things are going too fast. She's also very energetic, and when we spend several hours together it gets pretty exhausting, but I can't really talk to her about that, because that's something she's insecure about. I really like her for other reasons, she's very creative, very kind, and I feel comfortable enough to be very authentic around her. It's just feels like way too much way too fast. It seems like I have to be very strong and stable in order to help her, but I have issues in my own life to deal with too. I know that if anything happened to her I'd blame myself. I feel responsible for her even though we just met. It's scary knowing that even being a little impatient with her or making a slightly negative comment could have a large effect on someone in that kind of mental state. It seems like a state of selflessness is required here that's way beyond my level of development. Any comments or advice would be greatly appreciated

If you’ve ever learned about the complex multi-step process of protein folding, it’s pretty incredible! Think about all the chemical reactions happening in trillions of cells all at once: cell division, muscle fibers twitching at the molecular level all in sync, hundreds of enzymes each specifically shaped, etc. It’s an unfathomable amount of intelligence and complexity! Add to that in humans the structure of the brain with billions of neurons connected by trillions of synapses. ...And then all this comes together to form a flat-Earther. And then a group of these people come together to create a Qanon conspiracy cesspool on 4chan. My mind is struggling to understand the seeming contradiction here, how we can be perfectly calibrated and structured at the cellular level, but fail in the most basic ways as individuals and as a society. Does anyone have ideas about this?

@Carl-Richard The point about the cost of information processing is one I forget to give enough weight. I think that the cost of lacking an accurate perception of reality would be greater, especially in the case of large societal issues such as climate change. Maybe that will end up being the case, but our evolutionary mechanisms are primarily geared toward things with personal stakes and short time horizons. Maybe if I had all the information it would make sense to me why humans need to have the shortcomings we do, it just seems like a huge waste of potential

I’ve been moving toward Stage Yellow for a few years now and I feel like I have a pretty solid grasp on systems thinking. I do still have psychological hang-ups from previous stages, but for the most part I’m able to evaluate things on a multi-perspectival level. Periodically though, I’ll have a new insight on a topic and it’ll make me wonder if before I wasn’t truly at Stage Yellow yet. I feel like of all the stages, Yellow has the murkiest definition. I sometimes have trouble distinguishing Yellow from intellectual Orange. Fundamentally the difference lies not in the intelligence level of the material but in the underlying thought processes behind it It’s also easy to overlook some of the more radical implications of a full stage Yellow worldview, for example that democracy and authoritarianism are simply different governmental structures that represent different survival strategies on the part of the nations involved. With some more nuance added, I think this would be an accurate description, but still a difficult statement to make at a time where democracy is under threat throughout much of the world. So I guess I’m still trying to grasp where the threshold is where a set of ideas qualify as Stage Yellow rather than a more traditional intellectual analysis. I’m also questioning if under Stage Yellow it’s possible to take on strong personal positions or if one would tend to have mixed views on basically every topic to maintain an intellectual objectivity

I’ve noticed a pattern in recent years that as certain aspects of Stage Green have been rising in prominence, Stage Orange has been quick to try to co-opt it for its own purposes. The most consequential example is when corporatist politicians use progressive rhetoric to gain votes with no intention of delivering. More blatant is when ads for low consciousness products do this. I’d think it would be obvious to people how disingenuous this is, but it must work because they keep doing it. It’s disappointing to see how easily Stage Green language and aesthetics can be made non-threatening to the Stage Orange establishment by being used by people who share none of its fundamental values. Like the image of progressivism can be turned into just another product to be marketed. I’m also disappointed by how ineffective most activism and protest has been, with the fight for gay marriage being the prominent exception. But for the last 20 years, almost no progress has been made on the climate crisis, despite how important and urgent it is. I believe most members of these movements are sincere, but I can’t help but think that the people leading them kind of know that it’s an empty virtue signal. The term “controlled opposition” sounds like a conspiracy theory, but sometimes it seems like an apt descriptor I’m considering if this is just part of the process of evolution and if this sort of thing has happened with previous stages. An example could be the mostly Stage Red Roman Empire adopting Stage Blue Christianity as its official religion. Maybe something similar happened with Christianity pretending to tolerate Stage Orange European Enlightenment values In conclusion, I’m wondering if to achieve true Stage Green, there needs to be a complete collapse of the current system and if so would it be something that humans could survive?

