Carl-Richard

So I was walking my usual night walk, and before I came back to go inside, I stopped to look at the beautiful snow, the moon and the oddly lit clouds up above. Then I got a nostalgic feeling back to when I used to smoke out in the night. Then I simply had the impulse to pretend taking a hit from a joint, inhaling and exhaling, just for the nostalgia. Then I decided to pretend like I'm going to smoke an entire joint just the same way I used to. I was also curious if I could recreate the high state this way. Smoking is like riding a bike or playing an instrument in that even after a long break, you quickly if not instantly get into the old groove, the old patterns. So I took the careful puffs like I used to do to not accidentally cough. I filled my mouth with the cool winter air running through my fingers, and the cool air filling my lungs gave the feeling of inhaling something other than just air, actual smoke, causing the slight heaviness and irritation in the lungs reminiscent of the real experience. After each exhale, I felt into my body, searching for the faint warmth associated with the body high, and the memories of this feeling flooded me, creating a feeling reminiscent of the real experience. I thought that smoking for a high like this is actually quite an exercise in body awareness. Similarly, I remembered the sensation of becoming more aware of one's surroundings, of sounds, of the visual scenery, of the visual static in the visual field while looking up at the dark blue early-morning nightsky. I kept on taking puffs, following the script, pretending like I'm not wasting it, hurrying a little in between puffs, feeling the slight excitement of smoking it, again feeling the body high coming on, feeling slightly exhausted from smoking, thinking that there is not much left of the joint and it's soon time to pack up. I finished the imaginary joint with the smaller and smaller puffs, milking it for every last breath, all until it nearly burns my fingers, until I throw it away. As I throw it away, I look one more time at the beautiful snow, the dark blue nightsky, feeling my lungs breathing slightly labored, feeling the warmth in my body, and standing there for a moment taking it all in, until I decide to go inside. I turn towards the door and walk slowly towards it, I type the PIN slowly and unlock the door, step inside while carefully removing my shoes, removing my jacket slowly and gently and hanging it on the jacket stand. And then I walk and turn on the light on dim, and I pause for a moment to assess my overall state. I was actually feeling quite "high". Not in the sense that I was overwhelmed by bodily euphoria, although I did feel something in my body as well, but especially my mental state had experienced quite a significant shift. Even as I'm writing this, I feel different. I've read about how the embodied or procedural aspects of drug use have a strong effect when it comes to driving things like addiction and craving, but seemingly, it seems to have a strong effect on the drug experience generally, and that you can emulate some of the experiential aspects, granted that you are able to emulate the procedural aspects accurately (which I felt I did). I wonder what a similarly invested attempted emulation could do for something like LSD. I have sometimes done small excursions with my mind where I try to emulate the psychedelic state, and it does have some noticable effect, but if done in a procedurally similar fashion, it could probably have even more profound effects. And as for people saying "it's placebo". Well, yes, that is exactly what it is. Placebo, or the mind, is incredibly powerful. It's the thing that gets high after all. You can make it do incredible things if you push the right buttons in the right way. Ingesting a substance is only a particularly powerful way of doing it (and of course, should not be undersold or underestimated). But I believe with such techniques like I've described here, especially if practiced and mastered, similar to other techniques like seated concentrative meditation, could definitely aid in profound transformation. Does that mean I will get "high" more often like this? Maybe? Anyways, thanks for reading my "trip report", travelling sober into the sea of memories and deeply ingrained procedural habits, triggering pathways of mind and feeling that have long laid dormant but which are associated with truly altered states of consciousness, partially emulating and provoking them in an act of psychic necromancy. Thank you and god bless America.

My favorite stage Red psychopath That wig is certainly stage Red

Not necessarily me either, but that's at least Wilber's model

Mysticism ("union with God"), awakening; I treat them as the same concept, and I think Wilber does as well (not that it matters much). Tier 3 is the transition from Tier 2 without mysticism to Tier 2 with mysticism.

