The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. There is a science to intelligence, but most people get it wrong because they think intelligence is about book smarts and performing cognitive tasks. And while those play a major role in success, of course there is much more to the story.

People who score well on IQ tests usually land in the conventional stages of psychological development, which we're going to go over all nine stages at the end of this video. But little do they realize because lower stages can't understand higher stages. You can think of a higher stage as a point of view. So from a higher point of view, you can view everything below.

But if you were at the lower point of view, let's say the bottom of the mountain, you can't see the same view as the top of the mountain. So the high IQ people who are at this lower stage were using lower and higher. They're not bad or worse, they're just lower and higher to distinction. The lower stages are still in the bottom 80%

of quote unquote intelligence. But the thing with these people that score high on IQ tests or just very smart people all around, is that they are still like most of the population where they are broke, unhealthy and angry at the world and especially they are lonely because very few people can match their intellectual capabilities.

They can think through complex problems, but they can't solve the bigger, more holistic problem of creating a rich life. Chris Langan, the man with the highest IQ, says most high IQ people have the magnification, but not the aperture. In other words, and as we will learn, having a high IQ is not the be all, end all of intelligence.

If your mind is a camera, there is more than the ability to zoom in. So now if you want to achieve the articulation of Jordan Peterson or the thinking ability of Alan Watts, give yourself to the end of this video because it will make sense how they have achieved that articulation and thinking. The other thing is that you have to commit to this year.

You aren't just going to watch this video and see five jumps and stages. It takes the years to get through the stages of development, so you have to have some kind of practice. You need to study an hour a day. You need to build something and apply what you learn. And that isn't much to ask to develop a trait like intelligence, which determines much of the enjoyment and success in your life,

the ability to navigate your mental health. The ability to make as much money as you want, the ability to understand reality and get what you want out of it. That's what we're going to learn. Intelligence can't be summarized in a 1 to 5 minute YouTube video, so if you aren't here to watch something that is long and in-depth, please go and get your cheap dopamine hit somewhere else.

But if you stick it out and you stay with this video, it will radically change the direction of your life. I can promise that for most of you watching this, we have a lot of good stuff to talk about. Where do we start? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. We've all heard that quote before from Einstein if he actually said it.

Einstein is notorious for having quotes assigned to him as if he said them. But either way, that doesn't take all. That doesn't take away from how smart and revolutionary of an individual he was. So if Einstein said that, that's the quote we're going to talk about because it reflects cyber genetics, we need to talk about cybernetics. Cybernetics comes from the Greek word cybernetics

or Kubernetes class, which means to steer or good at steering. In other words, cybernetics illustrates the properties of an intelligent system. It measures the intelligence of a system. So to start out, we can consider intelligence from one perspective. From the cybernetics perspective, as your ability to steer or correct your steering toward a goal.

And cybernetics is also known as the art of getting what you want. So if the first quote that we talked about at the very beginning of this video from naval, that intelligence is your ability to get what you want out of life, if you understand that, then you understand that cybernetics is the science or the way that you can study in order to do that. So here is this graphic of a boat steering

right and steering left to get to the lighthouse. Cybernetics is pretty much to have a goal to act toward that goal, to sense where you are to compare to the goal and act again based on that feedback. So it is listening to the feedback mechanism of making mistakes or just getting blown off course, say, by life.

So if cybernetics illustrates the properties of intelligent systems, and your mind is a system that houses many complex systems. Your mind is the meta system from which you operate and act within life. It's the operating system for life. Then by having a goal acting toward it. Noticing okay, I'm over here and this is where the goal is.

What can I do to start to get toward the goal rather than continue going in the wrong direction like most people are in life, and they just don't have the awareness like, oh, I need to get towards the goal. They don't pay attention to that. They set the goal and then they head off in one direction and then they either quit or they end up in this trap that they can't get out of. That is unintelligent. You can judge intelligence based on the system's ability to iterate

and persist with trial and error. A ship blown off course that corrects towards its destination, a thermostat sensing a change in heat and turning on the pancreas, excreting insulin after blood glucose spikes. Cybernetics is a frame. It's a worldview. It's a perspective that you can adopt to understand quite a bit of the world. So what does this have to do with

getting what you want out of life? Everything. Acting, sensing, comparing, and understanding the system from a meta perspective is fundamental to high intelligence, high intelligence is the ability to iterate, persist, and understand the big picture. The mark of low intelligence is the inability to learn from your mistakes. Low intelligence people get stuck on problems

rather than solving them. They hit a roadblock and quit. Like a writer who fails to build a readership and quits because they lack the ability to try new things, experiment and figure out a process that works for them. To think that there isn't an effective process you can create is verifiably false, no matter your limiting beliefs. Hence, being low intelligence. In other words, there is a path to achieving your goals.

