bmcnicho

4.5 Gram Mushroom Trip - 1/13/22 This trip was from a couple months ago. I haven’t thought about it much since, as I think I used quickly directing my intention back to my normal life as a coping mechanism to avoid emotionally processing what happened. A few days ago I was hit with sudden motivation to delve back into spiritual work, and for the last few hours I’ve been vividly going through my memories of the experience. So I thought writing it out would help me process things. (All time stamps are estimates, as I didn’t look at the time until near the end) 0:00 - I take 4.5 grams of dried mushrooms at 10:30 in the morning on an empty stomach and start walking to a nature preserve near my house. My girlfriend is with me to tripsit. 0:20 - Arrive at the preserve. We find a spot to sit in the grass. We’re in a large open field near a lake shore and a small grove of trees. There’s a large hill and small mountains in the distance. This area is adjacent to a public park, so once we’re settled I head over to a drinking fountain to refill my water bottle. 0:25 - The effects start to kick in on my way back. The familiar tingling and looseness starts to spread over my body. I’m feeling giddy, relaxed, and fresh. “Hahaha here we go!” I think to myself. I sit down next to my girlfriend, acting like an old pro, as at this point she had never done a psychedelic before (100% my ego btw as this was only my 3rd trip - I’m complete noob compared to most people on this forum) 0:30 - I’m looking at the sky, there’s wispy clouds. They start to morph into fractal snowflakes. A few minutes later they become multi-layered, stretching out into 4 semi-transparent layers. The normally flat looking blue sky appears to have depth. 0:35 - I become aware of the sky as a giant dome, overhanging and inclosing my world. This is something I like to notice sober as well, it’s easy to think of the sky as flat when not paying attention. I then look around at the trees, lake and hills. I find the sky much more interesting, so I return to it. What happens next I view as deeply meaningful, maybe even spiritual despite its simplicity. My interpretation of the domed sky inverts, such that its curvature seems convex rather than concave. I get the feeling that I am in outer space looking down rather than up at not merely the sky but the entire planet earth. 0:40 - At this point my experience shifts. While before it was dominated by my physical surroundings, at this point they begin to matter less and I feel my inner world starting to have more influence. I close my eyes unintentionally, and see the classic swirling, spiraling fractals. 0:45 - This is when it gets crazy! I open my eyes and my attention begins to be overtaken by my imagination. Physically and visually, I’m still myself and still in the same place, but mentally I’m traveling to other worlds! The distinction between imagining/seeing/being in these places was blurred. Imagining is the most technically accurate, but I’ll be using the terms going-to/being-in as they best capture the subjective feeling. I was in a cosmic void, I saw a techno-biological alien spacecraft. Barely have any time to look at it, 2 seconds at most. I pass through a dark portal, and now I’m in a field of green grass, vague fantasy vibes. I then enter another world, and another and another! It was so fast!!! Part of me wishes it was just a little bit slower so I could interpret what was happening in each one, but the sheer speed was exhilarating! I wanted to tell my girlfriend about all the cool stuff I was seeing, but I realized in the time it would take to describe one, 2 more would go by! So instead I had to just concentrate on what I was seeing to try to absorb some of it. I won’t describe any of the others as I barely remember them and each lasted only a few seconds. All I remember is they varied widely and I was incapable of thinking about my life or anything in the real world during all this, I was so absorbed by the fantasy. I then mellow out a bit and my experience takes on this somber tone out of nowhere. It doesn’t last long enough for me to figure out its source. It doesn’t seem to be about anything in my actual life, maybe just vaguely that melancholy is an inherent