Mal

@Saarah Enlightenment doesn't change anything: You just understand that you are the divine. If you're at blue cognition then your blue ego is the divine, along with the rest of the "blue tinted world" you see - including your projected shadow. Shadow work only begins at 2nd tier because 2nd tier cognition is the first in our history to allow all 1st tier structures to be as they are. However, 2nd tier does not hold the same intellectual views as 1st tier because it is integrating the shadow, so it's a kind of radically inclusive stage of development. Once you reach 2nd tier you will see how all this is applicable and you will be able to tell instantly as soon as a self-realized person opens their mouth exactly which stage they are coming from. This does not mean to say they don't have valuable nuggets of wisdom to teach you, everyone holds a piece of the truth. The litmus test is to ask the self-realized person if they agree with that statement! Mal

@Saarah Hi Saarah, Thank you for bringing this topic up. I have a specific answer to your inquiry here:

@Presty Hi Presty, I'm going to give you my brutally honest opinion. If you had the app for a year, and only met 2 people on it and one of them was a one night stand... What does this tell you? If you want sex get out and start talking to people. Tinder can be viewed as entertainment for bored and tipsy single women who laugh at the profiles while sipping on cocktails and painting their nails before leaving the house to go out to laugh at more single men. But of course, it's your choice to continue with it. Respectfully -Mal

@jes You do make me laugh! Thank you for being you

@Lha Bho Yes of course! This is the whole point. As long as we remain contemplative then we can allow life to direct us through our authentic self. We are going to know when we make mistakes and how to rectify them. This is mostly about cognitive development, and cognition growth is based on experience and self authoring. An authentic spiritual path and a very good map is essential. Try to "fly your way over the Rockies without a good map" you might be able to achieve it, but it's going to be a hit n miss task. Spiritual practice, cognitive development and the right guide are all interconnected. Mal

@jes Hey jes, I just want to point your attention to your intention right now. You're asking "will it work?" If you take a moment to think about this, it will become obvious that you are resisting by trying to practice non-resistance. The ego is a sneaky one! Go back to the Matt Khan video and notice the two word mantra "It's OK" is not a way to try to escape this place, situation, feeling, life. It's a way of radical acceptance. Radical acceptance means you accept the pain as if you had chosen it. It's not to be gotten rid of at all. This practice is to change your relationship TO your experience rather than change your experience. This will bring you freedom Mal

Hello, It looks to me that you may have been doing a lot of reading, but not doing any of the work required. Reading and practice go hand in hand, self-awareness (which is actually the thing that makes one attractive) is built over time with certain practices. To be frank, it looks like you are stuck in your head and wondering why after "all this work" that you are not getting the results you hoped for. It also sounds like you have some distorted views about masculinity, alphaness especially. One cannot pretend to be something they are not! If you are afraid then embrace that, and you will find self-awareness (attractiveness) grows. This is about accepting you as you are now, and nurturing yourself back to health in a kind way rather than a self-defeating way. I think your best option would be to stop with the information overload, build up your conventional life the way YOU want it, and do some real self development practices in order to raise your vibrations from a state of fear and lack and into a healthy sense of self and abundance. No more dating coaches. No more books. Just take some time developing yourself and your relationships and you WILL find that your true "alphaness" (which cannot be learned from any outside resources) will appear in your life. Basic meditation and self-acceptance practices will be perfect for you at this point. Leo has video's on this. Cut the dependency on the outside sources of information and start to look inside. It's all inside you, you are genetically designed to get you to as far as mating and supporting yourself financially and emotionally. When this phase is complete then you can take yourself further spiritually if that is what you want. Regards Mal

"You are either self-realized, or you ain't! There's no in between!" Sri @charlie2dogs

I like this, because the people who do that to you are not enlightened. They are actually stuck in the absolute. Enlightenment is just one perspective on life. I hope to still have an ego and have full access to it because without an ego in this society, they are the crazy ones. Integral spirituality is the future.

I'm going to start my own cult! ...Am I allowed to say that?

