Shadow side of Stage Yellow

[tuckerwphotography]

Something I've noticed about a lot of the beloved Stage Yellow thinkers out there is that they sometimes tend to critique and complain about everyone and everything. Yes, Green can be overly optimistic to the point of naivety, but Yellow seems to go into these dark meta perspectives which fail to see The Miracle of This Present Moment which Turquoise embodies. There's very few Turquoise people I've seen who tend to critique as much as Yellow, which leads me to believe this is a shadow aspect specific to Yellow's worldview (and the perhaps lack of embodied awakening). 

I recognize I might be projecting my own shadows onto this. That said, do others feel similarly, or is it just me?

 

Edited March 18, 2021 by tuckerwphotography

[Flyboy]

Yup you're definitely correct.  Yellow is a bit too nebulous of a bucket to understand this phenomenon well... Read Cook-Greuter's EDT.

Yellow is roughly the equivalent of the "construct-aware" phase just prior to being "ego-aware", which is where all the really high velocity spiritual growth starts to happen.

Being arrogant and superior and meta-critical as you evolve into rarified territory is all part of the process.  Just don't get stuck there.  It does help to know that this behavior is NOT characteristic of those more advanced than you, and thus to start catching yourself doing it and deconstructing why, over and over, until it starts to sink in and you move beyond it.

Edited March 18, 2021 by Flyboy

[blackchair]

i Like to critique Oscar's dresses and suits 

[Megan Alecia]

It's not just a yellow thing. Everyone criticizes everyone, just look at channels like secilar talk... The whole trump era. And sometimes criticism is valid, and necessary. 

Edited March 18, 2021 by Megan Alecia

[SamC]

5 hours ago, tuckerwphotography said:

Something I've noticed about a lot of the beloved Stage Yellow thinkers out there is that they sometimes tend to critique and complain about everyone and everything. Yes, Green can be overly optimistic to the point of naivety, but Yellow seems to go into these dark meta perspectives which fail to see The Miracle of This Present Moment which Turquoise embodies. There's very few Turquoise people I've seen who tend to critique as much as Yellow, which leads me to believe this is a shadow aspect specific to Yellow's worldview (and the perhaps lack of embodied awakening). 

I recognize I might be projecting my own shadows onto this. That said, do others feel similarly, or is it just me?

 

intellectual arrogance maybe but I believe that is more of a green or orange shadow.

[RendHeaven]

1 hour ago, Flyboy said:

Being arrogant and superior and meta-critical as you evolve into rarified territory is all part of the process.  Just don't get stuck there.  It does help to know that this behavior is NOT characteristic of those more advanced than you, and thus to start catching yourself doing it and deconstructing why, over and over, until it starts to sink in and you move beyond it.

well said.

I think there is a very specific flavor of arrogance (grounded in the ability to "go meta") that is found in Yellow which is absent in the other stages.

[tuckerwphotography]

@Flyboy Yes agree. I’m familiar with EDT - just said Yellow as it’s more commonly referred to here. 

2 hours ago, Flyboy said:

Yellow is roughly the equivalent of the "construct-aware" phase just prior to being "ego-aware", which is where all the really high velocity spiritual growth starts to happen.

From my POV, both construct and ego aware are a fairly high level of ego dev, and the majority of Yellow is more Stage 5 Strategist/Autonomous. Does this align with your understanding?

[Flyboy]

On 3/18/2021 at 3:10 PM, tuckerwphotography said:

@Flyboy Yes agree. I’m familiar with EDT - just said Yellow as it’s more commonly referred to here. 

From my POV, both construct and ego aware are a fairly high level of ego dev, and the majority of Yellow is more Stage 5 Strategist/Autonomous. Does this align with your understanding?

I just re-read the EDT white paper, and my take is that "construct aware" fits well with the upper parts of yellow, in that it is continually trying to tie everything together into a master system of systems, a theory of everything.  (This is pretty similar to the overall point of Actualized.org, honestly).  It's hard to see beyond this unless you have experienced it... and while I am not there yet myself, I have a housemate who is at the "Ego-aware" stage, and it is just a different ballgame.  She is in "flow" always.  Her entire world is flow.  It's a quantum leap.  So, that's where I see the distinction between Yellow-ish and Turquoise.

[tuckerwphotography]

31 minutes ago, Flyboy said:

  It's hard to see beyond this unless you have experienced it... and while I am not there yet myself, I have a housemate who is at the "Ego-aware" stage, and it is just a different ballgame.  She is in "flow" always.  Her entire world is flow.  It's a quantum leap.  So, that's where I see the distinction between Yellow-ish and Turquoise.

@Flyboy My personal experience of Construct/Ego Aware is not always as glamorous as being in a constant state of flow. I'd caution using your roommate as a descriptor for everyone at this stage (though I'd love to meet her and hear more about her experiences). 

In my experience, Ego Aware can be a pretty existential mindfuck that is at times destabilizing and ungrounding. Almost like one foot in two worlds - not fully "inside" nor "outside" of "the ego," a no-man's land of sorts. Can often feel lonely and isolating to not have anyone in my life (except for one friend I recently met) who can relate to the way I often perceive life. There's certainly a lot of flow compared to earlier stages, and that comes with a deep trust in the universe which vastly reduces anxiety, etc. But it's certainly not all roses all the time. 

Below are a few quotes from EDT that highlight the challenges of this stage:

“Ego-aware individuals start to pay attention to their own emotional and rational processing patterns. To watch oneself trying to make sense is intriguing and absorbing and can become all-consuming. Living at the edge of meaning and meaninglessness can be exhilarating at times and frustrating at others. Whether individuals at this level focus more on the liberating aspects of their awareness or more on the disillusionment and sense of loss that come with this mindset probably depends on many factors: among them personality type, the company of understanding others, and general life circumstances.”

