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[Music] welcome to another edition of an episode for bi miniseries about spiral dynamics in this episode we're going to add on top of the six episodes that I already released go see that mini-series on Spile that AMEX it starts with stage blue to orange to green to yellow to turquoise and I might go back and add stage purple and red in the future but we're gonna be adding to that with a very important episode that's gonna cover a lot of important nuances and points that address and relate to the entire model as a whole and how to apply this model properly which I didn't really have room to discuss in that long miniseries because each one of those focused on individual colors and here I need to say certain things about the whole model as a whole you might think you've heard everything there is to hear about smile dynamics but I promise you you haven't until you've watched at least this episode and we have a lot of material to cover here this is gonna be a multi hour episode so get ready very information dense material here so the reason that I felt this episode was necessary was because I see a lot of sloppy application of smile dynamics and that's very understandable because smile dynamics is very complicated and nuanced and rich model and that's exactly what makes it so powerful is all of the nuance that's there but it's precisely because it's now so complicated and nuanced that it takes so many hours to properly explain it to people and then to have them try to apply it and fail over and over until they learn the lessons and then you know maybe after 20 30 40 hours of trying studying this model reading various books listening to various videos and lectures and then applying it in your own life and then seeing where you're making mistakes and getting corrections to all that only then do you become really good at using this model and only then does it really reveal its full potential because it very much is possible to just sort of hear this model and then apply it willy-nilly and then use it to judge people and to classify people and pigeonhole people and not get the full fruit of it so we're gonna correct that today and you know it's taken me a long while of study you know dozens of hours of study and application of this stuff to really start to understand the nuances of this model and how it gets Mis applied because I've certainly miss applied it myself so first I want to just show you the chart here that I made which shows the entire model shows all the colors now I'm not going to rehash the same material that I covered in those six-part episodes so you know I already covered blue and orange and green and yellow and turquoise those are the most important ones you got to worry about and I'll probably cover purple and red in the future so you see the the spiral here displayed for you and basically what this shows this is that human individuals and societies develop across the screen from beige to coral but also you see there's three other lines here that I want you to be aware of and these are just additional ways of sort of slicing and dicing the same thing and talking about human development and the evolution of consciousness but they can be important so here you see that timeline the first one that says epochs and that one is archaic magic mythic rational postmodern integral mystical and non dual so what do these labels really mean well these are just additional vocabulary for understanding sort of the evolution of mankind and you even think of mankind is having evolved through these sorts of stages that can be useful the reason I bring it up here is just that you're aware of these terms and I might be using these terms in the future in various episodes just so you kind of understand what those words mean and where those words now are situated across the the colors that you understand from Sproul dynamics so when I say rational you understand that falls into rather the sort of the upper blue or the orange range when when we say postmodern the you know that falls into the upper orange and green range and so on the next two lines is the moral development line and the cognitive development line and this is something I'm going to talk a lot more about later in this episode is lines of development so here are two some of the most important lines that there are which is moral development and cognitive development and these can be developed individually so for example you can have high cognitive development but low moral development and vice versa moral development roughly breaks into four different phases egocentric which saw about the self ethnocentric which is all about my community worldcentric which is concern about the world and then cosmos centric which is concerned for the whole cosmos and this you can clearly see how one circle of concern is expanding ever wider and wider with each of these stages and then you have cognitive development and some of the words here you don't need to know some of these terms like sensory motor sensory motor just basically refers to the basic cognitive development that toddler child baby goes through then you have the emotional stage which also toddlers and babies go through then you have conop which stands for conventional operational and then you have form op which is formal operational and these come from Piaget x' work on human development and then most adults stop their cognitive development and roughly formal operational which is roughly it's the sort of rationalist cognitive function but then there's more there's post formal which is sort of the postmodern then there's vision logic and this is a very advanced form of thinking and reasoning which really goes beyond visioning and beyond reasoning into vision and into higher states of intuitive understanding and that's mostly what actualized org is an example of all of my content if you think that there's something unique about the way that I present material it's sort of beyond just your regular ordinary rational presentation of content and it's even beyond postmodern it's really vision logic that's what actualize that I'm really good at that I love that then beyond that there's psychic and beyond that there's non-dual so this just gives you a little bit of an idea of what we're talking about here so now let's get into the meat of what I got to say so firstly to apply the model properly you have to understand this notion of what I call the center of gravity of a stage so what that means is when I say that such and such a person or such in such a country is at stage Orange what we really mean by that is not that that person or that country is at 100% orange and that they don't have any qualities of any of the other stages rather what we mean is there are 50% orange that's their center of gravity and then 25% spills over into green one stage above and then 25% spills down into the lower stage from which it came which in this case would be blue sea so very few people or collective entities like corporations groups countries religious groups are 100% any particular color this is what makes this model a little bit messy and this is why when you're trying to diagnose yourself or you're trying to apply this model to other people you've probably found that but wait a minute Leo it doesn't fit not everyone fits into these clear pigeon holes that you've painted not everyone just a pure rationalist or a purely dogmatic fundamentalist or a pure postmodernist and that's correct because you're moving up the spiral from this direction from your from your perspective you're moving up the spiral this way and as you're doing that you know your progress is incremental so it's not that you're you're just jumping by increments of a hundred percent from stage to stage but you're sort of like slowly inching your way up so you should expect that you're not gonna be a hundred percent at any particular color and this of course applies to societies as well and in fact it applies even more so to societies because the society has even more diverse elements in it than of course the individual psyche does have quite a bit of diversity and people are complex we can't just boil them down to one single dimension or one single color with societies even more so you know societies have different regions the north the South the East the west we have different subcultures and subgroups we have cities in rural areas some parts of the country are more advanced than other parts some subcultures are more regressive others are more progressive so of course within a society you have to be careful in how you're applying this so we might say something like the Middle East is roughly around stage blue of course but there's many parts within the Middle East some are more evolved some are less evolved so keep that in mind also what you have to understand very importantly is that these stages stack on top of each other which means that every stage is necessary in the same way that fifth grade stacks on top of fourth grade and the material you learn in fourth grade stacks and builds on top of the material you learn in third grade and so on so it's not like you get to fifth grade and you throw away all the information and knowledge and wisdom that you learned in first grade and that then you you demonize and you ridicule and you judge first graders know because it's a progressive ladder that we're all climbing collectively together and just because you're at fifth grade and somebody's at first grade doesn't mean the persons at first grade is somehow deficient or bad or wrong you know maybe you could criticize them if they've been stuck in first grade for ten years okay maybe then you have a legitimate point but for most people who are just passing through first grade you know they have to pass through first grade to get to second grade to ultimately get to fifth grade where you're at and you know what just because you're fifth grade doesn't make you a hotshot because there are many grades above you so keep that in mind it's only by understanding the necessity of all these stages that you can stop demonizing and judging them so perhaps one of the biggest mistakes that newbies make when they try to apply Sproul dynamics is they think we well leo now on that stage green and look at how bad stage oranges let me go criticizing stage orange and let me throw away all the lessons from stage orange know what it means to be at stage green is that stage green incorporates in it the lessons from stage orange and blue and red and purple and below C so acknowledge the necessity of the lower stages otherwise you're gonna create a shadow and you're gonna get stuck another way to look at it is that turquoise cannot be the only stage because nobody is born automatically into turquoise turquoise getting up there takes a lot of work takes decades to get there you have to go through all the lessons and all the challenges and all the transformational dilemmas that come from all the lower stages before you can work your way up to turquoise you'd be lucky if you ever get the turquoise in your life most human beings would be lucky so the term is used transcend and include when you evolve up a stage you're transcending that particular stage you transcend orange into green but then you also include and bring orange with you you brings the healthy elements of orange with you and you leave behind the pathological and dysfunctional elements the limiting elements of orange so you transcend it include not transcend and demonize and not transcend and judge not transcend and then look down your nose at the other stages also understand that just because you yourself are let's say at stage green or yellow or one of these other high stages that doesn't mean that everyone in the world can be this is very important to understand you need to be very cognizant of your own privilege and of basically the good luck that you received as a child growing up because look you were born if you staged green or yellow chances are you are that way because you were born into a first world country that had a stable democracy a good legal system had a relatively peaceful upbringing you had a decent family that didn't abuse you you didn't have drug-addicted parents and so forth and you had a decent economic situation and you were able to go to school and you were able to finish twelve grades and you were probably even able to go to college and university and by virtue of this by virtue of the development of your society by virtue of the fact that your society already gave you access to the internet computers books and the greatest philosophers and teachers in history in the form of of our education system you're standing on the shoulders of giants and only because of that argue now let's say at stage green so be careful not to then expect the rest of the world to already be there this is a relatively recent development stage green and these various technologies and luxuries that you have you know they didn't even exist a hundred years ago even in modern first world countries and most of the world does not have access to these resources and even many people in your own country like in in Europe or in America the most developed countries in the world even many people there are still live in poverty and still don't have access to education they didn't go to university because their parents couldn't afford to pay them right and so of course don't expect them to be at green this explains why they're not at Green you need to acknowledge how lucky you were it's really just a matter of chance that you weren't born in some remote village in Africa that didn't have any of these luxuries and so of course now you're at stage like red living in a village may be blue but no higher than that of course so you know you also have to give slack to these various underdeveloped countries and regions of the world because not all of us grow up together so just because Northern Europe is more or America is more advanced you know well America in Northern Europe had certain advantages that other nations didn't have it got really a head start so some people like to criticize and demonize the Middle East or Africa or South America or other parts of the world like this in Asia maybe for you know well they're not as advanced as the European race as a European countries that's just an accident it's really just an accident so you know watch out maybe in the next lifetime you'll be born into one of these less developed regions of the world and then you'll realize how difficult it is to evolve up to spiral you have to understand that every child starched life from ground zero basically from beige and then you have to quickly evolve upwards now society and culture are always evolving and inching their way up the spiral and we've had several thousands of years of evolution culturally and this is a really positive thing because if you were off on your own trying to figure all of this staff stuff out out in the middle of the forest or the desert somewhere you would be at the very lowest stages beige and purple the only reason that you're at orange or green or yellow is precisely because of how much society and your culture has helped you Society has a pulling up effect but also pulling down effect and this depends on the center of gravity of your society so for example let's say we take a person who's that stage red and we throw that person into a stage orange Society what's going to happen is that the gravitational pull of the society is a few stages higher than the individual so it's gonna be very easy for that individual to make progress rapid progress up the spiral towards orange because all of the media he's gonna be exposed to all of the all of his friends and all of his co-workers and everything he sees on TV and on the internet and all the books that he reads in all schools he goes to all of that will program him with the society center of gravity which is let's say orange in America and so that person will quickly and rather effortlessly move up towards horse now of course it's not guaranteed you can still stay suck at red if you really want to but most people will evolve up but here's the downside of that is that once that person gets to Orange now growth and development becomes a lot harder because to go beyond orange towards green or yellow or beyond well now