I’m disappointed that this thread turned into a silly racial debate. My original post was about a specific obstacle to the development of Stage Green, I never mentioned race @Leo Gura Thanks for pushing back on my pessimism a bit. My concern is the insidious nature of it, that fake green could become an obstacle to true green. That the energy behind these movements could become sanitized to the point that it limits the pathways forward. But I suppose this is all part of the process

I've been thinking about how a single human is made out of a colony of trillions of cells with specialized roles that act together to form a single organism. There are many advantages to this, as they form highly adapted organ systems allowing each individual cell to benefit from the collective structure and intelligence of the whole. However, this comes at the cost of the cells giving up their ability to survive independently. If it turns out that the multicellular organism isn't well adapted and is likely to die, its individual cells aren't able to leave the organism and must die with it. It's also true that individual bacteria and other single celled organisms can survive just as well on their own with more limited interactions with surrounding cells. Based on biomass distribution, it's not obvious whether the single celled or multicellular survival strategy is best from the perspective of an individual cell. Relating this to humans, being able to socially cooperate with other people has given us a considerable advantage over other mammal species. Our forms of social organization have become more complex with time, and the culture we're brought up in has come to have a large impact on the people we become. I see this process continuing, especially with rapidly increasing technology. As of now, individual humans are still able to operate with some degree of autonomy, but in the future it will most likely be possible to directly link minds together using technology. My intuition regarding this is that the risks could easily outweigh the potential benefits. Whoever initially controls this technology will have immense power, and I fear the possibility of humanity becoming a hive-mind, where one ideology is forced on everyone with no possible recourse. Even if such a nightmare scenario doesn't occur, there's still the problem of how this collective system would be organized. There would need to be some sense of coherence to it, so that it wouldn't become an incomprehensible noise of everyone's contradictory thoughts and feelings. But it would also need to preserve unique perspectives and allow for creativity and change. Such an endeavor seems like it could so easily become a disaster, so the main thing I'm wondering is if a collective mind is inevitable given our current trajectory? Even today it seems like the common person isn't highly valued and doesn't have a meaningful ability to affect their circumstances. Ideology and culture already seems to induct people uncritically into it. So it seems to me like we're heading for a totalitarian future. Is there anything that can be done about it at this point?

Clearly survival pressures influence our worldviews greatly, but I'm contemplating whether there could be any truth value to beliefs independent of the evolutionary and psychological factors that produce them. Is treating people with compassion morally right in some higher sense, or did it merely benefit our ancestors survival to be able to cooperate in groups? Are virtues like competence, resilience, rationality, strength, creativity and love actually valuable or do they only happen to be useful for a group of apes living on a rock in space? This line of thinking is leading me towards a caricature of postmodernism, where every perspective could be equally correct, so it's sort of impossible to really reach conclusions about anything. I guess the more spiritual answer would be that Truth lies beyond thoughts and the mind, but I'm not ready to give up on the potential value of more relative truths. Playing a game of trying to deceptively 1-up the other meat blobs around me doesn't seem all that compelling to me. But if all our religions and philosophies are a bunch of nonsense our ego-minds invented then I don't see what else is there. The side of me that's an idealist tends to conflict with the side that's a rationalist, but that's what I've come up with so far.

I’ve been thinking about what the world’s continuing development up the spiral might look like in the next 200 years. Stage Orange seems feasible almost anywhere as much of the developing world is starting to industrialize and I expect stage blue religions to continue to decline. Certainly pockets of purple, red and blue will continue to exist for a long time, but I expect that blue will eventually reduce to around the influence that purple has today. Majority Green also seems possible, but more ambitious. I expect some of the issues with capitalism and technology to become more obvious in the coming decades, which should push people in this direction. Also, if affluence and security continues to increase, then more of the world will resemble the life conditions in Europe which facilitate Stage Green. However, attaining Stage Green requires a substantial increase in compassion, which I see as a major challenge for much of the population even with improving life conditions. The stage I’m more skeptical of is yellow, because it seems to require an understanding of abstract concepts that would be very difficult for the average person. Considering a Green/Yellow society that would be the precursor to a full Yellow society, certainly life conditions would have improved dramatically. The education system would have improved dramatically as well, promoting abstract reasoning, critical thinking, and deep conceptual understanding. Even so, most people don’t seem intrinsically drawn to intellectual topics. I could see about 30% of the population being stage yellow, about the same percentage that currently go to college in the US, but after that it seems like stage yellow requires a certain level of intelligence that would limit most people. For those who have studied spiral dynamics, do you think majority Stage Yellow is possible without some kind of mass scale cognitive enhancement?