You just aren't aware of it. You haven't done the thing, you haven't tooken the step that reveals the next step, and then the next step, and then the next step. And when you take the wrong step, you don't have the awareness that you did take the wrong steps. So you can course correct. And if you can't achieve a goal or you just realize that the goal or vision for your life was wrong in the first place, then you iterate and you pivot rather than quitting.

If you start a business and realize that you didn't want to be in that business in the first place, then change it. So if you want to become more intelligent, start with the goal. Your pursuing goals are what determine the system. In other words, the destination is what determines the journey. The goal and destination are vastly more important than the system or journey because they create it.

Sure, you can argue that the end of a melody isn't its goal, as Nietzsche would say, but the goal of the artist was to create the melody. Anything you do from watching this video to moving your eye a fraction of a centimeter, to taking one step forward, to scratching your nose, to building $1 billion business, is the act of pursuing a goal, creating the melody or journey or process in its path.

The destination is a point of view that allows you to appreciate the journey. In other words, do you ever notice that people say it's all about the process? Or the process is the only thing that matters after they've achieved the goal, after they have the perspective you aren't, you usually aren't sitting in the suffering that the process is that life is thinking, oh, this is great.

You can have gratitude for it. But if you don't achieve the goal, you're just stuck in this perpetual loop of suffering. And that's just the thing. You rarely enjoy the process until you reach the goal. And that's okay. That's how it's supposed to be. That's that's reality pushing you toward achieving the goal. You're not supposed to enjoy everything.

You need a bit of suffering to appreciate the periods of peace. If you were happy all the time, it would become normal to you. Happiness would stop making sense. All true happiness stems from a perspective of previous sadness. In other words, the journey and the destination are inseparable. Now I talk about goals a lot and the importance of goals like I am in this video,

and I have in some of my best performing videos about my daily routine. But I'm not talking about goals from your typical self-help lens of oh, you need to set a goal for the sake of productivity in this, in that I'm talking about it from a teleological lens, that everything serves a purpose in reality, and a purpose is a goal. What I'm trying to say is that everything is a part

of a greater whole, and if you lose that connection, you lose a lot of meaning in your life. Spirituality is connection to something greater than yourself. So if you don't have a goal or a purpose that is meaningful and chosen by you in alignment with reality and you making mistakes and correcting those mistakes, because reality will not tolerate those mistakes,

you will feel the pain. So correcting from your pain is what allows you to live in alignment and with meaning. So goals in this sense that people think are very practical are not anti spirituality, they are spirituality. You can think of goals from the self-help lens as finite games. Just get this much money, go to school, get a job, do this purpose or goals

from the teleological lens is that you are a part of a greater whole, and that whole is a part in and of itself that is a part of a greater whole. That's the structure of reality. And so by connecting to that, to maintaining this relationship with reality, you begin to play the infinite game. And that is the house of all of the finite games that you are playing

that allows you to bring meaning to those things that you thought were superficial and shallow before, like making a lot of money or doing whatever your desires are. Man is by nature a goal. Striving, being. And because man is built that way, he is not happy unless he is functioning as he was made to function as a goal striver. That's true success and true happiness not only go together, but each enhances the other.

That's a quote from Maxwell Maltz. He's the author of Psycho Cybernetics, which is in line with what we're talking about cybernetics. But he wrote it in a more self-help lens for the mind, for the psyche, goals are so much more important than we think. In a world where people can't stop regurgitating programing from their new school systems over goals, goals determine how you see the world goals.

Determine what you consider success or failure. You can try to enjoy the journey, but if you pursue the wrong goal, you are making it 100 times more difficult to enjoy the journey. Your mind is the operating system for reality. That system is composed of goals. For most people, those goals are assigned to them, programed like lines of code in their psyche. Go to school, get the job.

Get offended. Play victim, retire at 65. Unknown path that doesn't work. So to become more intelligent, you must reject the known path. Dive into the unknown. Set new higher goals to expand your mind, embrace the chaos and allow for growth. Study the generalized principles of nature and become a deep generalist. We will learn how to do all of the above

as we continue in this video. Now we need to talk about how your mind interprets reality, how your goals frame how you perceive situations, because that determines most of the decisions that you make, most of the choices that you make. And if you are the culmination of your past choices,

then your choices today that you're going to learn how to make better choices are going to create your future. So we will start with a quote from me. Hi chick sent me. Hi. The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy or attention is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action.