the society is gonna have the opposite effect it's gonna pull in the opposite direction because you're still exposed to all of the cultural programming and all the media and all that from your peers and that's gonna be all highly orange so to evolve beyond the center of gravity or society that's very rare probably less than five or ten percent of the entire population will go much further beyond the center of gravity of their society in their culture because that now requires that you don't just sit back and coast your way to success or to development now you have to actually do the work independently now you have to go out there to find those rare teachers and sources and books which are like the top cream of the crop of your culture and society which usually you know you don't see advertised on TV or in mainstream media your friends aren't going to be supportive of your efforts your family is not going to understand what you're doing and in fact they're all gonna do that sort of crabs in a bucket effect we're gonna try to pull you down to their level and they're gonna think you're a little bit nuts for trying to go beyond and that's just how it always was if you look at human history that's exactly how it always was the most advanced human beings have always had to struggle against the the commoners and the giant mass of lower consciousness people and they have to drag and pull society up and so that's what happens and that's what we see all the wars and all the culture wars and all the intellectual debates that go on it's all about the few individuals who have seeing the peaks of what human development and human society can be trying to pull the rest of the giant herd up the mountain so to speak but the herd doesn't want to go and it tries to pull them back down and so that requires initiative and leadership on your part if you want to go beyond the center of gravity of your culture your family and your society and that's of course where actualize that aura comes in and then of course if you want to go way beyond actualized org well you know good luck with that you're gonna find some other source that's beyond me that will help you to go even further because you know us at a certain point if you evolve really really high you will out evolve me and then the actual eyes that are content if you keep watching it it'll actually pull you down now of course I grow pretty quickly so I'm not standing still I'm also growing the entire channel so then the question is who's gonna be growing faster me are you that's up to you all grow faster than most of you but a few of you will outgrow me and of course by no means don't let me limit you and you will probably reach a point someday a few of you will wear you out grow actualize that org and that's fine that's exactly how it should be you know you don't stay in first grade forever you outgrow first grade and you outgrow your first grade teacher and so forth now there's an interesting catch-22 for raising the consciousness of mankind that I've been thinking about lately I want to share that with you and that is as follows here's the catch-22 we start off as humanity as a society at a relatively low level of consciousness and then we want to develop higher but we can't because most of the individuals comprising the society are all at low levels of development and consciousness so what we need to do to really help to elevate them up to higher levels is we need to evolve our culture in our society but of course we can't do that precisely because all of the people who are voting and making the decisions are all conscious people and low conscious people create a low conscious Society so we need high consciousness individuals to raise the level of society upwards we need high consciousness leaders but it's precisely because the level of our society is low that we don't have a lot of high consciousness leaders see and so this keeps us stuck but also you might now say well Leo so then is it hopeless it's not hopeless it's just that it takes time and we have to inch ourselves up and we have to bootstrap ourselves and that's what we've been doing for the last several thousand years as a species and you know what actually we've made a lot of progress a lot of progress which you can easily see by comparing an advanced country like America or some Scandinavian northern European country with some remote village in Africa you can see how different the levels of development are there and that just kind of goes to show you how much growth is possible and then you can kind of project forward and see how much more growth is possible that you can't even see yet societies don't even exist yet at the turquoise and yellow levels and beyond so that will be very interesting as that develops right so yes it's a struggle raising consciousness is a struggle it's a bootstrapping process it's a sort of clawing your way up the mountain up the cliff inch by inch by inch it comes it comes hard it comes hard especially when you're trying to go beyond the center of gravity of your culture but it's precisely those people who are bold enough and are willing to do the work of climbing up that sheer cliff they're the ones who end up pulling the rest of society upwards and then your children and your grandchildren your great great grandchildren they will be able to take all of that for granted because it'll come to them easily because now they'll have books and they'll have internet videos and they'll have virtual reality and they'll have all this technology and all this stuff that we've built up which is going to propel them very quickly from birth to stage yellow and turquoise and beyond it's just that most of us take this for granted most people who are born in a first world country they are already in an orange or in a green society and they just take it for granted and then what they'd like to do is they like to demonize and criticize the third-world countries the blue and the and the Reds and the Purple's for not being advanced enough for being too religious and too fundamentalists and all this well look you were just lucky you were just lucky to be born where you were born and to go to the schools that you into and to have all these advantages because you're standing on the shoulders of giants now let's move on to talk about what the stagers really represent there's a couple infant ways of looking at it first each color stage represents density of ego so red has a more dense ego than blue then orange then green then yellow then turquoise so that's an expanding of what you're identifying with and so basically if you think of the void or formlessness the the I am that true sense of I am nough State you are that enlightened self that that sense of formless within you is identifying with more and more form so first it starts with just your physical body then it expands beyond that to your tribe into your nation then beyond that to you to your maybe to your entire race and part of the world then beyond that to the entire human species and beyond that to include all animals and and then everything in the entire cosmos and then you know ultimately at the very end you identify literally with everything in the universe because generally that's what consciousness is doing spiral dynamics is not just a human thing really it's just one particular case or example of evolution as a whole and what the evolution of the universe is doing as a whole is its developing more complexity and it's expanding a sense of identification consciousness you can see it for example with the evolution of life starting from little microbes all the way up to mammals and chimps and then humans and then whatever comes after that maybe artificial intelligence or something like that the other way you can look at what these stages represent is they represent levels of cognitive development and what that means is that it's how you think it's how your mind works every color of stage represents a more sophisticated nuanced and complex way of thinking about reality and understanding reality a way of thinking which builds on top of older ways of thinking so it's sort of like you have the reptilian brain then you have the evolution of the mammalian brain which sits on top of the reptilian brain and then in humans you have an additional layer which is the frontal cortex which sits on top of the mammalian brain and it doesn't stop there there's look there's more levels to it right then it's how you're using your neocortex it's the software that's running it and so I'm sort of like you're upgrading your software from 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0 and so on and your cognitive development really determines your value system which is what these stages represent is different values and also the needs that you have the quality of the needs that you're satisfying so the reptilian brain it's only concerned with the most basic needs Maslow's hierarchy of needs of like sex and food and survival but then once you satisfied those and you're moving beyond that and now your values include stuff that's beyond just basic necessities of survival and now include stuff like love and arts and self-actualization needs and even then even self transcendence needs and so forth and then the third way of thinking about these stages represent and this here is critical this is a huge insight so pay attention each stage represents the ability to take on more perspective more perspective this is one of the keys to understanding how to climb the spiral quickly it's about taking on more points of view beyond your limited personal egoic perspective which is sort of where you start life with I talk a lot about perspective and I try to introduce you to lots of different kinds of perspectives and this is just something that's been a strength of mine for my entire life I've always been good at this and that's one of the things that I bring with actualize that org is that I can bring you to higher perspectives I'm really good that and I didn't realize this until recently that that's what's piled I nameks is about it's about being able to explore new perspectives and being open-minded to new perspectives and so the thing that keeps people stuck at their level and not evolving is that they get stuck in one perspective or another now a mistake that many people who are good at dealing with different perspectives and looking at the world through different lenses you know if you're like me and you're good at doing that you tend to assume that well everybody can do this right it's like it's not rocket science to see for example that if I'm a Christian then that's just one perspective and then you know if I'm a Muslim that's another perspective and the Buddhists have their own perspective and so every religion is just like a different perspective it's not rocket science everyone can do that right no not at all the majority of mankind at where we are today in the 21st century is incapable of doing this looking at the world from multiple perspectives and being able to be mentally and cognitively flexible enough to jump and abandon your own perspective and look at different points of view that's like a skill think of it like trigonometry that's a skill you had to learn now maybe some people are more adept trigonometry than others but you still have to learn it you don't really start off with that ability and so most of the world doesn't know how to do this especially stage blue and below they're very poor at being able to see from any point of view beyond their own in fact they don't even recognize the existence of perspective or the importance of perspective there's no such thing to these people to these people there's just like reality and just like the truth and whatever my perspective is that is the truth that is reality so you got to understand this to understand why people get so dogmatic and so stuck and closed-minded especially at stages like blue or orange or even green these people are not able to go to higher and higher perspectives so for example don't be surprised that stage blue people are fundamentalist religious and can't see the interconnectedness of all the different religions in the world and all the different cultures and that stage blue you know it's very ethnocentric and therefore it can be quite racist don't be surprised by that a lot of people are kind of surprised by racism as though it's this disgusting thing like how dare these people still act racist in the 21st century oh you don't understand the majority of the entire population in the world is at a stage of cognitive development where they are supposed to be racist this is not a mistake this is something that still needs to be worked out stage blue can't help but be racist this isn't a demonization of them this is just how that mind works at that level of development you were that way your ancestors were that way at one point and you know if not for for a lucky coincidence you would have been born a part of the world where you would have been at stage blue and you would have been racist and it would've been considered totally normal nothing wrong with it at all yeah of course I'm not saying this to justify racism I'm just explaining to you that you know you got to stop taking modern developments for granted the shedding of racist perspectives is a very modern development which has happened like in the last 50 to a hundred years in the most advanced countries on the planet - maybe like 10% of the global population all right you got to understand that that appreciate that that explains a lot of the stuff that's going on in the world today so don't be surprised when stage blue for example turns spirituality and mysticism into religious fundamentalism and dogma or goes to war over these various spiritual ideas don't be surprised by that because that's their level of cognitive development so what do I mean really when I say that each perspective or rather each stage is the ability to see more perspectives so here's what I mean so let's start with stage blue stage blue is the ability to see for the perspective of your civilisation and your culture and defending that and working towards it which is a great evolutionary step because before that people were very very egocentric so this is an evolution to ethnocentric but the stage blue person is unable to step outside of the perspective of his culture his race his ethnicity his religion so it's like just it doesn't compute for the mind right the mind can't do this the mind like needs a software upgrade to be able to move to orange and at orange now orange becomes a little bit less ethnocentric more world centric now orange can start to see that wait a minute my civilization my culture is not the best one there's various other kinds out there and now orange moves into sort of at the rational perspective everything is rational and scientific but orange still is not able to take higher perspectives orange now become stuck within rationalism and within science and now orange thinks that science and rationalism is the most true the best perspective its objective its factual well that turns out to be an illusion and if you go beyond that you can evolve to green which requires that you take an additional level of perspective and you see that oh wait a minute science and rationality that was just one perspective out of many others and that moves you into postmodern but then at that point you start to think that well now I've gotten to the end now I'm at the highest level of perspective-taking that's possible because Leo now I acknowledge all perspectives look I'm okay with different religions and different cultures in fact I value a multicultural I value different perspectives I want to hear from different cultures I don't want to oppress any cultures and I want to fight for human rights and equality and justice for everybody but what you're missing there is that that itself is also just one perspective out of many others and it's not the best and there's no normative reason for why everyone should be at that level and when you understand that then you move up to yellow and that yellow now for the first time you're able to see the full spiral you're able to see that people are at different levels of development you're able to understand that all of these levels have certain need and serve a certain function in the same way