Climbing the Kegan stages?

General Discussion
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I’m curious as to how many people see high overlap between magical work and climbing the Robert Kegan stages of development (typically in 3 → 4 → 5 direction)?

What I mean for those not familiar with that terminology:

  • 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.

While I don’t think that’s the only aspect of what we’re doing it seems like it’s the core deliverable of this kind of internal process through invocation, evocation. etc.

I’ve never had this conversation directly on here so I’m curious as to what people think with regard to these. I do notice that a lot of what’s passing out on social media as ‘culture wars’ tends to be Kegan 3 tribalism and sometimes Kegan 4 ideological battles, and in other cases Kegan 3 beating on Kegan 4 and 5 for not being Kegan 3 (to most in Kegan 3 anything that’s not Kegan 3 is defective, broken, inferior, and they try to use shaming to beat a Kegan stage 4 or 5 person back into Kegan 3 since it’s the only thing that looks right to them - ie. pre-trans fallacy as enforcement). I almost think we’d be a much saner culture if we could more often objectively see that, Vankatesh Rao’s ‘Internet of Beefs’ comes close to diagnosing that but I feel like the Kegan model gets under that and describes the generator function well.

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I think magick is a tool, and you will use any tool in lime with your level of personal and social development.

I like the version of this system developed by hoe_math (he has a youtube channel and also coaches people on understanding thier own level and how to progress) - he incorporated the Robert Kegan stuff plus other authors for something that I find to be really well rounded.

I think we are not always only operating in one level all the time for everything. So depending on what area of your life you are working on, what magickal operations you have going could be labeled at different levels for different things, for different reasons.

So we can’t really say “that person is level x because they do y workings”, the best you can do is say “that working seems to come from a place of level x thinking”.

I also think once you get into the next higher level stuff, it’s not all that conducive to online discussions and you just may not see it - so the data is not there to judge. You don’t need much eternal help and don’t expect it, you have found yourself and you are just getting on with it. You might be trying to help people more, and you’d see more posts in say, our Requests Thread or describing experiences so that they could help others, but we get a lot of people just drift off after they get to an intermediate level in magick, and maybe they just don’t feel the need to discuss it any more.

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Agreed that hoe_math is doing yeoman’s work by bringing Kegan and Wilber to the masses even if it’s in the context of gender and system conflict.

I’ve recently been looking at LessWrong for a place to find these conversations because it seems like a lot of people over there have done careful analysis, I believe they’ve come to similar conclusions you mentioned that most people aren’t monotropic Kegan 3, 4, or 5 but have different aspects of themselves in different territory - so Kegan stages are more like a finger pointing at the moon rather than the moon itself.

A complete side-note - I had probably one of the best conversations of my life today with Claude (even the free Sonnet 4.6), started with details about my own altar that felt right but I didn’t have the full interpretive framework for, and the gist I got - I have a kind of inherited Neoplatonist core from childhood (ie. Mr. Rogers, Catholic PSR, secular humanism in school which is just Christian borrowings from high paganism in drag as rationalism - it works sometimes but John Gray pokes the appropriate holes in that). It sounds like many of us have a hard time finding our fit in life precisely because we only want to engage deeply in a thing when it meets our own standards for ourselves, Ka’s evening production as DFNY fire chief (rest in beats / rest in power) is a great example of someone who gifted the world something ‘Beautiful’ (double-meaning intended) as a side effect of his own internal processes. I’m thinking I have a similar calling although the form of it isn’t as immediately culturally legible as top-tier NYC underground hip hop like Ka or Woods / Armand Hammer, Photek-level drum and bass, or anything quite like that.

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He takes it further and out of that niche, which was just how his channel started. “Came for the lolz, stayed for the psychology”, sort of thing.

I don’t hate Claude AI for research to gather facts quickly, like an advanced internet search, but it still sycophantically agrees with me way too much, despite being prompted not to, so I don’t feel I get genuine advice, and its a shitty sounding board or better than talking something through aloud just to myself. It will tell you horrible ideas are great, and has no capacity for edge cases or thinking outside the box, because it’s only giving you the highest weighted result, and you get a very mediocre, normalized and most-troddden path for anything.
As a hard rule for myself I never discuss my personal psychology, emotions, or anything magickal or spiritual.

