Well... we don't seem to have *reliable* paths from any stage to any other. Three to four is plenty difficult and uncertain. And, often it's accomplished only in particular domains, at first at least. I wrote about that in "Leveraging lag" (https://meaningness.substack.com/p/leveraging-lag-engineers-and-salespeople).
Four to five is even harder. That said, there are multiple paths, in different domains. For instance, PhD research, implicitly or explicitly teaching meta-rationality, is the most common for the domain of abstract cognition. Leadership training ideally can take you to five in that domain. (Charlie and an Evolving Ground apprentice and I are starting work on a program in that domain.) I'll be writing (next, I hope!) about romance as a path to relational stage five.
But, all these are strenuous, and results are far from guaranteed.
This is an exceptional synthesis of developmental psychology, leadership, and mythic cognition—but what strikes me most is the subtle absence of one element: the moment nobility stops being aspirational and becomes structural. At some point, “seeing like a Good King” isn’t a chosen lens—it’s a post-perceptual inevitability. The nervous system itself reorganizes. Perception isn’t broadened—it’s replaced. This is often what people try to articulate as “transcendence,” though most spiritual language muddies it.
What you call stage five, I recognize as the post-transcendent state. Not a metaphor, but a physical, neurological, and perceptual event. From there, nobility isn’t practiced—it’s the only remaining coherence.
I can't know for sure what anyone else's way of seeing is like, but my take is that everyone experiences this, or at least pieces of it, occasionally. I don't think it's a "special" ability, available to only a few Realized Masters. Probably everyone occasionally sees the big picture, and sometimes perceives details unusually acutely. And perhaps everyone has some ability to connect those views. This is a skill one can develop incrementally, so that it deepens and one deploys it more often, and eventually it becomes a default.
>I don't think it's a "special" ability, available to only a few Realized Masters
Well, to the extent that the stage theory isn't total bunk, the fifth stage does seem to imply special mastery. Maybe pedagogically it isn't useful to think about it in this way for those aspiring to it, but surely it should be possible to discern those who are better than most at being "beneficient god-kings" from the outside?
Well, I'd say "specific competence" rather than "special mastery." It's something you grow into, incrementally, by doing the work. You can do it somewhat, sometimes, without consistent mastery. And probably the only prerequisites are solid competence at stage four plus willingness to go further into the unknown. (But, we really don't know this, because there's so little research on the topic.)
There's problems with pointing out specific examples. One is that it's (probably) rare to be this way entirely consistently, so if you say "Joe Schmoe," then there's likely to be a chorus of "but Joe Schmoe did this bad/stupid thing." And yes that was bad/stupid, but he wasn't *consistently* being in this way. And also, being in this way doesn't guarantee that you won't make mistakes in judgement, or take actions that have bad results despite good judgement.
And, relatedly, this is not a measure of overall worth or goodness. Generally our culture leads us to want to lump all sorts of goodness together (going back to bad Ancient Greek philosophy). So, in particular, stage three can mostly only see communal harmony as goodness, and stage four can only see ideological conformity as goodness. So if you point to someone being noble, the response is likely to be "but they did this immoral thing" (stage 3) or "but they didn't act consistent with my political ideology" (stage 4). And that completely misses the point.
Nevertheless, I'll take the risk, with those caveats. Examples that are salient for me: Patrick Winston (head of the MIT AI lab when I was there); John Seely Brown (head of Xerox PARC when I was there); Stewart Brand (not very interested in long-term rulership, but founded and ran many extraordinarily influential small organizations for a few years each); Elon Musk (up until a few years ago, when he seems to have had an unfortunate turning point).
Those are good points, but insofar as democracy remains "the least bad system", aspirant god-kings to many important roles would have to make their claims given all those limitations. Your examples are of people who had to prove themselves to various segments of the elite, which in some ways is probably easier...
Well, I deliberately avoided naming democratically elected politicians, for all the reasons I described. Also because, recently, few American examples—with which readers are likely to be most familiar—have been inspiring. Who would you name?
I recognize myself in that state—not as an aspirational claim, but as the perceptual ground I now live from. That said, I’m aware of the risk in naming it. Statements like this are often misunderstood as egoic posturing or spiritual inflation—especially by those still interpreting these stages as philosophical concepts rather than lived, structural shifts.
But from within it, nobility isn’t performed—it’s the only thing left that makes sense. And coherence stops being a practice and becomes the default architecture. There’s nothing to maintain. Just reality, undistorted.