What is Truth? Truth can’t be spoken, it can only be experienced. And this experience takes place in the mind and manifests in reality. The world is truth.

To clarify my point, it seems to me that true Yellow contains certain components that would be very difficult for someone of below average intelligence. They’d need at least a foundational understanding of history and psychology, and be able to see the paradoxical relations within complex systems. Perhaps there’s a less intellectual version of yellow that’s more intuitively based, but otherwise it’s seems that cognitive enhancement or genetic engineering would be required to create a stage yellow society. I guess what I’m getting at is who is currently stage yellow who isn’t also a fairly advanced intellectual?

Women are adults with equal rights and abilities, so why are men, at least to a certain extent, still expected to provide for them? Why would men do this? What do men get in return? Men aren’t the parents of the women they date, so it just seems really stupid and unnatural. Sure women provide men with emotional support, companionship, affection, and various other things depending on the individual, but men provide all those things to women too. Of course there are lots of women with successful careers who don’t expect this, but in general men are largely judged based on what kind of job they have, whereas women, with the exception of shallow men who care mostly about appearance, are evaluated more so for their personal qualities, which I think is a much more reasonable standard. This phenomenon could be explained in terms of evolutionary biology or as an after-effect of traditional gender roles, but isn’t it contrary to the values of modern liberal democracy? Doesn’t that standard suggest that women are inherently more valuable, while men have to give the products of their labor to women in exchange for their attention?

I find it interesting that I didn’t mention marriage or children in the original post, yet that’s what a lot of people used as an explanation. The standard of men being providers applies to a certain extent to all age groups and regardless if the people involved are considering marriage and family. Also, once the kids are in school this no longer applies, so this is only a valid justification for a few years out of 60+ years of adulthood.

@electroBeam Isn’t an aspect of Infinite Love its continuous transformation and evolution? A crucial aspect of growth and change is questioning the status quo. I don’t think it’s inherently unspiritual to point out a social issue.

I’m becoming more conscious of the cruelty of the capitalist system, and the cruelty inherent to most of our social and political systems. However, given that other systems throughout history and in many other parts of the world were if anything worse, it seems to be inherent to survival itself rather than to any particular system. Even if reality is infinite, it seems that more entities will want to exist in any given space than will be able to, at least in realms of existence resembling this one. Therefore wouldn’t cruelty be a huge survival advantage? And wouldn’t you expect any entity that exists to have a certain amount of it? Cooperation, of course, is also a very effective survival strategy, but even so a certain level of enforced conformity and exclusion would need to be present to keep things functional. So how can reality be Infinite Love, as Leo has been emphasizing recently, if cruelty is so essential to how beings maintain themselves? One answer could be that I only view cruelty as a negative out of fear of falling victim to it. Would that then make cruelty good by definition because it exists? Although it seems like cruelty would decrease as beings reach higher levels of consciousness.

@Nak Khid The idea of what is being perfect by definition seems strangely similar to social Darwinism or radical conservatism, even though it’s framed as a higher consciousness way of thinking. Another weird paradox I suppose.

I'm currently 8 months into a relationship, and up until now we've been seeing each other 3 days a week. Recently she was furloughed from her part time job, and my hours were cut from 5 days a week down to 3. So now she wants us to spend more time together. I agreed to increase it to 4 days last week, but now this week she doesn't think that's enough. She told me she's jealous of her roommate who gets to she her boyfriend almost every day. So I guess I'm just looking for some feedback on what seems reasonable. Am I neglecting her because I want to have a few days to myself?