that different levels within a skyscraper are all necessary to make up the whole skyscraper you can't just get rid of the the third floor in a skyscraper because all the other above above floors depend on the third floor and so yellow takes the perspective that all of reality is a matter of perspectives and that all perspectives are partial and that we need to integrate various perspectives together and make sense of them all and be holistic and that's great that's a huge leap beyond all the other colors that came before but then there's even an additional level of higher perspective you can take which is that past yellow into turquoise now you start to transcend the perspective of a human being and now you start to take on mystical perspectives and cosmic perspectives which are no longer rational no longer human even and really transcend even the idea of perspective ultimately you get to non duality and a non duality you're sort of in the non perspective perspective which is you're at the absolute which is how reality looks when you're not looking at it from any particular point of view see so so keep this in mind if you want to evolve up the spiral very quickly you got to get very good at dropping your old perspectives and taking on new perspectives and this is not easy to do looking at the world from a new perspective is difficult it's challenging for the mind it's taxing for the mind to see a problem in a new creative way that's what new perspectives amount to but you can train yourself to get good at this so by no means am i condemning the rest of the world by saying that well they're just stuck and they can't take more perspectives they certainly can they can be taught too but they need to be taught which requires work and time and effort like if we spend billions of dollars creating all the right books and the videos and the teachings and the courses and the universities in Africa that are necessary then we will quickly grow Africa into a higher developmental stages but of course we aren't doing that not nearly enough which is why the rest of the world is not developing as quickly as we'd like them to you know if you want a solution to the world's greatest evils like terrorism and Nazism and races and slavery and corruption and mafia and criminal gangs and online syndicates you know criminal syndicates that steal credit cards insult if you want to solve that problem what you need to do is that the first world countries need to pool their money together to help to raise the third world countries to higher stages up the spiral to at least blue or orange and then most of that stuff would just automatically stop because that behavior only comes from people who are at stage red or low blue on the spiral you won't get those kinds of behaviors from orange or from from green people as society evolves survival needs change and that's another way to look at Spile dynamics well smile dynamic stages are their responses to various kinds of survival needs but look at how this works like if if an animal is living in the forest it has certain survival needs if an animal is living in the desert it has a different set of survival needs if it's living in the tundra in the wilderness and the Arctic it has a different set of survival needs each set of survival needs corresponds to the particular environment that it needs to survive in but look what happens with mankind mankind shapes and creates its own environment which adds a very interesting extra layer of depth to this whole survival needs issue because mankind doesn't survive in a forest for the most part or in a desert or in the tundra we survive within the society and culture that we create most of our society is collective so think of it as like we are like ants building an ant colony or were like termites building this giant termite colony so we are creating literally our own environment we are terraforming the planet around us to suit ourselves but as we do that we then become our own greatest enemies because it's our changing social climate and all the changing technological advances that are happening the cities that we're building and so forth that now creates new sets of survival needs now it's no longer about who has the biggest muscles and who can physically dominate nearby tribes we have outgrown that now it's about how capable are you at socializing and schmoozing and playing politics that's what you need to ascend and to survive with in modern society how good are you are using technology if you're a good tech user to the point where let's say you can be a programmer you know program it gets paid very well by society so if you want to survive in in modern times become a programmer it becomes very easy to survive and to feed yourself and to feed your family because our social environment the structure of our ant colony has gotten to the point where we need a lot of programmers because we have a lot of computers and computers are very powerful at shifting information we're in the Information Age see and then you know in a hundred years or a thousand years it'll be something else it won't be programmers we'll need somebody else and all the programmers they'll go hungry and broke so so you got to understand that you know as our society changes what you need to survive within that society changes certain things become less important certain things become more important like having big muscles is not important these days knowing how to use your mind though that's very important that's very powerful knowing how to use your mind properly can earn you millions and billions of dollars knowing the right skill sets how to program how to socialize how to network with people these sorts of soft skills as you might think of them are way more important than the hard skills of like being a lumberjack cutting down a tree or being able to drive a bulldozer or something like that these are much higher value than than those old kind of skills because we don't need them as much so mankind is in a process of bootstrapping itself and ultimately what's happening within our society what our society the environment that we're creating with our society our ant colony our ant colony is making it easier and easier for more people to be more conscious today the 21st century we have access to books and videos and resources and institutions and education that can quickly get you to stage green and beyond and so ultimately we're engineering and this is all happening spontaneously nobody is masterminding this no individual human really even understands this is happening is that this ant colony is sort of naturally evolving to the point where in the future in a thousand years most kids who will be born and they will be quickly transitioned into stage turquoise and Beyond and they will have very high levels of consciousness very quickly because their ant colony will have been designed by thousands of years of evolution and struggle and hard work to make that just effortless and easy in the same way that you know today if you grow up in a first world country you're gonna be literate 99% of people in America who are born today are gonna be literate it wasn't like that 300 years ago it's not like that in many other places in the world you know in Africa I don't know what the percentages are but they're low in certain parts of Africa there will be less than 50% of kids who are literate who we even are able to go to school because there are no schools or because the the area is so dangerous that just going to school is a is a risky affair see likewise you know in the future enlightened will be very easy for people because you'll be just told about it from the very very beginning from first grade you will already hear about it from kindergarten and it won't seem weird or woo-woo or new-age or any of this sort of stuff it'll just be easy your parents will already be inlined all your friends will be enlightened your teachers will be enlightened so of course you'll get enlightened super easy but not in our lifetime that'll take some number of hundreds of years to get there maybe thousands of years so I just want you to understand what's happening at the very big picture level at the big picture level consciousness is bootstrapping itself and it's building the infrastructure that it needs to facilitate more consciousness that's pretty cool a common mistake that people make especially stage green people is they like to romanticize early phases of human society the hunter gathers that lived before the agrarian age and they were the spiritual ones they were the peaceful ones they didn't have this toxic masculinity they didn't start any wars they didn't have any nuclear weapons they you know they were just peaceful and simple people and then and then was when agriculture came along that's when everything became violent and then there's war and military and conquests and dictators and tyrants and all of this and ever since mankind has been going downhill that's not a correct view because if you actually go and you study these hunter-gatherer tribes who still exist in certain parts of the world in South America in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia and Africa in certain areas what you see with these tribals people is that in a certain sense yes they are peaceful and in a certain sense yes they are spiritual but really the majority of them are at stage purple which is very low this makes them superstitious they're highly uneducated they're not able to reason properly their scientific understanding the world is very limited these people are also very racist and bigoted they're closed-minded they're not open-minded people they're not open to all sorts of worldly cosmopolitan perspectives because Ted takes development these people have slavery hunter-gatherer tribes all around the world through all of human history had slavery and it was perfectly acceptable slavery was only abolished around stage Orange they also engage in tribal warfare where each tribe although it might be peaceful and spiritual with itself with its own members it will fight to the death over very silly matters with neighboring tribes like a neighboring tribe could steal a pig and then they'll go to war for decades clan warfare that stuff still goes on in the Middle East clan warfare very tribal culture because a lot of them in least is still stuck in purple they have no legal system so it's hard to get justice they don't really have any corporations or businesses they don't really have a solid economic system it's difficult to to make transactions because everything has to be bartered and traded there's no currency or if there is it can be easily manipulated and exploited these tribes they rape in they pillage and all so what you have to understand is that in a certain sense it's easy for these tribes because they're still at a very low scale they're not at mass scale we're only talking about hundreds maybe thousands of individuals and one of these hunter-gatherer tribes but what people don't understand is the kind of stuff that is easy and that works the solutions that work the structure the infrastructure that works at low scales of humans does not scale up without huge problems when you start talking about hundreds of thousands and millions of people what happens when you take ten million people and you put them into a densely packed area together how do you make sure that they don't rape thief and slay each other's throats that's a real challenge a real challenge and what happens when you throw technology advanced technology into the mix what happens when you throw rocket launchers into the mix and automatic weapons land mines pollution waste gas and nuclear weapons how do you make sure that those people don't all kill each other well that's a real challenge and that's what society has been coping with and it was gradually evolving itself to deal with these challenges and to scale up so even though these hunter-gatherer tribes might seem like they have it all figured out they live peacefully with nature that's only because they're doing at a low scale that's easy that's easy it's easy to get ten people to live and harmony together try doing it with 10 million try doing it with 10 billion when you start to have so many people that there's actually a strain on the resources of your environment like for example on Easter Island these hunter-gatherers lived on Easter Island but then they ended up chopping down all the trees and over farming the entire land to the point where they couldn't sustain themselves on that island they all died out that's precisely what happens and that what that's what could happen with the entire globe if we're not careful so what needs to happen is that we need to keep evolving forward to solve these problems and in a sense because we're building our own environment our own ant colony we are our own greatest enemies so we have to be cognizant of what kind of ant colony are we building but in the end no one person is in control there's an intelligence that's guiding this entire process that you can sort of have faith in you know mankind has solved a lot of problems over the last 5000 years so you can probably expect that will solve a lot more in the next few thousand years at least if you want to be hopeful and optimistic because no one is running the show no one individual is smart enough no dictator no businessman no L on musk figure is going to be smart enough to solve all of these problems for us it's going to be solved by the collective intelligence of all of mankind and really all of the entire force of evolution the force that's responsible for designing your body and all of these cells that are working together trillions of cells all working together create this organism here that force is going to be responsible for creating the optimal society to help elevate the consciousness of all of mankind and ultimately the entire universe now let's move on to the next topic which is a super important topic so pay attention here and this is the distinction between stages states types and lines of development and this is an idea a brilliant idea that I got from Ken Wilber who's a really a visionary thinker when it comes to these topics so with spiral dynamics the different color stages those are what we call stages of development that's good but that doesn't explain everything on top of that we have an additional layer that we need to add in of complexity called States so the stages are purple red blue orange green yellow turquoise the states are waking dreaming deep sleep various mystical states various non dual States psychedelic States meditative states emotional states so when you're asleep tonight that's going to be the Dreaming state and then when you wake up that's gonna be the waking state and then there's gonna be a mystical state that you might achieve on some psychedelic and so forth when you are in a you know something terrible happens to you like you get a divorce or something or a loved one dies now you're in a terrible depressed emotional state so what you got to understand about these stages and states and types and lines which I'll cover in a second is that these are independent axes so for example you can be at stage Orange waking dreaming deep sleep or in a mystical experience in a meditative state or in a state of depression or in a state of excitement and inspiration but you're still at an orange level of development along all that changes in States so this gives a lot more complexity and nuance to Spile dynamics a lot of people mistake States for stages like they might be meditating and they might be some in some meditative peak state where they feel like they're one with the universe but then when they stop doing that they come back and they're just at an orange level of development they're still pursuing money and sex and food and just like basic orange type stuff and they're working on their business that's very different from a stage turquoise because a stage turquoise might have locked in that peak meditative state to something that is like there all the time for that stage turquoise person it's also very important that you understand that mystical states are possible at any stage so again this confuses a lot of people because people think that well leo so I will get enlightened when I get to stage turquoise that's not really how it