Stage Yellow = spiritual development?

[Intraplanetary]

Is it possible that a person can move to Yellow by simply developing oneself spiritually, hence naturally becoming perspectival and also through contemplation? 

Is it possible that spiritual development by default bring a person up to Yellow stage?

 

[Ulax]

Nah don't think so

[Arthogaan]

I don't think so. 

Many spiritual priests are stuck on blue.

Many spiritual hippies are stuck on green. 

 

[Carl-Richard]

As mentioned by other people, spirituality is not one thing. You have spirituality at all stages. The way you seem to be presenting it sounds like an Orange discovering New-Age spirituality (the type of individualistic spirituality you see in the West, e.g. Advaita Vedanta, the mindfulness movement, Western buddhism, occultism, energies, etc.) and becoming more multi-perspectival that way and moving into Green. Green is the last step before Yellow, but will it take you to Yellow by itself? Probably not.

Edited January 5, 2023 by Carl-Richard

[spiritual memes]

32 minutes ago, Intraplanetary said:

Is it possible that a person can move to Yellow by simply developing oneself spiritually, hence naturally becoming perspectival and also through contemplation? 

Is it possible that spiritual development by default bring a person up to Yellow stage?

 

No, if you look at a lot of spiritual influencers, they tend to flatten out at green, sometimes regressing to orange and blue when they get into conspiracies. 

[Thought Art]

I think yellow isn’t the most spiritually developed stage nor is spirituality what spiral dynamics is measuring 

[Intraplanetary]

so what allows Yellow to happen then? if not becoming perspectival? 

[Carl-Richard]

37 minutes ago, Intraplanetary said:

so what allows Yellow to happen then? if not becoming perspectival? 

You should explore many different perspectives of spirituality and of thought in general. The process of a Western Orange person discovering New-Age spirituality is really just that person finding one new perspective. Although all types of development are somewhat correlated, spiritual development is not the same as cognitive development, and SD is largely a cognitively oriented model. So if the focus is on cognition, you should focus on increasing the amounts of perspectives of thought that you're familiar with, and that's really not as simple as flexing your meditation muscle in your basement. That would be like viewing fitness as only doing bicep curls through the entire workout.

It's also not just about thought as in highly abstract intellectual thinking, but as in experiencing all aspects of life. How does a blue collar worker experience life? How does a surfer experience life? A pornstar? A politician? And this one is very interesting: how does a royal family member experience life? Imagine being born into that role, where you're one out of millions of people, and literally everybody knows you and expect you to fulfill that role. Imagine being born into a royal family in the modern world of social media, in a highly progressive constitutional monarchy in Scandinavia. How does this person perceive themselves, their identity and their insecurities; hell — their sense of reality? That one is of course very hard to imagine, but it's those kinds of questions that become interesting.

Edited January 5, 2023 by Carl-Richard

[Adam M]

100% 

The traditional formulation of Stage Yellow in Spiral Dynamics terms is pretty limiting in the sense that it characterizes Stage Yellow people as being bookworms who think in a sort of autistic "systemic" way. (kind of like Eben Pagan)

One might get the sense from the descriptions that in order to embody Stage Yellow values you would have to read 500 books like Leo (which is 100% not necessary).

The traditional description of Stage Yellow is slightly biased towards the masculine intellectual type... and I don't think that it paints a good picture of the stage (I think that might be because Spiral Dynamics was used as a business-development model).

It's important to distinguish "types" when looking at stage development.

Leo talks about the distinction between types and lines in his video "Spiral Dynamics - Additional Nuances and Insights."

For example, I am an ENTP masculine therefore my embodiment of stage yellow is pretty typical according to the model.

However, my girlfriend is an INFJ feminine and her embodiment of stage yellow is COMPELTELY DIFFERENT than mine.

(make no mistake, she is definitely stage yellow moving into turquoise)

My girlfriend isn't much of a reader or information junkie at all.

She's only read a handful of books in her life and she doesn't devour podcasts and lectures with nearly the same ferocity that I do.

That being said, she has an acute understanding of the linguistically constructed nature of reality and a great awareness of Source Consciousness or Pure Self and many other spiritual awarenesses that are difficult to explain. (including unusually well-developed spiritual powers such as clairvoyance, clairaudience, energy healing abilities, and a very high awareness of synchronicities).

The point is that she DID NOT get to this stage of development by reading lots of books and studying models of models (like I did).

She got there via direct contemplation... TONS of self-reflection, meditation, and a little bit of listening to some high-quality audiobooks (like Conversations with God and some of Leo's videos and other spiritual mentors here and there).

 

[Intraplanetary]

15 hours ago, Adam M said:

The point is that she DID NOT get to this stage of development by reading lots of books and studying models of models (like I did).

She got there via direct contemplation... TONS of self-reflection, meditation, and a little bit of listening to some high-quality audiobooks (like Conversations with God and some of Leo's videos and other spiritual mentors here and there).

 

That is exactly my path. I contemplate and self-reflect the shit out of myself, plus I do some practices from all different spiritual disciplines. I integrate them all. And even though I read books, I've never been very cognitively oriented in my development at least not in the way SD describes. However, I'm  still highly perspectival and able to make connections where people would not usually see them which is the key in how Yellow thinks and sees the world.

Map is not the territory.

Thanks for sharing this @Adam M 

[thisintegrated]

23 hours ago, Intraplanetary said:

Is it possible that a person can move to Yellow by simply developing Green

That's basically what you're asking.