SeaMonster

Everyone has loveable and unlovable traits. That's just reality. "Everybody" is delusional if they think they can find someone with solely lovable traits.

@Andrea Bianca Well...assuming what you said is correct, and that it is indeed your ego that wants to eat healthy and your shadow that wants to eat donuts, here's how I look at it. I don't think your shadow wants you to eat donuts ALL THE TIME. What might be the situation in that case is that you are so scrupulous in your diet that you go overboard and don't even allow yourself the occasional treat, which wouldn't harm you. So eating the occasional donut would be ok, and a healthy balance. As far as love and hate, they are such loaded words that I want to bring them down to something more workable and practical here. Let's call 'love' what attracts you and 'hate' what repels you. In that case, 'loving' something harmful to you is not a good thing for obvious reasons, and 'hating' it is no vice if it keeps you away from harm. Those are feelings that motivate your actions. If you're not twisted or self-destructive, e.g. you would love and hate appropriate things in that context. Even in a relationship with some person -- you don't LOVE AND HATE the person. You love the lovable things about them and hate the loathsome things about them.

In essence, what you're saying is that spirituality cannot be divorced or compartmentalized from LIFE in the broadest sense. It has to be life-affirming. So of course it has to be grounded in a life-affirming daily routine. It's not ascetism or mental fapping; it's just not.

It is a cope mechanism, an extreme one at that. The trickery in that line of reasoning is that you're going from "consciousness is the only thing that exists" (fine) to YOUR consciousness is the only thing that exists. In other words you're begging the question as far as the separate self concept being real, as opposed to a conditioned perception. That only works on people who haven't seen past the separate self illusion.

That's why you read multiple books. The problem with videos is that they're a low-resolution summary; in essence you're spoon-fed like a little baby bird. That's not real knowledge; it's pretend knowledge. It's a lot easier for unscrupulous or ignorant people to misrepresent a topic in a video and then claim they did a good faith summary of the topic. With the kind of influencers I see young people following on YouTube (like Destiny) -- give me a break. That guy is either ignorant or a liar on so many topics, a king of lies of omission. I would never rely on videos to attain in-depth knowledge of a topic. The lower resolution the source is, the more you're fed conclusions as opposed to being given the ability to form your own theories from source data.

The good vs. bad ego, as you described, aren't "good" and "bad" -- they are both bad. One is only "good" from a certain type of morality (Christian?) They are both bad from an Aristotelian golden mean kind of outlook. If you're a narcissist, that's bad; if you're committing suicide because you're too sensitive, that's bad too, from that viewpoint. They are both extremes. Firstly, the "ego" is simply that which we think we are; they are traits we identify with. This is morally neutral, although MOST of the time, we think whatever we are is good or right. Nonduality moves along the process of integrating the shadow, that which we tend to disidentify with. It can occasionally be considered good, but most of the time we think of it as bad. We tend to project it onto others or repress it. The endpoint of spiritual development is a yin-yang kind of integration of the two, where we discover that we were wrong all along in associating the shadow with evil (the case most of the time.) We drop the negative association and see it as a necessary part of ourselves.

I don't want to get into a "this is what's wrong with your generation" take...but this is what's wrong with your generation. Lazy, intellectually shallow and cultish is no way to go through life. "Videos" are perfect brainwashing by omission.

I would be extremely careful about applying the pre-trans fallacy to SD stages. It is more fruitful to apply it to states of consciousness rather than structures of consciousness. Even Wilber contradicts this idea by admitting that there are enlightened (i.e. trans-egoic) people in the Blue Stage e.g. Eastern monks, etc. Clearly people in the Bible such as Moses or Jesus were enlightened yet the Orange stage was nowhere close to existing. Really, it is animals and the most primitive kind of native peoples that don't have an ego and could be considered pre-.

The important thing is to understand the pattern. What you're really talking about is, there are certain behaviors or habits that lead to bad outcomes and others that lead to good outcomes. So even if you slip up occasionally, at least you know how to get back on track. At least you're not confused. You can TAKE RESPONSIBILITY. Most people are not even at that level of awareness. They don't connect their vices with their failures. So occasional weakness of will is always easier to manage than self-delusion and avoidance of personal responsibility.

Even bad people don't deserve to get killed if they're not trying to harm someone. I mean, I suppose there are gray areas (like gang or mafia rivalry hits, where it's a tit-for-tat killing) but is that what you're talking about?

Coaching is not a green business. It's ideally yellow. Green pretty much means "whatever stupid sob story I tell myself about myself is true and needs to be accepted by society that needs to change for me." It is antithetical to and resistant to any coaching (which means changing yourself.) It is impossible to coach people in Green mode (aside from letting them vent about how people/society has wronged them.)

Did you ever get checked for a learning disability? Sheesh. Didn't I say this shit like years ago? Not my fault if you didn't listen. You could have gotten extra time on the test.

I don't understand what the problem is. Is it that you don't have a social circle of intelligent people? Is it that you're forced to deal with stupid neighbors or relatives or co-workers? How does it affect you personally (and if it doesn't, why is it your problem?)

