Sea

@lmfao Damn, I don't think my mental state is that bad. Yeah, I see the problem, this is a crutch. But I've had this problem for years. It existed even at times when I was exercising regularly and when I was eating very healthy (and my current diet isn't too bad either). The only thing mentioned on this thread that I've never done is neurofeedback.

All he has been told in essence is that attraction is random and out of his control. How is it even possible to "use" that information for anything?

I feel Leo did a good job with it, it helped clear some of my misconceptions. Btw, I remember in one of the first videos on spiral dynamics Leo said that most people are two stages below where they think they are. Does this apply only to people's first impression after learning of spiral dynamics, or is it more common? Reflecting on that after the recent videos, it seems like a freaky rule.

If that's true then ascending to Green is not that difficult.

It's not so much the ideas of green I have a problem with, I can see where they are coming from with many of their points. It's their methods. Various green groups seem to be out of control, they're prepared to use as much violence as they can get away with to advance their agenda. Even if their agenda has some merit, the use of violence turns me off so much. However, someone like Bill Gates for example I can fully resonate with (from what I've seen).

@Emerald That's a very informative and comprehensive post, thank you.

@Scholar "Mostly yellow and partly green" - yellow is above green so wouldn't that make her more conscious? Or do you mean orange?

@Scholar That sounds like a No True Scotsman fallacy. Here is a video of Lierre Keith, she was both vegan and an ardent feminist (still is the latter afaik, I hope this this is enough to show she's in green), but ceased to be vegan due to deteriorating health:

Yeah, and Vegans aren't even the worst example of the so-called green stage. After thinking long about it, I just don't see a way for me to believe in spiral dynamics. It's too simplistic of a model.

Sam Harris is actually very similar to Leo, in that both of them dedicated their lives to finding truth and the "purpose" of life (i.e. finding the most fulfilling way of living). They even arrived at many similar conclusions. The biggest fork in the road between them is probably how they see religion. Leo, sees it for what it was meant to be, Sam Harris sees it for what it is.

You just pulled that out of your . There is a slight complication here - the attractiveness curves for men and women are completely different. OkCupid did a study about this but I think they've deleted it now. Anyway, they plotted the ratings out of 10 for both genders and while men ranked most woman as above average, women ranked most men as below average. If we go with your last post where you said people go for mates of similar value, it's no wonder you get statistics like 80% of women going for the top 20% of men. Men are not made for beauty. I'm not one of those men who whines about their looks though, it's not something I'm particularly attached to. Tbh, that's probably because I'm very average. But I had to point out that it's misleading to make statements like top 20% of women go for the top 20% of men. That's an idealized view of reality. The majority of men are going to have to compensate in other departments if they want to find any partner, it's not just a case of lower their standards.

@White Out of curiosity, what stage are you at right now?

Alpha is pure red. Orange men either try to use money to attract women or they're like the pickup artists where they improve their social skills and their lives in general to be able to create situational attraction. However, society shuns pickup artists and women don't consider them to desirable men. They're only desirable when they're creating value for themselves in a social setting but they're not intrinsically valuable partners. But I see why green may be considered alpha as well, though it depends more on the individual. Yeah, I don't get the whole ego backlash thing regarding Trump. Leo is talking about it as if Trump is the president most Americans would have wanted (btw, I'm not American). Let's not forget that Hillary actually got more votes, the Trump win was a fluke resulting from weird electoral college system. And if Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic candidate he would have won by a landslide.

I'm the same. Actualized.org made me this way for some reason. Before I listened to Leo's videos on enlightenment a few years ago, I never reminisced an cried so much. Usually I get triggered by music, if I hear some deep music it sends be into a bout of reminiscing and sadness.

@White Thanks. I have in theory been aware of all worldview being equally true for some time, however treating them as equally true is a different matter because there's a clash with self agenda of course.

@White Ok, so how much does one need to immerse themselves in a phase to be able to transcend it? From what people are writing on this forum, it seems there's a consensus that much more is required to pass through green than through the earlier levels. For example is being just centre-left on the political spectrum enough, or do I need to be ok with everything the Venezuelan and Chinese governments are doing?

