SonataAllegro

Isn't this just because Leo's highest value is understanding? What if mine is love, or creativity? or hatred? Even if all values collapse in the end into unity, how we get there is completely personalized, no? Either you transcend your particular personality first, and do the "shutting off the mind" approach, or last, and do the "interconnection" approach. Your highest value = what you're unwilling to surrender till the end of yourself

And yet, as soon as I get the message, and then discard the message, I either endlessly look for the next highest level of "meta" on which to get the message, or I realize the message was only ever complete presence in the Now, in which case I wonder why I needed the philosophical chain of inquiry to get there. Do you experience this?

@Leo Gura what I've discovered is that this direction you're speaking of has more to do with personal understandings of reality which, when in high states of consciousness, become intensely magnified and project me into ever higher realizations. But what thoughts work for me to examine this interconnectedness wouldn't work for others. This comes from the particular things I've studied, like music. So God, as me, is grasping itself using what it's learned from "music" to draw a series of metaphors that project itself beyond concept, label, and form. But YOU as God don't have the same knowledge base to draw upon and thus have a different set of experience to grasp yourself with. Would you say I'm grasping this concept accurately or not?

@Leo Gura interested in your thoughts on this

Maybe your watch had satori

Is it apathy or neutrality? you may be conflating the two. The difference is subtle, but apathy requires a negative view of reality and future. You seem neutral to me. Neutrality means you no longer get your sense of security from accumulating things and experiences. Notice how the next two "levels" on this chart are willingness and acceptance. You DON'T need to do something to fill your life. Instead, the thought "I need to do something with my life" is keeping you in neutrality. Be okay living a modest life for a while and some kind of willingness to do something more will naturally emerge, it can't be forced.

Continue to notice the manifestations that this event has on your present life. Do not judge them. Do not make a story about yourself based on them. Do not feel that they shouldn't be there. Do not judge yourself for judging yourself - this process is hard. The reason they're being uncovered now is because an opportunity is presenting itself for you to challenge them - maybe by changing friend groups, by finding counterexamples from your past, by going to a workshop, etc. But until now, you may have been unwilling to change the situation. Until you challenge them, they will persist, but don't be hard on yourself for not being the way you want. They will change when you're ready.

Yes, get a dog.

Similar to @Vivaldo's post earlier, what do you guys tell people when they ask you if you're religious/spiritual/if you believe in God? Especially for those who've experienced God consciousness? Does your answer change depending on who's asking?

I’m in pretty much the same place. I’m trying a new tactic: I’ve made an agreement with myself that in a given amount of days I will have a certain amount of “hedonistic experiences” available to me (10 highs in 100 days, 15 masturbations in 100 days, etc.). This puts me in a mindset of abundance; rather than feeling like I’m prevented by some external force from doing these behaviors that I genuinely enjoy, I instead make each one special by limiting the number while choosing a number that feels reasonable to me based on the strength of the addiction and how much it throws me off balance. The fundamental idea is YOU need to be in an agreement with YOURSELF so you aren’t fighting with yourself and so you feel like you are in abundance rather than scarcity.

Until you are “so good they can’t ignore you”, you won’t get out of wage slavery and shouldn’t try to with a wage slave job. Build your skills on the side. ”but I don’t have enough time” cannot be an excuse if you care enough about photography to make it your life purpose.

What school out of curiosity? I’m also at a very orange school (Indiana University) and kind of regret it lol

Stay away from it! He says, sipping his cup of joe. Seriously though, it's exactly like a credit card, it will make you feel less tired but you're still in energetic debt. I use it in a limited amount each day cause it helps me with intellectual insights, but even then there's a point of diminishing returns -- it alters the way I think so much that I start to ignore mundane practical shit and get really stuck in my head. I say, use it for a specific purpose -- being peppy around friends, or boosting your contemplation abilities, or hyperfocusing on a cognitively demanding task. But NOT more than once a week. I think its honestly better to avoid it entirely, I quit for 3 months and felt the most amazing I've ever felt. But we mustn't be too self-controlling

How do you know there isn't a knife in your apple? How do you know someone didn't pour cyanide in your coffee?

Addiction to anything is caused by a low state of consciousness. There is always a negative self image behind it. The problem is not with the substance or activity itself, and you must make sure not to demonize whatever you're addicted to, since that just causes more negativity. The real problem is in that you've trained yourself to respond to the question "should I engage in this behavior" with "it can't hurt this once" or "fuck it, I deserve to relax" or "I have nothing better to live for " or "if I say no to it, I'm moralizing, and that's bad" (irony intended). You can put an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other and exercise "self control", but if you're conscious enough, you'll realize this can't work. The reason you can't stop the addiction is because you love the experience it gives you, but want to escape from your constant self-judgement and guilt for having this addiction. The only permanent solution is patience and mindful engagement. Mostly patience. You will not overcome these habits as quickly as you think, and the more you expect yourself to do it easily, the harder it will be. Mindfully engage with the activity/substance and notice how it feels. Ask yourself: Can I tune into the feeling of joy/satisfaction this gives me? Can I observe, without judging, the moralizing that goes on when I do this? Can I understand how all my addictions are related and how they all stem from a central feeling of lack? Is there a time during the day that I tend to seek this out and other times where I'm feeling fuller? Why do I feel i need to quit this? Is it cause I want to be the best? Is it cause I believe I can't have happiness as long as I'm addicted? Why do I believe this? What might mindful and responsible use of this thing be? Have the utmost patience and self-compassion. Overcoming addiction of any kind is HARD and we guilt ourselves so much because we think it should be easy.

