thibault

Trying very hard to miss the point. Yes ! Of course ! People in urban neighborhoods live the same as people in the jungle ! All bow down to @Jodistrict, master of consciousness !

Can you study the Spiral Dynamics model thoroughly before posting nonsense in a thread about Spiral Dynamics ? The original poster is asking a Spiral Dynamics question, if you don't agree with Spiral Dynamics, that is fine don't post here. It's like going into a thread that says "What is God's plan?" just to post "I don't believe in God". What is the point exactly ?

He also missed a lot of other things. At this point I think he's doing it on purpose.

You are born at the first stage. Society can facilitate your evolution through the stages. It is possible that society does this so well that you forget about some stages. Remove the safety net and a green is forced to face his orange nature regardless of how he "understands" it. Linear is probably not the right word. Sequential is more accurate. It's like a stack of blocks : |D| |C| |B| |A| You must place A before B and B before C. If you remove B, C and D collapse.

Purple is ethnocentric. Just because they are unaware of their stage orange nature, doesn't mean it's not there. If the money that is feeding and housing them stops then their stage green will collapse. If they themselves are not taking responsibility for that stage orange, someone else is; otherwise they couldn't be green.

Would you not qualify a person's parents to be a backbone of their development ?

It's possible to be green pretending you don't have an orange backbone.

You assume that differentiation between stages implies progress.

You are however brutally unaware of the stage orange "snake" that is razing your forests. That is what low consciousness means. Inability to conceptualize what is happening, inability to formulate solutions. It is not good or bad that your forests are being razed, to society it's good, to the tribe it's bad. You are the one glamorizing one stage over another when this is not what SD is about at all. All stages are equal but a seed is not the same as a tree.

All the people glorifying purple in this thread have seriously missed the point of the SD model. Each stage BUILDS and is NOT SEPARATE from the previous one. i.e. Red can't develop without a Purple foundation so in a way Red actually includes Purple. If you want to lose consciousness and destroy all the development that society has provided you for free, go ahead just buy a bottle of vodka every day and you will return to purple soon enough. If you want to return to nature and live in harmony, go do it, or maybe read Into the Wild first. There is nothing virtuous about being stage purple like there is nothing virtuous about being a mouse, a tree, or a human. We have very little to learn from a cow or a donkey and yet that does not mean we are superior. We live, die, chase food and sex like every other animal and in that way we are all the same. We only differ in the way to get there. That is what SD describes.

Unless you inherited or something, you worked hundreds of hours to save up that money. It takes probably 1 hour per month to manage your money yourself. There is no additional insider information that will become available to you from having someone manage your money, all they will do is standard things you can read in any book about investing. If they had insider information, they wouldn't be working for an investment firm, they would own an investment firm. All you are doing when you hire a manager is meeting the most opportunistic and greedy people in the world with a big sign on your forehead that says "take my money". I would not be surprised if you are paying ~25% of your gains in management fees. You are essentially choosing to go through a middleman because you are too lazy to educate yourself financially.

So when you see a kid your reaction is to think that you are better than that kid ? Do you not have an intuition that you were once where he is and he will one day be where you are ? To me what you are saying is like saying that the end of a movie is better than the beginning. While you need the beginning to appreciate the end and you could say there is more complexity being played out in the end, is it really fair to say the end is better than the beginning ? Maybe we are just arguing over semantics here but I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to say. Are humans not part of nature ?

From who's perspective ?

I think there is a huge mistake with spiral dynamics with people thinking that as you go up the levels you increase in morality. This is not at all what spiral dynamics describes. All it describes is the evolution of consciousness. What stages come first and what stages come next. In the same way we would find it ridiculous to say a fully grown tree is "better" than a sapling, stage yellow is not "better" than stage purple. It only describes the natural evolution of consciousness over time. Many people see this kind of model and intuit or assume that later/more developed stages imply higher moral character or some sort of objective "betterness". This is absolutely incorrect and false. In the same way we would say a plant starts as as a seed to a seedling to a sapling to maturity to a huge tree in the middle of a forest, spiral dynamics only describes natural growth of consciousness. There is absolutely no moral judgment behind it. Interpreting it in this way misses the entire point of the model.

I like this.

This is the entire thing about consciousness. Pretty much the same thing is happening in purple and red, it's just that in red it's acknowledged whereas in purple it's not. Here's another way you could see the the stages : Purple : Unconscious coercion Red : Conscious coercion Blue : Unconscious judgment Orange : Conscious judgment Green : Unconscious acceptance Yellow : Conscious acceptance In the same way you say red seems cruel in relation to purple, you could make the same argument that orange seems cruel relative to blue because now we are measuring people to judge them. The sort of judgment we are putting on them seems to have some sort of "objectivity" behind it, almost as if it was "final". At some point if you assume that developing consciousness is all flowers and rainbows then I suggest you look at history or just the animal kingdom that has not reached the same levels just to see the sheer brutality that was required to reach the levels we are at today. No one who understands SD well would tell you consciousness is good or consciousness is bad. It is just our trajectory. Whatever judgment you put on it says more about how you see the world than what consciousness actually is.

I like to think of the SD stages from a game theory perspective. Purple is the first stage of the human game. We form groups and develop our way of interacting with each other. At this point the game plays out fine. The first problem arises when two groups like this bump into each other. If their way of life clashes with one another that leads to friction and conflict which decreases the outcome of the game for everyone. A new strategy is necessary. One day one person realizes that this friction and conflict is unresolvable unless someone steps up and takes control of all the different tribes, uniting them into a single group through conscious coercion. Purple is unconscious coercion, red is conscious coercion (remember this doesn't imply better or worse, just more conscious). The reason that it is more conscious is because now the coercion can be attributed to a single individual rather than being distributed in an obscure way throughout the group.