part of life and existence. I sat with it peacefully, didn’t interpret it negatively, it actually felt nice in a way. The worlds resume shortly afterwards 0:50 - I become trapped in a hyper-abstract thought loop about solving a fictional problem in a fictional place. I couldn’t possibly remember it, but I’ll construct an example now to provide a sense of the general tone: “Wait…so if the teal cylinder goes here then the lion’s head needs to go there and oh my the people are really counting on me to get things right…wait what’s happening…oh yeah we’re placing the things for the health of the world and oh yeah I’m doing a great job…this is pretty difficult and confusing…” (imagine this going on for another few minutes) 0:55 - The imagination stops. I look out over the lake and begin contemplating why conflict exists in the world. I vaguely decide that people have mutually exclusive identities, but then I think why couldn’t it just not be that way somehow and I’m unsatisfied with my answer at that point. 1:00 - I lay in the grass. My body and my environment seem so vibrant and surging with life. I look up at a large tree and it seems to be imbued with mystical significance. I reflect on all the mental worlds I had just traveled to and become fixated on the idea: “You go to a place! You go to a place, and realize it’s all ok!” I said that over and over, along with: “You can go anywhere, do anything!” 1:05 - I hallucinate hundreds of tiny black insects crawling through the grass surrounding me. I was fine with it, as I knew they weren’t real. I looked at my girlfriend and she looked so out of place in this natural environment. It’s strange how a human face looks like the most bizarre object. She was wearing a bright violet shirt and had large glasses and looked like a massive caterpillar in the grass. I also was hearing various sounds that I could only describe as techno-biological. There were long droning tones in stacked frequencies low to high, it wasn’t like a chord I’ve heard it was neither harmonious nor dissonant but still strangely beautiful. This was interspersed with sporadic chirping noises and electronic sounding wub wub noises, some so faint I could barely hear them. The whole experience seemed like I was intuiting a future where technology became so advanced that it was able to merge seamlessly with life itself 1:10 - I was surging with energy and vibrancy and my girlfriend asked if I was going to speak in a funny voice like last time. I spontaneously started speaking in a British accent (I’m American) possibly mimicking Alan Watts, or maybe some stereotype I had in my mind of an exuberant explorer: “You can go anywhere! Do anything! Be anyone!” and with a surge of euphoria, “And it will be magnificent!” 1:15 - A few minutes after that, is the first time I’ve ever felt fear on a psychedelic. I’m hit with a spontaneous insight. It felt deeper than could be expressed in words, but it essentially boiled down to the simple tautology of “it is because it is”. This is an idea I’ve had before, but it felt so real, not merely an idea but non-negotiable, unavoidable reality. I was mostly at peace with this idea. For the last 5 years I’ve dedicated a lot of time to philosophy and trying to find the reasons for things. But at a certain point I need to accept that there are no more reasons, it just is. The fear came in when I got the feeling that I had been irreversibly changed by this insight, which was weird because this was already my belief before the trip. A part of me wished I hadn’t seen it. I dug my fingernails into legs and hunched over. I got the feeling that there was this vaguely sinister, disembodied force, looking down at me, that had me trapped and was mildly mocking me. It wasn’t a particular entity, but in my mind it represented the living representation of reality itself. I was filled with a paradoxical mixture of fear and acceptance. 1:20 - I was feeling better now and reality started to seem like a waking lucid dream. It seemed like I could will my body to travel effortlessly in any direction far out into the distance. I felt excited by this limitless potential. I ran briefly in one direction. It felt like effortlessly and smoothly gliding along the ground. Then I stopped. I could go anywhere, but had no reason to. I was overcome by a frustrating sense of nihilism. I ran back to where I came and my shoes fell off as they were loose. 