He has the model with Tier 3, which to my understanding is when you are Tier 2 but you are also developing your mysticism. I have less problems with that model for a few reasons. Firstly, his models are not based on structured empirical methods like giving sentence completion tests to people. So there is nothing to really critique about things like sampling, because there really are no such things. He is basing his models on his reading of philosophical texts, history and scientific literature. Secondly, he has the system of "Tiers", which mark a significant disjunction between previous stages. If he wants to denote the transition of Tier 2 (high cognitive complexity) into a focus on mysticism (trans-cognitive, trans-personal) as Tier 3, that's at least more illustrative then having it all under the same umbrella of "ego development". After all, Cook-Greuter calls the stage in question "Ego-Transcendence". It lies in the word (but not only that) that you have in large part abandoned ego development, in favor of "trans-ego" development. Now, of course even after significant ego-transcendence, there is a dialectic between ego and trans-ego development, but nevertheless, there is a significant disjunction between them. Thirdly, it is indeed accurate to say that once you max out Tier 2, then maxing out mysticism is a "step up", which would make Tier 3 more developed. But of course, mysticism by itself is not more developed than Tier 2 (it's a different game). I think Wilber is more explicit about this than Cook-Greuter (but maybe I'm wrong). One issue though is that it makes the model in a sense historically contigent in a discontinuous way, in that any potential development past Tier 2 that is not classifiable as mysticism will not be captured by Tier 3 and would therefore need to be amended like a patch update. It's more intuitive that you would add stages that develop later in history (and that are more cognitively complex) on the very top of the hierarchy, but this would not be the case here. But maybe as the world develops that even lower stages could start to show discontinuity like this given enough time. Imagine a new stage popping up between Orange and Green.

It's a shame I was only parroting Wilber then 😂

The highest levels also include eating food and breathing air. But these also occur at lower stages. Same with awakening.

Well, let me then re-iterate: I'm not the one lumping things together. I'm talking about what I think the model is doing, trying to interpret what it is saying on its own terms (as far as that is possible), and that requires reading what the author said and the methods they used to construct it. And like, if you want to talk about your own understanding of reality, don't call it "Susanne Cook-Greuter's Ego Development Theory", if you see what I'm saying 😆 Maybe I will 🤓 (I've actually seriously considered this, for maybe a few minutes 🙂).

You would have to spell it out to me with concrete text examples from her 90-page document because I'm not convinced. It is, but I'm saying those are attributable to the stages below Unitive/Ego-Transcendent, not the stage in itself. Maybe she should have done more in-depth tests than sentence completions then (jk) That's good, I like swimming in those waters in this situation. And it was just a tongue in cheek way of describing the people who dominate the top of these models. I'm not lumping them together. I'm saying the people making the models are inadvertently lumping them together with the lack of diversity in their samples. See my above comment or just remember my whole thread on this. Notice this beautiful juxtaposition which underscores both my points (that Unitive = mysticism, and that the lack of diversity of samples is the probable cause of it being included as a stage at all): "Nine Levels Of Increasing Embrace In Ego Development: A Full-Spectrum Theory Of Vertical Growth And Meaning Making" (Cook-Greuter, 2013, p. 74). If only the samples had included rigorous selections of both Eastern and Western peoples at various levels of currently conceived "ego development", I believe this notion of Unitive/Ego-Transcendent as an ego development stage would collapse.

I'm simply not convinced that Unitive or Ego-Transcendent in its essence describes anything else than mysticism or awakening; whatever word you want to put on it. Maybe the only significant difference would be that you are also cognitively complex and are able to describe your mysticism in a "complex way" (and are also unlikely to steal, rape, abuse, etc.) rather than what the state of consciousness implies in itself. Which is again, the white collar, intellectual elite spirituality.

Not even some of the shamans? 🤔

But will some of them also be "Unitive" and "Ego-Transcendent"? 🤔 If you study these people from birth and into adulthood, you will likely find a distinctive developmental course, probably with some similarities to Western models, but maybe also some differences. But we won't know that before somebody actually does the study