The pursuit of a goal brings order and awareness, because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else that is from the book flow. Now, the mind has two key purposes for survival that align with cybernetics that we talked about earlier. The first is achieving known goals and the second is discovering unknown goals.

This is what your mind wants to do. The mind is an information processing and pattern recognition machine that we have a certain amount of control over based on our level of development. The mind is a system containing a complex set of systems that accepts, rejects and uses information to aid in the goals you feed it. So if you're always focused on negative outcomes, they will become reality and you'll blame everyone but yourself

for the misfortune in your life. The man who conceives himself to be a failure type person will find some way to fail in spite of all his good intentions, even if the opportunity is dumped in his lap. The person who conceives himself to be a victim of injustice, one who was meant to suffer will invariably find circumstances to verify his opinions. So, in other words, cybernetics.

If your goal is to fail, or your subconscious or unconscious goal, not even something that you're really paying attention to, or set yourself one that was conditioned into you by parents or a society that wanted you to fail. If you have the goal of failure, you're going to fail. If you have the medical of success that houses

the other goals that you're holding, you're going to notice the opportunities for success. You can have the goal of starting a business, but if in the back of your mind, the thing encapsulating that goal is a negative intention to fail, you will fail at the root of your mind. Like a puppet master. Is your identity or ego. Your ego is a system of ideas, beliefs, values, and standards

that shape your perspective. And contrary to popular belief, the ego is not the enemy. It's the storyteller, the interpreter. Your job isn't to get rid of it. Your job is to develop it, to expand it, to remove the condition limits, keeping you in the narrow minded perspective that makes life reactive and negative. We're going to talk about this in the next section. When we talk about the stages of ego development,

your perspective is like the lens of a camera. You can zoom in and out. You can focus on one part of the scene while the background is blurred, or focus on the detail of the entirety of the scene. Your perspective influences your perception of situations, meaning your identity will limit the information it can perceive, and if it receives information that does not match its beliefs, values or standards,

it will reject it. Your mind automatically accepts or rejects information to achieve the goals that are programed into your head. If you want to get a job, dopamine will signal the importance of information and opportunities that help you get that job. Your book highlights will reflect that goal. How you approach conversations with anyone will reflect that goal, and the algorithm will help deepen

the roots of that identity by showing you more of that information, for better or worse. So if you're trying to go to school, get a job, retire at 65, then the conversations you have are going to you're going to interpret them from the lens of that goal. They may not directly be about those things that you're conversing about, but you're going to pick up information for them. You're going to be talking with this person,

let's say your parents friend, and you're going to be thinking the whole time, what are they doing for work? Do I want to end up like that? What did they do for schooling? What major did they go through? How much do they make? Do they seem like they enjoy their life? And it's going to shape your actions in the pursuit of that goal. But you're probably not going to achieve that goal unless they challenge those beliefs of yours. Now, if you want to quit your job, dopamine will do

the same thing, like hunters that noticed new berries on a bush, dopamine signals information that is important for the survival of your top of mind goal, so you are more likely to remember and utilize that information. Humans both attempt to survive and reproduce the information in their DNA, like animals and the information in their consciousness, their identity, their psychic body, their mental body.

And if your goals and perspective are what frame that, it's the shape of your body when that thing is threatened, or if you're just trying to achieve a goal, you're going to your emotions and your suffering are going to reflect that. When you feel pain, it's usually because you are out of alignment with a goal or it threatens the goal. And when you notice something exciting or good,

that's something you need to double down on and go to to actually achieve that goal, to solidify your identity so that it doesn't fall apart. So if we take that into account in your goal is to quit your job, then something like your Google searches are going to change from best careers to go into in 2024 to best business models to start in 2024. And you're going to start to go down the rabbit hole

and you're going to start to follow new people on social media. If you actually want to achieve the goal again, if you are bound to fail or you want to fail, you're not going to do these things or you're going to interpret them from a skeptical lens and program your mind in the opposite direction to stay comfortable. And if you have the goal to quit your job, maybe you feel more compelled to check out digital economics with the link in the description

where I help you deconstruct your identity and turn yourself into the business. Let's recap that section very quick because your mind is a cybernetic system. Society is a behavior system, and there are three big goals that they injected into your mind, right? When you learn to comprehend the language, speak one, school two, job three.

Retire 99% of people are only interpreting everyday situations in a way that leads to those goals. They study what they're told to study for the sake of status and survival. That's closing their mind off the things that really matter in life. They become a specialist slave who's dependent on those who need that specific knowledge. They don't have the deep, generalized skill set that allows them to pursue their own path.

