WaterfallMachine

What is the difference between Islam and Evangelicals that one is near the bottom of blue and one is at the top? There is no specific stage for each religion, often there are people of different stages in each religion. If you'd like a type of Islam that often associates themselves with higher stages, look for Sufi Islam practices. What would a low yellow vs a high yellow look like? Right now, all yellow looks the same to me; I can't envision what a high vs low yellow would look like. Low yellow is self aware of the different stages, but has terrible social skills to make changes with it. High yellow really knows how. What would a turquoise who didn't properly integrate yellow look like? Probably similar to me, actually. A little too hard on ourselves on our ambitions, a habit of projecting our inner critics on others, and basically overthinking the social process of gaining allies here. Green spirituality seems underwhelming to me, from what I understand. It's just people taking yoga classes and tripping at festivals and meditating 15 minutes a day. Why is this taken seriously? Purple, Blue, and Turquoise spirituality seem tough and then green seems casual. You are mistaking Green examples for the idea of Green itself. It's not just doing all of these, because you can be Orange and just doing all this just to make your reputation look better. It's more than that. Green is more of an acceptance that success isn't going to make you happy, and giving a shit is really what true strength is. Not many people can do that if you ask me. There seems to be many greens who are science rational atheist people who reject anything spiritual. This conflicts with the model, doesn't it? The model says that green spirituality is about the power being with you, best explored with others. Yes, I know there are lines of development, but it seems to me like lots of liberal people are rationalists and that green spirituality is actually only at the tip of green. Religion is not the same as spirituality. In fact, the crazy fundamentalists religions are often Blue. Religion is just organized religion, while spirituality is gaining self awareness through reflection and being kind. Green actually has a lot of the rationality Blue often doesn't have, and while seemingly overemotional to some of the, especially lower levels, from outside, they sound overoptimistic. Except you know, they actually act on their kindness instead of just criticizing the idiots without making any progress. How can it be said that green worships turquoise people? Isn't that only a small portion of green who are spiritual? Surely liberals don't worship gurus, do they? There's nothing in the definition of liberals about that. What exactly is beige? The only examples I get are unusual circumstances like babies and mentally disabled and starving masses. What is beige culture like? Is it cavemen and hunter-gatherers? Yes, pretty much. How does red see the other stages? Basically wanting to force everything they have on others. Yellow is such a small percentage of the population, isn't it? If this is the case, then how is it so easy to know how the other stages see it? (I.E. blue sees them as intellectuals, orange sees them as impractical philosophy, green sees them as dispassionate) Who exactly are the other stages looking at when making these judgements? This also begs the question of how was stage yellow even studied properly by the model makers. Often by studying a large case of people, of course. Small percentages don't equal the exact amount of people. It can be still thousands of course, but when a percentage is compared to the human race, it's of course going to look small. Know your statistics. It is said that a broad perspective of the world starts at stage yellow. Before yellow, people are myopic. But, don't green people care about world issues too? What is the precise difference? They know the root cause of issues rather than just fixing the symptoms. Take time to read on it before asking these questions.

You're getting this all wrong. What you want is temporary pleasure that aligns with long term health. If you can find a way to do both, you'll get what you want. Sometimes playing around and experimenting with something new and exciting, while not being something you thought would help in the first place, would allow you the new perspective to figure out what to do.

Yellow doesn't mean being a loner. It doesn't even mean being solitary either, considering very wild extroverts can be stage Yellow. It just means you spend more time thinking for yourself on how to help others, whether that involves debating with someone who also wants to help, or being alone. It's just that Yellows today are very rare, and so they don't have much people to talk with on these topics.