Broad trends and patterns, relationships between and within nations and the complexities of their interconnection, understanding the many causes and effects of every action as a vast butterfly-effect network, and understanding the history of humanity as the drive to answer two questions: 1) What is true? and 2) who should lead? Think about what history is from each of the SD stages (it will look different depending on the model you're using). At stage purple/red/blue history is the history of my tribe, my family, my race, my religion, and how my personal story fits in with that. It will be extremely biased toward supporting the validity of that worldview (calling the Civil War the "War of Northern Aggression"). At orange, history becomes about finding "objective" truth, discovering the facts of what happened using evidence and logic to fill in the missing details of the "one human story" that we ascribe to (notice how even the idea of having a history textbook, as though all of human history could be summed up in one book, is deeply blue/orange). At green/pluralist, we care less about details and "facts" and more about understanding from as many perspectives as possible - primary sources and their validity and biases become more valuable than the distilled compilation of a modern voice. We understand that all perspectives on history are biased and that we never hold the full picture. The notion of "history" is seen more as your own understanding of other people's perspectives. At yellow, the sword of uncovering bias turns inward and realizes that it is YOUR own biases and limitations that define what you're willing to accept as your personal story of where you and your ancestors came from. Studying history becomes indifferent from the self-science that we do here; after all, you've constructed your whole identity around what you were taught happened before you were born. At turquoise, what need is there for history other than to play along with the silly game your fellow humans are playing? You're imagining it all! But there is good value in studying the most biased perspectives because doing so IS what gives you a less biased worldview. I highly recommend immersing yourself in all the SD mega threads and trying to contemplate yourself holding a purple worldview, a blue worldview, an orange worldview, etc. Rather than see people as following a prescribed mold defined by their stage, see the richness and diversity of even the lowest stages and how from those perspectives, reality appears very convincingly to be what they believe it is - that if you were in their place, having grown up in the same society with the same values, YOU would hold all their same convictions. An unbiased mind and full compassion for every single human and non human that you share this planet with? Don't think of history as this monolithic tome of facts that have occurred in the past. Think instead as a process of endlessly wondering, "what factors have shaped the world around me? This person, this building, this idea, this tradition, this war, this grass, this elephant, this universe. Don't hold a distinction between the history of people and the history of the universe (what we call "science"). And don't think that there is any one way of understanding the truth of what has happened, or that you ever could -- the point is that you are aligning yourself with the process that the universe is doing at every moment - wondering what the hell it is.

If nothing is solid, why would we ever perceive anything as solid ever? our mind reduces what we see to the simplest explanation. When you do consciousness work, you start to see what you are actually seeing before your mind interprets it with its usual solidity bullshit. its not indicative of anything, per se; you can't derive with certainty any understanding of what's going on with you spiritually. Just bask in the mystery of uninterpreted perception.

I don't understand why @Leo Gura emphasizes uncovering your biases when he also says that, no matter how aware of them you are, you're still going to act on most of them. Why contemplate fucking a goat when I'm never going to do it? Yes, it jars my mind and reveals my bias more starkly, but practically speaking, the only way I can become infinite is by gradually uncovering and letting go of my biases in a baby step process. Uncovering smaller biases seems more worthwhile because I can actually let go of them through action - what kind of foods I avoid, what kinds of questions I ask, who my friends are, etc. Contemplating taboo topics has value but I don't see why simpler things aren't more important for this work. He also only briefly mentioned at the end what I think is maybe the most important part - holding a bias against bias is bias. This, to me, is the master key. If you can be totally impartial to either a completely biased mind or an unbiased mind or every degree of bias in between, the work stops being a goal-directed desire to reach infinity and becomes a game you play with yourself, and that is infinity. In fact, any time Leo paints this kind of strange loop (God limits itself because limitlessness includes all limitation; rationality is skeptical of everything but its own skepticism; nihilism deconstructs everything but meaninglessness, Non-Duality includes non-duality and duality), is where my mind is blown the most and I derive the most meaning and guidance from his work. His explanations like this are what collapse huge contradictions that few spiritual teachers talk about, and I wish he belabored more upon those points (and maybe less on pointing out the biases in science and politics, which by now, most of us are keenly aware of).

