Carl-Richard

You will be experiencing taking actions regardless of whether free will or determinism is true. Nothing changes there.

Welcome to Green. It will get better. You're also young. As for choosing a path, you just have to try something. Doing something is better than doing nothing. Nothing will be absolutely perfect. As for finding out what to believe, it's the same answer. As you try out things in life, you'll find out more about what you want, which in a big way informs what you believe.

Hanzi Freinacht was right. Studying the Model of Hierarchical Complexity does make you disillusioned about people. Do you have any arguments for your position?

Guitar if I remember correctly. It could've also been bass or drums.

I have always been attracted to the pragmatic way of describing knowledge: as useful fictions. In other words, things aren't so much true as they are useful for fulfilling some goal, e.g. describing, predicting or making sense of something in the world. However, the common and valid objection to this is that in order to establish that something is useful, you have to establish that something is the case, i.e. true. And I understand the point of that objection, and that fundamentally, a certain kind of realism is unavoidable when trying to speak about anything. However, I still prefer the pragmatic way of speaking, namely for this reason: it keeps you perpetually grounded and aware of your fundamental assumptions. Any time you claim "this is true" without clarifying with "granted that we're speaking about constructions, concepts, models, etc., for the sake of making sense of the world, etc.", you become more prone to slipping into naive realism, i.e. taking your constructions for something more than just constructions. This is a terrifying prospect and something I intuitively want to avoid, and clinging to the pragmatist language game provides me with a sense of safety against this. So it's not that I think the pragmatist view is ultimately "more true" than the realist one. It's ironically that I think it's more useful. I think it's safer and wiser. And at the end of the day, it's simply a different language game, a different tool, and you should use the tools which you think are the best for you. It doesn't really change anything at the bottom of things, only how you interact with the world. And when you constantly interact with the world while using deep and heavy abstractions, keeping the fact that they're abstractions perpetually above board is a very sobering and responisible thing to do. I might also prefer this because I'm more feminine in this respect, in that I don't want to be too quick to judge or conclude something as a clear-cut case, or that I prefer to minimize risk, or that I prefer to express things fully with all their flaws even though it takes more work or looks less elegant. And someone else might simply prefer the opposite and are more masculine in this respect. "This is true and this is not" is more elegant and assertive than "this is useful for this end", but it's also more dangerous and can lead to self-deception if you're not otherwise diligent with how you use your language.

@Rigel I performed that song in high school together with my music class as a band

This is not a book or an article but a really interesting talk about the possible mechanics of (conscious) reincarnation ("choosing" your next life). Essentially, he draws parallels to lucid dreaming.

I've recently become obsessed about observing how leaves change throughout the seasons, especially when they're at their peak before showing signs of decomposing. "When is it going to happen?" And virgin leaves. And of course, autumn leaves.

A couple of years ago, I found out Spiral Dynamics has a problem: sampling bias. Specifically, Clare Graves' essay samples consisted of only North Americans (primarily white, affluent college kids), and Don Beck's "samples" (I can't find anything on the methods he used) consisted of only North Americans and South Africans. Generally, the sample is biased towards Western cultures (and more importantly, it completely lacks Eastern cultures). When I first learned about this, I thought maybe it's not a big problem, because dozens of other models (although with similar sampling bias) have come to similar conclusions (Piaget, Holberg, Loevinger, etc.). However, these models generally do not include the equivalent of Turquoise. And this is exactly what turns out to be the problem: Turquoise itself seems to be the result of sampling bias. When Western people reach Green-Yellow, they get statistically more familiar with New Age ideas, particularly Eastern-inspired non-dual mysticism. This is because the West significantly repressed its mysticism for the last millennia, so you generally need to import it from other cultures to discover it (which obviously happens more often at Green-Yellow). You would expect these people to describe it as their highest value, which according to Graves' methodology would be their highest stage, in this case Turquoise. However, non-dual mysticism has of course existed all throughout history and at all stages of development. This is self-evident as you're importing these ideas from ancient religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. Now, if the creators of SD had used samples from the cultures you're importing the ideas from, mainly Eastern cultures, then they could've easily ruled out mysticism as being its own stage, because again, it's essentially present at all stages in these cultures and not just at later stages. Had they done that, Turquoise would clearly be seen as an artefact of sampling bias. You can make the same case from a theoretical perspective, without relying on empirical data. For example, Hanzi Freinacht in The Listening Society, has pointed out that Turquoise fails to provide any critique towards Yellow (which I agree with). More specifically, it doesn't provide a higher level that "transcends and includes" the previous stage. It doesn't address any of the problems of the previous stage. It only sidesteps them, as I've pointed out, through mysticism. And maybe not coincidentally, Hanzi refers to Turquoise as New-Agey "holistic" or "integral" people. So to summarize, "Turquoise" is essentially what you get when you build SD based on data from Western educated youth and not much else. Its purported contributions to Yellow is not substantially different from New Age mysticism, and it does not critique or solve any of the problems of the previous stage.