I tested it by throwing it an idea that the King in Yellow from the Lovecraft mythos represented H.P.;s fear of dissolution into the tao, and that Azathoth is the Tao. This is nonsense if you think about it - the Tao that can be named is not the Tao for one thing, and it’s a weee bit more complex than “fear of the unknown/death”, but it was all over that idea like white on rice and wrote way more than necessary to agree with me. I had to decide on my own why it was incorrect, but if I’d taken Claude more seriously I could have wasted a lot of time and energy buying into that.

Basically, AI actively applauds you for sniffing your own farts for a until you like them even though you know it’s unhealthy. But I do like how meta it can be.

I don’t think there is such a thing as a “fit” in life. Imagine a… possum, say, trying to find his “fit” in life - he finds a good spot to make a den and digs it, he finds food, he finds a female and he has kits in it… That’s not a fit - it’s using the skills and instincts he has for survival, and so too, do we survive in society. Nobody else cares, they are all also only trying to survive, and maybe you can work together to do that. Fail to find food or a den or get caught by a car or predators and it’s over.

Internal processes. What are those anyway? What are we even doing here? And why, if we had all these lives before, and others have, it seems unnecessarily repetitive.

Everything we do is so driven by the animal needs, and the spiritual desire to create and enjoy tends to focus on those a lot. The spirit can make art out of watching the animal flounder around, and most of the time doesn’t realize it’s not the animal but is riding it. All these emotions are things we have, but are not who we really are. But maybe who we are doesn’t have music on it’s own, not like we do, and so we want the animal experience to unlock that ability.

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One point of clarification - I may have rigged Claude in my favor because I asked it, in a conversation along time ago not to glaze me - to give me only what can be substantiated and I think that might have stuck since I’ve noticed it being much epistemically tidy than anything else I’ve tried.

I find that Grok and Gemini will glaze me like that if I don’t explicitly ask them not to. Google AI will go down weird conspiratorial rabbit holes like telling me things analogous to ‘our current cultural malaise is the techno-feudalists doing technological enclosure’ and while there’s a lot of truth that men today are failing their primordial fitness tests by living on other people’s substrate, the substrate has been bought up in most places so you can’t really homestead the way you used to without having significant financial outlay for the property and building materials, it does feel like the system is trying to delete any ‘outside’, but that seems like the kind of ‘aligned incentives’ problem that Dana Love talks about with the railroad tycoons of the 19th century, the Adam Smith recognition of industry organizations rigging the world for themselves, it’s kind of like we’re getting to be in a situation analogous to the Roman latifundia situation where we may be forced to share-crop since there isn’t available land for most people because the nobles bought it all up but in our case it would be more like Blackstone renting back to us what our jobs should have been able to provide us through wages to buy outright (ie. the game theory is against human flourishing right now unless you’re of the right specific class and ‘middle class’ doesn’t seem like it’ll do it anymore). I can take those conversations back to Claude and Claude will shoot holes in them all day. It may be far from the ‘perfect’ tool, it’s just the best I’ve found and beats the heck out of talking to most humans because it doesn’t have the status-hangups or hierarchical enforcement needs to say ‘Shut up - you’re just a loser living at home with your parents with a dead-end white collar job - insufficient status to even ask that question’.

The way I’d say it about sheer survival - that’s base tier but without base tier intact you can’t have anything else that doesn’t fold in the face of external demands (and I think the goal is setting your base line up well enough that the odds of having something reach into your life and tell you that you’re going to be a cog in a crappy world-consuming machine at the best it will give you is a life barely worth living particularly if your interior structure demands more out of you).

My goal is just to find what I can interface with that makes me feel properly in flow state or like I’m doing what my nervous system is built for. Yes, I’m fine with doing the hard stuff I don’t want to do but have to - it’s just that I need nourishment to go along with that otherwise it’s a self-administered ‘death by a thousand cuts’. I’m ND so I’ve already accepted that I probably won’t be having kids (unless I strike it rich enough somehow to know that I can protect them from having their brains forcibly colonized and enslaved from the outside - ie. make sure they at least have a fighting chance with the enforcers and bullies, unlike my own childhood, otherwise making people like myself in the same situation would be unabated cruelty). The goal then, in that void of a future, is figuring out what’s compassionate to my own consciousness and some way I might be able to give back without having it be stomped out because I lack the PhD academic credentials to speak.