A writer who only learns writing doesn't have a chance at making an independent income. 99% of people are practicing the skills, focusing their attention, and programing their minds to live a mediocre life without even knowing it. Because they failed to question and revolt. This is a realization that people make way too late. Success is not planned. It is automatic.

Successful people, whether they were conscious of it or not, had a mind that was programed to achieve the goals that led to their success. They saw life through the perspective of their goals, and that allowed them to store the right information in their subconscious, influencing their choices that compound into achieving that goal. Your identity, perspective, and perception of situations are all systems

that feed into and reinforce each other in that order. With that said, 80% of living the life you want boils down to creating your own goals. While most people are mindless slaves to society's goals. The last thing here, and a very important thing, is that you can't become aware of a problem unless you have the goal.

And if you don't invest energy into the goal, you won't feel the pain or identify the problem of not reaching that goal. As an example, I will occasionally go out and have a few drinks at dinner and in my past I would drink a lot more in college days. And that was until I realized how much it took away

from my goal at the time of cutting weight for the summer, and I was also writing my book at the time, so I never saw the drinking as a problem because I never had anything to dedicate my time and attention to in the morning. So when I realized, hey, I'm waking up, I'm a bit more foggy. I only had two drinks, three drinks last night, and I'm just foggy.

Ideas aren't coming to mind writing this book. I'm literally sitting here for an hour staring at a screen when I'm supposed to be getting 5 to 10 pages for my book done. And that's not happening in that feels terrible because I'm not making progress. Then second to that, when I'm supposed to run first thing in the morning and I try to power through, I try to have the discipline and I go out, go outside, start running, and it's just so much harder.

It's so much harder to achieve the goal and lose the weight. And not to mention how alcohol interacts with your body. So it's different situations as well where that's not a goal of mine. I don't have those things to pay too much attention to in the morning. I'm not a fan of a static and permanent lifestyle or routine. I like the change. I like being able to learn.

I like being able to identify and loop back to problems from a higher level of development. So now at this point in my life, maybe for the next few months, I like going out and having a few drinks on the weekend with my friends. But the point is that problems aren't problems unless you have a corresponding goal. If you don't have any worthwhile goal, you aren't able to see

the plethora of problems that once solved lead to a better life. So if you don't have these goals that you're investing energy in and feeling the pain of not making progress towards them, you can't see the problems that are in your life right now. If you were to condition yourself with new stimuli, constant self-education to the point of having an identity that couldn't survive

without achieving new goals, you would inevitably achieve whatever they are with ease. If you want a successful business relationship or anything that is out of the norm, you must fundamentally change the goals your mind operates on by changing who you are to change who you are, you must educate, practice, and experience new information to reprogram your mind's faulty wiring that was installed by society.

Now, finally, we're going to talk about the stages of psychological development or ego development, so we can understand what it takes to reach the top 1% of intelligence. And we can understand what stages people like Jordan Peterson or Alan Watts or your average everyday individual falls into. So here is a graphic that I got from Slocombe.

All of the graphics. I think all of the graphics from here on out are from slow, slow SEO, but this is what we're going to be going over. So you can screenshot this or just keep these things in mind. This is what we're going through. But first I want to share another quote that Einstein supposedly said, you can't solve the problem from the same level of consciousness

that created it. So if you remember everything that we just talked about in terms of cybernetics and goals and how those frame situations, how your goal determines the process or the journey, how your goals, if they are a part of who you are or a part of who you are becoming or what determine your success. What you need to understand now is that there is another layer to this.

You have the goals of your level of development, of your level of psychology called development. Those are what are important to you. So you have to understand that these goals evolve. Once you achieve one or A0 as you are pursuing one, that goal may evolve in perspective. So you're viewing it from a different lens.

So by increasing your level of development over the years, by doing what we're going to talk about you slowly refine what your version of success is and are more able to achieve it because you have the skill and knowledge and development to match. If you want to become more intelligent, you need to expand your mind to see the bigger picture,

to tell a more holistic story, to view situations from all perspectives, to not decapitate your thinking by conforming to one perspective, one religion, one business model, one area of study that is verifiably non truth because of its one dimension. When you have a higher goal, you can think more intelligently toward that goal, but you can't expand to a higher level of mind in an instant.

In fact, it takes an entire lifetime to reach the highest stages. Who knows how much further human development will go when technology allows us to live until we're 500, don't die. We are going to dissect ego development theory in relation to intelligence and what we're talking about. So, I'm going to link a PDF to Suzanne Cook Reuters

90 plus page, dissertation on ego development theory. It's very insightful. It's definitely worth reading. Save it. Read it later. But understand that there are some nuances and things that we're leaving out because cybernetics, we are writing towards a specific goal, and how we get there is going to be determined by the goal.