You're making a mistake here buddy. I'm getting the sense you're just stereotyping what enlightened people look like. The thing about the enlightened is that they're not more similar to each other, in fact, they're actually more likely to stand out differently. Uniqueness and what's normal are two sides of the same coin after all, and often enlightenment is just what would create what would be normal in the future. Because what is normal anyway? It's another label. Normal is different throughout history, throughout all cultures, and beliefs. Apparently to many of us, normal is someone who has all their life figured out. That belief in your head that you believe that most people don't have past traumas, that they don't have problems with family or friends, addictions, lost dreams in their career, insecurities and so on. There's a reason you're still asking this rather than just going away, you know? What is it? What's different about people in really deep stages like me now. . . is that I can see into each people's words and faces and tell that they all have these problems. Rich or poor, white or black, man or woman, no difference. Besides, you can make change while still being accepted into society. You just need the right people skills for it, right? So look for it if you want to. Normal doesn't exist. It's a lie made by people who don't want to admit that they don't follow the idea of what normal is.

That's mostly because the ego never really dies after enlightenment. It just transforms into love. It's trying to feed itself with junk food, but really, it needs something more fulfilling than that.

Ego isn't exactly a good answer, because there are different types of ego and how they express themselves. This type of ego mostly comes from people being either : 1. Being overly passive most of the time, and so releasing all their anger into one or a smaller group of people. 2. Being overly aggressive, to make up for not having power when they were younger or in another vulnerable place. 3. Controlling others because they secretly want themselves to be hated to punish themselves. It can be one or all really. The Enneagram Anger Triad focuses on this though -- Type 9 -- The Mediator, Type 8 -- the Challenger and Type 1 -- The Perfectionist. I'm guessing you're asking or reading this thread because someone else is like this in your life? Or is my intuition wrong?

That's true, actually. But let's define enlightenment differently. It's not just meditation and stuff. Let's define it as a deep level of self awareness. From what I can sense, you're making some progress, but you're . . . you're just stuck because you don't really know what enlightenment is exactly. Self-awareness doesn't mean knowing everything about you, mostly because people change on a regular basis, and so new things have to be changed as you go on. That's why enlightenment doesn't tell you what stage you are in Spiral Dynamics. It's more of something that will help you get a boost in whatever stage you are to go higher. To put it straight, self awareness is in being aware of what the most essential thing about you you need to change right now. Nothing more. Not less. The thing about enlightenment is that we stop all of the bullshit of having to deny it, distract ourselves from it, over-criticize, overwork, feel pain, shame, sadness, anger, fear and such rather than just really knowing what you need to do. That's why you need both enlightenment and personal development together.

From what I can sense about your history, you probably need to go through some past traumas and come to terms with them rather than acting. Just pushing yourself to act isn't going to do much.

A lot of the point of meditation is to be able to stop taking action, and reflect. In Orange, it's often recognized as a type of chasing after success, and the hard work as a way of getting over insecurities. In Green, you calm down somewhat, but it's still possible to overwork on helping other people then. In Yellow, you finally calm the shit down, but you end up overthinking things a little too much in that you're afraid to get new allies for Turquoise. Which one you're in is up to you to figure out. But anyway, how are you going to be able to figure out the root cause of things when you get to Yellow? It reminds me of this Infinity Meditation I made, which involves looking back to your past from 1 second, 10 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month and so on until you somehow reach the Big Bang. The thing to realize is that to know what matters the most, is that it really matters to your past, history and the farther future. There's no use acting when you're acting on a terrible decision.

It reminds me a lot of futuristic thinking actually. You don't just think of the cause and the effect directly. You think what the effect will affect, and what the effect will even affect more, and how it can all snowball into something worse. Tiny things make a difference when added up over time, not only to your life, but to everyone else. Little actions you do can affect another person's action, which also involves another person's action, and so on. What you believe to be true can get people to either make good or bad decisions in life, so be responsible.

