Jwayne

Sustaining these insights and allowing them to inform their own applications - and being disciplined to stay engaged in other work (including with others) and intellectual pursuits - is what we are tasked with.

"If they tried a little meditation" is an exaggeration. Even given a committed spiritual practice one depends on physical health as an aid.

High GABA

Read Doctrine of the Buddha by George Grimm

This is normal. Its good to keep studying to organize your buzzing thoughts into terms easily relateable to others.

Follow your enthusiasm and you'll never get mentally tired from learning or working.

Self-identity naturally changes as we learn through experiences, including intellectual/spiritual contemplation.

The proper term would be "indefinitely large" intelligence. Infinity is that which is not limited (by any determinations, such as "intelligence").

This is very basic self-awareness. Rather than trading conclusions and egoically-invested opinions try to keep learning. This means you need a real community (including online) based on the dialectical production of knowledge rather than merely led by the personality of a presumed authority figure. Any real guru, in the original sense of the word, is concerned with your growth at heart rather than your allegiance.

People who subject the term "infinity" to something (i.e. more or less) don't understand the meaning of the word. But this is typical in the era we live in. People are more likely to become drug addicts than read books. Infinity is that which has no limits. Likewise it cannot be substituted for the word "consciousness" either.

I'll explain how a similar model should be created to avoid ideological defects. If you want to understand non-WEIRD psychologies, you must learn their language, participate in its traditions and experience its multi-faceted civilization identity from within (its own literature, art forms and ways of life, etc.). That approach will give you an experiential basis so as to first-hand be familiar with those peoples own phenomenology, so to speak, with their own epistemology. Which of course, won't be stated in such terms, but expressed howsoever that culture sees itself. Spiral Dynamics is just looking from a culturally and historically-contingent WEIRD perspective, with an obvious linguistic bias, from the outside at the rest of humanity in all its richness. And it assumes - erroneously - objectivity about its conclusions rather than seeing them as obviously self-conditioned.

I don't think in these terms at all, or find the model useful in any way. I think its highly reductive rather than clarifying. It's main purpose is in projecting an ascending hierarchy of psychological evolution with certain cultures and values above (chronologically) others. When people here say there is no hierarchy nor progressive evolution then I wonder what value they see actually remaining to the categories. Except to pseudo-intellectually reduce complex realities into colors and hence confuse yourself into thinking you have actually accomplished or understood something.

If we don't look at it hierarchically - meaning, not to wield it as a political weapon against other cultures (as Leo does) - then I see no serious danger in it as a intellectual framework of limited application that many apparently find helpful. All of the danger enters in by taking it as a color coded hierarchy of values and asserting you have ontologically-spiritually ascended higher than others. There are many dire consequences that follow immediately from that. I mean, imagine telling that to your family and friends ("I am at a superior level of psychological development than you") and see how harmful it will be to your relationships. And now imagine extending that at a global scale of international relations...

Doesn't the word 'spiral' connote a hierarchy? As do the words evolution and progression. A non-hierarchical model would have more intellectual integrity as it is less flippantly arrogant.

So that's the argument in a nutshell, right? We don't need to lower ourselves by doing philosophy and having intellectual standards because our truth is 'obvious'. Imagine if everyone in the world talked that way...