Unfortunately, that ship has sailed as of about 5 years ago. Leo has way too much baggage to go mainstream (and he knows this himself, he's not an idiot.) He would get destroyed by the media worse than Charles Manson. They would dredge up every family survivor of his suicided followers, run stories on irresponsible psychedelic use, discuss his grandiose claims and obsess over his pickup artistry and other salacious details of his past. Leo is not mainstream material and has not been for a long time. There is a reason he keeps a relatively low profile. If you think otherwise, you live in a freakin' dream world, and have no PR savvy.

Relationships for you would be a waste of time and money. You got this right: "socialize, get friends, and get laid first." Don't put the cart before the horse. You are too inexperienced to want a relationship. You would get ground up into dust going into that prematurely. What you need is (1) a social circle; (2) to observe how women actually behave; (3) to understand that you don't need to spend a lot of time and money to get laid (and that it's not even what at least half the women want either.) Your career is an asset. It's your status with women, whether that's acknowledged or not. You are somebody. Don't undervalue it. It would be good to at least have a sense of direction. If you play your cards right, the women in your social circle will hit on you. You don't need to do a lot of work. "Game" is really a joke (in the sense of cold approach.) It is highly inefficient. The return doesn't justify the effort (aside from doing it a few times to prove to yourself you can.) Smart men work smart, not hard. They build/join social networks with many single women. That's where it's at. There is pre-built social proof that covers about 75% of game.

The Mack Within by Tariq Nasheed.

LOL. Thinking about it may not do it for you. Who knows what the cause is? You may suffer from a vitamin deficiency or not get enough physical exercise, which affects your mental state. You can't mental-fap your way to the truth if your body is not at 100.

Jung's concept of individuation is infinitely more accurate and useful than SD. A lot of SD is ego development/polishing the old ego. The problem with Wilber is that he's only partially enlightened, so he places a lot of value on systems and intellectual development. He merely assumes that SD is somehow superior to being fully enlightened if the fully enlightened person is some ignorant rustic monk in Tibet or something. The fundamental paradox is that stage development is pointless until you're fully enlightened and unnecessary if you are. Wilber DOES NOT KNOW THIS. So even though I'm not a big fan of the "colonialism" argument, it is a very CLASSIST argument in the very least. A lot of being in Stage Green is really accounted for by the more basic socioeconomic and cultural factors, or an IQ differential vs. your parents perhaps. (I'm not even mentioning not being straight or things of that sort.) So the basic problem with stage development is that it is highly CONTEXT-DEPENDENT. If I drop you off in Africa tomorrow to live with forest people, your Green goes out the window. State of consciousness isn't. It is fully portable.

Sorry for your loss. There is no special way to grieve. Whatever feelings come up for you are valid.

This is incorrect. Green is NOT a second-tier stage, therefore it doesn't "transcend and include" Orange. It rejects Orange. This is Spiral Dynamics 101. Leo, you're missing my point. I'm not arguing that many scientists aren't self-proclaimed or self-identified Green. I'm arguing that they're full of shit and their stance is ultimately a self-contradiction. Your argument for nuance is an argument for confusion and cognitive dissonance and having your cake and eating it too. The two are simply incompatible at a fundamental level, and no amount of trying to thread the needle fixes the fundamental contradictions. This is all resolved by scientists going to the 2nd tier, of course.

It's possible your gut health is shot. This can GREATLY affect your mental states. Try to restore your gut health with probiotics and shit, and don't jump to any doom-laden conclusions.

It is the unconscious mind that does this, so it is unintentional. No-one wakes up in the morning and goes "things are going too good, how about I fuck things up a bit?" It simply HAPPENS because people, including celebrities, are unaware of their unconscious needs. If you're unaware of your unconscious needs, your unconscious mind will fuck things up to balance things out. The key with that is recognition that this is what is happening, and not doubling, tripling and quadrupling down on egoic behavior that calls for ruthless balancing of this kind. Rather it's about recognizing what you REALLY NEED as opposed to what your ego wants.

Leo's got lots of opinions, not all of them are correct.

If one experiences a separate self, then one believes one is the doer. At the point one no longer experiences a separate self (they call it No-Self -- it's akin to having no focal point center as an "I", now there is some local emptiness) one is also a non-doer. This is the first stage of stable non-dual awakening. Understand how the fiction of a separate self is maintained: it is through constant thought reinforcement that "THIS (focal point) is ME." These are terms describing how states of consciousness are experienced. Ultimate liberation is "the natural state." One realizes that "nature" is doing all the work: there is no "I" to take credit.

When you get into spirituality and enlightenment, you're fundamentally dealing with paradox. Linear logic goes out the window. Your logic is sound, but imagine e.g. if one completely sees through any form of identity...and yet, one's rational mind doesn't stop working, in other words is able to make all kinds of distinctions and categorizations. This is what you encounter upon extinguishing the I-thought. Your mind hasn't stopped. You know that many others e.g. see you as a discrete being, and it is easy enough for you to use your rational faculties to see yourself the same way. Yet, you also know that this isn't "reality" (in a metaphysical sense) but a product of rationality with certain premises and logic. The "real" reality is that everything is nondual consciousness. So the two can coexist without conflicting, and you can integrate both into a harmonious whole in your life.