@Nilsi You seem to be talking about a more practical everyday concept of pragmatism. I'm specifically talking about epistemological pragmatism: the idea that "truth" is better stated as "utility". Epistemological pragmatism is more linguistically messy than epistemological realism, because it's obsessed with stating the context and conditions for truth claims; "this is true in so far it's useful for this aim". Meanwhile, realism focuses on the truth claims themselves; "it's true though". Of course, realism can still be context aware, but it's not baked into the language. The concept of utility always signifies "utility for what or whom"? So it's always somewhat context aware. On the other hand, the concept of truth, fundamentally, is true by virtue of what it is, irrespective of any external condition. So realism need not be context aware. Now, what pragmatism gains by being more informative (context awareness), it loses by being less elegant (stating the truth plainly). In this way, it's more feminine; it's less concerned about reducing things down and rather stating things in their full complexity, even if it's more chaotic and messy; being open and allowing vs. judging and deciding. All in all, in their mature (not naive) forms, I see pragmatism and realism as simply different ways of speaking about the same issue, with different pros and cons. And I simply prefer the baked-in context awareness over the elegance.

@Leo Gura Is it true that you only read the title before commenting? 🥲

I train with a plan but still try to go intense. I did try the slow and controlled approach for about a year when I was trying to fix my muscle imbalances, but now in the last few weeks when I tried the usual intense training, it's night and day in terms of how it feels (mood, energy, pump, etc.). It's also night and day for your cognitive functioning (for example, lactate is directly involved in glutamate transmission). If it's one thing a newcomer does not naturally gravitate towards, it's slow, controlled, deep stretch, pause at bottom.

Probably. This is just testing Wilber's Waking Up vs. Growing Up hypothesis. You should expect to find people with mystical ideas and states that do not understand Orange, Green, Yellow, etc., which means that mysticism by itself cannot be the highest level of human development. Now, you can argue like Wilber that once you max out Growing up then Waking up would be a "step up", which to my knowledge is what he describes with Tier 3. But of course, that is different than claiming whatever has been claimed about Turquoise; that it's somehow distinct from Yellow and somehow not mystical (or is it?). I'm planning to read a bit more about Wilber's Tier 3 idea. Now, while I don't think Turquoise currently exist, I do think it will probably exist in the future, but what that looks like, we don't know.

Loads of steroids and coffee 😤 It's not that they don't listen to their bodies. It's that they listen to their mind first and body second. The way they structure their training penalizes intensity and flow, which is what makes training feel good and how you perform the best. They make training feel like you hate yourself. Back in the day, bad form meant "not full range of motion". Today, thanks to Dr. Mike and Mr. Nipples, bad form means anything else than slowly controlling the excentric, ridiculously deep stretch and pausing at the bottom. You can train intensely with full range of motion (good form), no problem. Not at all. Training hardcore is what feels good. It is what comes naturally before your nerd brain takes over and overanalyzes everything. And really, fearing being judged as an "ego lifter" is the real ego lifting.

