Does Robert Kegan's 5 Stage tell us everything?

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In the past few years when I've looked at the strangeness of left-right social dynamics and trying to sort out who can not only think critically but can do so independently respective of side, it seems like one of the best sorting mechanisms I've found is Robert Kegan's 5 stages of adult development. It's also referred to as the 'Constructive Developmental framework':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construct ... _framework

The gist:

Kegan describes 5 stages of development, of which the latter 4 are progressively attained in adulthood, although only a small proportion of adults reach the fourth stage and beyond:

Stage 1: Purely impulse or reflex-driven (infancy and early childhood).
Stage 2: The person's sense of self is ruled by their needs and wishes. The needs and wishes of others are relevant only to the extent that they support those of the person. Effectively the person and others inhabit two "separate worlds" (childhood and adolescence).
Stage 3: The person's sense of self is socially determined, based on the real or imagined expectations of others (post-adolescence).
Stage 4: The person's sense of self is determined by a set of values that they have authored for themselves (rarely achieved, only in adulthood).
Stage 5: The person's sense of self is no longer bound to any particular aspect of themselves or their history, and they are free to allow themselves to focus on the flow of their lives.

CDF refers to such stages as "social–emotional" in that they relate to the way a person makes meaning of their experience in the social world. CDF holds that people are rarely precisely at a single stage but more accurately are distributed over a range where they are subject to the conflicting influences of a higher and a lower stage.


What I've noticed time and time again is that when politicians and media lie they're CONSTANTLY taking advantage of the bulk of the population (at least with neurotypicals) being stage 3 and the problem - these people are almost defined by how labile they are based on an external locus of identity (they normally wouldn't hop parties on a whim but they're not often critical recipients of information). These are the people they keep pulling divide and conquer on, exciting to shoot at each other, these are the people who would never check an information source on a story from an outlet they prefer not because they specifically don't want to know - they're abdicating the cognitive load of even that question, it's more like 'This is my tribe!' and all things social get mediated like soccer rivalries.

It's not the only problem we have but they're the exact vulnerable population any corrupt politician will try to grab the minds of get them off the beaten path of liberal democracy.

I sit and think about these things because it strikes me odd at how much knowledge we have as a culture if we're willing to look at it and we could be living WAY better if we actually saw what the lines of group predation and manipulation were better to, say, find ways to say that we're responsible for spotting things like broad Kegan stage predation. Politics is rife with it in ways that you'd really think it wouldn't be if even 20% of the population saw it in either those explicit terms or something tightly adjacent (like Ken Wilber's system).

But yeah, we've got billionaires (like Singham and Soros) funding sedition right now and every string they're trying to pull is on stage 3 tribalism and lability. Also for information sources - people who show signs of stage 4 development typically don't fold on facts because it's not how they build their world model, and while it's not impossible for them to be compromised they're not compromised right out of the gate as they would be if they needed to take external approval for all of their thoughts and ideas prior to even entertaining them.

(Also - I'd have a good glimmer of faith in this forum restored if this doesn't get taken down)

That last sentence sounds like an important clarification. Without it, the scheme would be a vast oversimplification at best.

Anyhow, I don't think "Stage 4" is necessarily limited to adulthood. I also don't think that I, personally, was ever predominantly "Stage 3." Seems to me that, in my early-to-mid teens, I skipped directly from being predominantly "Stage 2" to being predominantly "Stage 4."

I always knew I was an oddball, and I realized very early that trying to fit in with my "peers" was a lost cause. My social life has always revolved around seeking out fellow oddballs of one kind or another, and I had to do a lot of thinking for myself.

In my mid-teens through early twenties, I also did a lot of talking to people I disagreed with. When I gave up Christianity at the age of 15, I wanted to make sure I was making the right decision, and, to that end, I got into lots of friendly theological debates with evangelical Christians. I also made an effort to counteract anti-gay bigotry by engaging in Socratic dialogue with people who made anti-gay remarks.


Hmm, I'm not sure how many people people who support a given political position simply because it's what there friends and family believe in, vs. how many people support a given political position because they believe it to be in their own self-interest.

It should also be noted that political "tribal" identities are based on a sense of linked self-interest, not just social conformity.

