What did your biggest stage transition actually look like?

[Joseph Maynor]

It also seems to be taboo to create spiral stages beyond Turquoise in my experience.  Many people will react to this not well.  I give anyone props who propose stages beyond Turquoise.

[Carl-Richard]

6 minutes ago, LordFall said:

I don't claim to be turquoise, but I have had many mystical experiences experiencing the world from that paradigm.

Turquoise is a conspiracy by culturally homogeneous empirical samples misappropriating a domain of experience as an ontogenetic level.

If you want to know what anything of that means:

 

[LordFall]

@Carl-Richard You’re right that Western theorists often confuse temporary spiritual states with actual ego stages, but using that to invalidate Stage Turquoise is an intellectual blunder. 

Yellow’s trap is over-intellectualization. At Yellow, you’re the detached engineer standing outside the machine, mapping out levers and feedback loops. It’s competent, but it’s still fundamentally mental and mechanical.

Turquoise isn’t just rediscovering ancient Eastern mysticism or New Age vibes; it solves Yellow's fatal flaw. It takes all that complex systems thinking and actually embodies it—moving from viewing reality as an engineered mechanism you analyze, to realizing you are a living cell inside the organism itself.

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, LordFall said:

@Carl-Richard You’re right that Western theorists often confuse temporary spiritual states with actual ego stages, but using that to invalidate Stage Turquoise is an intellectual blunder. 

Yellow’s trap is over-intellectualization. At Yellow, you’re the detached engineer standing outside the machine, mapping out levers and feedback loops. It’s competent, but it’s still fundamentally mental and mechanical.

Turquoise isn’t just rediscovering ancient Eastern mysticism or New Age vibes; it solves Yellow's fatal flaw. It takes all that complex systems thinking and actually embodies it—moving from viewing reality as an engineered mechanism you analyze, to realizing you are a living cell inside the organism itself.

1. You can read the rest of the thread. 2. Why?

[Joshe]

11 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Turquoise is a conspiracy by culturally homogeneous empirical samples misappropriating a domain of experience as an ontogenetic level.

If you want to know what anything of that means:

 

Tier 2 itself is baloney. It's basically a guess about where the line goes, derived from personality profiles the authors thought were next level.

"Yellow" is a type, not a stage. You can't get a yellow person without specific stable traits.

The spiral conflates temperament with universal development trajectory, and I don't have any reason to believe collective humanity on a long enough timeline would adopt these traits. It's possible, but it seems highly speculative and I don't feel comfortable basing my map of reality off it. 

Edited 4 hours ago by Joshe

[Joshe]

Here's the cold hard basic truth about SD

[LordFall]

@Carl-Richard Because an engineer who treats an ecosystem as a machine to manipulate will inevitably create second-order side effects that break the system. You cannot sustainably govern or optimize a living whole from an attitude of mechanical detachment. That’s why.

 

@Joshe Calling it purely a "personality type" misses how life conditions force worldview evolution. You don't get "Yellow" just because you're born with an analytical mind; you reach systemic thinking when the simplistic dogmas of Blue, the individualist rat race of Orange, and the egalitarian consensus paralysis of Green completely fail to resolve the chaotic, interconnected problems in front of you.

Temperament influences how you express a stage, but Tier 2 is fundamentally about cognitive complexity which is the capacity to hold multiple competing paradigms simultaneously without needing to destroy any of them to feel safe.

[Joshe]

1 hour ago, LordFall said:

Calling it purely a "personality type" misses how life conditions force worldview evolution. You don't get "Yellow" just because you're born with an analytical mind; you reach systemic thinking when the simplistic dogmas of Blue, the individualist rat race of Orange, and the egalitarian consensus paralysis of Green completely fail to resolve the chaotic, interconnected problems in front of you.

Temperament influences how you express a stage, but Tier 2 is fundamentally about cognitive complexity which is the capacity to hold multiple competing paradigms simultaneously without needing to destroy any of them to feel safe.

If we just think about this logically, it doesn't make sense. Say someone is born with a trait profile that is highly compatible with stage yellow. Such as: 

• High openness
• High need for cognition
• High systemizing
• Low need for closure
• Low affiliative need
• Low social conformity
• Low emotional reactivity (low neuroticism)
• Intrinsic, competence-driven motivation rather than status-driven
• High general cognitive ability

That's mostly my profile minus low neuroticism. 

Now, imagine I am brought up in a blue culture. These traits of mine made it inevitable that I would escape the bullshit. And when that happened, you're saying there's only one option for where to go next, and that's to orange? Just think about how absurd that is. 

Why couldn't I jump straight to green or yellow? 

Think about what those stages offer. Orange rewards status, competition, and winning in front of other people. Green rewards belonging, emotional expression, and consensus. Look at my profile above. Low status motivation, low affiliative need, low conformity, intrinsic drive. There's nothing in orange for me to want, and nothing in Green either. Both scenes are built around rewards my profile doesn't respond to. So when I left blue, I didn't get pulled into the next stage on the line because there's no pull. I just stopped being in blue.

[Joshe]

My highest values have always been most aligned with what you call yellow. But it's funny because I never passed through any stage to have these values. The values are innate from my cognitive architecture. 