works how it works is that you can have an Enlightenment experience at any stage you're never limited that's why enlightenment is always available to you you don't need to be at a particular level of development stage blue people can have a mystical state they screen people yellow people struck which people they're of course the higher your level of cognitive development the easier it will be for you to have a mystical state because you're not going to be so preoccupied with low-level concerns like survival needs you're much more likely to be interested in meditation if you're at stage green or yellow than if you're at red or blue but nevertheless for example uh many blue religious people have genuine mystical States the problem though is that your mystical state whatever stage you have it at will be interpreted through the lens of the stage that you're at so when a blue fundamentalist Islamic person has a mystical experience he's gonna interpret that in a very limited ethnocentric way of like oh I experienced Allah for example and that proves that Islam is the greatest religion and that all the other ones are false Buddhism is false Christianity is false now I know for sure they're false because I had this mystical experience and likewise for example in a stage blue evangelical has his mystical experience and he sees Christ the vision of Christ comes to him and that validates in his mind that Christianity in Christ is the one true prophet and Savior and that all others are false and there's nothing to learn from Buddhism or from Islam or from anybody else all those people are obviously wrong and see in this way it's possible to have genuine mystical experiences but then still to interpret them through a very limited level of cognitive development because look how it works yes it's true that the absolute is one and it doesn't change and it doesn't really evolve if you have a mystical experience of absolute truth or awakening or enlightenment and that's by the way not the only kind of mystical state you can have there are lesser mystical States you can have all sorts of visions of deities and all sorts of stuff but if let's say you're at stage blue and you do have a pure experience of the absolute well yeah when you're in that frame of mind that absolute is the same no matter what stage you're at doesn't matter if you're blue orange green or anything and in that sense it doesn't matter in that sense you could say you had a genuine enlightenment and it doesn't matter what color stage you were at but of course in practice it does matter because then you're back into your everyday life and you're in the relative domain of forms yes the formless is the same its nothingness its emptiness it's void it's always the absolute but then form form changes and how you interact with form how you live in the dream that very much depends on your level of development and also how you interpret the formless and how you embody it in the formed realm that of course very much depends on your level of cognitive development your ability to take perspectives so it's very important that you make this distinction between awakening to the absolute on the one hand and development on the other hand these are independent things now there is some correlation so the more developed you are the more likely you are to awaken the more likely you are to be interested in awakening and vice-versa the more awake you are the more likely you are to be developed and to be interested in development but they're not perfectly correlated and it's very easy to awaken for example but then stay stuck in stage blue it's also very easy to evolve to stage yellow or even turquoise but never fully deeply awakened and you really want both what I'm pushing for with my content with actualize that org what I really advise for you is to pursue both awakening is about waking up from the dream realizing that none of this is real it's all a hallucination that's very important because that detaches you from the dream you stop taking it so seriously but [Music] you're still going to be in the dream so long as you're alive you're still gonna be in the dream and as long as you're in the dream you might as well play the dream out well excellently develop yourself within the dream development is about being able to play within the dream in an excellent manner in a sort of more integrated more holistic manner to understand more of the dream to appreciate more of the dream to explore more of the dream so you can be awake but you know just because you're awake the dream doesn't end it keeps rolling along no matter what so no matter what choice you make the dream will keep unfolding until you're dead physically dead so it makes sense that if the dream is gonna unfold no matter what you might as well try to play the dream out to be the best dream that it can be so both now that was an explanation of States and stages now also we gotta add an additional layer types types are things like masculine versus feminine the various myers-briggs personality types there's 16 them the Enneagram types there's nine of them or if you're a left brained person or more of a right brained person that's two types right there and perhaps there are other types as well but those are the most common ones that I have studied so what types mean is that for example you can be at stage Orange obviously and you can be a masculine stage Orange or you could be a feminine stage Orange or you can be one myers-briggs type like an intp which is what I am at let's say stage yellow or you can be an intp at stage red a common mistake that people make is they think of well leo but like stage green that's the feminine stage stage or that's the masculine stage and like intps those are the yellow people and some other Myers Brigg thing type is like a rent person no no no you could be masking or feminine at every color of the spiral every myers-briggs type can exist at every color stage every Enneagram type as well so that adds an additional independent axis to consider an additional dimension so you see how this model is now getting very very complicated but also as it gets more complicated it becomes better at explaining human behavior now human behaviors not just as simple as slapping on a label like orange or green or yellow but now you have to also take into account well yes this person is orange but also they have a like a a masculine skew of orange and also they they've had a mystical state or they haven't had a mystical state those are all independent factors and variables and then if that wasn't enough now there's the fourth final dimension which is lines lines of development so the human psyche has different facets to it mostly when we're talking about Spile dynamic stage is what we're talking about is we're talking about one line called the cognitive development line and also values what are your values and that's a very important developmental line but there's more for example you can have a high level of cognitive development but a low level of emotional development or moral development so let me give you these various lines these are the most important ones cognitive and values which we talked about a lot then the emotional line the moral line career and livelihood health and nutrition and diet interpersonal relationships the meta physical and spiritual line your education your political development your psychosexual development and kinesthetic development so if you think of yourself as like an RPG character in a video game you know these RPG characters they have different things you can put points into so it's kind of like that so for example you can be at a stage orange cognitive development but your moral development can be a stage red which means that you're gonna be a criminal and you're gonna hurt a lot of people because you're at an egocentric level of moral development and also maybe your interpersonal relationships the development you know how developed are you when you're relating with other people that can also be very low or maybe for some other person they're metaphysical or spiritual development will be very very high at turquoise but then their cognitive level of development will only be at orange or blue and maybe their moral development will also be very very high think of someone like a Gandhi or a mother Teresa who has a rather high moral development but you know they might have a poor development in in politics or in career or in the interpersonal realm so you can see when we add a sedition level of lines now now the model becomes like four dimensional now we have all these independent axes all these variables to consider so if you were trying to peg yourself at some color like orange or green and you weren't quite sure where you fit and you were kind of confused and you were thinking like well Billy oh I have certain aspects of myself which are orange certain aspects which are blue certain aspects which are green and yellow well that's right because the psyche is complex and it has these four facets so now it helps you to be more specific it helps to ask the question if you're trying to evaluate yourself or somebody else you can ask the question of like well let's focus on the moral line how morally developed is this person are they green orange or blue and then whatever that turns out to be then we can still ask the question well how how is their interpersonal development green orange or blue and those can be different and so of course if you really want to develop yourself you sort of want to become a well-rounded human being especially certain of these lines are important to increase otherwise they're gonna be sticking points for you and they're gonna drag you down and they could even ruin your entire life for example if you even if you've been spending a lot of your time increasing your cognitive development and your your health and diet and maybe your interpersonal relationship but your moral line is very very low and you're not doing any work to increase that then that could derail your whole life because you might be engaged with some kind of criminal activity that will ultimately get you arrested and thrown into prison see now this also doesn't mean that you need to be perfect in every line so don't get to obsessive thinking that okay I got to be a sage turquoise on everything across the board in practice that's gonna be very difficult to do because even raising one of these lines takes a lot of work but you know that's that's why we spend years and years doing this work you know there's so many topics to cover because growing up to be a well rounded and developed human being is a complex affair and lopsided development is very common most people are lopsided nobody is the same color across the board on every line that's very very rare now these lines that I've talked about these were lines when you're considering an individual human psyche but what about when we're applying this model to collective groups like corporations nations religions sports teams and Families what are the lines there there's different lines there as well for example if we're considering a country the lines there might be the economy or the religion or culture or the media or the food or the politics of the country or the science and technological development level of the country or it's medicine system or its education system or the way does business and marketing or its legal system and its human rights or its law enforcement system its prison system its mental health how family and marriage is viewed within that country or art so each of these lines can have different levels of development so a country for example can be very highly developed economically but at a low spiritual level of development which is rather where America is today or vice versa some some countries can have a very high level of spiritual development for example like India but then there are science and technology or their economy isn't very well developed and so all of those factors are important to take into account so if you were seriously gonna apply Sproul that damage to a complex problem like you wanted to apply it with in business or you wanted to apply it to create public policy you would really want to break it down into all these individual lines and you would want to be very specific and say well you know if I'm trying to reform our legal system what stage of the spiral is our legal system at in America and you might say well it's rather orange what would a green legal system look like what would a yellow legal system look like and and then you can get a lot of actionable solutions to try out there let's take a look at an example of how the masculine and feminine and moral developmental line how these types and these lines actually play out sort of in the real world so masculine and feminine remember is a type so there's a sort of a masculine set of values and a feminine set of values which skews whichever color of the stage you're at so for example what's the difference between masculine and it boils down to this essential thing for the masculine there's an emphasis on rights autonomy individuality agency thinking and freedom and for the feminine there's an emphasis on the value of care connection compassion feeling rather than thinking relationship and community so you see it's a slightly different emphasis so most men would lean towards the mask and most feminine most women would lean towards the the feminine but of course you know this this change is depending on your hormones and your sexual orientation and so forth and your gender identity and and so look this did this this masculine feminine will play out at different colors of the spiral in different ways like what does autonomy look like a stage red versus what does autonomy look like that stage orange or stage yellow for a man and then what does for example compassion or relationship mean for a woman at red versus orange vs. yellow you're gonna see an evolution of that and so now let's also look at at the moral developmental line so how does this evolve it basically can be broken down to three simple phases first at the most crude level is you have just a purely selfish orientation towards the world then there is a caring orientation towards the world and there's what's called universal care so from selfish to care to universal care or we could say it as me we or the entire globe and uh if we want to break it down even further even finer than the way that basically morality develops within human beings is as follows when you're born all you basically care about is you so it's all me me me then as you get socialized you start going to school and become part of a community now it can't just be all about me now it has to be about us the family the tribe the city the nation the team the corporation that's a shift in your moral development then there's another shift where you realize that it can't just be about us and my tribe it has to include all decent human beings which means now I care my level of care extends to every human being who isn't evil but not to the evil ones the evil ones I don't care about then there's the next level well you realize you know what I got to care about the evil ones too because they're also part of this human species they're all part of the community so now my level of concern expands to all human beings without exception but then I realize wait a minute it can't just be human beings it has to be all creatures on the entire planet and so now expands to all living beings on earth without exception but then I realize wait a minute the earth is just one little speck in this giant cosmos so now my concern expands to all sentient beings in all places on all planets and in all realms if there's some astral realm where there's some DMT alien I got to care about him too can't exclude him and then ultimately when you get to the highest level to the ultimate non-dual levels you realize that your care isn't even just limited to sentient beings because the idea of sentient breaks down and so your care is for all of reality past present and future in all the ways that it can manifest you're concerned about it all and you want the best for all of it rather than just wanting the best for yourself or for your family or for your tribe or for your species or for your race or for the planet Earth you want the best for