Carl-Richard

Sure. Very few people use academic defintions of words.

Let me tell you word salad is fun until it has to interface with the real world.

By "incoherent", I don't mean that the stage is incomprehensible or lacks internal inconsistency. It's that it's not consistent with the rest of the model (it doesn't critique or transcend the previous stage, Yellow), and it just also happens to be based on flawed empiricism (WEIRD bias). The description of Turquoise is in fact entirely comprehensible and internally consistent: it's the New Age religion of Western rich kids. I really recommend The Listening Society by Hanzi Freinacht though. It's really sobering for anyone who is interested in Spiral Dynamics.

That's funny. I was just reading The Listening Society describing downward assimilation: taking symbolic code (language, culture) from a higher stage of cognitive complexity and using it at a lower stage of cognitive complexity. That's of course a concept I'm intuitively familiar with, but it's good to hear it being echoed. But if that is what was meant, I still don't understand how it explains the incoherence of Turquoise. By the way, The Listening Society claims Turquoise is incoherent because 1. it doesn't provide any critique towards Yellow (which I agree with), 2. the cognitive development it requires is simply too rare (which connects to 3.), and 3. it has no social manifestations (communities, institutions or organizations). It also describes Turquoise as "new-agey 'holistic' or 'integral' people", which echoes my hypothesis. People who object to 3. (e.g. in this thread), are most certainly subject to the same New Age conflation that I used to explain why Turquoise is incoherent: American college hippies discovering Eastern mysticism is not equal to the emergence of a new symbolic code, nor is it indicative of the cognitive development required to understand it.

I honestly understood 0% of what you wrote.

This triggers me.

https://unconsciousagile.com/2023/05/21/motivation.html Self-determination theory. I wrote my bachelor's thesis relying on this theory.

I don't see how you get freaked out by that but when Leo says he can shapeshift into a literal lizard alien you're probably letting that shit fly.

But you always have to judge where that point is. There have been times where I could work through the neck pain and it didn't get this bad. If I just have a minor headache, I won't lay down on the sofa all day.

Then we can always ask the question: where do we exactly draw the line between simply working through a headache and "not prioritizing your health"? That's maybe not so black and white 😛

Chronic pain sufferers have my eternal respect.

Sometimes you just have different priorities. I'm a bit like Sadhguru in that way: I hurt my neck at the gym recently, and instead of skipping my program, I kept going, and of course I hurt myself more because of that. Then the next day, neck still hurting, I decided to not skip my sprint session, and that made my neck significantly worse, so much worse I couldn't think straight because of the pain. Then the next day, I decided to not skip leg day, because I've trained my legs before with neck pain and it helped somewhat. This time, it only got worse, but I had also just caught a virus which enhanced the pain. Despite the pain, I decided to not take painkillers for the night, which turned out not so good, because I couldn't fall asleep. Only early in the morning, I decided to take the painkillers, and here we are. It's not that I didn't know the possible outcomes of my actions. It's that I prioritized one thing over the other, took the risk, and at some point, it didn't work out anymore, so I had to change my strategy. You also obviously can't be omniscient and predict everything perfectly, and being enlightened doesn't change that. I think Sadhguru chose to run himself into the ground before changing his strategy last moment, because that is just how he is.

If you ask someone who is metaphysically illiterate about metaphysical questions, of course you'll get metaphysically illiterate answers. Mainstream biologists and doctors work squarely within metaphysically illiterate materialist science. They don't need to know the difference between concepts like phenomenal consciousness, intentionality, meta-consciousness, etc. They only need to know the difference between someone who is sleeping, or in a coma, or under general anesthesia. These are surface-level behavioral observations that do not require any deep philosophical thought.

You just have to get calmer then. You could make it a daily practice ;D I'm not saying receiving grace is easy. It requires extreme devotion, openness and surrender. In a sense, you have to fully buy into his bullshit to receive it. You can't be a cynic. You have to be a follower. That is a feature, not a bug. Your skeptical mind will sabotage you against receiving it. And that is what he meant with the "mysterious" quote: your mind is playing tricks on you, so he has to play tricks on it to crack it open. You can judge his assertions based on what your mind is feeding you or you can become directly conscious of what his state is through empathic synchronization. This is a human ability you're born with; feeling other people's state. Some people are naturally better at it than others, but you can train it. Nevertheless, if you listen to your mind too often, you'll become a cynic. If you open your heart, you'll (eventually) see things for what they are.

I read it earlier today and it didn't tell me anything new about Hanzi's position, and what they said about Turquoise only confirms my suspicion (that Turquoise is an incoherent stage). Also, the author is high on his own farts.