From my own intuition, I get the feeling Sadghuru is somewhere between stage yellow and stage turquoise actually. He seems to be able to bring enlightenment in a way that adapts to the different stages and personalities on a regular basis. His videos focus on different issues in society -- such as the success oriented type of stage orange in his video about calming down with studies, or more of stage green issues in some of his videos where they take things too seriously about changing the world, and lacking a sense of humor. Though, he seems to be lacking the ability to make the major alliances to actually begin to get to stage turquoise that much. What is it with all of you resorting to insults at this question? How is the person even going to learn the lessons of this guy with insults in the first place? I thought one of Leo's books (Neti-neti probably) involved the difference between trying to communicate someone or manipulating someone. If you are trying to change a person while trying to speak to them, that's not communicating, that's manipulating. It's best to know that you can't change anybody, the person changes themselves. When typing a stage, don't just tell what it is, also say why. How are they even supposed to get it? You think we have memory shifting machines to just send our knowledge to another person? How are you even going to reach stage Green at this rate with that lack of empathy? Next time, actually explain the reasoning behind your insults. It's more educational that way.

Just learn to think of things in very small steps. A lot of people get overwhelmed because they get very strong visions of all of their dreams, without planning it out. Just ask, "What's the next small step to do?" And if you can do it after counting 5 seconds, you'll manage to get it. The more specific your vision is, the more likely you'll do it.

Trauma? Have you ever heard of Complex PTSD by some chance? It's a type of PTSD characterized in a way that it often has a more severe effect towards your life, often caused by childhood trauma -- considering that the brain of a child is more sensitive during that age. Visit the site traumahealed if you haven't already, and try to find some of those lists called "What to during a flashback" if you need help around this. I haven't been back in this forum for a bit. I think I left because I felt called to help somewhere else, and the majority of people answering my threads just had the habit of making extremely short answers or making fun of me, but I wasn't that assertive back then. Apparently some dick was spamming the forum and bullying everyone, but you see, I was blamed for reporting him. So now I'm back, see you around.

We're influenced by both our genes and the environment. Hell, according to epigenetics, our genes can change according to the environment. Not the structure of those genes themselves, but the expression of them.

I'm autistic myself and going into yellow, and from what I know about the autistic community is that they vary as much as normal people. Like in most first world societies, most are somewhere between Orange and Green. The neurodiversity movement is a particular expression of Orange and Green opinions. Neurodiversity is the belief that cognitive differences are just differences, and not necessarily disabilites. Autistic people may lack social skills, but they're also more likely according to research to have greater analytic abilities and a much deeper ability to focus on tasks. ADHD people may lack focus, but they're also more likely to be creative and original in adapting to new environments. Orange autistic people often tend to value success, and feel broken at the standards of society of success being outside their cognitive differences. So many of them disagree with the neurodiversity movement -- as they see Green's idealism as something out of emotional overoptimism. Those supporting neurodiversity though, tend to be green, and are trying to promote equality and human rights similar to the LGBT movement. Yes, @Jonatan, Autistic people also lack the ability to see combinations of subjects well, but they often tend to make up for an increased eye for detail in analysis. Systems thinking is not just about connective ideas, but also the root causes of issues itself -- an often very developed skill in autistic people. Yellow is analytic, and this perchant for analysis can serve them well in Yellow.

I'm Green going into Yellow. I've had a lot of practice in learning about Green worldviews by volunteering, but I'm moving out from that. I think all this Green emotionalism is making me too prone to agree with others too much sometimes, and be a little too idealistic in my worldview. Sometimes others' don't change as much as I like, and sometimes some ideas are better than the others. I feel a little shaky with all this change, but I guess it's nice to be more individualistic again -- not sure where it will go though. I notice in my everyday life, I'm more likely to adapt to people's stages. If someone's being too strict and obedience oriented in blue, I try to argue back with the rational thinking of Orange. If someone seems to be feeling down about not being succesful enough, I start opening up my feelings to encourage them to share their own in Green. And recently, I've been getting Green people to actually see more of the root cause of things in Systems like with another forum. I feel a little anxious sometimes about possibly offending others, but I guess that's just Green. I guess I need to learn more about rationality again huh like I did in the Orange stage. Well, oh well. Hope this turns out well.