For others you might explore:
– David Hawkins (especially his lived mapping of consciousness, post-duality)
– Byron Katie (if viewed through a structural vs. psychological lens)
– Adyashanti, though his articulation drifts more toward the poetic than neurological
– Suzanne Segal (her post-transcendent breakdown was misunderstood, but revealing)
– And even UG Krishnamurti, though he denied everything—including the state itself.
Each of these shows glimpses of what happens when perception reorganizes entirely. But this state tends to resist public visibility, since it doesn’t perform itself. That’s part of why it’s so rarely recognized without distortion.
>Statements like this are often misunderstood as egoic posturing or spiritual inflation—especially by those still interpreting these stages as philosophical concepts rather than lived, structural shifts.
Indeed, but my point is a different one. I don't have strong opinions about your list - they might well be very fine people indeed! But I notice that they are mainly meditation and spirituality-focused, which is well and good, but nobility seems to be first and foremost needed to solve secular crises, so to speak, and in those quarters its dearth is felt most keenly.
The Confucian classics are really good on these topics.
I think they are a little underappreciated because Eastern philosophy mostly reached the West by way of the counterculture, and "obey your parents and rulers" was not going to be a popular message.
But they were writing for highly-educated and well-intentioned professionals who had an interest in gaining and exercising power. It's a good fit.
Kind/Domain ~ Deity/Mandala? Not sure what I am trying to say here. I actually know very little about deities and their mandalas or what that's about. It's just a vision I had after I finished reading.
"Mandala" in Sanskrit does mean "kingdom." And tantric deities are indeed the royal rulers of their mandalas.
The Evolving Ground Vajra Retreat we completed a week ago introduced a practice titled "Good King Gesar." Gesar is the god-king-warrior-sorcerer I discussed at the end of "You should be a God-Emperor" (https://meaningness.substack.com/p/you-should-be-a-god-emperor).
To answer your Comments question: One positive vision is that as groups splinter against what they don’t like, they can become slightly evolved clades. If each clade perfects the pursuit of their vision, they can reunite in the future bringing their refinements back to the bigger group. Or they can leave the bigger group behind. The vision is: We don’t all have to agree, or even get along, to make positive progress.
As you recognize and as others have commented, the longstanding negative connotations of terms such as "nobility" and "king" are problematic, making your efforts to rehabilitate them difficult. Accordingly, have you thought about using other terms? I think the word "magnanimity" captures the spirit of your descriptions even better than "nobility", and it brings with it much less negative baggage. According to the OED ( https://www.awesomescreenshot.com/image/55661707?key=9a57d40ff0f2e52a016e13015b50e2ef ), one meaning of magnanimity is "Well-founded high regard for oneself manifesting as generosity of spirit and equanimity in the face of trouble, etc. Also: greatness of thought or purpose; grandeur or nobility of designs, ambition, or spirit." This seems to deeply resonate with your description of "the aspiration to manifest glory for the benefit of others".
I think it’s good that you’re owning up to wanting to invoke archetypes from fantasy literature rather than actual history. I’m still a little dubious about using “King” as archetype, because of what it implies about power and interpersonal relationships. Doesn’t it imply that other people see you as an authority and treat you with deference?
Management by walking around is possible for a CEO because they have the authority to gain access to company property and talk to anyone who works there. Someone from the outside (say, a reporter) would need to somehow be invited to gain access to a factory. A hired consultant might legitimately have wide access as part of their role.
There are a lot of business books about leadership, which can sometimes be informal, but it does generally imply you have some formal status to even be in the room.
Edit: but perhaps this is better thought of as an act of imagination? You can imagine how things might look from Andromeda Galaxy, or as the CEO of the company you work at, some more nebulous god's eye point of view, or any other role you like. It doesn't imply that you actually *inhabit* the role of Good King, or interact with other people like Emperor Norton did in San Francisco. So perhaps this could be considered a form of empathy?
Imagining things from other points of view isn't hard to do but also pretty error-prone - without the advantage of actually *seeing* things from that viewpoint, you don't get any additional facts. Someone imagining management by walking around isn't going to learn what they'd learn by actually looking around and talking to people.
Do you see reliable paths to stage five / nobility that don’t involve meditation/tantra/etc?