Anyhow, I don't see an avoidance of the other side's POV as being necessarily evidence of being "Stage 3," or as evidence of any aspect of a person's motives for holding a given political position in the first place. People naturally tend to avoid things they find distasteful for whatever reason. Even an intellectually conscientious "Stage 4" person who is willing to spend at least some time looking at the other side's POV will likely want to limit the amount of time they spend doing so. And it seems to me that most other people are just too intellectually lazy to look at POV's other than what they are accustomed to.


Hmmm, it's my impression that most politicians try to appeal to people on a variety of levels, from high-minded ideals to plain old self-interest.


Is there any particular reason why you've singled out two of the relatively few billionaires who support leftist or left-leaning causes, and not any of the many more billionaires (e.g. the Koch brothers, Peter Thiel, and Robert Mercer) who support right wing causes?

Here is a timeline of causes supported by George Soros, on the website of his own Open Society Foundations. What about these causes leads you to believe that they would be supported solely or primarily by "Stage 3" people?

I think that's common for autistics because we aren't allowed to be stage 3, we try and fail because we seem to be 'wrong no matter what', even if we said the same thing in the same context as the person next to us. Joscha Bach's also talked about that one at length on at least one of the Curt Jaimungal Theories of Everything channel.


It's a both-and but the gist - they're not as likely to update their models with inconsistencies or friction as a driver for that update, it would more often take someone else telling them what to think - like their prioritized media source or people in their lives whose opinions they listen to on politics. While there's nothing wrong with having those as part of the equation it's the lack of internal mastication of concepts which puts them at risk for manipulation.


They stand out to me for funding mobile riots, and Singham stands out most interestingly as a vehicle for Chinese manipulation of the US to get a leg up and pass - leaning into the Thucydides trap, ie. Singham's influence money is an issue of national security.

The other more obvious reason why I wouldn't pick Koch brothers, Thiel, or Mercer to talk about right now - they're kind of on 'team order' right now and I personally (add most of the country) think open borders are insane, having our cities fill up with Mexican and Venezuelan cartels is insane, Batya Ungar Sargon presented one of the most compelling flush-outs of what the 2010's were about with respect to the open border (effectively anarcho-tyranny, the elites were using open boarders for a means of expropriating middle class wealth upward, you couldn't say anything about it because there was somehow selective amnesia that there's 'legal' and 'illegal' immigration, you'd be jeered as a xenophobe summarily, and wealth transfer was the grift). The other reason that could be somewhat obvious - I'm not a Leninist, Jacobin, anarchist, or any of that, capitalism has its own reliable failure modes (such as its potentials going outside our acceptable moral ranges and crony capture / oligarchy) but it's much more manageable than ideas that normally just resolve out by the people who disagree not being liquidated (not as sure that's a thing with simple anarchists but Leninists and Jacobins? Yeah....). Also none of the three (four technically) are trying to help China dominate the US.

Also I'm well aware that Bessant's associations with Soros. That's an interesting / complicated situation but from what I gather Soros and Bessant 'breaking the Bank of England' was over what Soros saw as a sloppy contrivance - ie. pegging pound sterling to Deutschmark, if he wasn't wrong on that (which seemed to prove itself out) then that was more of a bubble-popping procedure. Also for concerns about getting ripped to the opposite right extreme - antifa seems to be doing a good job of sending principled liberals out of the party and I think they'll help jake-break any of that, the number of newly minted left-centrist Youtubers will add to that, and I also notice - our material situation still being somewhat cushy in that we're not starving - that seems to make 2017 Charlottesville types a rare species, meaning I think most people who are leading the impulse to 'clean up' from the right want 1990's liberalism back, or make civic nationalism 'great again', they're not looking to rebuild along the lines of Evola or anything wild like that.

Can you provide any credible evidence that Soros has been "funding mobile riots"?


It does appear that Singham, in particular, has ties to the Chinese government. This doesn't necessarily mean that everything he funds is necessarily against U.S. interests, but suspicion of his motives is indeed warranted, to some extent at least.

Soros, on the other hand, has long been a focus of completely nonsensical conspiracy theories.


Our cities are not filling up with Mexican and Venezuelan cartels. The vast majority of immigrants are not criminals and are generally well-behaved.