He has books, not free books. https://www.amazon.com/Why-Materialism-Baloney-Skeptics-Everything/dp/1782793623 He says neurology (the brain) correlates with personal consciousnesses, but everything happens within transpersonal Consciousness. I have thoughts, feelings and experiences which you don't have. They're my personal experiences. But you can look at my brain and predict with some accuracy what I'm experiencing. In that sense, the brain correlates with my personal consciousness. However, in no way does this imply the brain causes my personal consciousness. And certainly, the brain does not cause Consciousness. The brain is happening within Consciousness.

Does anybody have access to The Listening Society by Hanzi Freinacht? They write a chapter about "Death to Turquoise". They also believe the stage as currently conceptualized is not coherent. Do they say anything similar to what I said? @DocWatts

Try this out as a meditative exercise: Find a YouTube video where he speaks in a spiritual setting (e.g. this one). Observe him closely for the entire video. Do not listen to the words — observe him. Observe how he moves, observe how he talks, observe his gaze. Do this while sitting in an upright and relaxed posture while breathing deeply and slowly (before you begin, take a few deep breaths). At some point, try to imagine how he experiences the present moment as he speaks. Do this while closely observing him. Then, after a while, open up another video of a random person speaking and compare what you see with what you just saw (or repeat the same procedure for them).

You can literally awaken by just looking a guru in the eyes. Never underestimate the power of Grace.

If you present someone with the truth as plainly as possible, you will either say literally nothing or something extremely vacuous like "you are it", "this is the truth", "Oneness". That often isn't very helpful, so you instead try to poke them in the right direction, which is not a straightforward process (and it's often different for different people, and they can be in different stages of the process). People's minds are a mess, and they're constantly tricking themselves, so you have to "trick them back" to unwind that mess. So the guru is a jester in that sense, trying to trick them into seeing the truth.

What exactly is that?

Intelligent AIs, yes. Conscious AIs? That's a different question. If you're like Bernardo Kastrup, conscious AI just means artifically created life, i.e. abiogenesis. That could happen in a few centuries too, but that's a bit different than proposing that silicon chips (melted sand and metal) can become conscious. Now, I'm clearly nowhere near as qualified as Bernardo to speak on this, but it makes me feel a little queasy when he scoffs at the idea of "AI ethics", simply because he is convinced such a thing is basically impossible. It gives images of a frenologist scoffing at the idea of human rights for African slaves during a presentation about their skull shapes. It's not impossible that he could be wrong, and to me, I would've preferred to be humble, but again, maybe he just thinks it's that ridiculous that he can't even pretend to be humble about it. But again, I do intuit the perspective of perceiving computers as just a pile of rocks, and certainly with the current conception of what a computer is, that perspective could be valid.

"It's just a thought" 😝

I'm starting to think maybe Turquoise is an incoherent stage due to the way the model was constructed, back with Clare Graves using person interviews. The problem of course boils down to the problem with WEIRD samples (Western, Educated, Industrialized, etc.); "Western people" for short. When Western people reach high Tier 1 or early Tier 2 and get statistically more familiar with New Age ideas, particularly Eastern-inspired non-duality, maybe this then becomes their new highest value system when asked about it in interviews, even though it's trans-personal/trans-cognitive and it's possible to happen earlier in the Spiral (like it has for millenia), producing what appears as Turquoise. Had instead the sample been more universal (including particularly people from Eastern cultures), then this confounding variable of Eastern spiritual beliefs would've been ruled out much more easily. So Turquoise essentially ends up becoming this bastardized mix of Green-Yellow cognition and Eastern spiritual ideas, only because we based the model on rich kids in American universities and not much else. But I would have to study the particular methods used in more in detail before making any firm conclusions.

The thing is if you don't engage in that hierarchy, then you just become a part of the other hierarchy of unread dorks who think they're original and think they've re-invented fire for the millionth time. Not long ago, I personally wanted to write a book about the relationship between flow, instrinic motivation, meaning, health, functionality, etc.; something which I felt I had discovered all by myself; but not long after, I realized that this has been talked about for millenia through concepts like eudaimonia, virtue, wisdom, etc. Probably the only favor I would've done to the world would've been to package the same ideas in my own clumsy and idiosyncratic language for people to spend their time scratching their heads over. If I were to "borrow" a concept from John Vervaeke, what you're talking about is called "rabbit hole epistemology" — burrowing yourself down in your own bullshit, which again at the end of the day becomes the same boring and unoriginal exercise, because so many people do it and end up unintentionally replicating the same uninformed low-resolution view on everything.