Hmm now I understand. Like what does my ego get deeply triggered by. I would say for me it is virtue signaling. There is something about hijacking genuinely loving things for your ego's personal gain that deeply disturbs me. I think in some years it might even be seen as a form of abuse or exploitation.

I actually interpreted this as a form of fear of abandonment. Like as if in the difficult moments of the relationship she was afraid that I would leave her so she wanted to beat me to the punch in a way. I saw it as her forcing me to take a position and show her that I cared about her and that I wasn't going to just leave her. And I believed she did this out of fear. In this way she would know more quickly if I planned to stay with her and she would also be able to tell herself that I didn't abandon her but that it was the other way around if I didn't want to continue.

So to clarify when I say some behavior she had was linked to her BPD, I mean in her specific case. As in for example (I don't believe this literally but entertain my line of thought for a second here) if she has BPD and one of the symptoms of BPD is "Unstable relationships" and she was close to breaking up with me several times then I can say "Usually in my relationships, my girlfriend doesn't want to break up with me several times over the course of a few months so it seems something is off here and one of the symptoms of BPD is unstable relationships which could explain her behavior. Therefore in her case that behavior could be caused or encouraged by her BPD". This says nothing about "BPD people want to break up every few months", it's only personal to her yet it can still be useful for me to draw the link so I don't blame her directly for the behavior but I can understand that it is part of a larger problem in her life. Do you understand what I mean ?

Yeah I definitely agree with that.

Damn you did some work there lol. There is one particular thing that I read in there for BPD. The "unstable self-image". I definitely had this feeling with her and even farther than unstable I almost got the feeling that she was using her self-image as a "tool" if that makes sense. As in I felt like she could see herself in one way one moment to serve a given purpose, another way in another moment to serve another purpose, and sometimes somewhat random almost like from my perception there was a "backlash" and she was suffering from abusing this shifting self-image too much. With all of these behaviors that she had that when I read the BPD symptoms I think to myself "yep that's her, that's her, that's her...", I feel I don't have good examples of almost any behaviors because of how subtly I noticed these things. It's not like she was screaming "I FEEL EMPTY" but when I read that I can definitely map it in my experience somehow. Maybe I'm just projecting and completely missing the point but since I first started reading on BPD I haven't been able to shake the feeling that she was a textbook case. I guess I will never know...

Yeah sorry I think I'm not particularly good at bringing the most relevant details forward. I mostly adapt to how you are understanding me and try to pull in other information when I feel it doesn't fit with my experience. I'd definitely be interested in this list because for a while now I've taken it for granted that she was dealing with BPD and this is why the relationship failed so it would definitely force me to reconsider. Although I still can't shake the feeling that when I read your journal I saw so much overlap with her behavior. I'll have to think about some more I guess.

IQ is a great measure for saying how good you will be at something. I don't think it says anything about the quality or consciousness of that thing. Let's take your serial killer example. Someone with a high IQ will be a good serial killer, someone with a low IQ will be a bad serial killer. It doesn't ever say anything about the goodness of serial killing.

@Preety_India Hey, what if I tell you I'm 1000% sure she is not bipolar (because I'm bipolar and she is nothing like that) and I'm ~80% sure she is BPD from reading and the fact that she was diagnosed. Regarding the mood swings I also have my own distinction between how it works for me and how I saw it working for her and you can tell me if this makes sense to you. My moods don't change relating to the environment. I will by happy for weeks, I will be average mood for weeks, and I will be depressed for weeks. No single event will change that and the mood will change back and forth gradually like a sine wave. A bit like this I guess : She never exhibited these kinds of mood changes. Her mood changes were instantaneous like an electric switch. Regarding our break up, she called me after several days of being distant because it was snowing. She was all giddy and happy about it (the snow) and all I could see was an attempt to get me back on her side after being distant with me for a few days. I didn't play into her game and that is when she instantly shifted into extreme anger mode and hung up on me. I have NEVER felt something like that being bipolar, when I am hypomanic/manic you could throw a brick in my face and I would think it is a positive sign from the universe, that is how detached from the environment my moods are. Regarding her breaking up. I agree she would never have broke up with me if I had not called her, she would simply have never made contact again and moved on. She did also apologize a lot by the way for things that weren't even her fault even. But then she had trouble taking accountability for things that I thought actually were. Basically what I'm trying to communicate is I have no doubt I am bipolar. I am diagnosed, I am on mood stabilizers and if I don't take them I will get manic. This proves to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that I have a mood disorder. Now I've introspected on what it is to have a mood disorder and I can say with 99.99% certainty (there's always room for doubt) that she did not have one. Regarding my ex and specifically the break up, there are some highly unusual things that I noticed that led me to think the diagnosis she got of BPD was correct. She called me after days of little contact with me (I had come to interpret this as her "self-destructive" mode), I could hear the excitement in her voice and I felt that it was too much, way too much excitement for having been somewhat avoidant the past few days. I didn't really follow her in her excitement, she got angry and hung up. When I called her a few days later it sounded like she was expecting to never hear my voice again. We met up, she broke it off and told me that she had pretty much been crying non stop since hanging up with me. I asked her why she didn't call me back and she said that she had wanted to but been unable to, that she had told herself she would call me back when she had stopped crying but didn't stop for 3 days. I honestly don't know of any disorder that can cause a person to act giddy and then cry for 3 days over snow. I thought it was BPD but maybe not. If it is something else it seems to me that it will definitely be a personality disorder.