everything and that's sort of God's perspective if you think about it you know God sort of you might imagine was sort of the best for the entire universe and so you can see you know where are you on this level of development this moral development in the level and where are you resisting going further you know some people get stuck at the at the level where they okay leo yeah I'm willing to care about all human beings on the planet but you know I'm not willing to care about the Hitler's and Stalin's and terrorists of the world and the criminals you know they we just got to kill them them I don't care about them that's where you're at that's your level of development and then at some point if you keep evolving you will realize that wait we have to include them as well we can't exclude them just because they're evil and selfish and kill people doesn't mean that we stop caring for them and if you're resistant to that well that's something that you got to work on that's what development will correct in you it will it will open up your eyes and your perspective such that you realize that you were too limited your care was too limited and that you need to expand further so it's all about expansion expansion expansion expansion so as I've been giving you these examples of masculine feminine in the moral line of development this helps us to understand a common problem for example that we see you know some feminists make this problem is they make this mistake of thinking that well if we look throughout history history was so vile there's so much war and that was because the men it was this toxic masculinity that was dominating society and now finally now we're getting some equality between the masculine and the feminine and if society just got more feminine energy if if more females ruled the world and we're in positions of power that will solve all of mankind's problems and we would all live in peace and harmony together well that's not true if you understand the nuances of states stages lines and types because what you got to understand is that there's different stages of feminine so what stage of feminine are you talking about when you're talking about increasing feminine you need the right stage because if you add a bunch of stage red feminine to a masculine orange society you're actually gonna make it worse not better because feminine can still be cruel feminine can still be limited feminine can still be racist feminine can be still be homophobic feminine can still be tolerant of slavery now of course what many feminists mean is they mean adding green feminine stage green feminine now it's true if you add a bunch of stage Green feminine to an orange male dominant Society like in the u.s. then that probably will elevate the society and probably will lead to more peace and more compassion that's true but that you know is that because you're adding mass feminine or is that because you're adding green feminine that's an important distinction and because if you understand this distinction you'll also understand this additional nuance that masculine isn't the enemy per se because there's different flavors of masculine red masculine certainly is a problem and maybe even Orange masculine is a problem but there's also green masculine so maybe what we need more of is not just green feminine but also green masculine because the problem is that if you juice a lot of green feminine you're gonna sure you may be you solve certain problems in society but then you create new problems because now you still have 50% of the population who are masculine the men but now these men feel feminized they don't feel connection with their masculine energy and now they become dysfunctional and start to misbehave which we're seeing with some of these in cells and and men's rights movements and so forth right they're reacting against feminine not realizing that feminine and green aren't necessarily the same thing there's also a green version of masculine so that's why these additional nuances can make a big difference not as simple as it seems here's another very important thing to understand is that these different color stages cannot be seen through introspection when you're sitting on a meditation cushion they require wide scientific research you have to go out and actually study lots of groups of individuals across the whole world different cultures different societies different races and you have to compile all the data and only then do you see this entire developmental model like spiral dynamics unfold and this these developmental stages they were only discovered in last hundred years so what this means is that most religious and spiritual traditions around the world which are hundreds or thousands of years old do not understand the idea of stages or types or lines of development and most of these spiritual traditions they were developed by advanced meditators who would sit on a cushion and introspect for many many hours to attain very high mystical states but see mystical states are separate from stages of development so just because you're at a high mystical state doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna understand and see the entire spiral and all of the possibilities of development that exist and so one of the biggest problems right now with all the traditional religions Islam Hinduism Christianity Judaism and even Buddhism is that none of these religions basically understand Spile dynamics and they don't account for development very much most of them are focused on helping you to attain higher states if that and then you know a lot of them only focus on just filling your head with Dogma which is which is even worse so you don't even get the mystical states so you got understand that and and this also explains why you know those people who say Oh leo but this smile dynamic stuff it's all just concepts and models it's all if you just sit and you're just present in the moment there there is no spiral there are no stages yes of course that's true it's finally name is a conceptual framework but but just because that's true doesn't mean that Spa that Amex isn't useful and that you're not missing something and in fact you are missing something if all you do for the rest of your life is you just sit on a cushion and you introspect and you practice mindfulness and you practice meditation and you become fully enlightened they're still gonna be something that you're missing and you're not gonna be fully developed and you're not gonna fully know how to analyze the various problems that are happening in the world socially collectively because our social eclectic problems mostly have to do not well some of them have to do with the fact that people aren't awake of course they do but they also have a large component of people just lacking in development organizations and and countries and legal systems lacking and development and that's important because our society and our culture contributes enormous ly to our ability and potential to wake up so if you want to wake up a lot of people you can't just teach them techniques for sitting on a cushion and meditating all day that's great that's a very direct path and of course for some tiny percentage of the population that will work great but for the vast majority of the population it won't work at all because they're not at a level of development where they can even hear you and understand your teachings or even be open minded to your teachings because to assume that a person is open-minded enough to hear non dual teachings they already have to be at like stage green or beyond otherwise they'll they'll demonize you maybe even burn you at the stake and it would be nice to understand that so if we really want to wake up the whole world we got to also take into account development in light emits itself it's very important understand has no stages enlightenment is absolute but how you interpret that enlightenment very much depends what stage you're at and and how holistic and integrative are you with your understanding of spirituality and all of religion and science and how much do you integrate it all together that very much depends on your level of development a stage blue-lined person can still be racist sexist could even potentially own slaves or condone slavery or have some sort of crude archaic political views for example or might be very biased towards his own culture might be very ethnocentric might be very biased and partial to his own religious tradition like some you know some Hindu guru master might just be all about Hinduism but discount the value of Buddhism or Islam and there might be some valuable nuggets within Buddhism or Islam that that person is missing maybe some valuable techniques may be some valuable moral teachings or whatever that would help round out this Hindu master that's the value of a more holistic integrative approach it's also much more enjoyable to see the interconnectedness of everything because that's one thing that consciousness is doing because consciousness is one we're talking about oneness here yes you can awaken to the infinite void the emptiness the nothingness yes you of course you awaken to that that's that's that's critical but then what you do for the rest of your life is now you're still navigating this dream you're navigating this infinite creative with all these forms and shapes and all this stuff that's happening you're navigating it and what you're seeing then your mind is integrating it all together and you're seeing all the nuanced interconnectedness of everything you're seeing for example how Buddhism is talking about this and Islam's talking about the same thing and and then Hinduism is also talking about it but it it's all being talked about in different ways and then you see the beauty of that and then you see for example like Hindu art and Islamic art and Christian art and you see how all of that fits in together and so you're seeing more and more of the interconnectedness of everything and in this way your awakening becomes richer more holistic more integrated and more beautiful it's also important understand that spiral dynamics doesn't account for everything there are factors which are just independent of spiral dynamics for example maybe IQ like you could have a different level of IQ at every stage that's an independent variable or your level of spiritual attunement people might have a natural spiritual talent for spiritual work or for meditation that would be separate from whatever stage of development they're at or maybe karma that would be a separate factor genetics and environment those can also be separate factors early trauma that you might have suffered as a child maybe you were abused or you were in a near-death situation or you were molested or you have some PTSD you know that would be a complicating factor which is independent of your spiral stage maybe you have some kind of physical illness maybe have a mental illness and a disability you know father name is doesn't account for things like Psychopaths and sociopaths and criminals it accounts for criminality in some ways but but you know you can still be a criminal pretty much at any stage it doesn't account for racial differences if there are any class differences economic status you know these are all further complicating factors in fact let me give you an even more elaborate list of various cycle factors and things which are independent of your stage on the spiral I'll run through the whole list it's pretty big list I'll run through the whole list real quickly and then I'll I'll expand on certain parts of it so judgment and as I'm saying each one what this means is that this this word that I'm saying like judgment this thing can happen at any stage in the spiral because sometimes people think that oh well judgment that can only happen a stage blue and a stage green person can't possibly be judgmental so if I ever encountered a judgmental person that immediately places them in the blue category no that's wrong judgment can happen even at Kirk wise now of course a stage red person will be much much more likely to be judgmental than a stage turquoise person but judgment can still happen it's just that judgment looks differently judgment evolves through all of these stages is very difficult to transcend all judgment entirely you know that's very very rare so judgment hatred addiction fear demonization projection radicalization ideology and Dogma is not limited to blue it can happen all along the spiral paradigm Locke duality justification distractions self bias ignorant bad public policy do not assume that just because someone is a stage turquoise guru that he can't have some loony wacky public policy proposals that would be terrible and that would hurt lots of people that can certainly happen emotional reactivity happens at all stages getting triggered closed-mindedness can even exist at turquoise passion you can be passionate at every stage you can be a super passionate su we're charismatic stage red pirates for example you could be passionate about killing people or you can be passionate about loving people you see these are independent variables lying you can lie at every stage selfishness there's different forms of selfishness at every stage abuse of power you think stage turquois gurus can't abuse their power they certainly can fame you can be famous at any stage spirituality happens at every stage crime can happen at every stage you can be a stage turquoise criminal now of course that's much more like less likely than if your stage red but it can still happen manipulation each stage manipulates in its own way hypocrisy injustice and inequality love don't think that only the highest stages can love all the stages can love even a stage red tyrant can still love and no I don't mean in the sense that he loves to kill people I mean he can he you know a stage red tyrant can genuinely love his daughter or his wife a problem horniness you can be horny in every stage don't think that a stage turquoise guru doesn't have sexual cravings mistakes can happen in every stage business and wealth can happen at every stage people make the silly mistake of thinking that well if it's a business if this is a business person they must be automatically staged orange because orange is all about business and making money that's generally true but you have businesses at every stage of the spiral they just look different they have different values you could have lots of money at every stage of the spiral you could have lots of money as a red tyrant lots of money as an orange Wall Street broker or even lots of money as a stage turquoise guru like osho with his 90-some for all choices denial can happen every stage gender happens at every stage playing victim the victim mentality laziness you can be lazy at high stages pathology groupthink misunderstanding miscommunication happens at all stages reasoning don't think that reason and rationality are limited exclusively to stage Orange yes it's generally true that stage Orange is the sort of the rational one but you know stage blue people can reason even stage purple tribal people in the Amazon and in Africa and in Papua New Guinea they they use reason it's just a different kind of reason used for different purposes obesity can happen at every stage don't think that just because a person is fat you see some fat guru and then you think that well a fat guru can't be turquoise because turquoise people they're supposed to be healthy and fit no nobody said that those are independent variables mental disorders can happen at any stage and a self-deception happens at all stages also even the very highest stages you get self-deception I have a three-part miniseries called self-deception where I outline like 50 different self-deception mechanisms all of those sub deception mechanisms can happen at every level of the spiral now of course the higher up you are the the more aware you will be of them but you're never going to be fully immune from them all right so let's take an intermission right here we've covered a lot of ground but we still have a lot more to go all right let's continue so the way that I like to think about spiral dynamics and reality as a whole is that there really is no such thing as one reality what you do is you replace this notion of one reality instead with spiral dynamics which means that