@White I'm ready to discuss this.

Ok, so simply being non-skeptical atheist gets you through blue? Isn't this really stretching the definition of blue? What's weird to me is that according to you guys, you can go through beige, red and blue as a child without ever believing even 10% of the sh** an adult in those stages would believe. I don't get the impression the standard for orange on this forum is very high either. Just be a materialistic atheist for a while and you're through! Then suddenly for green, you have to adopt quite a specific worldview. Wouldn't it be much easier to just accept that people generally start out at whatever stage their parents are. Yeah, the theory would be less "neat" but at least it would be more consistent.

Stage red men get laid the most!

For all the criticizing of religious people in yesterday's video, I honestly don't know what's more manipulative: modern forms of religion or the Clare Graves model. Religion is very manipulative to children to the point of even being abusive in its indoctrination. But try talking about heaven and hell to a non-religious adult and see how much they care. At least hell is not something people are biologically programmed to be afraid of, social disapproval is. Even with only Leo teaching this model, he's a very strong authority figure for many of his followers. I used to give Leo a lot more credence before, and I found it almost impossible to disbelieve anything he said. And if knowledge of this model spread and more public figures began to talk about it, they could essentially bully millions of people into adopting whatever worldview they decided corresponded to the color at top of the hierarchy. My biggest problem with this is Leo didn't even provide any evidence to back up his claim that this hierarchy is based on a one-way natural psychological progression (that people don't go backwards). I guess Leo's big argument for why this model should be followed is that you would go through it anyway if you lived long enough, and only some people progress fast enough naturally to reach the higher levels in their lifetime. However, the fact people never regress on the hierarchy presented in this model seem like a very questionable claim to me that contradicts personal experience. In my opinion, Leo shouldn't even begin talking about how to use the model until he has presented strong scientific evidence to back up his claim. The internet shows us the wide variety of different worldviews and life paths people take. If you give me any two worldviews I can guarantee you I'll be able to find a blog or an article written by someone who converted between them, in either direction. I've read some really surprising religious conversion stories. And if we take politics it only gets easier as people are generally more flexible in their political views than in their religious ones. Buddhists converting to Christianity, Christians converting to Islam, staunch conservatives becoming communists, it's all there. I have close family members who according to this model, have "regressed" over time. I have personally taken both small steps forward and small steps back in different areas of my worldview. I changed my mind on certain things, then changed back years later. And lo and behold, I checked the wikipedia (people will say it's unreliable but imo it's going to be more reliable than biased new age sources) article for Clare Graves and found this: "Graves' work observes that the emergence within humans of new bio-psycho-social systems in response to the interplay of external conditions with neurology follows a hierarchy in several dimensions, though without guarantees as to time lines or even direction: both progression and regression are possibilities in his model. Furthermore, each level in the hierarchy alternates as the human is either trying to make the environment adapt to the self, or the human is adapting the self to the existential conditions. He called these 'express self' and 'deny self' systems, and the swing between them is the cyclic aspect of his theory. Graves saw this process of stable plateaus interspersed with change intervals as never ending, up to the limits of the brain of Homo sapiens, something he viewed as far greater than we have yet imagined." The part about not being able to guarantee direction confirmed my hunch of course. But the entire paragraph gives a different perspective on the model than Leo has presented. Without this one fact, what other reason is there to following the Clare Graves model than feeling like you're a good "personal development", "spiritual" or "progressive" person? And whenever you're doing something to be an X person, you're really doing it to fit in and gain the social approval of a certain group. This ties in to my first paragraph. I feel like mindset and worldview should evolve organically and authentically. They should change as a result of finding new information or new perspectives, and changing your current worldview to account for them. Changing your worldview or life mindset according to some model requires a leap of faith strangely similar to what's seen in religion actually, someone else knows what's best for you.

Yes I know that, in the next sentence I said only some people will reach the higher levels in their lifetime. By "long enough" I meant like a superhuman lifetime, possibly hundreds of years.