Well... we don't seem to have *reliable* paths from any stage to any other. Three to four is plenty difficult and uncertain. And, often it's accomplished only in particular domains, at first at least. I wrote about that in "Leveraging lag" (https://meaningness.substack.com/p/leveraging-lag-engineers-and-salespeople).
Four to five is even harder. That said, there are multiple paths, in different domains. For instance, PhD research, implicitly or explicitly teaching meta-rationality, is the most common for the domain of abstract cognition. Leadership training ideally can take you to five in that domain. (Charlie and an Evolving Ground apprentice and I are starting work on a program in that domain.) I'll be writing (next, I hope!) about romance as a path to relational stage five.
But, all these are strenuous, and results are far from guaranteed.
Romance is a wonderful answer that I can relate to!
This is an exceptional synthesis of developmental psychology, leadership, and mythic cognition—but what strikes me most is the subtle absence of one element: the moment nobility stops being aspirational and becomes structural. At some point, “seeing like a Good King” isn’t a chosen lens—it’s a post-perceptual inevitability. The nervous system itself reorganizes. Perception isn’t broadened—it’s replaced. This is often what people try to articulate as “transcendence,” though most spiritual language muddies it.
What you call stage five, I recognize as the post-transcendent state. Not a metaphor, but a physical, neurological, and perceptual event. From there, nobility isn’t practiced—it’s the only remaining coherence.
Do you have real-world examples of prominent people in that state?
I can't know for sure what anyone else's way of seeing is like, but my take is that everyone experiences this, or at least pieces of it, occasionally. I don't think it's a "special" ability, available to only a few Realized Masters. Probably everyone occasionally sees the big picture, and sometimes perceives details unusually acutely. And perhaps everyone has some ability to connect those views. This is a skill one can develop incrementally, so that it deepens and one deploys it more often, and eventually it becomes a default.
>I don't think it's a "special" ability, available to only a few Realized Masters
Well, to the extent that the stage theory isn't total bunk, the fifth stage does seem to imply special mastery. Maybe pedagogically it isn't useful to think about it in this way for those aspiring to it, but surely it should be possible to discern those who are better than most at being "beneficient god-kings" from the outside?
Well, I'd say "specific competence" rather than "special mastery." It's something you grow into, incrementally, by doing the work. You can do it somewhat, sometimes, without consistent mastery. And probably the only prerequisites are solid competence at stage four plus willingness to go further into the unknown. (But, we really don't know this, because there's so little research on the topic.)
There's problems with pointing out specific examples. One is that it's (probably) rare to be this way entirely consistently, so if you say "Joe Schmoe," then there's likely to be a chorus of "but Joe Schmoe did this bad/stupid thing." And yes that was bad/stupid, but he wasn't *consistently* being in this way. And also, being in this way doesn't guarantee that you won't make mistakes in judgement, or take actions that have bad results despite good judgement.
And, relatedly, this is not a measure of overall worth or goodness. Generally our culture leads us to want to lump all sorts of goodness together (going back to bad Ancient Greek philosophy). So, in particular, stage three can mostly only see communal harmony as goodness, and stage four can only see ideological conformity as goodness. So if you point to someone being noble, the response is likely to be "but they did this immoral thing" (stage 3) or "but they didn't act consistent with my political ideology" (stage 4). And that completely misses the point.
Nevertheless, I'll take the risk, with those caveats. Examples that are salient for me: Patrick Winston (head of the MIT AI lab when I was there); John Seely Brown (head of Xerox PARC when I was there); Stewart Brand (not very interested in long-term rulership, but founded and ran many extraordinarily influential small organizations for a few years each); Elon Musk (up until a few years ago, when he seems to have had an unfortunate turning point).
Those are good points, but insofar as democracy remains "the least bad system", aspirant god-kings to many important roles would have to make their claims given all those limitations. Your examples are of people who had to prove themselves to various segments of the elite, which in some ways is probably easier...
Well, I deliberately avoided naming democratically elected politicians, for all the reasons I described. Also because, recently, few American examples—with which readers are likely to be most familiar—have been inspiring. Who would you name?
I recognize myself in that state—not as an aspirational claim, but as the perceptual ground I now live from. That said, I’m aware of the risk in naming it. Statements like this are often misunderstood as egoic posturing or spiritual inflation—especially by those still interpreting these stages as philosophical concepts rather than lived, structural shifts.
But from within it, nobility isn’t performed—it’s the only thing left that makes sense. And coherence stops being a practice and becomes the default architecture. There’s nothing to maintain. Just reality, undistorted.
