Simplified "Second Tier" Quiz

[Layman Pascal]

Hello Everybody,

I've been soliciting/compiling people's intuitions about the casual identification of the the "second tier personality". Many such simple selection tools must come into existence. Such a questionnaire must, in my opinion, meet the following criteria?

• Be short, easy, quick to fill out, NOT based on open-ended answers, NOT requiring great depth or time in order to interpret results.
• Does not need to be perfect. Only needs to initiate a boundary beyond which the odds of finding "integralites" is considerably increased.
• Should not be based primarily on "Theory". We are not looking for the "integrally-informed" person... nor are we trying to deploy any top-down personality analytics which correspond to the more developed academic models. Instead, we are working from the grassroots looking for the community to clarify its own sense of the instincts, capacities & response-patterns which characterize themselves.

So this is just a draft. Many of the questions of clumsy. I would love to know these things from you:

(a) do you find yourself basically answering yes to all these?

(b) is there a better phrasing? tighter? some slightly adjusted emphasis?

(c) which are least important? Ideally, this should get down to 10 Simple Questions.

CLUMSY DRAFT QUESTIONNAIRE

This brief questionnaire is looking for a certain type of person. It is not perfect but it allows us to increase the odds of finding the sort of people we are looking to benefit.

Are there really types of people? Can a simple questionnaire work? If you are unsure about these things, then you might be just the type we are looking for!

Please answer as honestly as possible...

Yes, No or Huh?

(Huh? will be counted as YES if you have more Yes-es,

or NO if you have more No’s.)

1. At some earlier point in your life, do you feel that you were more relativistic, “nihilistic”, exaggeratedly open-minded or unreasonably tolerant than you are now?

2. Do you consider yourself to be both pro-worldly & pro-transcendental? (That means you strongly feel the importance of action-in-the-world and something like a robust “inner” or “spiritual” practice...)

3. Do you feel naturally very interested in the pattern of developmental stages -- whether in the process of individual maturation or else in human history generally?

4. Have you noticed in yourself that you very quickly and very often move from your initial reaction (to people or situations) to an unexpected empathy with the opposite position... and then a fleeting sense that these positions are linked or explained by a common significance?

5. Do you often try to deal with yourself, other people and life situations by being very present? Does it seem to you that your consciousness, receptivity or sense-of-being can be a significant contribution?

6. Do you wish that more of your interactions with people should produce lucid flow, insights, exchange of high values, a feeling of inner “opening” and a sense of emergent novelty?  Are you ever concerned that your own naivete, lack of focus or avoidance of genuine intimacy inhibits this productive We-space?

7. Do you feel, for some reason, that you might have a lot personally in common with sensible, humanistic saints and great Wisdom-Teachers from every culture and tradition?

8. Do you basically agree with most Conservative, Mainstream & Progressive values -- but not necessarily with the people espousing those values?

9. Do you ever feel a strong interest in Grand Unifying ideas which attempt to integrate, coordinate and synthesize the enormous diversity of different theories, interpretations and human values?

10. Do you feel -- whether rightly or wrongly -- that you are inwardly in touch with either (a) a deeper sense of shared human experience or (b) an ultimate transpersonal being which is available through many diverse interpretations and lenses?

11. Do you discover that your own mind frequently takes perspectives about its own perspective -- and that this distance, depth or self-awareness helps maintain a kind of a spacious inner balance which allows you to feel less reactive in the face of things which are stressful, complicated or highly charged with personal and moral significance?

12. Do you observe people expressing themselves as parts of large populations of predictable worldviews... and do you wish that a new or deeper understanding would help resolve these repetitive tensions into a more integrated and harmoniously enriched dynamic complementarity?

13. Are you instinctively interested in the developmental potential of sore spots, negatives, frictions, resistances, etc.?

14. Do you find yourself slightly “turned off” by people whose statements DO NOT simultaneously respect subjective, objective and interpersonal experience?

15. Are you (or would you like to be) an ally of a New Culture -- one which is fulfills the glimpses that people encounter in their diverse “peak experiences”?

16. Does your thinking regularly end up favoring complementary, simultaneous, parallel or synchronized truths? Do you frequently find yourself needing to make a somewhat paradoxical double-affirmation ... “both/and”!

17. Do you feel the great variety of different human experiences and belief systems needs to be organized by some kind of unfolding creative inner-and-outer process or “evolution” -- and that you have some kind of responsibility to be a better and more conscious participant in this process?

18. Are you interested in the usefulness of “subtle” energies, visions, entities, miracles, etc. but reluctant to make any exaggerated or hasty belief-statements about them?

19. Are you subtly put off by people who seem to share your own style, preferences and values when they seem overly identified with those forms?

If you answered yes or scored highly on most of these questions there is a strong possibility that you belong the “type” we are looking for -- a type whose personality and preferences are variously called integral, second tier, transpersonal, centauric, new existentialism, post-post-modernism, evolutionary spirituality, enlightened dualism, panentheism, tantric buddhism, High Sufism, transrational humanism, the Work, post-metaphysical spirituality, the “friends of the Way”, etc.