1:25 The last thing I remember I was sitting there for a few minutes and then I must’ve fallen asleep. Which was weird because I was just running and full of energy, didn’t feel tired at all, had slept well the night before, and it was around noon on a sunny day. My girlfriend said my eyes were open for some of it, so maybe my waking trip continued, but I lost memory of it. Whether I was actually asleep or not, I have zero memory of the next 3 hours 4:30 - What happens next is the most bizarre experience of my entire life. I wake up in a complete daze, it’s around 3 in the afternoon. I unconsciously put my shoes back on that my girlfriend retrieved at some point. I have no idea who I am, and have zero memory of my past life, or that I took a drug. I stare off into empty space and my experience feels timeless. It feels like I just now came into existence from nothing, completely from scratch. No past, no concept of a future, just a dazed experience of sitting there, body cold from being outside for hours. 4:50 - I check the time and it displays 20 minutes later than the last time I checked - 3:20-something. It paradoxically feels like either a very long, or surprisingly short time has passed. I look down at my phone, keys, and wallet laying in the grass. They look like very strange, foreign objects, but I vaguely know I’m supposed to keep track of and keep them on me. I recognize the loose feeling in my body as being caused by mushrooms, but all sounds and visuals are gone now. I’m oddly detached from this fact though. I think to myself, “Wouldn’t it be crazy if someone just came into existence from nothing as a grown adult who’s high on mushrooms?” So I knew humans in this reality were supposed to have a past and a life story, but I didn’t have one. “Wait,” I suddenly realized, “Isn’t that what’s happening to me right now?” I was very confused. 5:00 - I had a memory of taking mushrooms, but it felt incredibly distant, as if it was months in the past. Although obviously this was the logical explanation for what was happening to me, it didn’t seem plausible to me at the time. I thought some very bizarre metaphysical event had taken place and things were seriously wrong. This was very scary and unsettling. I think if I was just able to accept that falling asleep on mushrooms was the cause of this, then I could’ve relaxed and enjoyed the end of the trip, but this thought loop kept spiraling. 5:05 - I vaguely remembered my general life story, that I was in school throughout my childhood and have done various other things since then, but my past felt completely uninteresting and unimportant to me, so I didn’t really try to figure it out. It was still difficult to accept mushrooms as the cause, because I had no idea something like this could happen. It felt nothing like mushrooms had before, I was in a lethargic, dissociative fugue state. Like the normal disorientation after an afternoon nap amplified massively. The only thing I could compare this to was trying to piece together what happened after I got a concussion one time, but even then it was much less strange and much easier to reorient myself. I know my head wasn’t physically hurt because I woke up in the same place I fell asleep, and my girlfriend had been with me the whole time. 5:10 - I felt complete nihilism. I was stripped of all psychological motivation. I believed I could do anything I wanted, but had no reason to do anything. This was actual nihilism, not what I thought nihilism to be before. What I called “nihilism” before was a set of ego fueled notions of how I’m so edgy and smarter than everyone because I figured out that nothing actually matters. But that was still filled with all kinds of judgments, beliefs, and values. With this, though, I had none of those. (Except I did still assign a negative meaning to meaninglessness) so I guess that still wasn’t true nihilism) I dug my nails into my leg again and thought that all of us are here desperately, helpless, for no reason, and the only way we can redeem it is by clinging to each other and trying to show compassion. 