There would be a lot less illegal immigration if we had better pathways to legal immigration. And there would be a lot less immigration, legal or otherwise, if the U.S. government were to play more of a role in helping Mexico and Central American countries develop their infrastructure, so that more of their people could earn a decent living without having to move here.


If you are concerned about "wealth transfer," it seems to me that you should support (1) higher taxes on the rich, and (2) more funding of job training programs like the 599 Program. Do you support these things? If not, why not?


Neither is George Soros, right wing conspiracy theories to the contrary notwithstanding. He left Hungary to get away from Communism. He is still decidedly anti-Communist, although he understands that pure capitalism isn't necessarily the best possible system, either.


Democracy and freedom of speech are not identical to capitalism. The form of government and the form of the economy are two very different dimensions of politics.

And most of the world's wealthiest countries are neither purely capitalist nor purely socialist/communist, but are mixed economies. To me the question we should be asking is, what is the best mixture?


Robert Mercer does have a long history of promoting Russian interests.


Not many people are out-and-out neo-Nazis, but Christian nationalism is still a very powerful organized political force.

(By the way, Christian nationalists tend to believe that you, as an occultist, are consorting with demons.)

Looks like it's just an investigation at this point. Will be interesting to see how it turns out.


There were 617 Sinaloa and CJNG arrested in the last few months. The majority of the people they terrorize are hard working and lawful immigrants as well as the illegals.


It looks like we have 48.5 million foreign born in the country, only 14 million of those are illegal, so that's a good 71% that did it correctly. I'd imagine if better pathways and not cheap labor were the issue that percentage would be a lot lower.


TY for sharing.


TBH I'm more concerned about Singham, he's much farther left and has good reason to help China. I only bring up Soros because of the DOJ probe.


With socialism and communism the game theory expedites an outcome for government (equality for all except the party). Liberal countries need at least capitalism-dominant blends otherwise the incentive structures are pulling them away from democracy.


Never heard of him TBH but thank you. Checking that I saw Cambridge Analytica, alleged but not confirmed integration with Russia.


Not a fan of them either (maybe except for Andrew Wilson - it's fun to watch him beat on Destiny) but neither are most centrists and center-right, and the pendulum's not swinging back all the way to 'blood and soil', the number of people who would have wanted that were able to comfortably fill downtown Charlottesville back in 2017 - it's not an interesting or realistic threat so no likely far-right coup. Christian nationalists if I understand this correctly would try to push their way in by legal means, I don't know where the Christian revival in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk is going but I'm guessing it's probably not toward Christian Nationalism in 2025 and most people who then read the bible will realize what happened, that it has a lot of cultural and memetic wisdom accreted around it but it's ultimately a blend of history and myth, they'll see that, maybe stumble into Hermeticism like I did (realized neurohacking's pretty much it there) or they might look at John Vervaeke's 'religion that's not a religion'. Watching antifa and left-wing paramilitary groups clashing with ICE, shooting at ICE facilities like in Dallas, shooting public debaters, government shutdown going into revenge mode to protect Oregon and Illinois from national guard, I'm hoping that last part doesn't happen but if it does, especially the extended shutdown, China might find it a good time to attempt an invasion of Taiwan. Putin could accelerate on Ukraine. The whole world would get a lot worse.

I'd say it's highly unlikely. Soros is a fan of Karl Popper. Soros even named his foundation after Popper's book The Open Society and its Enemies, which strongly criticizes radical politics of all kinds, left or right, and favors nonviolent piecemeal reform.

Seems to me the DOJ probe is most likely based on conspiracy theories and nothing more. Soros has long been a target of outrage from right wingers offended by the fact that not all billionaires support right wing causes.


617 alleged Sinaloa and CJNG. Many of these are probably actual gang members, but there have also been quite a few well-publicized cases of probably-innocent people being snatched off of U.S. streets and sent to a concentration camp in El Salvador. And, for every one of the latter that we've heard of, I suspect there are many more whom we haven't heard of because they lack the social connections necessary to get their cases publicized.


"Cheap labor" would be less of an issue if Mexico and Central America were better off economically, which they would be if the U.S. government were to give them more assistance in developing infrastructure. Instead, one of the first things the second Trump administration did was to almost completely gut USAID.