For others you might explore:
– David Hawkins (especially his lived mapping of consciousness, post-duality)
– Byron Katie (if viewed through a structural vs. psychological lens)
– Adyashanti, though his articulation drifts more toward the poetic than neurological
– Suzanne Segal (her post-transcendent breakdown was misunderstood, but revealing)
– And even UG Krishnamurti, though he denied everything—including the state itself.
Each of these shows glimpses of what happens when perception reorganizes entirely. But this state tends to resist public visibility, since it doesn’t perform itself. That’s part of why it’s so rarely recognized without distortion.
>Statements like this are often misunderstood as egoic posturing or spiritual inflation—especially by those still interpreting these stages as philosophical concepts rather than lived, structural shifts.
Indeed, but my point is a different one. I don't have strong opinions about your list - they might well be very fine people indeed! But I notice that they are mainly meditation and spirituality-focused, which is well and good, but nobility seems to be first and foremost needed to solve secular crises, so to speak, and in those quarters its dearth is felt most keenly.
The Confucian classics are really good on these topics.
I think they are a little underappreciated because Eastern philosophy mostly reached the West by way of the counterculture, and "obey your parents and rulers" was not going to be a popular message.
But they were writing for highly-educated and well-intentioned professionals who had an interest in gaining and exercising power. It's a good fit.
Kind/Domain ~ Deity/Mandala? Not sure what I am trying to say here. I actually know very little about deities and their mandalas or what that's about. It's just a vision I had after I finished reading.
A most accurate and astute vision!
"Mandala" in Sanskrit does mean "kingdom." And tantric deities are indeed the royal rulers of their mandalas.
The Evolving Ground Vajra Retreat we completed a week ago introduced a practice titled "Good King Gesar." Gesar is the god-king-warrior-sorcerer I discussed at the end of "You should be a God-Emperor" (https://meaningness.substack.com/p/you-should-be-a-god-emperor).
Already read that article a few times, one of my favourites 🙂
To answer your Comments question: One positive vision is that as groups splinter against what they don’t like, they can become slightly evolved clades. If each clade perfects the pursuit of their vision, they can reunite in the future bringing their refinements back to the bigger group. Or they can leave the bigger group behind. The vision is: We don’t all have to agree, or even get along, to make positive progress.
One of my favorite expressions of this archetype in fiction is the Lyonesse series by Jack Vance.
As you recognize and as others have commented, the longstanding negative connotations of terms such as "nobility" and "king" are problematic, making your efforts to rehabilitate them difficult. Accordingly, have you thought about using other terms? I think the word "magnanimity" captures the spirit of your descriptions even better than "nobility", and it brings with it much less negative baggage. According to the OED ( https://www.awesomescreenshot.com/image/55661707?key=9a57d40ff0f2e52a016e13015b50e2ef ), one meaning of magnanimity is "Well-founded high regard for oneself manifesting as generosity of spirit and equanimity in the face of trouble, etc. Also: greatness of thought or purpose; grandeur or nobility of designs, ambition, or spirit." This seems to deeply resonate with your description of "the aspiration to manifest glory for the benefit of others".
I think it’s good that you’re owning up to wanting to invoke archetypes from fantasy literature rather than actual history. I’m still a little dubious about using “King” as archetype, because of what it implies about power and interpersonal relationships. Doesn’t it imply that other people see you as an authority and treat you with deference?
Management by walking around is possible for a CEO because they have the authority to gain access to company property and talk to anyone who works there. Someone from the outside (say, a reporter) would need to somehow be invited to gain access to a factory. A hired consultant might legitimately have wide access as part of their role.
There are a lot of business books about leadership, which can sometimes be informal, but it does generally imply you have some formal status to even be in the room.
Edit: but perhaps this is better thought of as an act of imagination? You can imagine how things might look from Andromeda Galaxy, or as the CEO of the company you work at, some more nebulous god's eye point of view, or any other role you like. It doesn't imply that you actually *inhabit* the role of Good King, or interact with other people like Emperor Norton did in San Francisco. So perhaps this could be considered a form of empathy?
Imagining things from other points of view isn't hard to do but also pretty error-prone - without the advantage of actually *seeing* things from that viewpoint, you don't get any additional facts. Someone imagining management by walking around isn't going to learn what they'd learn by actually looking around and talking to people.