5:15 - I felt guilty for the sheer length of time my girlfriend had been sitting here with nothing to do. I felt trapped in my own mind, unable to say anything. If I had been able to say the words “I forgot who I was” we could’ve talked and I would’ve felt better. But I also thought I had the right to sit there in peaceful silence. She hadn’t said anything this whole time either, probably feeling apprehensive because I looked visibly distressed. 5:20 - I finally asked if I had fallen asleep and she initially said she didn’t know, which made me feel more confused, but we quickly cleared it up and I was forced to conclude that it was indeed what happened. She was asking me about food, but I was so out of it. I was dissociative, I was talking to her but it didn’t feel like it was me. I tried to just give her my wallet so she could get food on her own, but she stayed with me 5:25 - We started walking back home and I felt like my identity as a human was a metaphysical prison I was being forced back into. While my memory was fully back now, it still felt like I had been newly born an hour ago and I was a bit disappointed about the person I had become. I resented that I would soon have to go to work and live out my normal routines. I was afraid I had been permanently changed and that I was going to be stripped of motivation like this forever 5:30 - I was able to tell my girlfriend that I had forgotten who I was and I started talking about what happened. The trip was completely over at this point, I was just extremely tired and struggling to process what had happened Conclusion Afterwards, I was wondering if I needed to radically change anything about my life, but I found that I was mostly ok with who I was. My motivation returned and I wasn’t permanently changed like I was afraid I was. But it felt like I was able to consciously choose to go back to being the person I was before. I probably did that out of fear and a desire for order and control. After initially processing it, I haven’t thought about it much until now. Looking back, I can imagine continuity, that I’m the same person with the same life story as I was last year. But fundamentally that’s not true. I died, and was reborn. There’s a clear break, a clear discontinuity. I freshly came into existence 2 months ago and decided to continue being the person that my memories told me I was. That was not the only choice I could’ve made, but I’m happy with that choice for now. The last hour was definitely scary, but I’m lucky to be quite psychologically stable and open to bizarre metaphysical ideas, so I still found value in the experience. I can definitely see how something like this could traumatize someone who wasn’t ready for it. Besides the falling asleep issue, I see the other difficult aspects of my trip as a mirror, showing my own dysfunctional nihilism to me. This may have been worsened by the fact that I didn’t have a specific goal going into this trip. It had been almost 5 years since my last trip, and I had always had the idea that I would eventually try a higher dose, this just happened to be when I had access to it. Next time, I’ll have more positive, productive intentions going in and hopefully that will lead to better outcomes. I still see difficult experiences as immensely valuable though Despite some difficulties, that 1st hour was profoundly beautiful. I didn’t know that kind of vibrant, surging feeling of being harmoniously alive was possible! I wish I had stayed awake to experience more of it. Next time I’ll try a lemon tek, as I heard it might help me stay awake. I’ll definitely tell my tripsitter to try to wake me up if this happens again, as that level of disorientation isn’t something I’d want to repeat. I think I definitely would’ve had a full ego death if I had stayed awake. Although I definitely experienced a rebirth, I didn’t feel the sense of oneness with my surroundings that a lot of people describe. Even upon first waking up, I still felt like a separate something, I just had no idea what that thing was I feel better after writing all this, and I’m thinking I might trip again next week, this time on Hawaiian baby woodrose seeds, unless I decide I need more time to integrate