Seems to me that neither extreme is good for democracy.

It also seems to me that the main problem with socialism/communism is not its economic structure per se, but rather the fact that most socialist/communist countries became that way as a result of bloody revolutions, with founding ideologies so focused on economic matters that they largely ignored issues of governmental structure, e.g. checks and balances and separation of powers, even having a tendency to dismiss the latter concerns as "bourgeois."


Mercer's role is not confined to Cambridge Analytica. Far from it. On various fronts, e.g. as one of the owners of Breitbart News, he played a huge role in helping Trump get his campaign off the ground back in 2015-2016. (See The Mercers and Stephen Bannon: How a populist power base was funded and built.)

Back in 2015-2016, my partner and I knew two women who became fanatical early Trump supporters. One of them was a fan of Breitbart News, and the other was a fan of Zero Hedge, another Mercer-owned website. Occasionally they called my partner's attention to various weird news stories in Breitbart News and/or Zero Hedge. Sometimes my partner then googled to see who else was publishing these stories. Often he found that these stories were covered only by a handful of right wing sites plus Russia Today -- and RT usually had the earliest timestamp on a given story. Thus, it was glaringly obvious to us that Breitbart and Zero Hedge were acting as conduits for Russian propaganda.

This happened well before either of us saw any public speculation in the mainstream media about Trump's Russia connections. Indeed, we ourselves felt an obligation to bring my partner's observations to the attention of the Hillary Clinton campaign, in the hope that she would expose it.

So, I personally have absolutely no doubt about Mercer's Russia connections. The only question is whether these connections are in any way illegal, and, if so, how. After all, Mercer does have a First Amendment right to express fondness for whatever country he might have a fondness for.

By the way, quite a few American right wing and right-leaning organizations have ties to Russia. One major example is the NRA. (See Wyden Unveils Report on NRA Ties to Russia, Findings Show NRA Misled Public About 2015 Moscow Trip, September 27,2019.)


How most centrists and center-right folks feel about the religious right wing is less important than how well-organized the religious right wing is and how much money it has.

And the Christian religious right wing (or at least its conservative Catholic branch) now controls the U.S. Supreme Court, after decades of effort toward that specific goal. This guarantees they will continue to have lots of power, for decades, even if they become extremely unpopular.


If there ever is a far-right coup in the U.S.A., it most likely wouldn't come from out-and-out neo-Nazis. It would more likely come from some combination of Christian nationalists, Peter Thiel acolytes, the "conspiracy theory" subculture, and/or Trump loyalists in the military.

Are you aware that Peter Thiel is a fan of Curtis Yarvin, who specifically rejects democracy and advocates monarchy?


For the most part, yes. The problem is that they want to use those legal means to take rights away from the rest of us.


The murder of Charlie Kirk feeds their martyr complex, and will likely be used as an excuse for politically-motivated crackdowns, by the Trump administration, on nonviolent leftist groups as alleged conspirators in riots or whatever.


That would be nice. But there have been times in the past, e.g. way back in the 1960's, when it seemed like hardcore fundamentalist/evangelical Christianity was on its deathbed, but then it revived in new forms -- and, with it, the religious right wing.

I think we've had a big enough side bar already that we should just let the thread breath and see if anyone has any thoughts on the contents of the OP, otherwise we'll be looping around for pages on topics completely unrelated and I don't think it helps the main topic.

when i look at these five i say bs
maybe thats bc im not from the usa

maybe also drop the name dropping, eeverytime, guess that's an american thing too
- RK - Havard and Change Leadership -
that says unbiased and interest free, right
mind you people get promoted for promoting the plan

how can you have needs and wants, if you have no sense of self
- the clay foot of this rotten proposition

i see where its going, point 3
the social credit -- aka you can only be what others construct of you -
4 & 5 make it worse, what does it mean? (rethorican q)
how can you 'live your life' with 'no sense of self'
- pure evil misguidance in my humble opinion




social - emotion is all they want, that should make anyone suspicious

even the word social is reduced to - connectedness, or under the surface it always was??


masks and actors is what is the goal?? what sort of hell is that,
the best wolf in sheep clothing,
or the best impersonator in skin suit

The one thing I'd probably slightly amend since I've had time to think of this:

People in Kegan stage 3 do have different characteristics, some are on track, kind of in a boot-loading mode, for Kegan stage 4 - like getting raised with solid moral foundations on how to treat people, how to (and taught moral preference to) prefer positive-sum games to zero-sum games and negative-sum games, even when zero-sum games have to be played to play them graciously (like you'll all have to deal with each other ten years from now, not a one-off adversary on the battlefield).