That would be fine if only it didn't have exactly the same problems of sampling bias as I described initially (only US and UK samples; Cook-Greuter, 2013, p. 19). When you only sample people in the West, mystical ideas seem to pop up at the top of the model. And here, the mysticism is undeniable: Cook-Greuter (2013) explictly calls the Unitive stage "a shift from a personal to a transpersonal or immediate witnessing capacity" (p. 86). EDIT: I'm actually blind: she had one international sample, however she states nothing about the demographics, and it's likely an internet-based sample which skews more Western anyway. The interesting samples are rural and tribal people in Eastern societies.

Another quote from The Never Ending Quest (2005, p. 18):

Put a human baby in a black box and see what SD stage they develop.

There is also a problem with sample size. According to wikipedia, the initial student sample that Graves used to construct the main levels consisted of 1065 people in the ages of 18-61. According to The Never Ending Quest (2005, p. 66), "most of these were in the lower age group", presumably ages 18-30. Now, for virtually all people, in order to develop a SD stage, there has to at least be a SD stage below it that is well-integrated into society which you can critique. The only exception is if you're a super-genius like Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein who can develop revolutionary new paradigms completely on their own, which is obviously way more rare than 1 in 1000. As we speak, the highest stage that is well-integrated into society (i.e. that has an abundance of communities, institutions and organizations) is Green. In the 1970s, when the research was being done, this was way more questionable, but let's assume it was also Green. How on Earth would you expect Turquoise to be measured in a sample of 1065 people, mostly in a "lower age group" who are probably not at their developmental peak, in a questionably Green society, in the 1970s? There is no Yellow society to critique! Where is Graves getting his super-geniuses from? How big is that sample? How many Einsteins, Newtons, Darwins? No, it is in my opinion much more likely that he sampled some people at Green-Yellow who would've had mystical experiences influenced by the 60s wave of New Age, who would've rated it as the most life-changing experience of their life and that revolutionized the way they think about the world, and that this is what has been described as Turquoise. I'll leave you with some quotes. Try to guess which ones are a description of Turquoise and which ones are simply descriptions of New Age ideas: Spoiler: All of them are Graves' own descriptions of Turquoise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graves's_emergent_cyclical_levels_of_existence

As an empirical scientist, your job is to follow the data, and when your data is characterized by sampling bias, this will be reflected in your conclusions, especially if you are an expert scientist. If it's not, you're not doing something right. I'm not pointing to a flaw in their scientific expertise. I'm pointing to a flaw in their scientific process. Science always has flaws, and this particular flaw I'm claiming has quite particular consequences. If you want to dispute that claim, I'm much more interested in you doing that than trying to explain what Turquoise is for the fourth time. So tell me for example: 1. How is the sampling bias not a problem for the model in general? 2. How does the sampling bias not affect Turquoise specifically? 3. How does the increase in Western adoption of mysticism at Green/Yellow not affect Turquoise specifically?

Do you have any specific examples of that? In what way? Sounds like mysticism or intuition, which again, is present at all stages. How do you elevate human consciousness?

What problems does Turquoise solve that Yellow is unable to solve?

I said it has been significantly repressed, for example due to theologians like Augustine of Hippo who influenced the modern conception of faith. Let's put it this way: who here is into Jewish Kabbalah or Christian mysticism?

Contemplate with it how many mistakes it makes.

As you point to yourself, SD (Don Beck) does not make this Waking vs. Growing up distinction theoretically (only Ken Wilber does), nor would you expect it to be able to sift out this distinction empirically (in the data interpretation process), again because of the sample bias. Had the sample been more universal, specifically including cultures with prevalent non-dual mysticism, then you could expect such a distinction to be found, and "Turquoise" would be considered as a phenomena of Waking up rather than Growing up. Ken Wilber found this distinction theoretically by learning about the history and different cultures with non-dual mysticism, but I'm saying you will find it empirically as well using the very methods that were used to create SD, given that you sample the same cultures. Systems thinking in Yellow and systems thinking in Turquoise are not "symbolically different" (to borrow Hanzi's term), only in specific areas application, which does not provide a radical new view, does not critique Yellow's "way of thinking" or produce radical new solutions to problems. Hence, it's not a meaningfully new stage.

There is nothing to critique about Coral, because basically nothing has been said about it.