I'll tell you how I learned it for 6 years and still maintain it after 4 years of not practicing: 1. Speak to yourself every day in French. Don't talk about trivial things either, have deeper conversations with yourself. It forces you to search for new vocabulary and see that your ideas appear in your head without any particular language assigned to them. Speaking is the most important part, second is listening, third is reading, fourth is writing. 2. Master key: if you don't know how to say a word while you're speaking, use the vocabulary you know to say it in a different way. Then write down in English what the word is and look it up later. Don't concern yourself with nouns so much as verbs and their conjugations, adverbs, and sentence structure. 3. Conjugation is King. Write down your verb conjugations every day, speaking as you write. Trust me, if you speak while you write you will learn so much faster. 4. Learn like a baby learns its first language. Your mind doesn't learn a language from putting nouns together, it learns from mimicking sentence structure. This is why listening to the radio (TV5 is great) is so important, even if you don't know what they're saying, your mind picks up on the sentence structure musically, then gradually makes distinctions between words. 5. Think in French, not english! Avoid the extra step of translating. This will take practice but once you can do it you learn so much faster.

1) how do you know you won't suffer way more if you don't break up? 2) how do you know you can solve your attachment problems while maintaining a relationship? If she understands what you know about ego then maybe she will be compassionate, but if she doesn't, how do plan to tell her what you're going through without causing more strain? You gotta be real with yourself and say either "I'm too jealous and turmoiled to have a relationship right now" or "I'm going to redirect my attention toward a higher purpose than her and keep her in my life". Those are your 2 options.

Hey y'all! I'm getting ready to teach Spiral Dynamics to my Leaders-in Training for the Summer camp I work at (ages 15-16) and I'll be spending all of May deeply contemplating the model and integrating each stage so I can know that I'm teaching from my own experience. I've studied this and other developmental models for 3 years, and I want to get into the heart of each stage, reflect on my own embodiment, and understand how to effectively teach it. Please help me answer any of these questions as I plan this journey: 1. In addition to studying the book, Leo's videos, and the mega threads, what are some exercises I can use to understand and integrate each stage? 2. What are the most essential films to watch for each stage? Ones that show the benefits of each stage in addition to the limitations? 3. How do I get teenagers interested in a psychological development model, given my age group and the fact that most of them are stage high Orange/Green? (It's a nature camp in Massachusetts and most are from schools that stress equity and diversity) 4. What happens if I get someone from a stage Blue background (unlikely but possible) or otherwise people who are very closed-minded? 5. What are the positive aspects of Purple, Red, Blue, and Orange that I can stress? 6. I'm concerned about pointing out limitations of materialism. I don't want to fully deconstruct science for them but I still need to explain how and why the materialist paradigm is not sufficient. How do I avoid giving them existential crises and looking like a crackpot while still addressing the issue? 7. I'm even more concerned about talking about the limitations of Green, as they may confuse the self-centeredness of Yellow for that of Orange. They're also likely to think I'm constructing a hierarchy even if I tell them that being at a higher stage does not imply being better. I also don't want it to seem like I'm excusing anyone's actions by asking them to understand and have compassion for racists, sex offenders, capitalists, Hitler, Trump, and anyone else Green demonizes. Leo is able to be very direct in this way but I'd immediately lose credibility if I say that, for example, Hitler acted out of Love. How to manage? 8. What are some engaging exercises I can have them do to for each stage, especially Yellow and Turquoise? I want to hit them over the heads with the depth of self-actualization and self-transcendence, but how far do I go? I want this to be maximally impactful and memorable for them, but there are dangers to talking about this stuff with teens. It is, however, the best time for them to have an introduction to it. I want to give them a taste of what's really possible for them in life that I wish I'd gotten at their age. Thank you!!

If you want to develop that skill, talk to yourself all the time. I've done this for 12 years and I can tell you it really helps develop the connections in your mind and articulate them. It takes practice but just follow whatever chain of thought you're mind takes you on. Have some "central point" you're trying to approach, but know that you probably won't get there... it's the contemplation/speaking itself that's the fun part. Alan Watts and Leonard Bernstein were also amazing at giving extemporary lectures.

@Leo Gura I have 3 questions: 1. Are you aware of/contemplating methods other than psychs that move you in the "upward" direction such that the finite mind gradually expands until it becomes infinite? Is contemplation essentially this? 2. How is the "downward" movement, which is focused on removing mental labels, not the same thing as the deconstruction you advocate? Is it that the "upward" embraces construction as a necessary part of Deconstruction? 3. I understand radical aloneness, that there is no one to help and nothing to do. Why do you think so many cultures advocate the bodhisattva approach of withholding one's awakening to help others, and do you think there's any wisdom to it?

Don’t moralize when you inevitably do get stuck in one of them. With time your attachment will loosen.

Thanks all, this is good advice and I’ll reconsider what I tell the campers about SD, if at all. I would still like input on what kinds of things I might do during May to integrate and understand each stage.