So there is going to be some information from her paper whose goal is to accurate, accurately explain every aspect of ego development theory. There's going to be some things left out, so just keep that in mind here. But along with this, I would also recommend that you study Spiral Dynamics. And Ken Wilber is actual model.

And when you connect the dots between all three, it's pretty incredible. How your mind starts to think. In ego development theory, there are three directions of movement or growth or development. There's horizontal which is lateral expansion at the same stage. So you're developing new skills and adding information and knowledge. There's vertical up which is transformation.

So growth to a new stage or perspective. And then there's vertical down. So temporary or permanent regression due to life circumstances environment stress and disease. We can think of it like this. We can think of horizontal development as filling one's cup with skill, knowledge, etc. and then we can think of vertical development, the thing that we're aiming for a new level of mind as expanding

the cup, the capacity of the cup, the water still in there. But you need to fill more. You need to you need to do more horizontal development as your vertical development goes up. That's increasing and expanding your complexity of self. That's becoming a more unique individual. Another fun fact here is that stress alone can cause you to regress into the past version of yourself,

or into a lower stage of development. So when you feel very spiritual and open at times when you are in a very stressful life situation, you can regress back down to a more dogmatic and singular perspective. Point of view, very reactive and negative and argumentative. The point is that the higher you develop yourself, the lower you regress under a stress situation.

So if you develop your self very high over the years, then when you do get stressed, you're still regressing to a rather well rounded stage. So here is a graphic again from slow slow of horizontal development and vertical development. And this reflects the spiral dynamic stages colors.

So in spiral dynamics it's very similar stages. But they're represented in colors like red amber orange green teal. Now with Spiral dynamics think of a spiral, right? Rather than circles. What the spiral represents in development. This is how you develop is like a spiral is that you sometimes loop back around to the same problems or the same.

It's kind of like deja vu or the same patterns in that cycle of development. So you can think that it's like it feels like I'm not making much progress, but you're an entire stage above where you were reaching new stages of development requires an evolution of your perspective. You need time, understanding and horizontal development in that stage.

So new skills, challenges and goals. You need awareness of and open mindedness. To explore a perspective different from your own. You need a fundamental change in who you are through education and conscious conditioning, a commitment to deeper understanding and seeking truth. And last, you need cybernetic trial and error to have a goal that resides in a new stage of development and solve problems in the way of that goal, and self-correct

when you realize you didn't solve the right problem. Now, pain is sometimes a necessary requirement for reaching a new stage of development, and even if it's not a prerequisite to it, it's usually the byproduct of transformation. You will feel the pain or suffering that comes along with that. It's like how I talk about with tactical stress, where you either

launch yourself into a very stressful situation and force yourself to evolve. I do this by moving, or I did this by moving to a place that I couldn't afford, forcing me to do better in my business and grow and expand through those negative emotions I was experiencing. But that's not for the faint hearted. Many people can't handle that with that. Understanding the stages of development helps you see what lies ahead.

It helps you orient your development towards them and it can change your life. So first we need to go over the pre conventional stages, which is about 5% of the population and usually takes place in early childhood. And because of that most of you aren't in these stages. So we're going to keep this very brief. The pre conventional stages symbiotic impulsive and opportunist are characterized by egocentrism.

In other words, they can't adopt another person's perspective. They haven't been socialized or they have towards the end of the phases. So you can think of a kid who is born and is, dependent on his parents, and his parents are just giving machines. They're just survival machines. It's like me, me, me. Just give me what I need to survive. And then you go to something like kindergarten and you start to realize, oh, I'm

not the only person on this earth. I'm not the center of the universe. And then by the age of ten, you're usually out of these stages. So we'll move on to the conventional stages. So there's pre conventional conventional and post conventional. We're into the conventional now which is 75 to 80% of the population. And this is where most high IQ people test.

We can think of the conventional stages as monkeys copying other monkeys in the attempt for status and becoming the top of the food chain. Usually this is from my own observation. When you talk to someone who is in a conventional stage of development, you're usually talking to a TV or a YouTube channel or a social media feed. You aren't talking to the actual person you're talking to.

They're regurgitated, conditioned beliefs from their environment. So stage three. The first stage of the conventional stages is the conformist stage. In the conformist stage, their identity is defined by their relationship to a group. As some examples, you can think of high school students who are focused on popularity, corporate employees that stick to the rules

like attending all mandatory meetings or something like military or religious adherence. In other words, conformists obey the authority and conform to the group, and you can easily observe this in Bible thumpers, which is pretty much people who just the ideology of whatever religion that they subscribe to is law, and that's all that comes out of their mouth.