I would appreciate an answer to this too. I fell asleep on 4 grams of mushrooms in the middle of the day a couple months ago. I don’t know if there’s a way to avoid that, or if it was just a one time fluke. Someone suggested I do a lemon tek, but I haven’t tried it yet

@thisintegrated The way I see it, the answer lies in the fact that time is both relative and imaginary. Time exists within consciousness, but does not apply to consciousness itself. So all possible experiences happen simultaneously in an instant and are eternal. However, one of those experiences is this human experience in which you imagine that time exists and moments unfold in a sequence. You’re also imagining that you lack awareness of the rest of infinity, hence your experience feels finite. Absolute Infinity must include all possible finitudes

They could talk about politics, although Leo might view Vaush as being too ideological. Vaush seems to be fairly knowledgeable about philosophy, but I haven’t seen an indication that he knows much about spirituality at all. He’s open minded and engages in good faith discussions, but he would probably lump Leo in with the new age community, which he views as a potential source of bad political outcomes by leaving the door open to irrationality So I don’t think either of them would be interested, nor would it go that well, although being a fan of them both it would be cool to see. Leo should definitely go on Joe Rogan though!

The way I think of it, the attributes of the Absolute arise from it being the groundless ground of all of existence. When asking why something is the way it is, if you come up with some cause, that cause will itself require an additional explanation. This creates a chain that can continue indefinitely. Hypothetically, the chain could be ended by some sort of universal finite limit that’s completely arbitrary and exists for no reason. But if you don’t believe that’s possible, then the alternative is that at the fundamental level everything is true at once. I believe the other properties of the Absolute are a natural consequence of this fundamental idea in various ways

@machiavelli I think Leo said awhile back that by the time we’re seeing a video it’s usually about an insight he had around 3 years prior. (Because it takes time to decide the best way of teaching things and there’s lots of topics to cover) So all along he hasn’t been sharing his latest and deepest thoughts I never saw Leo’s solipsism video either. I too wished I had been able to. It’s natural for curious people to want to know something that’s labeled as secret or forbidden. So I spent several hours contemplating solipsism, and since I’ve seen all his other metaphysical videos, I think I was able to figure out about what he would’ve said I understand why he took it down now. I consider myself to be very psychologically stable and open to radical ideas, yet when I put the pieces together it triggered a fear response that I haven’t had with other ideas. I’m fine now, it was a positive growth experience, just a very direct insight. It isn’t categorically different than Leo’s other ideas though, the pieces are all there. The contemplation twisted my head in knots, it’s counterintuitive, I needed to talk with someone to finish sorting it out. There’s probably other sources out there that talk about solipsism that can be helpful too I think it’s very sensible that the deepest insights should be safeguarded in some way. A paid course is a straightforward way of doing that, however maybe there could be a method for those who truly can’t afford it to demonstrate their psychological maturity and spiritual readiness somehow

I’ve heard it spoken of in both ways, and I’m wondering if both could be true despite sounding contradictory, or if one version is more correct Example: I am the only consciousness and all others are my imagination, so when I talk to others, I’m talking to myself Versus: You are the only consciousness and all others are your imagination, so when you talk to others, you’re talking to yourself If I were to tell someone they weren’t conscious, they could easily try to refute me by saying they were. I could of course respond by saying I’m just imagining them saying that, which perhaps is correct However, if I told someone that they were the only consciousness, it would perhaps be easier for them to understand the idea, but wouldn’t I be lying because I know myself to be conscious?

I know alcohol is normally considered anti-spiritual. Actual psychedelics are obviously a lot better, but sometimes on alcohol I feel a much greater sense of self honesty. Should I keep drinking for that reason? Or is it ultimately better to stop? Does anyone else feel this way?

@CuriousityIsKey It makes a lot of sense to me that consciousness is the fundamental reality and physical things are simply perceptions within it. Since we know that consciousness can exist at all, it’s also difficult to imagine what could limit it, and if there was a boundary of some sort it’s also difficult to imagine what metaphysical force would prevent things from coming to existence outside of that boundary That being said, since we are conscious, anything that we could observe would be observed within our experience. Theoretically though, it’s possible for something to exist outside of or even above consciousness, however it would be a reality far beyond what we’d be able to understand

I was contemplating a similar question during a mushroom trip a couple days ago. If consciousness is eternal and cannot be destroyed, only take on different forms, then why must conscious life fight and struggle to survive? One possible answer is that those who fight are too attached to their particular form, and are ignorant to the fact that consciousness will go on forever without them and nothing is truly lost in death Another possibility is that the Darwinian process and all the suffering it includes is somehow necessary to create forms complex enough to experience and understand the most profound states of consciousness. Although this only makes sense from the perspective of planetary life in the form we understand. In the absolute sense, I don’t see any reason why the ultimate mind couldn’t come into existence with no process leading up to it Those are my half-baked thoughts so far. Of course oftentimes in these inquiries eventually I’m led to the deeply unsatisfying tautology of “It is because it is”. Looking forward to reading other people’s thoughts on this