It's kind of like half of the group has moral inertia in a good direction - ie. pointed toward likely being Kegan stage 4 by mid adulthood (depends on what environmental constraints they have to deal with - high conflict situations being the worst deterrents), the other portion of the group seems labile / protean, they're into bullying anyone whose different from themselves in any way (men or women who are Kegan stage 4 or 5 who don't immediately display status markers to be exponentially higher in the food chain get ostracized or kicked out for not kissing the ring of power) and they market themselves as status hierarchy enforcers. When the labile / protean don't bully themselves they tend to align with and behind the bully.




As a complete side bar - there's a lady whose been making the rounds in media, she was just on The Wall Street Journal Opinion channel on Youtube with Gerry Baker about her article on feminization: Helen Andrews. From what I'm understanding she's suggesting, sort of in line with Dr Dani Sulikowski, that its female intrasexual competition and even mate suppression that yields 'longhouse' and 'woke', not as a political takeover but as a 'traits beat morals' thing, or more importantly it's not an individual morality issue - it's an emergent group dynamics problem where all you have to do is insert one 'mean girl' or 'bully' and the bully can grab the agreeableness in the room and abuse it to their own ends unless there's other women or even men in place to brick wall that dynamic (and if there's no one there to stop it who has support - it grows without resistance). The gist is then that when you get a higher ratio of women to men in a lot of professions, especially those where the job itself isn't feminine-coded (like law or scientific discovery for example where system or science has to trump feelings and variation spells disaster) ends up having somewhat violent interactions with male ways of thinking, such as reason-first (also I'm assuming this will feel completely alien to most women here - you're not neurotypical and my guess is that most autistic women, like most autistic men, are forced into Kegan stage 4 for survival, probably get slapped around for not being normie-conformie enough, I'm assuming a lot of you have taken a lot of damage from it as well) and the result is men leaving the female-dominated spaces in the workforce not on lack of ability to compete but incompatible norms (ie. guys don't play 'mean girl' games historically as a rule because they might be collecting their own teeth off the ground, or worse - family would be scraping their remains after a duel or execution - it's never been practical outside royal courts and salons).


I bring that last point up because a couple things come to mind:

1) Darwinian evolution happens with least friction at stage 3, particularly because sexual market value (peak Darwinian signal) and 'conformity' end up being the key markers for success and those are your 'right to dignity' in at least the poisoned corners of stage 3.

2) We only get to have a culture that's not as back-biting and chaotic if either more people move to at least Kegan stage 4 or, at a minimum, far more people in Kegan stage 3 have Kegan stage 4 as mentorship, ie. most of the stable and non-protean stage 3's I know use mentorship as a stage 4 structure proxy, just that it's something they're receiving rather than tampering / experimenting / tweaking-to-improve the way a 'self-authoring' stage individual would.


Also if anyone's wondering why I'm so interested in gender topics - this seems like the crux of the confusion I ran into when I went into the world, offered reciprocity, and got my outstretched hand and face smacked. When I first got here back in the mid 2000's people would be talking about almost the 'mystery of inquity', like 'Why are NT's mean for no reason?', and not only that but mean and even irrational in complete lockstep. I think these conformity-enforcing mechanisms, ie. a culture that doesn't acknowledge 68% of adults being in 'socialized' level and not watching carefully to bust predation on this group, because it's like damaging and parisitizing a group who needs protections all for the sake of furthering one's own genetic interests in the crappiest ways - ie. the manipulator burning civilization down by barking orders to the manipulated where their claims bring destruction and don't comport with either reality or good outcomes for men, women, intersex, or anyone else out there.