They don't have a logical argument or any intellectual argument against the religion or for the religion. They're just that's their mind. And another helpful model here is Ken Wilbur's pre trans fallacy, which I find pretty fascinating where there's pre rational rational and post rational and in the sense of religious beliefs that can be characterized

as Bible thumper to atheists, to mystic, which is really interesting. And it shows a lot of people's evolutions. It's like Jordan Peterson, who was raised in a heavily Christian household, and then he kind of left and became agnostic. And now obviously now he's looping back around to God. He's writing a book. We wrestle with

we who wrestle with God, and he approaches things from a more symbolic or metaphorical point of view. Now, we all have our own thoughts about Peterson, but this is true for myself, where I was raised in a mormon household, and then I turned into an atheist after challenging those beliefs, and I've looped back around to a deeper understanding of the nature of reality.

And while most of the time I don't call the ultimate reality God, I do understand that it is there. And I don't really like calling it God because that for me, that's too reminiscent of the Bible thumper or the pre rational stage. And people begin to mistake my beliefs for that when I don't want that to be the case at all.

It's misinterpretation. But if God were the term, that's the term I would use. Now. The next stage after the conformance stage is the expert stage. The expert stage is characterized by self authorship, personal growth, tackling complex problems, self-reflection, and complex problem solving. Professionals live in the stage.

Engineering types. Skill centric scientific materialists who think everything can be explained through modern science or reductionism. They're good at doing task, but bad at knowing if they're doing the right task. They can't see if what they're doing is important for mankind. The experts are the know it alls. They think they know everything and that everything should be done their ways.

They're still in a singular perspective, and they think that that perspective is absolute truth. Now the next stage or stage four and these stage numbers are a bit off they go. Stage three, stage three, slash four. And now stage four is the achieve stage. Most of Western education and schooling are geared toward creating achievers.

This is the pinnacle stage of where people can end up in their mind. This is the definition of Western success. It's making a lot of money having a beautiful partner or spouse, having a nice car, or having a house. It's the American dream embodying as a perspective. And then in this stage, there is a shift from employee mindset to entrepreneur mindset.

A shift from I have this individual skill to how can I use this individual skill to utilize it in society. So in our space, this is the dominant paradigm of social media. It's a lot of business videos. It's a lot of self-help. You can think of Hamzah or Mozi as people in this stage. It's the self-improvement or business or masculinity

or relationship accounts to health, wealth, relationships, happiness accounts that are examples of achievers that have the occasional glimpse into post conventional stages. Now, a lot of them could be intelligently putting on an act to attract people in this stage. This is kind of often what I do with my YouTube titles. Sometimes my YouTube titles are very superficial and shallow

and focused on making a lot of money or getting a specific desired end result. But inside the video itself, I try to raise people to the next stages of development. And sometimes you see this in Hamzah, who talks about the way of the superior man, which is a very spiritual book, but it's oftentimes interpreted in this very like red pill masculinity frame.

So those are the conventional stages. And now we need to go over the post conventional stages, which is the top 15 to 20% of the population. And I say top. But you have to understand that these are just stages of development that people go through. Just because you're born into a pre conventional stage doesn't make that stage any worse. It's just how you develop their higher and lower.

And if that doesn't tickle your speech then don't consider it higher or lower. Just see them however you want. But that's how it is. Each stage has different goals and worldviews, meaning their idea of success evolves. So the system their mind runs on evolves with it. If we would consider an efficient system to be ordered, we can understand why chaos, discomfort, and pain are a part of development.

It's because you are ordering your mind and then you realize something new, and you have to change your perspective or embody more. And you're exposed to chaos. You're exposed to the unknown, you're taking steps into the unknown, and you need to create order out of that. Intelligence is questioning your beliefs, realizing deep generalized patterns, and realizing that all is relative except for those deep

generalized patterns that can be universally applied. The post conventional stages are where we start to encounter systems thinking that holes are greater than the sum of their parts, that reality is more like an organism than a machine that can be dissected and studied. The big step between tier one conventional and tier two post conventional thinking is just that. It's multi perspectival.

It's not just about your business model, self-help ideology or religion. You begin to notice the properties that compose them all, like how Christianity and Buddhism point to the same identity of reality. God, even though they would disagree on that because lower stages don't understand higher stages, but higher stages understand lower. Of course, non-ideological Buddhists are a different story,

but most hippies blindly adopt those beliefs without understanding. So in these stages you begin to collect more perspectives, and the higher you are on a mountain, the more you can see the multiple paths you can take to get there. So you have the desire to help more people because of that. So the next stage, stage 4 or 5, is the pluralist stage. This is where a fourth person perspective is discovered.