It is absurd af to think the order in which you develop values and a healthy relationship to them is a fixed sequence. Contemplate this. The order is not fixed, at all! The best you could say is that it appears to be fixed from an evolutionary perspective and that society itself, in this particular reality, did mature in the way the model describes for tier 1.

That's the best the model can do for you. Using it as a tool for self-development or ranking yourself and individuals is just clearly absurd, if you're not biased toward the model. I'm someone who let the model sit on the table for probably 5 years. I would go around using it. So I'm not some outsider shitting on it. 

Consider this: if "yellow" is an actual thing in the world, then it makes sense that most yellow people would likely never have even heard of the model. What would a large percentage of those yellow people do upon learning about the model? 

The vast majority would find the flaws in it because they have no ideological attachment. And if those people came on the forum and told you the model was flawed, you'd likely have the automatic reflex to place them in green or below. That's the predictable AO move.

You assume the model works for the individual, but it doesn't. And anyone who can see that it doesn't, you mark at a lower stage because you actually do have attachment to the model.

These are just a few points of how the model is flawed and why you can't use it for the individual. There are many more, if you care to deconstruct it.

You have to try tearing the model down in earnest to see. 

Edited 1 hour ago by Joshe

[LordFall]

52 minutes ago, Joshe said:

Now, imagine I am brought up in a blue culture. These traits of mine made it inevitable that I would escape the bullshit. And when that happened, you're saying there's only one option for where to go next, and that's to orange? Just think about how absurd that is. 

Why couldn't I jump straight to green or yellow? 

Think about what those stages offer. Orange rewards status, competition, and winning in front of other people. Green rewards belonging, emotional expression, and consensus. Look at my profile above. Low status motivation, low affiliative need, low conformity, intrinsic drive. There's nothing in orange for me to want, and nothing in Green either. Both scenes are built around rewards my profile doesn't respond to. So when I left blue, I didn't get pulled into the next stage on the line because there's no pull. I just stopped being in blue.

You're missing massive parts of orange that have to do with mastering the productive tools of society. If someone jumped straight from Stage Blue to Stage Yellow or Green then they would miss the fundamental skills to have an impact in reality. If they ended in green then they would just be the average triggered leftist that just feels a lot of pain and doesn't understand how to fix it, but if they got into yellow they would connect the dots enough to see that their thoughts can only take form in the universe through solving problems of material reality that orange teaches us how to tackle.

Having low affiliative needs, high systemizing, and not caring about corporate status games doesn't mean you bypassed Orange to become Yellow—it just means your personality is introverted and non-conformist. The rule of developmental psychology is transcend and include. Yellow isn’t an aloof intellectual sitting on the sidelines analyzing systems from a distance; it's someone who has actually mastered the cause-and-effect competence of Orange and the perspective-taking of Green, and integrates them. You can't transcend tools you never learned how to use.

This is precisely the error a lot of users on Actualized.org make. They binge all these advanced intellectual models and theories from Leo, but they never ground them in Orange execution or use them to increase their actual impact on reality. What you end up with isn't Tier 2 development—it's just an apathetic intellectual with an inflated intellectual ego, mistaking an aloof personality and theoretical fluency for real-world mastery.

Edited 55 minutes ago by LordFall

[Joshe]

38 minutes ago, LordFall said:

You're missing massive parts of orange that have to do with mastering the productive tools of society. If someone jumped straight from Stage Blue to Stage Yellow or Green then they would miss the fundamental skills to have an impact in reality. If they ended in green then they would just be the average triggered leftist that just feels a lot of pain and doesn't understand how to fix it, but if they got into yellow they would connect the dots enough to see that their thoughts can only take form in the universe through solving problems of material reality that orange teaches us how to tackle.

Having low affiliative needs, high systemizing, and not caring about corporate status games doesn't mean you bypassed Orange to become Yellow—it just means your personality is introverted and non-conformist. The rule of developmental psychology is transcend and include. Yellow isn’t an aloof intellectual sitting on the sidelines analyzing systems from a distance; it's someone who has actually mastered the cause-and-effect competence of Orange and the perspective-taking of Green, and integrates them. You can't transcend tools you never learned how to use.

This is precisely the error a lot of users on Actualized.org make. They binge all these advanced intellectual models and theories from Leo, but they never ground them in Orange execution or use them to increase their actual impact on reality. What you end up with isn't Tier 2 development—it's just an apathetic intellectual with an inflated intellectual ego, mistaking an aloof personality and theoretical fluency for real-world mastery.

I built a solo freelance business from nothing and it's been my main source of income for 11 years now. There's rarely a day that goes by that I don't make some improvement to a system I've already built that helps me do my work or navigate my life more efficiently. All of this emerged from survival needs and a desire for efficiency and energy saving, and pure interest in building things to make life easier, not from some stage orange value system.

If you're changing orange to "master the productive tools of society", this is a cognitive ability that develops not only from values, but from interest, survival needs, career, etc. Being centered in stage orange values does not determine whether or not the ability to master the productive tools of society develops. Some people are competent by nature and it's no large task. I have a nephew who basically taught himself to solve a rubix cube by age 6 and he could do it in like 3-4 minutes. He didn't develop competence by developing specific values - he just had it.

A blue farmer runs a working farm and never held an orange value in his life, yet still learns to work the tools, and often even works harder than typical orange. 

Edited 19 minutes ago by Joshe