I took 5 grams of mushrooms at 10:30 in the morning. I had slept well the night before. It started off as a really good trip that I still remember well. I was awake for at least an hour. Last thing I remember was I was in kind of a manic state and wanted to see how jogging would feel. I wasn’t feeling tired at all, but my sitter said I immediately laid down and fell asleep I woke up about 3 hours later in kind of a dissociated fugue state. I had an experience I would describe as “coming into existence”. It felt timeless, I had no past and no motivations. I eventually remembered the year, month, day of the week, and the fact I had taken a drug. I came to know that I had a past, vaguely sensed what it was, but felt that it was unimportant. On the walk home my identity gradually came back to me, but I was saying things without feeling like it was me that was saying them This experience was valuable in its own way, but I feel like I would’ve had an ego death if I had stayed awake. Has anyone else fallen asleep like this? I thought on 5 grams you could still stay awake and remember it. I’m wondering if it was the high dose that caused me to fall asleep. Do you think I would stay awake if I took slightly less? My previous trip was 3.5 grams and was fairly mild for that dosage, which is why I wanted to try a full 5 for stronger effects.

@Khan 0 I’ve done 3 trips, 1 gram, 3.5 grams and 5 grams. They were dried all three times

@Thought Art Was it on a high dose that you passed out? Do you think lower doses are a way to avoid this?

@halfknots Ah ok, that makes sense. I didn’t know mushrooms were a sedative, because in my 3.5 gram trip I was manic for 5 hours. I appreciate my experience for what it was though, I just feel like I missed out on potentially the best part. I’ll try 4 grams next time to see if I can remember it better

@halfknots You think I wasn’t actually asleep? That’s possible, but there was a solid 3 hours that I have no memory of. I guess I remember having no ego and my ego coming back, but I don’t remember an experience of losing or transcending it

All the political stuff going on is nonsense. People seem like soulless grifters these days. The sheer level of incompetence and aggressive ignorance on so many topics is astounding. It’s like people are waging a war on truth and on goodness and on any kind of competence or direction The future? Doesn’t matter. Sure all our grandchildren will probably die and suffer horribly when they’re like 8 or 9 or 10 or 11 or 12 years old, but it’s not literally happening right now so who cares. Let’s find some nonsensical bullshit to pay attention to instead All this spirituality and meditation stuff is kind of nonsense too to be honest. I have followed Leo for many years and have found a lot of value in what he has to say, but ultimately using various techniques to destroy the mind’s ability to feel negative emotions isn’t some kind of “enlightenment” Truth is pain. The more pain one can bare, the more truth one can see. Happiness can always only come from ignorance and delusion. Maybe that’s why people are so delusional. Maybe there is only hedonism and all truth and meaning is a lie Anyways, I guess it’ll be fun to watch this nonsense called civilization finally crumble. It will be painful, but in the end it will all be over soon enough Edit: Merry Christmas, Motherfuckers!

We've only been dating a few weeks and she's already shared a lot of heavy personal stuff with me. She has pretty severe anxiety and depression, and she worries a lot that I'm gonna break up with her, even though I give her lots of positive attention and compliments. I found out that she self harmed today. She refuses to get help and is upset when I say she should. She's already very attached to me, and some of the things she says make me uncomfortable, but it makes her sad when I suggest that things are going too fast. She's also very energetic, and when we spend several hours together it gets pretty exhausting, but I can't really talk to her about that, because that's something she's insecure about. I really like her for other reasons, she's very creative, very kind, and I feel comfortable enough to be very authentic around her. It's just feels like way too much way too fast. It seems like I have to be very strong and stable in order to help her, but I have issues in my own life to deal with too. I know that if anything happened to her I'd blame myself. I feel responsible for her even though we just met. It's scary knowing that even being a little impatient with her or making a slightly negative comment could have a large effect on someone in that kind of mental state. It seems like a state of selflessness is required here that's way beyond my level of development. Any comments or advice would be greatly appreciated

If you’ve ever learned about the complex multi-step process of protein folding, it’s pretty incredible! Think about all the chemical reactions happening in trillions of cells all at once: cell division, muscle fibers twitching at the molecular level all in sync, hundreds of enzymes each specifically shaped, etc. It’s an unfathomable amount of intelligence and complexity! Add to that in humans the structure of the brain with billions of neurons connected by trillions of synapses. ...And then all this comes together to form a flat-Earther. And then a group of these people come together to create a Qanon conspiracy cesspool on 4chan. My mind is struggling to understand the seeming contradiction here, how we can be perfectly calibrated and structured at the cellular level, but fail in the most basic ways as individuals and as a society. Does anyone have ideas about this?