So if anyone is wondering, Kegan is completing Piaget's focus on four stages of cognitive development from infancy through adolescence, Piaget focuses on four stages of cognitive development from infancy through adolescence, while Kegan's theory extends Piaget into the next five stages of adult development that describe how a person's identity and meaning-making evolve over a lifetime. Kegan's theory addresses how adults' sense of self changes and becomes more complex. It also build's on Erickson's theory of psychosocial development and to some extent follow's the logic of Maslow's hierarchy of needs and Freud's theory of personality. Kind of re-packaging and repurposing.

1.Impulsive Mind: Driven by impulses and reflexes (early childhood).
2.Imperial Mind: The self is defined by needs and wishes, with others' needs being secondary (adolescence).
3.Socializing Mind: The self is defined by the expectations of others (post-adolescence and overlaps with Erickson)
4.Self-Authored Mind: The self is defined by a personal set of values that the individual has created (adulthood).
5. Self-Transforming Mind: The self is not bound by a single aspect of identity and is able to evolve and take on new forms (adulthood).

Most people end up as 3. and park themselves. A proportion are 4. self-author their own set of values (not realising they have just selected values from different sources to suit themselves). A minority are 5. and find self-actualisation (Maslow) transcending to superego (Freud) and destroying a sense of ego/self (Jung/Buddha)

TY for that.

One thing I might add though - Kegan 5's not always a warm and fuzzy place. The impression that I'm getting is one can be moved from Kegan 4 to Kegan 5 in the sense that Kegan 4 saw them try to build the best / most cohesive values they could, they then find out that even though that's a laudible goal they've made themselves prone to bullying for not conforming, so then they understand that there is no 'one' person you can be to survive the world around you, especially a logically consistent person (largely because we're Darwinian), and so they start to also pick up the broken frames, see how they can defend against them, and also see how they can be more effective in the world as far as - if they want to see more positive sum dynamics in the world - having a better idea of what they're up against and having perhaps a better sense of what can be done in the real world rather than being locked into their own solo journey and its progress.

^^^ Valid points
A weakness/limitation with western philosophy and psychology is almost all theory contains projection. Idea the goal of humanism is it leads to a moral and ethical individual. Problem pointed out by Levy back in the 1960s is that morality is relative to situation, upbringing, environment and culture. Modern moral and ethical frameworks are based on consensus of western governments and largely constructed after the horrors of war crimes and scientific racism in the 20th century.

Keegan's 5. is problematic in a western paradigm. Freud's ego sums up best how humans tend to fall on the reality principle (intersecting with Kegan's 3) in order to navigate the real world. So number 3 shapes our future values and number 4 is a creation in our own mind on what works best for us as who we are as individuals and this is what we settle with.

So no, Keegan's number 5 is not a comfortable place. Carl Jung understood integration was key. In Jungian terms, it's part of the individuation process. The ego must give way to the real self. So you don't destroy the ego, you align it with your whole self like a compass needle. But in order to live in the west is to accommodate contradiction creating what Festinger called dissonance in the mind, we all go through dilemmas and come to some trade off to achieve mental equilibrium. those of us unable to live with this contradiction are unable to achieve balance, Freud recognised this imbalance as conflict taking place in our unconscious mind leading to suffering.

Jung is one of the few western intellectuals who understood ego death through his study of Buddhism. In Buddhism ego loss/death is "... complete transcendence − beyond words, beyond spacetime, beyond self. There are no visions, no sense of self, no thoughts. There are only pure awareness and ecstatic freedom"

Buddha eventually understood in order to destroy ego and achieve enlightenment one had to accept the universe and separate the self from the illusion of reality. Once you achieve this you free yourself from Freud's state of unconscious suffering.

Long before western philosophy and science, Buddha wisely understood his fellow humans were unlikely to achieve enlightenment in this lifetime. So he recommend a path of the middle way. And this middle path is Freud's superego, Jung's individuation, Maslow's self-actualisation and Kegan's number 5. transcendence is thus only an aspiration for those of us living in the west. I think Kegan understood this.

Yeah, that tends to give the 'They Live' vibe, ie 'Consume..... obey..... conform.......'.


I'm still trying to tease out how autism relates. It seems like, for neurotypicals, truth is something that one only operationalizes in need, otherwise one is supposed to believe what 'feels good' not what matches reality, and to do otherwise as part of your public persona is to run roughshod over sensibilities which can't be allowed, which also - lo and behold - we can't have a better world because we can't address problems because every problem is how someone else 'eats' or how they milk status out of the environment to further their genetic interests (a big part of why mixing smart autistic guys with neurotypicals is like mixing elemental sodium and water).