Individuals with such sympathies and tendencies have existed sporadically throughout human history and have seldom been linked together or formed community for mutual benefit. We would like to change all that.

This change begins with people pondering the possibility that they might belong to a type. Then devising methods to concentrate more of this type in certain areas and arranging to benefit, empower, increase and deepen these people.

[Edward theurj Berge]

And this post and following. We can see the pattern to my thinking here, a radical* change to the typical notions of 2nd-tier.

* I just had to poke fun at this hackneyed kennilingus expression.

[Layman Pascal]

There is a role for more precise & less precise distinction-making.

When we are looking to locate (or increase the odds of locating) a high number of participants in the production of a new culture, or second tier holon, then we need to open ourselves beyond narrow cognitive definitions -- as useful as they are in specifying the real thing from its imitations.

It is entirely possible that people some people are aesthetically sensitive prior to their development of personal capacity. It is likely that some people who are in the "intermediary zone" move closer in by identifying and pondering a certain aspect of their own tendencies. And everyone who can be within second tier also has pre-second-tier systems operating in ways that do not always reveal their own leading edge. All of this is a very broad zone which must be encouraged and utilized apart from the concern to carefully police the border. 

We are looking for, in short, quasi-integralites. However I can get Indian status from the government if only my great-grandmother was Cherokee! For social activation purposes we must extend ourselves beyond, but around, what our theories specify as the key cognitive capacities. 

This is why I have specified that we are not trying to be "theorycentric" but rather to elicit and encourage the population of people whose tendencies, realized in varying degrees and styles, have tended to encourage the production of a variety of historical theories designed to describe them.

Obviously there is enormous overlap between these tasks... 

[Edward theurj Berge]

"There is a role for more precise & less precise distinction-making."

Perhaps so. I'll stick to my role and leave the networking and club-making to the more socially adept.

[Edward theurj Berge]

I'm also reminded of this SD FAQ post on tiers. And their article on the mean green meme, which notes that many who answer questionnaires on being yellow are really orange.

[Edward theurj Berge]

For example, from the latter article:

"When compiling and analyzing the data, an interesting dimension came to light -- Yellow false positive. [...] Selections of statements intended to elicit Yellow appear to be reflecting a more sophisticated form of Orange instead. [...] This might explain much of the 'second tier' elitism coming from MGM advocates [...] [that] results in a drive to convince self, and others, of living at 'second tier' (if such a thing actually exists!)" (4-5).

[e]

Hey LP,

These guys had a 60 item or so multiple choice questionnaire that generated a "psychograph" up to and including Yellow. Instead of indicating whether someone was categorically Blue, Orange, Green, Yellow, etc. The psychograph gauged how much a person accepted or rejected a particular value. I believe they call it a Values Test. They used to have a free download but I don't see it on their site anymore. I may have it on an old laptop...let me know if you want it.

http://www.onlinepeoplescan.com/indprofile.asp

[Edward theurj Berge]

If the recent posts in this thread (here and above) are an accurate variant of a postmetaphysical basis, and if it is a more accurate depiction of what constitutes postformal operations (postop), then it legitimately questions the typical kennilingus formulations as a more sophisticated form of formal operations (formop). The SD FAQ and article support that formop is indeed the origin of the so-called MGM meme, which argument comes right from the Lingam's mouth.* All of which calls into question any such 'test' of postop if it is based on kennilingus formop assumptions, including those of the MHC, itself the basis for much of these claims. The real/false reason thread focuses on the latter with similar postop alternatives, also erroneously labeled 'green' if not MGM by the metaphysical formopers.

* As is the so-called performative contradition charge against so-called 'green,' itself a formop argument incapable of understanding the type of paraconsistent logic used in the linked posts. Note also in the linked posts that this type of paraconsistent logic is distinguished from "various spin-offs or derivative,** the former of which is lumped in with the latter in kennilingus critiques due to the lack of distinction above.

** See X for this differentiation.

[Edward theurj Berge]

I  didn't have time to edit the last post so the X above is in reference to Catherine Keller in this post and the one linked therein.

[Edward theurj Berge]

Here's a link to the book Process and Difference, which Keller edited. From her introduction:

“He [Griffin] does not however engage Derrida, who coined the term deconstruction, nor Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, or Julia Kristeva, or indeed any of the French theorists whom one thinks of as originators of the 'deconstructive postmodernism' to which this series offers the preferred alternative. Instead, he disputes with U.S. philosophers like Karl Popper, Wilfrid Sellars, and Keith Campbell. They are no doubt worthy opponents. Yet their questions, terms, and analytic methods simply do not represent what is known as 'deconstruction.' Indeed there is if anything less tolerance between North American philosophy and French deconstruction than between the latter and process thought.”

Although I'd add that as noted elsewhere some North American philosophy does have kinship, like James, Dewey, Mead and Peirce, the predecessors of the cogscipragos.