Pluralist began to step outside of the system. They grew up. Pluralist began to step outside of the system. They grew up in the status quo and questioned their beliefs and values. The most prevalent example would be a hippie who has a vision of everyone becoming a hippie, but they can't yet see the development others have gone through, so that vision falls flat. You can think of this as the evolution from Bible thumper

to atheist to a hippie who first discovered spirituality, but they still haven't looked back or integrated the truth from the Bible. Thumper. All of this, all evolution, especially the stages of development, are transcend and include. You transcend the last stage and you integrate its principles or its truths. So to think that you are just transcending survival mode

and you will never experience that or have to utilize that again is false. Or to think that most of your childhood impacts what you do and what you think right now is false. You have to integrate it and leverage it. Now the next stage, stage five, is the strategist. I personally resonate a lot with this stage.

I believe you never actually know. I don't know, I'm kind of just like guessing here, because I resonate with the stage, is that the past few years of my life were spent in this strategist stage. Strategists realize that intuition is more powerful than logic and rationality found in conventional stages. To think that something has been formally

proven is silly and close to impossible. In other words, you're kind of realizing that the reductionist worldview just doesn't work. Again, your systems thinking you understand that the whole has emergent properties that can't be found in the parts. So when you take, let's say, a, pig like one of the ones you dissect in biology class, they give you this dead pig and they're like, oh, go dissect it,

look at it, study the organs, all of that cool stuff. Maybe look at things with a microscope, but you're not taking into the you're not taking into account the ecological or the zoological, effect of that thing and how everything in the universe has to be taken into account in order to in order to come to the highest truth about whatever it is that you are studying with that specific little pig.

And you are also understanding that there is the observer as a part of that hypothesis or equation as well, that my mind at a specific stage of development with specific goals, is going to interpret the findings different from the next person. That is extremely important now in the strategist stage,

exploration and discovery start to become more important than achieving a goal or making a lot of money, which can often lead to achieving more goals and making more money. Counterintuitively, the strategist has a vision of what the world needs to move forward in the evolutionary process and understands the generalized principles of reality. If I could give you one thing to read, to understand the generalized principles of reality,

it would be the Kabbalah on. But of course, most biblical texts or scripture help understand these as well. They're just interpreted in a different way. And to be quite honest, they're helpful for the stories and understanding of history or, perceived history, but they also speak a different language that you may not understand.

So you may reach a higher level of understanding just by researching that topic from more modern texts. But that does strip a bit of the magic and soul from it. If it's approach from that scientific lens. So read both. Actually, one one book. I would recommend the systems view of life.

Kind of dense, kind of scientific. There isn't much of a story. It's kind of just like information, but if you're just looking for information, then it's worth reading. The strategist is a value creator. Their main concern is self-development. Other development self-actualization. Integration, and owning their shadow. Truth can be approximated, but higher is better.

A higher perspective is more truthful than not. Now the next stage, stage five M6 is the construct aware stage, and in my eyes, Jordan Peterson falls mostly between the construct aware and the strategist stage. But in terms of religion and his doubling down on Christianity in what seems to be a regression, he may not be there anymore,

or he may just have this conventional stage shadow. Of course, that is, unless he is using that as an act to introduce and help more people develop. In other words, he is helping the people or attracting the people in that conventional stage with the Christian worldview to see it from a more metaphorical or higher lens.

But one interesting thing is that if we have to go through these stages of development, I'm curious to see how he'll do that without first turning them atheist or agnostic like the development that he went through. Or if there's just a different pattern that people can go through. This is very interesting to me. Like, I wonder if they can turn away from hard core Christianity into

not so hard core Christianity, and then loop back to a more holistic view of it. I don't know if the mind were computer construct A where people would understand that conventional stages play one app or video game on that computer there on one site or browser. Post conventional stages can start to navigate the full desktop.

They can play the most meaningful games and even create their own. So the construct a where you start to gain this programmer mindset, you understand the inner workings of the computer itself. If reality is the display of the computer and people in the conventional stage or one perspective are simply operating within one browser tab or one app

that they refuse to leave the construct aware tap into a fifth dimension of thinking. The cognitive dimension. They can see how the mind constructs reality and meaning. They can see that most people find solace in a perspective, but they can't zoom out beyond those perspective themselves to a now larger whole. They can't adopt a meta perspective that houses other perspectives.