every stage is a new reality you're sort of living in your own bubble at every stage and you see all these different facets of life in different ways corresponding to the lens that you're looking through which is the color of your stage so what that means is very practically is that love is different at each stage spirituality is different at each stage religion is different at each stage and that's very important to understand let's pause and elaborate on this point about religion it's very easy to fall into the trap of oversimplifying religion and thinking that religion is just a stage blue activity it's just fundamentalist dogma and that that's what Christianity is that's what Islam is that's even maybe you think that's what Buddhism is and Hinduism that's not quite right there are green versions of Christianity for example there can be yellow and turquoise versions of Islam now I'm not saying they're common and maybe even they don't really exist yet but they will in the future and so on with all the other religions alright so the mistake that's commonly made when people demonize a particular religion is that it's assumed as though the religion is this one monolithic static thing and that it's never gonna evolve or change and that's just not true religion has always evolved even very fundamentalist religious people who tend to treat religion as a monolith still if you look historically if you study history if you study the history of Christianity Islam and Buddhism you know there's always been evolution and change within all of these traditions it's inevitable because everything changes and everything evolves that's just the nature of all form so you know in two hundred three hundred years I very much foresee that there will be a yellow version of Islam a green version of Islam a turquoise version of Islam it's not like these religions are really going away they're gonna be there they're gonna soften at the edges they're gonna take on a more pluralistic perspective and most point more relativistic perspective they're going to become less dogmatic less ideological less violent more more loving having a sense of more universal inclusiveness and then ultimately they're going to incorporate mystical and non dual insights now of course the mystical and non dual insights are there right now if you look at Islam or Judaism or Christianity non-duality was there from the very very beginning that's how they were founded they were founded by mystics but there's a difference between the esoteric core of every religion and sort of the mainstreamed versions of it that are known by just average ordinary folks you know most people who are Muslims in the Middle East do not have any true sense of the mystical esoteric non-dual kernels of truth which are contained in Islam and if some of them do of course some of them do the Sufis and others do is very advanced you know Muslim practitioners may have this insight but it's very rare so again religion is different at every stage business is different at every stage there's a big difference between business at stage orange green yellow and turquoise and it's a big mistake to think that all well Leo once we get beyond yellow and turquoise into those stages then how do I make my money because I can't have a business of course you can have a business it's just a different kind of business how you view the family is different at every stage what your notion of a family is health and nutrition looks different at every stage relationships and marriage look different every stage art is different at every stage the kind of values and themes that art depicts if you've studied our history you can actually trace the evolution of art and the role that aren't played from the very early stages you know tens of thousands of years ago the the ancient cave paintings those came from stage purple tribes and then art during the Rome time's art that was commissioned by tyrants and dictators and emperors and kings and then the art that came from various religious traditions a lot of European art hmm from five hundred to a thousand years ago was was all basically almost all religious art all trying to put forth Christian themes in one for mother nun or another trying to mmm glorify Christianity and then you know more modern versions of art and postmodern art and all sorts of crazy forms of art that happens today avant-garde art is more of a green version of art and there's even arts from the yellow and even turquoise perspectives like the art of Alex gray who does these psychedelic trippy psychic types of paintings so art looks different media looks different video games movies entertainment I mean film is gonna eventually evolve and this will probably take hundreds of years but eventually film will evolve beyond the stupid mindless superhero movies that we're stuck in right now which are very staged orange into more refined more higher consciousness types of entertainment and so will video games and all the other stuff and virtual reality and all that politics of course is very different every stage motivation what motivates you or what motivates your nation or your culture or your team or your group of people that very much changes state-to-state your fears and worries are different for every stage criticism and analysis is different depending on which stage it's coming from and reason and justifications are different from each stage what you consider good bad destructive healthy unhealthy dangerous or crazy is relative to your stage these words do not have an absolute definition what's good at stage blue looks bad at stage orange and vice versa what's healthy - green is unhealthy - yellow what's crazy - stage blue is the opposite for stage green and so forth a lot of people don't understand this and then they get confused because they look at a thing and it looks so evil or bad or destructive or unhealthy or dangerous or crazy but that's from their perspective and actually the funny thing is is that some of the healthiest and some of the the highest things that you can achieve as a human being ironically look very unhealthy and destructive and dangerous and crazy to people who are at lower levels of development which is a huge problem because if we want to help to elevate and to evolve all of society that's difficult to do when half the population or even more is at a low level of development and therefore they see all the good stuff and all the healthy stuff is actually being unhealthy and crazy and that it's going to destroy the world how do you convince them then - to make these changes that we need you can't because they they demonize those changes and they're afraid of them and then a lot of people can't understand that every stage looks dangerous crazy criminal insane or evil or deluded to some other stage on the spiral that's not because things actually are that way it's just because of the lens that you're looking through and in fact I want to spend some time going to some detail to elaborate on how each stage looks at every other stage so let's start with blue how does blue see red as selfish and uncivilized beasts how does blue see blue as a lesser civilization blue doesn't get along with blue so for example when evangelicals look at stage blue Muslims in the Middle East they view them as inferior because that's the blue position the blue position is that I am a civilization but I am the best civilization and yes there are other blue civilizations out there I don't of course really know that they're blue cuz I don't even know about the spiral but they're all lesser than me because that's what ethnocentrism is how does blue view orange as too materialistic to secular and too liberal so for example how do Middle Eastern Islamic clerics look at American stage Orange capitalism they view it as hedonism they view as a descent into depravity and materialism all this porn and and women dressing and scantily clad dresses and all this makeup and showing their legs and wearing skirts and all of this and then you know what our Americans obsessed with money and cars they're forgetting the thing that actually is supposed to be grounding you in life which is God which is Islam see that's how it looks to them and of course many blue evangelicals in America or like maybe Mormons when they look at stage orange Americans they will also see them this way as to secular too liberal too materialistic they've lost touch with their Christianity with their Mormon roots or whatever with their face and with the Family Values and with tradition and with with heritage and family and with the you know with their children they've lost connection with all of this and now they just basically are just chasing material success and of course that's why they're depressed and miserable and their hopped up on drugs and all this and that's why civilization is collapsing and all the rap music and all this writes this classic classic example of how blue views orange how does blue view green as relativists nihilists Libertines Bohemians communists and hippies so if you want a really good example of how blue views green a lot of jordan Peterson's critiques of post-modernism and socialism and communism is coming from this perspective that doesn't mean that he's purely blue but a lot of his critiques are coming from this perspective how does blue view yellow as space cadets elites and intellectuals and lost than the in the clouds philosophers how does blue view turquoise as arrogant heretics and nut cases so for example how would a blue fundamentalist Muslim cleric view a non dual mystic he would view him as an arrogant heretic because the mystic says I am God we are all God but the stage blue fundamentalist says no we can't all be God God is beyond all humans there's that fundamental duality and you can't be the same as Jesus you can't be the same as Muhammad you can't be at that same level as the Buddha those were all prophets and nobody is at the same level as one of these prophets that's just because they haven't gotten there yet they're they're holding that as the dogma all right so how to stage orange review all the other stages orange views red as dangerous criminals blue as deluded religious fanatics who won't listen to reason how does you view orange itself as competition as competition how does view orange view green as naive idealist s-- hippies snowflakes social justice warriors bleeding-heart liberals soy boys and as being too feminine too soft how does orange view yellow as impractical philosophers theoreticians and a source of ideas to exploit and how does orange view turquoise as New Agers as frauds and religious nut cases orange confuses turquoise mystics and sages with stage blue deluded religious fundamentalists puts them in the same category or maybe lumps them in with with hippies but generally when an orange person sees the stage turquoise guru talking about some spiritual topic he's gonna tend to think of that turquoise person as a as a fraud or as a huckster trying to like pretend to be a guru just to earn money really that's just a projection of orange because orange is all about earning money and materialism so he thinks that these sages and mystics that that's all they care about - how to stage green view the other stages green views red as very interestingly victims of social abuse so Green has to have a certain kind of overextended compassion for red which is why red can often abuse and exploit green because green is that sort of very compassionate overly compassionate sometimes bleeding-heart liberal I remember there was a story that I read in the news maybe a year or so ago where there were some sort of like people from California some liberal types who wanted to go to the Middle East to Afghanistan - like Isis and confront Isis and like present them with flowers and with gifts and all of this thinking that they would be able to convinced a stage read you know Islamic fundamentalist uh who is gonna chop their head off that they could convince them with compassion with love no that's not gonna work they're gonna chop your head off you gotta understand that it's green got to be careful how does green view blue as heartless medieval fundamentalists who lack compassion fundamentally they lack compassion how does green view orange as used-car salesmen and greedy capitalists who are exploiting people how does green view other green as comrades fellow comrades to build a network for social justice with how does green view yellow as aloof elitists and intellectuals from the green perspective yellow is is way too much stuck in their head and not enough compassion and also not enough community in relationship because yellow is more individualistic and green is is a little bit more conformist how does green view turquoise very interestingly Green tends to look at turquoise as already what green is doing so when a green sees some turquoise guru they will say well that's green I am I mean what I am is turquoise that's how green tricks itself is Green thinks it's turquoise which is too high of an evaluation and also green tends to worship these turquoise gurus and that's sort of what happened with the osho phenomenon is you had a lot of Westerners and Californians and Americans who were really inspired by Osho and became his followers but they weren't nearly as advanced as Osho they were green the hippies and Osho is turquoise and so that can create a sort of an interesting and dysfunctional dynamic as it did there what about yellow how does yellow view red as dangerous narcissists how does it you blue as closed-minded bigots and moralists yellow views orange as myopic rationalists and sleazy businessmen and people who are trapped in the rat race and can't see beyond it yellow sees green as naive emotional do-gooders how does yellow see yellow as competent experts yellow values the expertise and the intelligence of yellow and how does yellow view turquoise as wise masters as sort of the the example of what mankind can aspire to so another point I want to make here is that confirmation bias works on every stage and what this means is that whatever stage you're at you will pick out the facts that support and validate the correctness of your stage while ignore while ignoring every other set of facts so for example if you're at stage blue in America then you will think that Muslims are taking over the world and they are the greatest threat and using confirmation bias your mind will cherry-pick all the facts in order to support that narrative you will read the newspapers you need to read look at the news that you need to look at and talk to the people you need to talk to you in order to only see the facts of how Muslims are gonna take over the world and destroy everything if they do and you're not gonna see all the contrary evidence you're not gonna see how Muslims are helping the world you're not gonna see the value in Islam you're not gonna bother to study that you're not gonna bother to learn to what the Sufis have in common with the Christian mystics you're not gonna to consider the possibility that there's no difference between Allah and your Christian God and that they're actually one in the same God right so none of these things are gonna be important to you even though they're factually true but all this year mine's gonna discount using confirmation bias just to reinforce that narrative because from a stage Bleu perspective you have certain fears and worries that need to be validated and they will look very real to you and you will buy into them and you will really believe that Muslims are the problem and that if if we don't put a lid on that that it's gonna lead to the destruction of the whole world and if you're at stage Orange you're gonna believe that Socialists are gonna ruin everything socialism is gonna destroy the world and you're gonna look for all the facts and supporting evidence to confirm that and it's really gonna look like to you from your orange perspective that look yeah leo but it's true look at all this this way of socialism is sweeping across America and look at all these socialists and communists and all of this and look at all the stuff that's happening in the universities and all this post-modernism and all this so this holds Ernst Peterson steel so you're gonna really believe in that narrative and it's gonna really look like to you that if you let these