@Baz Hi Baz, The bad news is that the better half of our species do require some kind of independence in any guy they would take a psychological "second look" at. I think we both know what this entails. I know you were looking for advice so the only thing I'll say is she isn't "judgemental"for the sake of it, but she is biologically wired to screen out men who don't have certain parts of their life handled. It's obviously nothing personal, is it? It's indeed a pain in the ass when all us guys really want is nothing more than a bit of quality female company! You know what to do, my friend. All the best. Mal

@jes Jes, Why don't you try this- I posted it a while back, it is very good at helping us relax. It's helped me a lot! Also, tell yourself "it's OK"... just keep telling yourself this. Because it IS ok to feel like this. I think you're getting wound up because you are resisting your feelings. Yes they are very intense and coming at you a lot, but if you tell yourself it's OK then you will quickly find inner support. Try it. And of course, if you need to talk you can P.M. me. -Mal

@jes yo funny!

@Jess Hi Jess, White lies are acceptable. Some of us at certain points in our lives need and want to be lied to. It's just a fact of life and if done with skill, care and the best intentions then one can't really go wrong. We will always be ready to hear little nuggets of truth anyway once we are ready. It all depends on the situation, and as we all know there is no perfect situation. What matters is the quality of relationship. Most of us here are not going to subject ourselves to neurotic pathological relationships based on deceit and deficiency anyway. So the answer for me is white lies can indeed be an act of love. Mal

@jes Hello Jes I like your new picture. It looks very tranquil. I also live by the sea. One the opposite side is the countryside. It's beautiful and peaceful. I used to live the rat race in the city and it was also noisy as hell. In fact, I could never get a moments peace and it was only when I moved out did I notice that I had not witnessed silence for a long time. These days I spend at least one day a week in solitude surrounded by nature. You won't believe the positive effects this practice has had on me. My advice is try to get away for at least one day, it really helps with returning to a noisy and lively environment, you will be surprised how much better you are able to cope with distraction. Mal

The reason for posting these psychologists was two-fold. Firstly to provide resources for the OP, and secondly for you to contact their institutes directly if you have an issue with their work. I'm not the right person to get into a debate with regarding the ethics of developmental psychology (like I said, I've got better things to do with my time than to argue on here). I just happen to think their insights are useful. Mal

I found a fantastic description of Integral cognition. "Often when he (Gebser) speaks of integral consciousness, he is irritated with the inability of language to express something experiential. Integral is not abstraction. It is not a new system of ideas that everyone can agree on. It is a direct experience of "Presence." Not an eternal now, but a consciousness that supports all the multitudes of experience, all the different ways we can perceive time. This "ever-present" nature allows all passing experience to arise and fall within it. To me, this sounds surprisingly like the mystical experience of "satori," or how many Zen masters and Christian contemplatives describe the nature of reality---as being a movement from and within the Godhead. Gebser described this as the "ever present origin," the source of which all events and all worlds are born and die---and are redeemed in. That is why they are "integrated" (and that is why it's called integral consciousness), they allow for the various structures of consciousness to "do their thing" within a kind of supremely creative "alpha and omega." None of these words do it justice. It must be encountered." You've lost me AbrabiaNytes. It almost sounds as if you're suggesting that preaching is a bad thing!

Psychologists who observed similar phenomena. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Loevinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kegan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Maslow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Gebser