It's more like looking around at the selection of restaurants in the area and expressing exasperation at what you find. Or even better, you travel from town to town and you find that all the restaurants are essentially the same, like McDonalds: seductive on the graphic, consistent in delivery, actually decently tasty, but leaves you with a weird taste in your mouth and maybe a stomach ache. And as a consequence, you become a bit skeptical of McDonalds. It's not an overstatement: all famous linear, sequential developmental psychological theories have significant Western bias, both empirical and theoretical. What I'm most concerned about is the empirical aspect, and it's possible to work towards reasonably rectifying that. It will never be completely rectified, but no science is perfect. There is no absolute universality, no absolute statistical significance, causal explanation, etc. But there is still a reasonable level you can try to aim at, and it's at least above zero (which is basically the current norm in developmental psychology). A couple of cross-cultural samples that also controls for assumptions like modernity is a step in that direction. Some point out it has individualistic assumptions that doesn't translate well to collectivist cultures (e.g. Africa, Asia) and that it applies more to "American men" than other people. What does Wilber say about that? Again, what I doubt is that current models are other than Western, and I think you can make reasonable steps towards rectifying that. Well, for one, those things are made more explicit. It's in the name ("psychosocial", "ego development", etc.). But EDT is not for example called "Western Ego Development Theory". It's called "Ego Development Theory". So again, when looking at the name and the neat graphics, it has a facade (surface appearance) of universality. And when you suggest that it essentially doesn't matter that it's not actually universal, you subtly fuel that facade. This is a general phenomena that I believe happens when you survey Westerners about their "development" (particularly when not strongly distinguishing it from their "values"): On the almost top of the model, you will generally have Western, highly educated, rich people and their multiplistic, self-aware systems view of reality (the "intellectual elite"). And on top of those, you will have the ones who re-discover "spirituality" within that context, which is virtually always New Age (so-called "Unitive"). And in a sense, it is a logically "next step" in that context: people feel a bit better about themselves (stepping out from the spiritual black hole of modernity); people become more "open", "expansive", "flexible", "nuanced"; get access to a "new" dimension of life (mysticism); etc. So this logically seems to place them higher. But of course, a step into spirituality can happen at any level of "true" ego development (which history proves and which e.g. Wilber has pointed out). Therefore, if you in your sample also control for cultures where spirituality also happens at lower stages, then you can expect to conclude in your construction of the model that it's not a next step of "ego development" but rather something else (which Wilber identifies as "Waking up" rather than "Growing up"). All in all, with a more culturally diverse sample, you would (at least) expect to shave off the top of the model and place it somewhere else (e.g. in its own developmental line). @Sandhu is not a Westerner (strictly speaking). We have many non-Westerners on the forum (again, cultural imperialism makes this more difficult; us Zoomer internet kids are essentially all cross-cultural kids). But cross-cultural development (emphasis on cross) is also a whole different can of worms. It makes it specific in a sense, but also in a sense incoherent or at least unelegant. Namely, is it an "ego development model" or is it a "cultural development model"? Just look at what I described earlier: the model presents a cultural aesthetic that has been suppressed for cultural reasons at lower stages and which sometimes boils to the surface for other cultural reasons at higher stages, as the actual "progression of the psyche", rather than what it is: a cultural artefact. And how are these cultural dynamics systematically accounted for? They are not. They are left as a mess (a mess which someone like Hanzi Freinacht has helped to address). And you can expect to get such problems with all the stages, not just the higher stages (like with the earlier mentioned individualistic and male bias). Again, absolute universality is practically impossible, bu my demand is at least some attempt at diversity, which aims at universality. It's possible to do it better than what is currently the norm (which again is essentially zero). And it is extremely costly, but that is the story of science. Pushing the science requires pushing the boundaries, be it on a pure practical resource level or theoretically. Maybe AI can help us with that in the future. It could also inform us about what human development is rather than what happens in white collar suites where people happened to drop acid once and started taking more seriously the hippie magazine they just walked past.

I had the same thought, but you know what? I don't think these people are actually being "not careful" with their rhetoric. This is mostly Dave virtue signalling to his audience and strengthening his pathos. He is just as not careful with his clickbaity titles about whatever suits his narrative for the day as anybody else. Also, if we want to make some topics inherently off limits because of social risk, let's take Dave criticism of conservatism and religiosity. I don't imagine him being "careful with his rhetoric" there. If you're not "careful" about criticizing conservatism or religiosity, society will revert back to tribal warfare, crime and despotism. People will take drugs and drink themselves to death with unhinged hedonism, people will lose their meaning, connection, purpose, community, hope. Nope. At some point you have to let the grown ups talk and not let the babies dictate the narrative.