What traits would make you think he was yellow by the way? I doubt I’m as knowledgable as you in Spiral Dynamics, but I read his entire biography by Walter Isaacson, and he didn’t seem like he even completed his Green development. Sure, he tried alternative practices associated with Green, but it didn’t seem really Green in its core. He was a brilliant man — a visionary of our age, but people wise, he doesn’t seem to have the patience and compassion of Green. He was overly harsh with his employees, asking for extremely high and sometimes impossible standards — that made much of his workplace hate him. Sure, they respected his strategic intelligence, but they certainly didn’t like him. A Yellow person would at the least would be able to disagree with his employees without raging against them, but unfortunately Steve Jobs did not. Reading some of his influences on managers in the Harvard Business Magazine, his story encouraged a lot of Orange managers to be unfortunately too harsh on his employees, and this is the result. Being an innovator does not make you Yellow. The combination of strategy and productivity from Orange and the compassion and acceptance of Green is what makes someone Yellow. And he is not.

@Arkandeus I agree with you in that there's a way to gather control -- without having to let it go. Letting go is necessary at times, but there's also an alternative way of a more healthy way of gaining control. What is that? it's kindness. If a person who years for power wants to lead, then at least lead with concern for others' well being. If a person wants control of their life, then control it to better yourself as a person. If you're greedy, use that money to donate to charities. If you're gluttonous, find a way to eat delicious healthy food. If you're full of wrath, then stand up for other's safety in the face of danger. If you're envious, then use that to envy your ideal self to become him. I don't believe that we ever lose our internal desires. We just find more healthier ways of dealing with them so it can be satisfied without something done wrong. Not to say that letting go of control and accepting things aren't important too, but so is this. What matters is balance, and that balance can be found in you.

Sure, I'll send you a PM. I'm pretty knowledgable in most of the questions you asked, and would like to invite anyone who wants some questions answered to send me a PM too. Take care.

@Santhiphap Hey, just wanted to say I'm glad you're making progress. I've been in dark places in my self inquiry practices -- very, very dark places, and I know how hard it can be to get out of them. Take care, and I hope you're feeling better.

I guess I could film it, and anyone could say it was a video editing software then. I could physically show it in real life — but some people may think of the computer clicking to certain things as coincidence. I doubt I can get millions with it either. There’s a reason why that prize to prove these abilities haven’t been taken yet — and I doubt the conventional scientific community is as open as you imagine it. I’m fine with no one believing me. I don’t have much need for fame or riches really — I’ll just go on being a mostly normal person.

Haha. I told you — it’s powered by the need to emotionally grow, and I don’t think watching people naked is one of them. Haha.

Haha, I'm not joking. . Though I admit I can't prove it to you. If you can't believe it well -- not much I can do, and it's not much of useful an ability either. I can already google with my hands -- what's the point of doing it with my mind?

It'd be pretty amazing if we can measure that progress with the brain. I hope in the future brain scans would be something you can use at home for our own growth purposes.

I agree with all that. Just wanted to comment there's a lot of depth in MBTI beyond the pop psychology version of it. The more advanced levels of it use something called "cognitive functions", and they're rather complicated to explain in detail here, but it recognizes how people are more on a spectrum than one or another. The truth is we all have introverted/extroverted, intuitive/sensory, thinking/feeling, and perceiving/judging functions. It's just one is stronger than the other, and is expressed in different ways in a type. In cognitive functions, the opposite preference to your own still has effects on you unique to your type. Growth is often made by developing your opposite preferences and learning from them, so people learn to go beyond the boundaries of what is useful for their type. Personality Hacker's a good place to learn about it if you're looking for some. What other models do I like to use? Enneagram is a personality typing that focuses on a person's primary motivations and responses to shame, fear and anger. Each person has a specific type for each of those three emotions -- with one being dominant, one in the middle and one response least used.