@Emilio

@ArabiaNytes Hi, "ArabiaNytes"? One of the beautiful aspects of reaching 2nd tier cognition is the newly found ability to see who's real and who perhaps is going to be a possible drain our already limited and precious individual and collective resources. This important piece of wisdom goes hand in hand with an ability to discern and then embrace (or disregard) some ideas in favour of more fruitful, self-sustaining and wholistically nourishing attitudes and relationships. Skepticism is indeed a much needed skill to navigate the dream state of 1st tier deficiency modes of experience. However, while at the stage Maslow coined as "The Momentous Leap", according to the research one no longer need employ an attitude of skepticism, but instead lean toward a tendency of increasing "Witnessing presence". This witnessing is a much more advanced mode of processing reality, and therefore is a lot more accurate than mere "throwing bait" and waiting for a bite. A good rule of thumb that has served me well during my years of self-development is to pick as accurate a framework (or "Map") as possible, lest I become led on a wild-goosechase with some random and empirically questionable New Age pre-rational mindset, and inadvertently make my life more of a mess that it previously was! I'm extremely glad however that this very common catastrophe has not been the case for me So, as this map seems to be working for me, (and many other thousands of Intergal people) along with the help of a large community of mature self-actualizers and developmental psychologists (professional post masters degree psychologists, in fact) I have absolutely no problem recommending it to other aspiring self-actualizers who are serious about their own self development - and I mean serious in the capacity that their lives depend on it! Those of us who don't feel our lives depend on it are welcome to chose from a varied catalogue of other self-development maps that currently accessible to us in this day and age. Fortunately for those of us who DO follow this map and reach high levels of awareness, it becomes apparent to us that we can never define "people" by any random colour - but merely point out that certain cognitive patterns belong to certain levels of cognitive development. If you are unfamiliar with this phenomena I'd like to direct you to Alfred Korsybski's work "The Map Is Not The Territory" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation This will explain things in better terms than I have time to to at this point. Despite the obviousness at 2nd tier that the map is indeed not the actual territory,I hope you would agree that it is wise and sensible for relative convenience-sake to categorize, say for example, the great Manchester United F.C. as a soccer club of "Premier Division" quality. Mostly because of the obvious work, investment and skillset the club has developed over the years. If we can certainly define a premier league soccer club, we can certainly define a person's level of ego development. There is one developmental stage we currently know of however who flinches at the mere whiff of drawing any such hierarchical value judgements. This is the "green" or pluralistic stage of cognitive development. Unfortunately for us at this time this is the current centre of gravity in the academia world. While we continue to indoctrinate and churn out "en masse" this particular flavour of deficiency mindset based on the works of philosophers who collectively (but not surprisingly) had a high rate of suicide, while it is an indeed crucial aspect of the evolution of consciousness, it is thankfully not the complete picture. I hope that more and more of us are turned on by the cutting edge model of Spiral Dynamics and other such "colour coded" models of development, and wholly embrace their already tried and tested capacity to individually and eventually collectively pull us all out of the deficiency mindset and catapult us into a new transformative and radically inclusive way of being. I hope that you too will be able to join us also! Warmly Mal

@Annie Hi Annie, All of the above advice is good. What I see though is a possible false situation due to an intense investment in your current "self image" The reason I say current self image is because the good news is, your self image CAN be developed and updated. So let's attempt to go from Annie version 1 to Annie version 2! One of the most effective things to do at any level of growth is to be able to take a step back from your self identity and take a position of observer to all of this. Simple meditation for 2-3 minutes per day will give you the leverage you would not think is currently possible. What it looks like you are attempting to do is solve a problem at the level the problem was created - on the thought level. It's actually a worthless practice to try to solve your problems by excessive identification with them. So take some time in the day to just observe your breath and observe "Annie" in action. The most important thing you can do while on your journey is to learn to just make some space between you and your mental/emotional self. If you follow these instructions you will probably find that the "hoplessness" is self created - illusions of your thinking mind. This is not to discredit that there are things in life that need to be dealt with, but it will take the urgency and intensity out of them if you can just get a glimpse of how your own mind is playing tricks on you. I wish you the best Mal

@oats Welcome to the world of REAL self development. Now you can drop the RSD, Elliot Hulse and pop psychology bullshit and start afresh today. You clearly understand cognitive development and how it's intimately connected to enlightenment. Welcome aboard! Warmly -Mal

@ArabiaNytes You're welcome. I'm not sure I understand this sentence - you said you speculate over such assessments. So I assume you have an opinion to share with us about your hypotheses? I have not taking the test myself, yet! I'm hoping the PDF will be waiting for me on Christmas morning 2016. Oh wait, isn't that blue thinking?...

@ArabiaNytes Hi there, For anybody serious about this, here is the web-page to apply for Suzanne Cook-Greuter's "MAP" Sentence Completion Test. It's very pricey, but it's in my opinion one of the best ways to assess where one currently is on their developmental journey. 2nd tier cognition is an incredibly complex stage of development, and cannot be understood from any of the 1st tier perspectives (hence the need for the test, in my opinion) http://www.cook-greuter.com/SCTi-MAPForm.htm -Mal