@Carl-Richard The point about the cost of information processing is one I forget to give enough weight. I think that the cost of lacking an accurate perception of reality would be greater, especially in the case of large societal issues such as climate change. Maybe that will end up being the case, but our evolutionary mechanisms are primarily geared toward things with personal stakes and short time horizons. Maybe if I had all the information it would make sense to me why humans need to have the shortcomings we do, it just seems like a huge waste of potential

I’ve been moving toward Stage Yellow for a few years now and I feel like I have a pretty solid grasp on systems thinking. I do still have psychological hang-ups from previous stages, but for the most part I’m able to evaluate things on a multi-perspectival level. Periodically though, I’ll have a new insight on a topic and it’ll make me wonder if before I wasn’t truly at Stage Yellow yet. I feel like of all the stages, Yellow has the murkiest definition. I sometimes have trouble distinguishing Yellow from intellectual Orange. Fundamentally the difference lies not in the intelligence level of the material but in the underlying thought processes behind it It’s also easy to overlook some of the more radical implications of a full stage Yellow worldview, for example that democracy and authoritarianism are simply different governmental structures that represent different survival strategies on the part of the nations involved. With some more nuance added, I think this would be an accurate description, but still a difficult statement to make at a time where democracy is under threat throughout much of the world. So I guess I’m still trying to grasp where the threshold is where a set of ideas qualify as Stage Yellow rather than a more traditional intellectual analysis. I’m also questioning if under Stage Yellow it’s possible to take on strong personal positions or if one would tend to have mixed views on basically every topic to maintain an intellectual objectivity

I’ve noticed a pattern in recent years that as certain aspects of Stage Green have been rising in prominence, Stage Orange has been quick to try to co-opt it for its own purposes. The most consequential example is when corporatist politicians use progressive rhetoric to gain votes with no intention of delivering. More blatant is when ads for low consciousness products do this. I’d think it would be obvious to people how disingenuous this is, but it must work because they keep doing it. It’s disappointing to see how easily Stage Green language and aesthetics can be made non-threatening to the Stage Orange establishment by being used by people who share none of its fundamental values. Like the image of progressivism can be turned into just another product to be marketed. I’m also disappointed by how ineffective most activism and protest has been, with the fight for gay marriage being the prominent exception. But for the last 20 years, almost no progress has been made on the climate crisis, despite how important and urgent it is. I believe most members of these movements are sincere, but I can’t help but think that the people leading them kind of know that it’s an empty virtue signal. The term “controlled opposition” sounds like a conspiracy theory, but sometimes it seems like an apt descriptor I’m considering if this is just part of the process of evolution and if this sort of thing has happened with previous stages. An example could be the mostly Stage Red Roman Empire adopting Stage Blue Christianity as its official religion. Maybe something similar happened with Christianity pretending to tolerate Stage Orange European Enlightenment values In conclusion, I’m wondering if to achieve true Stage Green, there needs to be a complete collapse of the current system and if so would it be something that humans could survive?

I’m disappointed that this thread turned into a silly racial debate. My original post was about a specific obstacle to the development of Stage Green, I never mentioned race @Leo Gura Thanks for pushing back on my pessimism a bit. My concern is the insidious nature of it, that fake green could become an obstacle to true green. That the energy behind these movements could become sanitized to the point that it limits the pathways forward. But I suppose this is all part of the process

