Transcending Green- Challenges of Being An Early Stage Yellow?

[Nervtine]

(This is all in reference to Spiral Dynamics, Leo has some fantastic videos on them if you want to know more!)

 What are some challenges any of you have faced while transcending green? 

 How do you honestly gauge where you are in the cycle and how have you transcended previous stages? 

 And also, how do you transcend yellow into turquoise? 

 

 I'd love to hear anyone's story and hope to generate a good discussion on the topic. 

[FoxFoxFox]

Admittedly i'm not the most versed in spiral dynamics, but,

Since transcendence towards higher stages is mostly about surrendering to God, I'd say you need to become conscious of the limits of your mind. I always say: "Abandon all reason, ye who enter." for this leap. Also, the leap from yellow straight to coral might be possible. Turquoise deals with mysticism and that is still in part a conceptual framework (albeit with actual experiential phenomena that might be trans-rational), but at the end of the day, the only thing that is important is "surrendering into God."

If you don't meditate, then you should sit down and do so. The object is to surrender all your thoughts and feelings to consciousness, which will eventually result in total clarity. At that moment, you are ripe for trans-rational realizations - AKA a direct experience of non-duality.   

[Breathe]

The challenge with green is judging other's who don't share the same views. Being unable to see things from different angles and accepting your views as truth is the barrier. At yellow you should be seeing the interconnectedness of all things. Anything that you do is going to have a ripple effect. Solving one problem is just going to result in the surfacing of another. So you never really "get there" so to speak. At yellow it's all about the journey and recognizing that you don't really know anything at all. Radical open-mindedness.

[EmptinessDncing]

I had a client firmly rooted in green.  It appeared very clear to me that the activist needed to be dropped.  Many are very passionate about saving the whales, equality, conspiracy etc without realising it is just a belief-system they are attached to because it appears so moral.  How does one let go of something they have dedicated their life to?  Kicking and screaming.  Try asking them how they are like the people they are projecting onto.  Awwww, hell no.

[Markus]

@Nervtine I never really used the model to consciously try to transcend some colour and reach the next one. I'm far from an expert on the spiral map, so I'm just gonna describe the stages to the best of my understanding. I think I have aspects of orange, green, yellow and turquoise.

Orange because there's still some sense of wanting to get more for myself at the expense of other's suffering. Some sense of others' suffering not always registering fully when I'm not seeing it first hand.

The green aspect I have is getting emotional about liberal causes. Getting pleasure out of green criticism of blue and orange. For example, I like to watch Sam Seder or Bill Maher or Noam Chomsky criticize conservatives and libertarians. I look down on blue and orange a lot, with significant emotional weight.

That said there's also plenty of yellow. The motive for transitioning to yellow is this: everyone is fighting another from their own bubble. Blue and orange attack green. Yet also green attacks them back. And in both cases, a lot of it is very petty. And all the stages have legitimate things they deny and don't include. The narrow-mindedness of sticking to and identifying with one ideology, even liberalism, becomes apparent. The biggest challenge in transcending fully to yellow is all the deep-seated emotional issues. Hatred of injustice. Hatred of dogma. Hatred of greed. Hatred of blind emotion. All the dislikes you have of the stages you're transcending. Because in order to deeply embody yellow, you truly have to get how all the lower stages have legitimate reasons for how they are. To such an extent that you can't get angry at them any more. I actually don't think a true lack of anger and looking down on others is possible before turquoise. So yellow seems more of an intellectual bridge to turquoise than a stage that can be fully embodied.

The motive for transcending to turquoise is: intellect cannot truly understand the world. It is very limited. It is impossible to take into consideration everything and make the right call. All this knowledge you have of supposed facts about the world - it's just best guesses and intuition. You can't know what's actually true. However, you can work on throwing away what's clearly wrong. All your judgments. All the ways in which you make things about yourself. All the ways in which you're not truly seeing the world for what it is. So, embodiment of turquoise seems ultimately synonymous with purifying your mind, clearing your karma. With the end goal of having nothing of that left.

 

[How to be wise]

@Nervtine Spiritual practice! Deep meditation and quieting the mind.

[mandyjw]

There's a strong need in stage green to change others and change the world.  Try to become very aware when you are triggered by other people or can't accept things the way they are. Not watching the news REALLY helps transcend stage green as well as not engaging in political discussions. Focus on seeing the positive in challenging people and accepting people and things for how they are.

[mandyjw]

I can't answer the other questions because I only learned about spiral dynamics already mostly in yellow with still with a lot of green habits still set in. 

I think that the need to talk about, understand and conceptualize enlightenment ends with stage turquoise. Realizing how ridiculous talking about enlightenment is in the end is probably the key to getting to turquoise. I don't think forcing it is good either so I continue to follow my desire to talk about and learn about enlightenment while enjoying the times that I fall through the cracks of yellow into moving beyond thought. Then I come back and try to think about and understand the experience. It's amusing really. 

[legendary]

I have had elements of green since childhood, and I still haven't fully transcended them. 
Looking at my personality now I'd say I'm predominantly Orange and Green (90%) with some Yellow (10%) in there.

My biggest challenge when trying to transcend green has to do with Climate Change concerns, worries about massive income inequality and idealizing Spiritual teachers/Gurus. As Leo has said a million times, awareness itself is curative and is the best catalyst in growing through these stages.

Also, all criticism is untenable, so what stage you are at will be determined by what faction of the society you judge and demonize. And it is likely that you judge different factions of society from different stages. 
I tend to demonize big & greedy corporations, massive income inequality, and organized religion, which indicates stage Green in me. Yet, I also despise SJW mentality, political correctness and things like letting ex-ISIS members regain their citizenship. Most of this is stage Orange, with a dash of Yellow.

For my climate change concerns:
I started auditing MOOCs on edX and Coursera about renewable energy and climate change. I see, now that there are inherent limitations with renewable energy generation and how we are already taking action on this. JRE podcasts with Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock were also helpful in seeing how climate change concerns can be a major epistemological trap.

For concerns about Massive Income Inequality, I started to:
Understand how economies work and how to best balance capitalism with socialism. Follow right-wing and conservative YouTubers and understand their perspective.

Idealizing Spiritual teachers/Gurus
Meditate and do spiritual practices. Reduce the amount of time spent on YouTube in following these Gurus

Overall:
Argue less with other people and understand their perspective
Get educated more on issues and understand the nuances involved.

Transcending Stage Yellow:
The biggest thing is turning inwards and letting go of all theory and concepts. These will obviously not be helpful when it comes to my engineering job, which I have massive ego-investment in.

So it will be a while before I'm ready to fully transcend Yellow, which is not to say that I cannot have genuine Self-realization and understand God. Psychedelics are good cheat-codes.

[Nervtine]

 Thank everyone who has shared their wisdom on this post! You've given me some invaluable things to think about. 

Does anyone happen to know what stage coral is like? I of course, have ideas/beliefs about them, but has anyone embodied it or known someone who has? (I imagine by that stage you already realize you probably were coral all along, and this spiral too, was just a deceptive believe. Or I am totally wrong- or maybe both!)