I've been dating someone for less than 3 months and they're developing an unhealthy attachment to me. She has mental health issues, so I don't think it's good for her. The relationship is going well, I'd just like for her to be a bit less intense and be ok when I'm not around. Not sure how to help with that or how to prevent things from getting more out of control

I just see ego and lies all around me. I've been considering different career paths, and everything seems to boil down to manipulating people in order to get some money. Money is completely meaningless anyway, and people spend it on silly things. You can survive pretty comfortably on $30,000 a year, so I don't see why people want more than that. So much suffering is inflicted upon people and we're doing so much damage to our future. And the thing is most people aren't actively malevolent, they're just either too lazy to pay attention or just don't care. Politics is so full of shit. Even people I agree with are full of shit in their own way. We have so much work to do collectively, but very little of it is getting done. I feel like the world is a giant machine of ego and devilry and everything I could do would just feed back into it. Even those who oppose the system end up being a controlled opposition, to appease everyone else and give them false hope. It's gotten to the point where I just don't want to do anything. I'm not depressed, I love myself and I love life. I just don't want to be manipulated by the system. There's so many lies, I'm just looking for truth. I've been reading lots of great books, but no source is a hundred percent pure. I sometimes lose motivation to read something when I realize it's only giving me a partial perspective. I feel like 99% of people over 30 have sold their soul to society. They have bad marriages, mediocre kids, meaningless jobs and are content to waste their entire lives. I'm in my early twenties now and get so much terrible advise. I'm conscious enough to reject it, because I feel like the modern world has descended into total nihilism. I can't imagine myself becoming like the people I see around me, but don't see viable alternatives. I absolutely love life, but I'd happily die to avoid becoming a slave. Maybe that's the key to finding truth: Put meaning ahead of survival

Since I was young, I've been very distrusting of authority and culture. Everyone around me seemed way too conformist, like they were blindly accepting the ideas of other people and acting only in the ways that were expected of them. Therefore it seemed like I couldn't find truth from any outside source and decided to rely exclusively on my own judgement. As a result I was very selfish, rebellious, and angry as a child. Of course that kind of egotism didn't work out well for me, and I gradually learned discipline and self control. By the time I was about 12 years old, I was also very distrustful of myself, seeing the potential of self deception in my emotions and impulses. And yet I also understood even more clearly the problems of the collective. If I couldn't receive truth from others, and I couldn't find truth within myself, then where was it to be found? That's when I decided I wanted to become a scientist. I saw science as the only valid source of truth, because I viewed it as separate from all human bias. It was only when I arrived at university that I started to see the problems with academia and institutions. I began to contemplate the potentially dangerous technologies that science was leading to, and that corporate interests distort it from being a pure pursuit of the truth. Leo's talked a lot about epistemology and he's talked a lot about the Absolute and awakenings. His teachings have been incredibly valuable, but what I'm still wondering is where is a valid source of conceptual relative truth? It seems like everything out in the world is clouded by collective ego, and my own thoughts and feeling are clouded by my individual ego.

@Keyhole She had a knife to her throat and said she almost did it. I don't know if that technically qualifies as an attempt. I don't know if I want to be a hero, but I would like the opportunity to help someone. I wouldn't call myself dead inside, although I have had some nihilistic phases.

@LordFall You bring up a good question which I'll need to devote some serious contemplation to. What is it about me that attracts and is attracted to girls with mental health issues? This has happened to me before, but in the past it was much less severe.

Thanks for the thoughtful responses eveyone! There's some good information in this thread! Update: She had a suicide attempt about a week and a half ago. She seems to be doing a lot better now. She's now open to getting help, but still hesitant. I've learned that her family situation is pretty rough, and that it's contributed a lot to these issues. We've gotten a lot closer over the past month. She really is very sweet, caring and accepting despite her mental health issues. I really want to make this work but am starting to understand that it might be necessary to step away @Leo Gura Thanks for your insights on this topic! I'll keep that in mind as I move forward. At a certain point I might have to accept that there isn't gonna be a way to make things work. @remember That's important to keep in mind as well. Individual situations are distinct, so our judgement shouldn't be clouded by trying to fit a story to some abstract stereotype of "the toxic relationship".