“One must learn to live in the tension of the paradox that as a human being one must embrace one’s need for meaning while, simultaneously, understanding the futility of such an endeavor.“

“Ego-aware individuals report more often than people at earlier stages that they are watching or witnessing the parades of thoughts and feelings come and go without trying to direct them. Thus, they experience moments of freedom from the ego’s constant efforts at control and self-affirmation. Yet, at this stage, such experiences are short-lived. As soon as one evaluates and judges them, the magic is broken.”

“Sometimes Ego-aware folks express a sense of envy at the simplicity of earlier periods because their own world is experienced as so complex. However, given their ego maturity, most are capable of arriving at a dynamic and hopeful balance within these fundamental conflicts: They fulfill their perceived or chosen destiny independently and courageously in full realization of their basic despair and aloneness.”

[Flyboy]

@tuckerwphotography Yeah, you are definitely correct and I don't mean to glamorize.  She very much struggles with feeling "between things" and alone.  Listening to her talk, her experience almost seems like one prolonged psychedelic trip.  Things come in and out of focus through all the angles that most people aren't even aware exist.  She can pause herself "in-plane" for a moment or two but is almost incapable of staying there.

My mind is wired much more like the "construct-aware" side of it--I'm extremely good at conceptualizing and framing, and can flexibly see meta-models and deep connections and infinite extrapolations.  But it is "square" for me, in a sense.  I stay in-plane or cross-plane, but can only vaguely see how she flows between them.

I'm curious, how did you find yourself where you are at?  Was it intentional development, or were you always that way?  She describes it as something she has been since earliest childhood, as if her mind is just wired this way.  Her flow is truly remarkable... she describes it even connecting different time periods (like communications with her future or past self, where she remembers both ends of the time link - pretty wild stuff).

Edited March 22, 2021 by Flyboy

[tuckerwphotography]

@Flyboy Sounds wild! I'm curious to learn more about how the flowing between planes experience is for her. It sounds like she's a bit more far out into the Subtle/4D world than I tend to experience. 

One of the main aspects of it for me is that I am aware, in the moment, of every thought that surfaces as being groundless aka only a microcosmic aspect of the truth, and that all of it is constructed and based off infinite numbers of other variables a tiny fraction of which we're only aware of in any given moment. Essentially each thought I have can be easily deconstructed back to Nothing, which makes everything feel groundless. Sometimes I wonder what the point of saying anything at all is, while at the same time wanting to create highly dynamic maps and understandings of life which is paradoxical to the groundless nature of that which is being mapped in the first place.

The consequence of that for me personally is that it sometimes feels like everyone is talking about a movie as if it's real life, but I observe it as just a scene in a movie, but I don't yet feel like the audience watching or the pixels creating the movie, I'm still stuck as the character inside of the movie, but I know and feel that it's just a movie. I've experienced myself as the audience/pixels many times, but always fleeting, which makes it hard to go back to being the actor knowing that I'm acting, like Truman going back to The Truman Show after he finds out it's a show.

I started identifying with Ego/Construct Aware in the past year after a few major psychedelic blastoffs combined with deep study of development psychology and the evolution of consciousness (stages of awakening), as well as mediation, etc. The time I really identified with it and realized that I'm starting to have my center of gravity mostly at this stage was when I read this book which uses EDT as a framework for psychotherapy. This was about five months ago. I started crying while I was reading it because I felt like somebody finally articulated my lived experience of the world, and despite living at a spiritual community, I hadn't met anyone else who could relate to this experience. 

Culturally, I still most identify with green/YELLOW values. I sometimes find it silly how seriously everyone is taking their own reality. Yet another part of me is deeply envious, nostalgic for a time in my life when I could be super passionate about something because I felt in my bones that it was "right" and "the truth." I see through that all now, which is so freeing but also ungrounding. I'm most passionate about observing others and mapping in my mind different people, ideas, beliefs, systems, world views, etc. It's all new to me, and yet at the same time I've always enjoyed people watching and was a documentary filmmaker, so it's same same just with different software running through my brain, so to speak.

Would be curious to hear more about your experience and how it's all unfolded for ya!

Edited March 24, 2021 by tuckerwphotography

[RossE]

My Yellow downside (at least I think this is a problem from the Yellow altitude) is that I can see how partial other, less inclusive Views are, which leads me to mindlessly criticising people who hold them. When I see I'm criticising them, I can then step back and really ask why they see the world as they do, taking into account the relevant social, psychological, historical and personal factors (which is true Integral thinking). But often my first reaction is just to mentally criticise. 

Another of mine is getting too caught up in categorising people and theorising about their worldview rather than really listening to what they're saying. I think this is possible at many other stages but when at Yellow you can intuit other people's level of consciousness and can see vMemes "talking through" them, this theorising is much more potent. Can be useful, can also be harmful. 

I think I have more work to do on my social and emotional intelligences! 

 

[RossE]

@Flyboy I think it would be naive to say that as a rule people with a deep spiritual connection aren't judgemental. I would actually say that many of these people nowadays are at Green and use their spiritual awareness to back up their postmodernism. 

[tuckerwphotography]

2 hours ago, RossE said:

Another of mine is getting too caught up in categorising people and theorising about their worldview rather than really listening to what they're saying. I think this is possible at many other stages but when at Yellow you can intuit other people's level of consciousness and can see vMemes "talking through" them, this theorising is much more potent. Can be useful, can also be harmful. 

@RossE I do this, too! I try to stop myself, but on some level it's just happening whether I want to or not.