🌐 Compassion for the assumed world

As I started writing this week's email, a friend texted me the following question. Although it's specifically regarding Integral Theory, I believe you can distill the general concepts for exploring relateful compassion by replacing "levels" (or any color reference) with "my assumptions about others":

Q: How do you cultivate compassion/openness vs judgment when you use Integral framework as a lens for navigating relationships and the world in general?

Third: whatever worldview someone is operating from in a given moment indicates that they assume a corresponding outer world.

Eg: A friend using an egocentric (red) mentality assumes they’re living in a dog-eat-dog (red) world of honor, respect, personal gain as king, and opportunists who will take advantage of anyone for personal gain at any moment. The same is true of you at any moment you’re using this egocentric mentality. So there’s compassion to the extent that you/they are wrong about that world—what a bummer to assume things are much worse than they are! And there’s gratitude to the extent that you/they are right—thank god you can assess what’s needed and use it.

Sometimes trying to use a higher level of maturity is like trying to hammer a nail with a machine learning algorithm; it’s not necessary and it makes the problem insanely harder than using a hammer. Other times you can get taken advantage of by not being aware of more fundamental levels—this happened to a friend of mine in real estate development recently.

With love, Jordan