socialists do what they want to do they're gonna destroy the whole world because those are your fears and you don't bother actually reading about socialism you don't bother about actually considering what are these socialists trying to do how are they trying to change society for the better you don't bother considering for example that FDR and many of the things that came with the New Deal like Social Security and Medicare and all of this that these are actually socialist policies you don't bother thinking about all the elements within current American society which are examples of socialism various forms of socialized medicine and and various ways in which our military is socialistic various government programs that we have which are effective and work well how we build our roads our firefighters our police how this is really just a form of socialism how basically all of society is a form of socialism so all of these things are lost on you because you just want to reinforce that stage Orange narrative and of course you're not gonna bother looking at other socialist countries around the world that are positive examples for socialism you're gonna only cherry-pick the bad examples so you're gonna talk about Venezuela and Maoist China and so via the you know the collapse of the Soviet Union and Cuba and Fidel Castro you gonna talk about this you're not gonna talk about the successes that have been happening for example in the Nordic Scandinavian countries and elsewhere other experiments with socialism then it's worked out well in various countries you don't think about that you're going to think about the fact that most first world countries in the world have various forms of universal health care you're not gonna really think about that because that doesn't reinforce your narrative and if you're at stage green you're gonna think that global warming and capitalism is killing us all it's all of the pollution that's a that's gonna destroy the environment it's the polar bears and the dying of the corals and the the felling of the forests and the burning of the jungle and the rainforest and in Brazil and in the Amazon and all this destruction all these species are dying so you're gonna you're gonna gather all of these facts which of course they're true all of this stuff is happening but from the green perspective you're gonna over focus on that and you're gonna ignore a lot of the good stuff that's happening for example you're gonna ignore the you know the rise of green energy and solar technologies which are being adopted quite rapidly how solar panels have been lowering and cost significantly over the last 10 20 years and are continuing to do so and the rise of electric cars and other technologies are being developed which or will help us to deal with global warming and various other kinds of environmental challenges in the future so that's your confirmation bias and if you're at stage yellow you basically will believe that no no it's not that stuff that's gonna kill us all it's all of tier one it's the tier one of the spiral that's gonna kill us all it's because stage blue orange and green all all hate each other and don't understand each other and can't get along and nobody understands spiral dynamics because it's so complicated no one knows about it that's why we're all gonna kill each other so we gotta find solutions for that now of course there's some truth to that perspective but you're gonna take a little bit overboard and then I staged turquoise you just are going to look at the world and either say it's perfect everything is perfect everything is going according to plan it's inevitable that's exactly how it's going to be all problems that we have will basically solve themselves and then you will find that the facts to confirm that perspective so that's confirmation bias for you confirmation bias is not limited to any one stage and that is by the way one of the self deception mechanisms that I was talking about earlier so as I've said already all tier 1 stages basically hate each other which means that stage blue hates green green hates orange and blue orange hates blue and green so there's a lot of hatred to go around people love to hate why is this well because at low levels of development the lower you are on the spiral the more hatred will be in you the more fear the more bigotry the more arrogance the more selfishness the more closed mindedness the more demonization the more manipulation the more projection and the more emotional reactivity which is why it's a very good idea to get as much of the global population to evolve and develop up the spiral as quickly as possible because these forces that I just listed especially fear hatred bigotry and closed mindedness and various kinds of emotional reactivity this is the source of much suffering and violence that's going on around the world and that could lead to you know massive destruction and death so so the benefits of having a high level of development is that you transcend fear and hatred and bigotry and closed mindedness and that produces for an objectively better society society functions smoother that way there's less violence there's less political turmoil less revolutions and bloody cooze less economic turmoil less market crashes less inequality less poverty less people going hungry better medical care and so forth and overall that's good for everybody so that's where society is going to evolve too but it's not going to be a straight linear path there's gonna be ups and downs because there are vested interests and so those people who already are doing good under the current system they're gonna have a vested interest in maintaining their current stage because otherwise you might wonder well Leo why isn't everybody on board for evolving as quickly as possible to the highest levels of our potential well that's a very naive view you see because every stage believes it's the best and so people get stuck at that stage thinking that we've got it all figured out at this stage and if only we can get more blue or more orange or more green we would solve all the world's problems and that ends up being a delusion and so because of this delusion and ignorance and ignorance of this entire model a lack of nuance in seeing that every stage has is a healthy aspects and unhealthy aspects and has serious limitations that need to be ultimately transcended it's because that's not recognized that we get stuck and we're not moving ahead as fast and pace as we could remember if you're still judging any of the stages below you you have not fully integrated that stage you're still missing something that you need to go back and relearn here's a couple of really good insights that you can get from the spiral dynamics model about humanity and people I mean and there's many of these but I'll just give you three right now which which will help you understand mankind firstly is that stages below green basically just don't care about the environment so if you wonder why don't more people care about global warming how do we solve the problem of global warming well the reason we can't solve this problem right now it's it's because most people in the world are at stage blue or orange and blue and orange just doesn't really care about the environment it doesn't have global concerns it cares about maintaining a status quo it cares about continuing to earn profits it just cares about carrying out its religious dictates and mandates stage blue doesn't care about the environment so of course they deny global warming it's not a concern for them global warming is an issue really only for green and above ecological concerns the ability to think ecologically only emerges that green people below green do not think ecologically so they don't take ecological problems seriously they dismiss them until it becomes too late another interesting insight is that stages blue and orange will not appreciate and understand psychedelics so you might have this naive idea that well leo if we just give the whole world psychedelics in this sort of hippie ideal of like let's just like lace all the drinking water with LSD and then we'll wake the whole world up well if you understand Sproul dynamics you'll understand that this won't work because psychedelics only start to become valuable to you at around stage green if you give psychedelics to a stage blue or orange person I mean there's a small chance that you could open their mind but more likely what'll happen is actually they will freak out and they will retreat because the psychedelic will blow their mind so much it will destroy and just utterly shatter their blue and orange paradigms it'll destroy their fundamentalist religious dogmas and it'll contradict the materials paradigm so much that the person will actually think that they're having a psychotic episode and that they're going crazy and so they're not going to be able to receive that wisdom that the psychedelic offers only stage green people and above see so if you want people to to be able to benefit from psychedelics first you got to raise them to stage green then you got to distribute the psychedelics and the third insight is that stages below Green will not appreciate non dual or mystical teachings so if you're a teacher of non-duality or very advanced truths you got to understand that your audience is gonna be staged green and above which limits your audience significantly and also you know if you're trying to teach your friends if you have some orange or blue friends or family members and you're trying to teach them about enlightenment or something like that and they're not understanding you and they're not interested in it and in fact they're demonizing you for it well now you understand why first you got to get them up to stage green and then maybe they'll be able to be able to appreciate that so this model is very useful and very practical I want you to see a common question I get asked about this model is Leo is it possible to move backwards or downwards down the spiral is it possible to go from stage orange to blue and the answer is that generally speaking not but understanding that you're solidly at orange so if you're solidly in a stage you're not likely to regress downwards unless there's a temporary regression due to some kind of threat that you receive from your environment so it certainly is possible to drop a stage temporarily like if your average stage is around orange and then something happens to you where you're threatened your life is threatened you get angry you get very fearful your negative or your lower your lower base emotions get activated you certainly can drop down to a blue for a while maybe for a few days maybe for a week for a month for a year but then once that's resolved the threat goes away then you'll generally kind of go back to where you were before and and I think that under under conditions of extreme threat there there might be a possibility for regression so for example if we had a nuclear apocalypse and resources were very scarce I can see in that situation that a large chunk of the population could regress by one or two stages or for example if you're sent to prison and you're forced to survive in a prison which is sort of a you know maximum-security prison would be a stage red environment if you're at stage green and you have to survive in a stage red environment well you're probably gonna drop a stage or two just in order to survive or maybe you have some sort of physical deterioration a deterioration of your mind your brain some physical ailment or disability that might drop you down a stage or two maybe if you join a cult that might drop you down a stage or two as they brainwash you and fill your mind with all sorts of low consciousness nonsense maybe if you lose your job temporarily you know you're really struggling to make ends meet and struggling to feed your children and that's really stressful for you you know during that time you might drop down a stage and do things that you normally wouldn't do maybe you would even engage as criminal activity just to survive that you normally wouldn't do another point is that you cannot see more than one or two stages ahead which means that if you're at stage Orange right now you can preview stage green and even a little bit of yellow but turquoise you won't be able to understand that's a very valuable insight that means that for most people in the world because they are at stage orange or even below they cannot even glimpse or see the deepest and highest teachings that the best human beings have offered can't see it completely blind to it you could you could show them a video you could give them a book that's a turquoise book and they will not be able to understand it unless they're roughly at stage green or above and what this also means is that the best teacher to help you to grow as a human being is roughly one to two stages higher than you because if the teacher is three stages above you you probably won't be able to resonate with the teacher or even to believe what the teacher is telling you you'll think the teacher is a fraud or charlatan or you just you you won't be able to apply what they teach you but if it's one or two stages above you then it kind of stretches your your imagination but not so much that it kind of shatters your entire reality it's still basically at that kind of level where you know you can stretch to it and get it which is which is a trick it's a problem because for example is actualize that or grows as I grow my teachings become more advanced but then the problem is that many of you who follow me who aren't doing the practices who are still at stage orange or below I'm gonna lose you you're gonna think I've completely gone batshit crazy talking about all sorts of stuff like oneness and and God and all the spiritual stuff that I talk about you'll think I've gone crazy you'll think I'm a charlatan you'll think I'm just trying to like use you for the money and I'm just making this up that's how it'll seem to you and that's sort of inevitable that's why you should start doing the practices so that you're growing along with me also support understand that you cannot get to higher stages through logic so it's not a matter of sitting down and logic in your way out of orange into green because every stage is like a new paradigm shift it's unforeseen so if you want to get from orange to green that's not gonna happen through logic that's gonna happen through opening your heart and then if you want to get from green to yellow that's gonna happen through some other new unforeseen paradigm shift not necessarily more opening of the heart and not necessarily more logic but something else something new that's why it's difficult to grow because it requires some new thing that you haven't seen before it's like a discovery it's like discovering a new mathematical truth or a new scientific theory that's tricky requires a new sort of insight something has to click in you I like to break down every stage into four phases so the way that it works is that let's say you're at stage orange and you're solidly in state orange there's gonna be four phases for how you move into green first there's the pre entry phase which is where you don't take green seriously you don't believe that Green has any worth or value at all and in fact you will judge and demonize and ridicule green because you're still arrogant and you think orange is the best then what happens is that finally you open your mind to the value of green and you start to enter it this is the entry phase this is Phase two at this point it feels like you've discovered a new world it feels fresh and new you're energized it's like you've discovered this whole new domain of self-help and green books and healthy eating and yoga and spirits a little bit of spirituality maybe you've tried a psychedelic or you smoked some weed and it's like that's you know that's open a whole new world for you and you're like wow this is amazing and at this point you get really charged up and you're growing very quickly at this entry point you're kind of going up the curve and maybe you want to go to your friends and tell your friends like hey guys look at all this amazing stuff here read this green book come smoke some weed with me come do this thing come come to this yoga class with me but then they look at you and they're like what are