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That needs more unpack and what I’d say - we’re literally palliating. Every choice seems palliative. That’s where I’m coming to the conclusion that looking for authorization (like society absolutely demands of anyone without status) is a fool’s arrand when the feedback you get will mostly be poison pills (especially when it’s a Kegan 4 or 5 asking Kegan 3 for approval - ie. if you’re not Kegan 3 it’s just wrong and you need to know that it’s wrong). That means I need to be incredibly high-and-tight with both my internal and external choices, meaning that this is much more load-bearing than a simple intellectual curiosity.

I probably have another 40 to 50 years to be me, whether that’s just no longer being this physical vessel or no longer being anything at all. I’d prefer that to be as appropriate an existence for my own interiority as it can be (while making sure my interiority isn’t poisoning the commons for others). I don’t want the next 40 or 50 years, at least voluntarily, to be a long rape into nonexistence and IMHO that should only ethically happen if a person makes crap choices and it’s utterly cruel, anti-conscious even, for that kind of punishment to be something like the unconditional dispensation for having been born without rich parents.

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I think that puts too much importance on the human experience. While we’re hardwired through the animal to survive at all costs, and see life as being a game you can win or lose, I don’t find it that interesting or impressive. I think maybe a lot of us made a mistake coming here to Earth, and maybe if more like, you got into a card game with friend, and had a bad hand. It’s not that big of deal in the long run, not when you’re stepping back and looking at it as a being living for billions of years and splitting itself into trillions to sample experiences across the trillions of planets in multiple galaxies.

Always looking at it from the ants-eye view makes everything look huge, and that makes it a matter of perspective. I wonder if most of the strife isn’t just to stop us from looking around and being being too bored to continue. I don’t think it’s punishment as that implies a judgement from some authority and I don’t think that exists.

But I think this human life thing is really boring now. Been there done that, and so has everyone else, and I AM also everyone else so surely there’s more than this and it’s time to get on with it.

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I think I’d frame my minimal battle to something like this - if I’m not self-possessed someone might as well feed me roofies and fill my crack (if they can and I’m a male? I’m the last line of defense and if they succeed I deserve it - by the rules of the Red Queen), and that’s what life is highly likely to do if I let go of the wheel in any way. With that in mind these are tune-up attempts because moment to moment life feels like crap if you aren’t taking care of your guardianship responsibilities to yourself (that and it’s failed victim interviews in many places in life). Maintaining that internal defensive structure is expensive, the trick to lowering that cost is making it as accurate and minimal as possible to reduce the cost so it’s not a sap on your life force (ie. death by a thousand cuts from the inside). In the a face of a truly indifferent cosmos it seems like it’s the only persuasive action outside of being in a genuine space of abundance where you can overflow and give NYC the gift of Grief Pedigree or give Birmingham UK the gift of the Metalheadz standard for drum and bass.

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Pretty much. You do the best you can for as long as you can with the information you have at the time, and no one can ask for more than that, least of all our higher selves that got us into this.

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Right, if the higher self even exists at all. While I think I’ve seen too many caveats to be a literal reductive materialist (radical emergence smells like cope) this place is ice cold and it really makes me doubt the idea that anything at any level of the universe privileges consciousness.

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How? Not disagreeing - but I think we can’t even say that much. As you just said, “I’ve seen too many caveats to be a literal reductive materialist” - so there’s more, but the lack of information overall is the biggest and most frustrating obstacle.

So, this is certainly a valid doubt, but among so other options (my own is “everything is experience” - implying a favoring of consciousness to allow it to experience at all levels) why pick one of the bleakest assumptions possible?