This is where the generalized principles of reality really start to click and connect. Unity and division. Creation and destruction, entropy and wealth. They begin to think about the world from a new abstract layer that can bring them pain, as they're constantly battling with the question of so what? What does this supposed mental masturbation do to help me? In other words, they often get so lost in abstractions or that meta perspective

that they can't ground it in reality or connect it to their decision making. Right now, I've experienced that quite a bit, and I'm sure many of you have too, with just intellectualizing all day and not being able to really understand what the point of that is, or philosophy. So maybe this is the stage where, well, there's probably a bunch of different stages, but this is one of the stages where it's like like, oh,

but that's that's just philosophy. It doesn't mean anything. Now the transcendent stages, the top 1% of psychological development and intelligence because of that, because intelligence can only expand to the level of your mind, the stage in this transcendent stage is called the Unitive stage. Now, this is as far as we're going in this video, but,

and I think it's the furthest studied, but Ken Wilber has like further stages that he has dabbled into or hypothesized about. So we'll see if this come about as the general stages of the population increase, like they have over time. Most people are in the conformist stage now. But what about in the tribal times when people couldn't speak and everyone thought the world was about them?

They were all in this lower stage of development. And as we move through revolution, more people are reaching higher stages. This is where I would put Alan Watts or Terence McKenna. This is actually kind of fun. I think it'd be fun to have the nine stages of ego development and do like a tier list of philosophers and where I think they land. That would be pretty cool. The thing with those thinkers, Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, is that they tap into source.

It's just infinite intelligence. You can just tell that by the ways that they speak. You're like, that is true. So a description of the unit of stage from Suzanne Cook Reuter, the person who, wrote her dissertation on ego development theory, reality is now regularly experienced as the undifferentiated phenomenological continuum or the creative ground of unified consciousness.

Every object, word, thought, feeling, and sensation. Every theory is understood as a human construct, separating out, creating boundaries where there are none. The quest for meaning and connection is an essential aspect of the human condition. Giving names to experience and making distinctions is necessary for human growth, study, interaction and communication. But at the source there is nothing to distinguish.

So in order to reach the top 1% or get to this unitive stage of development, you have to go through the rest. And that's going to take a lot of years. It's going to take a lot of years and development, and I'm not there yet. It's 1% of the population. Most people aren't there yet. And with that, you're going to have to go through a lot of pain. You're going to have to have your mind set in with the intention

to move through the stages and continue looking toward the next stage, rather than getting trapped in one specifically. But it does help to understand the traits of any given stage, so that you can notice and work towards that thing. So some traits of this unitive stage. The truth is imminent in the universe, but can't be grasped by logic or rationality.

They adopt a universal or cosmic perspective as the organizing principle in a steady place from which to derive meaning. Most definitions of enlightenment are achieved. They metabolize experience in a completely new, radically open way. They understand the need for a personal ego to survive, while also recognizing the illusion of the desire for permanence. The ego is useful as a perspective or lens when needed.

That is extremely important where a lot of people hippies, mainly in the like beginning of the post conventional stages, is that they reach that stage and they're like, oh, I figured it out. I'm just going to go off it, live in the woods, become a monk, not talk to anyone, cut off my connection from the world. I'm going to absolve myself of purpose when the people

at the unit of stage remember you transcend and include. They've integrated all of the truths and principles from the past stages, so they know that they can adopt the ego as a lens to act and help and contribute to mankind in the world. Next, dualities and conflict are witnessed without tension or the desire to change them. They live in a creative ground

and lean into an ongoing humanity, fulfilling their destiny of evolution. Life is seen as a form of temporary and sometimes a voluntary separation bodhisattva from the creative ground they are grounded in, so they can come down from this higher perspective, to adopt that lens of an ego, to act within the world. And that's kind of the middle way, the path of the bodhisattvas.

It's like Alan Watts, he's talked about that multiple times. And last, they aren't passive like conventional hippies assume. Instead, the non personal stance allows for more conscious, powerful, and direct action when it is needed. So to recap, intelligence isn't about book smarts or magnification. It's about expanding your mind towards truth. It's about holistic pattern recognition and aperture,

your ability to zoom out so far that all boundaries and limits are dissolved through conscious development, and having the awareness of when you're closing yourself off to growth and getting trapped in any stage, you can reach the unitive stage. In fact, my book the Art of focus, which I haven't talked about in a good amount of time, does exactly this. It kind of covers my steps to reaching,

to moving through most stages, at least from what I've learned. So thank you for watching. That's it. If you want to learn a high income skill to our writer, that allows for more meaning in your life as well. If you want just everything given to you for how to create your life's work, check out Digital Economics other links in the description. Check them out. Thank you for watching. Bye.