I don't know if you're familiar with Michael Levin (Tufts University) but he's a biologist whose found a ton of ground-breaking things (like the biolelectric template) that would sound like woo if he didn't have lots of hard evidence and peer review. He's going as far lately as to say not only that mathematics and logic patterns are from a Platonist realm (of the type Penrose describes in his three worlds model) but that consciousness itself comes from there. In a weird way it feels like 'materialism plus git repo', which is still a startling development.

I think anyone who spends enough time with LSD or mushrooms gets to see what's really underneath or they get to see the 'elephant' in more detail. That can be scary for people because it feels more Freud than Jung, ie. your sexual engine runs the show and seems to run health as well so once you push the lying new age fluff bunnies aside you encounter your daemon (which feels sort of like an amoral higher self which loves you like 'God', and that relationship becomes explicit rather than hidden). Kundalini syndrome seems to just be deep activation of the base of the spine, I've had Kundalini syndrome since mid 2012 (seemed to stem from a direct self-confrontation of sorts) and I still have no idea whether it's a process that leads to tangible results or whether that's wishful thinking.

On another note - I've really been pushed toward functionism, both from studying the Victorian and earlier worlds of 'magick' and seeing how functionalism was the only worldview that mapped the claimed behavior (especially Hillary Putnam's version which allows 'functionalism with multiple realizability' or what's most important - egregore webbing and multi-level participation of the same nodes - like the cell having its consciousness and the body having its consciousness that includes the cell's consciousness without disrupting its experience of self, or as if there's something that its like to be a starling murmuration rather than just an individual starling). Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash's 'Conscious Realism' does this with their three-agent joins, and it sounds like Stephen Wolfram went from skeptic to saying 'Don, I think you're working on the same project I am but from the opposite side' - which was a fascinating triangulation point.


It seems like to achieve enlightenment you have to internally eschew society's values, and we live in a society that will hate you for eschewing its values no matter how polite you are in public. If you try it as a guy in the US you'll have a very hard time holding a job regardless of how well you can do the job because you don't 'know your place', which then yields status destruction for underachieving, more dehumanization from that, and the saintly man in modern culture is just a cleverly hidden creep / pervert (because if your a man - that's all you can be, to claim otherwise is to offend).

Ah right, classic obsessed/special interest inventor/theorist (Newton/tesla) versus a pure functionalist who 100% uses knowledge to climb social ladders. Something of a sliding scale I suppose.

Basically boils down to a trade off. As a matter of fact Jesus said something similar about getting passage into the kingdom of heaven. Back in Jesus's time a wealthy merchant or king would seek to be buried with their worldly goods. I think it's probably the source of the folk saying that "when you die you can't take it with you"
So the trade-off is based on your attachment to materialism and the material world.

Applying Kegan then - I think most of us struggle to let go in number 5, we are fixated too much on our identity and sense of self. the two actually become firmly intertwined in old age. I visualise holding on to our self on death like Dory in "Finding Nemo" trapped inside a whale. Dory (like a person on death's bed) deep down knows she has to leave the whale but clings on too scared of plunging into the unknown.

Letting go is hard, destruction of self is true death. It was in my view a big mistake George Lucas made in Star wars where instead of becoming one with force, Anakin, Yoda and quigon Jin remained as force ghosts.

Kind of going in line with the Hoffman / Prakash thing, I see our minds as functionalist in their construction, meaning we can't have the kinds of minds we do here elsewhere because the contextual basis for having it (ie. the Darwinian drivers that built our brains) won't be present.

For enlightenment and destruction of the ego - I don't exactly know what people are talking about or if I do it's been either too trivial or too long-term for me to notice it, and I say that because I hear too many diverging definitions on what it means. I think I tend western in this context, ie. make the ego a tool for the larger self (it's a manager not a devil), sort of like Iain McGilchrist's take on the left hemisphere as decent executor but poor planner, and it's meant to be alchemized into something better through knowledge and practice where it's still you treating yourself like your own charge but at the same time content of values, intent, goals, etc. take on a much more positive valence.