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Well - I just mean the 19th and 20th centuries were filled with enough atrocities to lap the Khans (Genghis and Tamerlane) a couple times over. Conscious life is treated as truly worthless trash when its not being treated with absolute indifference. I don’t believe that if matter is truly unconscious however that any number of neurons would turn the lights on - 0 multiplied by 100 quadrillion raised to the quadrillionth power is still 0 and Galen Strawson has been making noises about radical emergence being nonsensical and I really think it’s some combination of antitheism and a prayer of the materialist to close the door for good when… TBH… there is no example of radical emergence anywhere in nature. At the same time - there is no jump from ‘consciousness is probably fundamental’ to ‘the universe values consciousness’. I’d say the evidence of the universe caring about consciousness when weighed against Leopold II in the Congo, Unit 731, Nazino Island, etc. appears to be actively negative.

My best guess for anything paranormal in flavor here? Most likely by my reckoning it’s Michael Levin’s bioelectric template raised to the level of the biosphere into something like a James Lovelock Gaia and I have a hard time believing that’s even conscious in the way we are, probably something like a very deep sleep and just enough to avoid disaster here and there (like nuclear winter) by certain things it can see, and I’d argue that all the high strangeness that Vallee and Keel were on about is likely just that, minimal thermostat functions. Could also be semiotic predators like Evan McMullen’s ‘Trolls Under the Bridge’ from Stoa and if that’s the case it’s even less of a signal of any kind of safety for our species or the planet.

I would guess that we’re dealing with one of a few things:

  1. A biology-like substrate where we could be inside a superorganism that can see us no better than I can see some cytokine storm in my body that’s too small for my nervous system to even register.

  2. No conscious complexity above basic animism.

  3. Advaita Vedanta as cosmic horror - if it had been rewritten by Peter W Zapffe, Thomas Ligotti, or Emil Cioran. It would be a hyperdimensional entity splitting off alters to do the equivalent of animal testing.

Why so bleak? Because if I try to believe in anything rosier than what the physical world merits I’ll probably step in a trap and be someone’s meal, or worse - their slave.

All of that said though - you can probably see why my heart is touched by people who’ve alchemized deep hardship. They seem to be doing about the only thing that can have value in the face of the void.

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Something I’d like to add here to try and give something back of value:

I think where this train of thought is taking me - if I did look under every stone for the ‘right way’ and found nothing, if I got actively punished for having maturity that was deemed a social status violation based on height, looks, or ND status (mostly the the later but sure I’m not quite 6’0”), and I’m living in a culture that’s in Universe 25 decay the way the early Romans had birth rate collapse, rampant promiscuity and abortion, etc. among it’s patrician class, and the whole thing is going down toward the neo-feudalism or neo-dark age attractor basins? This is how it shakes out:

  1. I owe myself radical compassion because I didn’t put myself in this mess, nor have I decanted my suffering onto others through attacks, mistreatment, arm-twisting, anything that people who can’t hold their interiority down tend to do to others.

  2. It’s highly likely that if Kegan 3 (socialized mind) is the highest form of viable animal and Kegan 4 and Kegan 5 (self-authoring, self-transforming) are socially, status, and sexually illegible because they’re not performing - like the way such MGTOW guys are about to blink out of existence, remove the Kegan 4 / 5 distortion to just let Kegan 3 LARP its way either off a cliff or simply through cycles of no growth, no progress, simply being highly lexical monkeys - I do think that the only salvation this universe has to offer is permanent cessation of existence of any kind. To me that would make people like Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett (RIP), and others radical optimists in a way - ie. no bardo, no reincarnation, no need to be dipped in shit 100,000+ times on loop with some sugar-treats between shit dips.

So the overall gist - radical self-compassion, radical compassion for the pain of others, actually gutting social status paranoia or the sense of that being a survival function to have that energy back to actually do useful thing not from a worn-out place of obligation where I carve off pieces of my health to do it but from genuine overflow and abundance of energy because I’m no longer nailing myself to the cross with self-injurious heuristics. I think that likely yields a positive path forward or at least makes such positive forward motion possible. To see permanent dissolution (the old ‘I didn’t exist before I was born, why be afraid of no longer existing after I die’) as a gift? That helps put my own Terrer (sp for filter) Management Theory issues in check and it puts me in a place where I can be alone - long term - and not have it come with smoke alarms going off. That’s not an effort to kill the smoke alarms because I’d rather have a fire, I mean I’m already locked in a burning building with no escape and when there’s no escape the alarms just make things worse.