Life Levels are a measure of one’s underlying method of operations; they are not a measure of one’s virtues or skills, though it can be all too easy to mistake skills or virtues for Life Level.
For instance, the openminded empiricism of LL4 naturally leads people to develop patience (a virtue) and good listening skills. Those are inevitable outgrowths of LL4. However, this does *not* mean that all good listeners are LL4, nor that all patient people are LL4. The skill and the virtue are symptoms of LL4, and they do naturally result from the LL, but they can (with some difficulty) be attained at lower LLs as well. They are symptoms, but they are not the LL itself.
Life Levels are a matter of modus operandi, not a matter of skill or virtue. In the case of LL4, this LL operates in all aspects of life according to one overall method: seeking the truth of all things at any personal cost. This method of operations does, eventually yet inevitably, lead to all the symptomatic virtues and skills of LL4, but none of those symptoms are the LL itself.
Someone who operates fully according to LL4 methods, but who is relatively new to this method, may not yet have had time to accumulate all the telltale skills. But that is immaterial; all that matters for Life Level is one’s underlying method; the symptoms come later, as gradual by-products.
For instance, people who have spent a lot of time operating at LL4 (or above) tend to adopt a particularly openminded way of speaking. They become more and more careful to constantly and verbally acknowledge the limits of their own understanding, using terms like “this seems to be such-and-such a way” rather than “this *is* such-and-such a way,” and “this suggests that” rather than “this *proves* that.” This way of speaking is a skill, reflecting the attitudes resultant from LL4. However, being a mere skill, it is only a symptom of the LL. A person might operate upon pure LL4 methods while not having yet developed this particular skill. But does their failure to verbally communicate their openminded attitude somehow mean that they do not have an openminded attitude? No. The underlying LL is what matters; the related skills and virtues are just telltale signs.
This means that we can never judge another’s LL by the surface; we cannot merely appraise someone’s virtues and skills in order to judge their underlying method of operations. An older LL1 person may have had time to develop many more skills than a younger LL4 person (albeit at a much slower rate), yet it would be foolish to conclude that the skilled LL1 person employs a better method than the as-yet unskilled LL4 person. Higher LL does always result in faster growth in both virtues and skills, but even the fastest growth requires some amount of time before it can bear fruit. We must be careful and not condemn unskilled or unvirtuous people who are, in fact, rapidly growing in skills and virtues even as we speak. A high LL person may start out with few virtues and skills, but they will not remain that way for long.
This is why investing time and energy toward improving one’s underlying Life Level is better than investing toward improving virtues or skills alone, let alone investing toward improving mere factual knowledge or external possessions.
On a personal note: We peasants are doing all we can to grow as quickly as we can in all areas we can. And we are learning more every day…but that necessarily means that, as we learn new things, we come to see flaws in some of our past efforts. We come to notice deficiencies of skill in some of our earlier posts. We come to realize that some things, which we thought had been communicated clearly, in fact came off in a way totally alien to what we intended. In such instances, we try to smooth off the rough edges and proceed more skillfully than before.
Nevertheless, we hope you can be patient with us. We hope that, when our skills at communication fail, you can give us the benefit of the doubt that it is merely a matter of skill deficiency, rather than virtue deficiency, and then proceed to ask clarifying questions to determine whether we really meant to say what we seemed (perhaps inadvertently) to say. Likewise, we try to be very careful in how we react to the things that others write or say. If we do say that a particular person’s words *seem* to be LL3, for instance, then we are very careful to make sure we have good reason to say so (and we stay willing to change our minds).
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