More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 13 - April 2, 2018
State is generally developed by positive rewards from your environments (e.g. successfully accomplishing work, relationships, love and sex) and things that benefit health and physiological well-being.
High state does not mean high complexity of thought structures
You simply have no six-year-olds inventing new stage 14 Paradigmatic theories; the only people who ever do are the ones who have passed through all of the earlier cognitive stages.
Although there are child prodigies like Nikola Tesla
The conventional way of seeing such exceptional states is to give them lower ontological status (that they are seen as “less real” than the reality of everyday life). Everyday life is taken to be the “really real” reality, and all else to be dreams, hallucinations or fantasies. What this view tends to miss is that mental life is never a “correct representation” of some objective reality.
Our experience of reality is always felt, embodied;
Compare the theological interest in AI - can we have intelligence (or conciousness) without embodiment?
Sensitive people tend to be, I would argue, both more vulnerable to the adversities of life and more in tune with the profound beauty of existence.
there is a kind of dialectic between the lower and the higher states: Lower states can be instrumental to the acquisition of higher ones. You will find similar ideas in the contemplative traditions: Jesus meets the devil while spending forty days in the desert; you have the “dark night of the soul” as a recognized state in contemplative Christianity; and Tibetan Buddhism is full of monsters you must face with equanimity to realize they were really aspects of your own empty, luminous consciousness all along.[138]
People aren’t generally aware of how different the phenomenological experiences of reality really are; we tend to communicate with one another with our subjective states held implicitly.
The most common mistake in communicatio is to believe it has occurded?
each person can hardly know her own state, how can we be expected to build a reliable community upon not only our own state, but the states of a whole group of people?
They insist upon displaying behaviors that indicate high inner states; hence that strange stare.
A possible antidote to this social-psychological malady might be to democratize spirituality; to make it more participatory, transparent and based on measurable results. Such attempts are being made in and around the Burning Man festival culture, and notably in the Syntheist (“religious atheist”) movement which recently emerged in Stockholm—and some interesting prospects along these lines have been brought up by public intellectuals like Sam Harris (in his 2014 book Waking Up, Harris, a renowned critic of all things religious, makes his case for a scientifically supported exploration of
...more
Too much narcissism - to little societal responsibilty?
Yes, the subjective state of organisms is the most important thing in the world,
Narcissistic?
yes, it should therefore be made a central goal of society.
One of perhaps four (state, code, cognition and the fourth)
depth is a person’s innermost recognition of the greatness and/or seriousness of reality.
“To live a life that serves love in all forms is what is of ultimate significance.”
to manifest divinity in the world, to find radical acceptance, to serve the becoming of the most profound possible unity and multiplicity, to surrender fully and without compromise to God or existence, to “be” wordless emptiness and recognize the pristine meaninglessness of the ultimate truth.
I think "to nurture and protect the earths thin layer of fertile soil" is a better and less narcissistic answer.
More likely, modern cultures and indigenous ones are at comparable levels of depth in their population averages.
Low or medium depth psychiatrists generally have no conception about what these people are going through. Ideally, therapists and psychiatrists should out-depth their patients, but unfortunately that is quite difficult to achieve.
Broken and crazy people, for all their limitations, often live in greater worlds; they have walked to hell and back. A lot of them just stumbled on their way back.
Beauty, in this sense, is a kind of recognition. We recognize things such as harmony, balance, proportionality, contrast, pattern, variation, rhythm, repetition; aspects of the world that we spontaneously seem to appreciate.
Seeing beauty somehow strangely seems to be the correct way of seeing. It means to gaze deeper into reality.
The greek word theoria is in christian tradition said to actually have meant To look with a loving gaze
There is a form of sublimity of reality that is recognized not by an aesthetic sense, but by a will to know, a search for truth for the sake of truth, by recognizing the fundamental mystery of reality.
Like I now feel for botany
Biology is rooted in another mystery: What is life?
... And biology. Machines are non-mysterious to me know. Life is the biggest mystery perhaps
In a world of misery and evil, at least there is the truth.
fact, there tends to be lingering pre-modern irrationalities and beliefs that disrespect any honest search for truth, often supported by explicit anti-intellectualism.
our scientifically inspired mainstream society tends to instrumentalize science and knowledge to an excessive degree, reframing it as “academic achievement”.
The spiritual meaning of science, of knowingness, is subdued to grosser human needs, such as acknowledgment, status, accomplishme...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
On the other hand, when we are stuck in social settings or relationships in which our inner depth—light or dark—are not honored and included, we feel that we are unable to act upon our most profound impulses and motives.
People will struggle to maintain the consistency of their own universes (self, ideology and ontology) by all means necessary: ignore, self-censor, ridicule, threaten, alarm the inquisition, call the thought-police, burn the heretic.
this struggle is taking place online and offline know
As I see it, what the wisdom people are sensing is the importance of seeing inner dimensions of people and society and the possibility of an active and deliberate development of these.
Fischer’s own suggestion is to see wisdom as fundamental and general insights about how to live a good life.
treating others well, going beyond materialism and selfishness, the importance of being goodhearted rather than successful, and so forth.
Wise ways of dealing with life
Wisdom is great depth, plain and simple.
Besides some awkward mistakes, an apparent lack of basic education on behalf of its creators and poor taste (all three of which are, after all, forgivable), the model really cannot answer rather simple questions.
Wut. Being just rude?
who is higher value meme, a contemporary fourteen-year-old with modern schooling, or a medieval genius like Thomas of Aquinas (to reuse an earlier example)?
Operates from not "is" if you'd read the book
who is higher value meme, a contemporary fourteen-year-old with modern schooling, or a medieval genius like Thomas of Aqu...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Dont confuse the logic of their actions with their schooling
If we were stuck with Spiral Dynamic we’d have to assume that the kid was of “higher vMeme”: She is ORANGE and Thomas of Aquinas is BLUE.
Fair enough
the kid has to be “achievement oriented” just because she’s from a modern “ORANGE” culture.
No, an individual can operate on a different value meme from her surrounding group of people and the culture they create
give up the idea of vMemes, and simply stick with the four dimensions I have presented (complexity, code, state and depth),
Or place vmemes in their correct domain?
For all its weaknesses, the Spiral Dynamics model catches something vital.
it’s the development, stupid!);
Good point
There really is an overall pattern of development.
Yes, can we allow general patterns that don't seem to hold when broken down into their analytical categories?
the same titles as I used for symbol-stages
Do you thereby say that effective value memes are symbol stages?
The effective value meme is an overall pattern of the mind; it is an equilibrium upon which one’s values and worldview tend to stabilize, setting the framework for the political behavior of a citizen.
We live, essentially, in a retarded world. Our value systems do not correspond to the society we live in.
And this is the issue of our age: to develop the political psychology of the world population. Unfortunately, stimulating such political-psychological development is an enormously tricky matter.
Your effective value meme is a kind of average between your complexity, code, state and depth. It is called “effective” value meme because people tend to have an overall pattern of how they function in society even if they cannot easily be squeezed into one of Beck and Cowan’s vMemes; hence they are “in effect” at one value meme, even if they may differ in one or more regards (for instance having lower complexity or greater depth).
Eclectical, but nice rescue of the baby
Each of the four dimensions has its kind of width.
Stage has IQ and other measures of cognitive capacity.
In code, it’s how much and how high quality kno...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