you what are you talking about dude this is this is ridiculous this is some new-age nonsense you've joined some kind of cult and of course they think that way because they're at the pre entry phase in orange your friends were orange and so they're judging and demonizing and ridiculing and they think that all this green stuff that you're talking about it's all worthless it's all nonsense but you're already a true believer so you've entered it then comes the third the third phase which is now you're solidly in green and it feels rather familiar to you because you've already read a bunch of books you've already gone to yoga classes you're starting to get some some solid experience with having green friends you've upgraded your friends and now you're developing expertise in this thing but there's still a lot of growth for you here so you're sort of now starting to get to the plateau and then comes the final fourth phase which is the end this is the point at which now you've been green for so long maybe for five or ten years you have a bunch of hippie friends and you've smoked a bunch of weed and you've done a bunch of psychedelics and now it's all starting to feel a little bit stale you're starting to get frustrated with it you're starting to see the limitations you look at your green friends and you see like ah their spirituality is kind of flaky yeah they pretend to be spiritual but they can't really embody it and you start to see the limitations of green and it's at this point and now you look forward to something new and it's usually at this green or at this final fourth phase where you are stagnating you might get lazy you might feel like you're in a rut you might feel stuck and then you're waiting for something new to pop on your radar screen some new video some new book some new teaching some new seminar somebody some guru to come in and to to offer you some new gateway that opens up to the next stage which would be yellow and then of course you're gonna have to surrender your judgments and demonization and ridicule of yellow and you're gonna have to admit that green was not the end-all be-all and so you have to bite that bullet that's gonna be a little bit of pain for your ego that's gonna Humble you because you were so arrogant before when you were solidly in green you thought Green was the the best that there is but then you realize no there's more and so that's how every stage basically works I just use the example here of the orange to green transition but every stage has these different phases so so use that idea and and kind of see where you're at right now where are you what stage are you at and what phase of the stage are you at the beginning the middle the end and that kind of tells you what you need to do next it helps you orient yourself remember that you don't want to take shortcuts with working through these stages so even though I might speak as though the best thing is for everybody to evolve quickly up the spiral I mean that's generally the case but you also don't want to rush yourself there's a lot of material and lessons to be learned from each stage these stages are deep there's a lot to learn even within red blue orange and green so don't look down at a stage and saying oh that's too that's too low I don't want to be there I got to quickly move out of it make sure you give yourself time keep going back to stages and ask yourself what have I failed to embody from this stage what if I failed in body from blue or from red keep asking yourself what healthy function does this stage serve that I haven't integrated and bodied yet make sure you solidify yourself in each color before you rush off to the next try to exhaust the stage become so full of it that you get sick of it for example if if right now you're struggling to make a living you're struggling with your business maybe spend the next five years just like working really hard on your business fixing your finances making a good living until you're just sick of it you're sick of all the materialism you've bought your house you bought your car you've gone to parties and you've done all the materialistic stuff and now you're just sick of it and now you're ready to move on to green now you're ready to work on your relationships you're worried to work on your spirituality now you're more interested in meditation all this because if if you try to jump to meditation into into spirituality too quickly without a solid orange foundation well you're gonna feel it you're gonna feel it and it's gonna be difficult for you because in a certain sense you do have to kind of have a sort of a level of priorities a hierarchy Maslow's hierarchy of filling these these various needs you know it's hard to it's hard to do the higher level stuff when you don't have a basic shelter when you can't pay your mortgage when your kids are hungry and they're crying you how to fix that stuff and that's what most of the world right now is still working on most of the world is still at a point where their stage blue and lower and they just have very basic needs like they need they need Medicare medical care they need food they need a decent economic system decent legal system they need decent roads and infrastructure a decent electrical grid water clean water various medicine from malaria and other things like that I mean these are just super basic issues that many third-world countries need to solve before they can really help to introduce people to content like that of actualized org now of course don't turn this into a limiting belief if you're somewhere in a third-world country I mean try to stretch yourself push yourself you're watching these videos I mean you've got a great opportunity to use this material to to sort of really rise above the center of gravity of your culture but of course it will be more challenging for you so keep that mind you're gonna have to work a little bit harder in a third-world country than in a first world country just because you don't have the infrastructure and because your culture is not conducive to self-actualization because self-actualization is really a stage yellow and above activity how do you fully integrate a stage here's a simple approach first you find a healthy role model from that stage and I do emphasize the word healthy a healthy role model because it certainly is possible to find many unhealthy role models so find a healthy role model and then study their work study how they think study their system of values and their principles that guide their life and then emulate them emulate how they think model them satisfy those needs that they're trying to satisfy and make sure you that you don't get stuck and then move on to the next stage what are the best techniques for moving up stages quickly I would say that without the following techniques it will take the average person 10 or 20 years just to move up one stage moving up the spiral is something that very few people really do especially when we're talking about going beyond the center of gravity of your culture whatever that happens to be so here are the the techniques these are super powerful techniques firstly meditation meditation is one of the most well documented and proven scientifically proven method for moving people up the spiral in fact they found they've done research on this and what they found with meditation is that people who meditate regularly will move up by two stages within several years of meditation of regular meditation that's how powerful meditation is that's why I say that meditation is one of the most important personal development habits have you started that habit yet what are you waiting for that's the fastest way to move the spiral it's guaranteed to work if you meditate earnestly and consistently also mindfulness practice which you could consider is similar than men to meditation or even the same as meditation but also there are some differences so mindfulness practice also helps a lot psychedelics in my experience is the most powerful tool for moving up sages if you do psychedelics consistently regularly over the course of a couple of years you will jump up by two stages I can almost guarantee it you know I've been doing psychedelics for about two years and that's I mean psychedelics have have solidly put me into turquoise where before it was inconceivable before I was at yellow the psychedelics have solidly put me into turquoise and had really helped me to overcome various orange fixations that I had I still had a lot of materialistic orange fixations even though a lot of my theoretical content my videos have been yellow for a long time I've always thought from a yellow perspective even when I was a teenager but a lot of my basic needs were still quite orange quite materialistic and success oriented I mean you can see that in my older videos from five years ago when I first started actualized at or you can see a lot of those motivations within me coming through in my in my videos but after doing psychedelics for a few years yeah I kind of I'm like super solidly yellow and now I'm starting to go into turquoise quite a lot meditative yoga is also very powerful techniques for this contemplation another one journaling another one reading that's why I emphasize reading so much because what is reading do reading opens you up to new perspectives especially when you're reading material from stages that are higher than you so one of the mistakes people make with reading is that they only read books from their own stage for example a stage orange person will read a lot of business and financial books nothing wrong with that that's great that's important for for fully integrating your own stage but but really to outgrow that you need to start to read green books and yellow books and turquoise books and that will grow you a lot because by reading these books you're exposed to new ideas and by the time you're exposed to all these new ideas and new perspectives you can't deny them after a certain number of years you know so much exposure just makes it impossible to deny and then your mind knows that you got to be heading for these higher stages and not to get stuck in orange or whatever stage you're stuck in another very powerful technique is having higher consciousness friends or rather I guess higher stage friends so a very sure way to grow into a new stage is to surround yourself with friends from a higher stage than you so if your orange right now surround yourself with a bunch of hippies you will become a hippie very quickly if you do that as long as you can stomach it of course none of this is gonna be easy all these techniques require lots of struggle lots of opening your mind lots of there's gonna be lots of resistance from your ego so it's not going to be easy but it will work you know and if you want to get to yellow surround yourself with a bunch of yellow people and bunch of turquoise people join a yellow community join a turquoise community now of course the higher you go up the spiral the harder it is to find these people because they're rarer and rarer and rarer but still if you're really motivated you can do it the other technique is solo retreats this is a very powerful technique I've posted videos on my blog about how I do my solo retreats basically ten days alone in the woods in a cabin somewhere sitting there and meditating and just being by yourself or contemplating the entire ten days straight very powerful if you do a few of those per year maybe one per quarter ideally but even just like two per year for a few years that will definitely boost you up by a stage or two workshops and seminars are also available that you can you can find workshops and seminars that are staged orange green yellow and turquoise and all of those will move you up as long as they're higher than you and then I think also travel travel and exposing yourself to new cultures new cuisines especially not the kind of touristy travel where you kind of just go and you go on a tour bus and you just see the kind of standard stuff to people see but I mean actually really exposing yourself to a different culture a very foreign culture like maybe if you grew up in the in America your whole life and then you go and you spend a month or two living in the Middle East or in Africa or somewhere in Thailand or you know in Indonesia this kind of stuff like I think that will grow you by a stage or two because what that does that expands your perspective and that shows you who just how limited your old perspective used to be so in conclusion I want to make sure I reiterate that there is only one thing in the entire universe and that is being or consciousness there are not actually stages to being or consciousness stages are a conceptualization they are relative because all form all creation is relative the absolute consciousness or being that the substance of which everything is made that is just one thing but then the structures that happen within it those are relative structures and that's what spiral dynamics talks about right so um there's really no contradiction between spiral dynamics and non duality or enlightenment there's value to having relative truths and so spiral dynamics is a relative truth it's not an absolute truth so when you're when you're in a state of Nirvana will there be Spile dynamics there no there won't in a state of Nirvana there's your you're way beyond spiral dynamics but you're not gonna be stuck in a state of Nirvana forever you're gonna come back down and then you have to interact in the relative world and that's where spine AMEX becomes very useful and you're still gonna be part of society you're gonna be part of a culture you're gonna be part of a country and so you probably want to improve your environment improve your society and help raise the conscience of people and in that sense Spa dynamics is very useful to be able to do that and to analyze all of these social problems that we have and finally remember that pathology is possible at every stage it's possible to screw up in the way that you are executing these stages such that you don't grow through it and fully integrate it but that there are some sort of hangups there are certain things parts of the stage that you repress or that you deny or that your ego reacts against and therefore you become pathological at that stage so watch out for that there are many many traps on this path many ways that you can misinterpret a stage miss apply this model not fully integrate the lessons of every stage so you know the devil is in the details but as far as an overall picture I think now you have a much better sense of how spiral dynamics works and how to apply it and get a lot more use out of it than you did before all right that's it I'm done here please remember to click that like button for me and come check out actualize that org that's my website you'll be able to find resources there to help you with your journey my blog the forum the life purpose course and the book list and then I will be making more resources available in the future and I'm always posting new insights on my blog which are not available anywhere else and you won't get those through videos here on YouTube so that's that the last thing I'll say is is that we're still not done with spiral dynamics you might think that we've beaten this horse to death but no there's still going to be one more episode that I intend to shoot about spiral dynamics application all the ways in which file items can be applied to all the problems within society there's so much to be said about that and it's so profound and it's gonna be so inspirational when you watch that that make sure you stick around for that that's gonna be coming in the future and also at some point I will go back and I will create one more episode for stage red which I haven't covered yet and one more episode for stage purple which I haven't covered yet those are sort of primitive stages but there's still value in understanding those and there's still lessons that you can you can glean from that so that will be coming in the future although those two aren't nearly as high priority for me as the applications episode I'm really excited about the applications episode I actually wanted to include it here but this one is gonna be so long that well I didn't want this to be three hours long so there you go stay tuned and that will come in future you