I've been thinking about how a single human is made out of a colony of trillions of cells with specialized roles that act together to form a single organism. There are many advantages to this, as they form highly adapted organ systems allowing each individual cell to benefit from the collective structure and intelligence of the whole. However, this comes at the cost of the cells giving up their ability to survive independently. If it turns out that the multicellular organism isn't well adapted and is likely to die, its individual cells aren't able to leave the organism and must die with it. It's also true that individual bacteria and other single celled organisms can survive just as well on their own with more limited interactions with surrounding cells. Based on biomass distribution, it's not obvious whether the single celled or multicellular survival strategy is best from the perspective of an individual cell. Relating this to humans, being able to socially cooperate with other people has given us a considerable advantage over other mammal species. Our forms of social organization have become more complex with time, and the culture we're brought up in has come to have a large impact on the people we become. I see this process continuing, especially with rapidly increasing technology. As of now, individual humans are still able to operate with some degree of autonomy, but in the future it will most likely be possible to directly link minds together using technology. My intuition regarding this is that the risks could easily outweigh the potential benefits. Whoever initially controls this technology will have immense power, and I fear the possibility of humanity becoming a hive-mind, where one ideology is forced on everyone with no possible recourse. Even if such a nightmare scenario doesn't occur, there's still the problem of how this collective system would be organized. There would need to be some sense of coherence to it, so that it wouldn't become an incomprehensible noise of everyone's contradictory thoughts and feelings. But it would also need to preserve unique perspectives and allow for creativity and change. Such an endeavor seems like it could so easily become a disaster, so the main thing I'm wondering is if a collective mind is inevitable given our current trajectory? Even today it seems like the common person isn't highly valued and doesn't have a meaningful ability to affect their circumstances. Ideology and culture already seems to induct people uncritically into it. So it seems to me like we're heading for a totalitarian future. Is there anything that can be done about it at this point?

Clearly survival pressures influence our worldviews greatly, but I'm contemplating whether there could be any truth value to beliefs independent of the evolutionary and psychological factors that produce them. Is treating people with compassion morally right in some higher sense, or did it merely benefit our ancestors survival to be able to cooperate in groups? Are virtues like competence, resilience, rationality, strength, creativity and love actually valuable or do they only happen to be useful for a group of apes living on a rock in space? This line of thinking is leading me towards a caricature of postmodernism, where every perspective could be equally correct, so it's sort of impossible to really reach conclusions about anything. I guess the more spiritual answer would be that Truth lies beyond thoughts and the mind, but I'm not ready to give up on the potential value of more relative truths. Playing a game of trying to deceptively 1-up the other meat blobs around me doesn't seem all that compelling to me. But if all our religions and philosophies are a bunch of nonsense our ego-minds invented then I don't see what else is there. The side of me that's an idealist tends to conflict with the side that's a rationalist, but that's what I've come up with so far.

I’ve been thinking about what the world’s continuing development up the spiral might look like in the next 200 years. Stage Orange seems feasible almost anywhere as much of the developing world is starting to industrialize and I expect stage blue religions to continue to decline. Certainly pockets of purple, red and blue will continue to exist for a long time, but I expect that blue will eventually reduce to around the influence that purple has today. Majority Green also seems possible, but more ambitious. I expect some of the issues with capitalism and technology to become more obvious in the coming decades, which should push people in this direction. Also, if affluence and security continues to increase, then more of the world will resemble the life conditions in Europe which facilitate Stage Green. However, attaining Stage Green requires a substantial increase in compassion, which I see as a major challenge for much of the population even with improving life conditions. The stage I’m more skeptical of is yellow, because it seems to require an understanding of abstract concepts that would be very difficult for the average person. Considering a Green/Yellow society that would be the precursor to a full Yellow society, certainly life conditions would have improved dramatically. The education system would have improved dramatically as well, promoting abstract reasoning, critical thinking, and deep conceptual understanding. Even so, most people don’t seem intrinsically drawn to intellectual topics. I could see about 30% of the population being stage yellow, about the same percentage that currently go to college in the US, but after that it seems like stage yellow requires a certain level of intelligence that would limit most people. For those who have studied spiral dynamics, do you think majority Stage Yellow is possible without some kind of mass scale cognitive enhancement?