Spiral Dynamics: Important Insights & Nuances
Sloppy application of spiral dynamics:
- Is a very complicated, nuanced and rich model, and that makes it so powerful
- Maybe after 30-40 hours of trying and applying it your own life and see where you're making mistakes and getting corrections to all that only then this model reveals it's whole potential
- It's easy to use this model to judge, classify, pigeon hole people and not get the whole fruit of it
- It takes dozens of hours of studying and application to understand the nuances of this model and how it gets misapplied
3 lines: additional ways to slice and dice the same thing and talk about human development and evolution of consciousness( additional vocabulary to understand evolution of mankind)
Lines of development: additional vocabulary to understand the evolution of mankind
Moral development & Cognitive development
- These can be developed individually
Moral:
Egocentric - about myself
Ethnocentric - all about my community
World-centric - concerned about the world
Cosmo-centric - concerned about all cosmos
Circle of concern is expanding wider and wider with each of these stage
Cognitive:
Sensorimotor - basic cognitive development that toddler child goes through
Emotional - also toddlers and babies go through
Con op( conventional operational)
Form op( formal operation) - most adults stop their cognitive development here( sort of rationalist cognitive function)
Post-formal( post-modern)
Vision-logic - advance form of thinking and reasoning which really goes beyond reasoning into vision an into higher states of intuitive understanding
Psychic
Nondual
- To apply the model properly you have to understand the notion of the center of gravity of a stage. E.g. When I say a country\ person is at stage orange it doesn't mean that is 100% orange and have no other qualities and characteristics from other stages rather they're 50% orange( their center of gravity) 25% spills into green and 25% spills into blue. Very few people are 100% one particular colour. This is what makes this model a little bit messy and when you're trying to apply/ diagnose you think that it doesn't fit.
- Movement up the spiral it's incremental( but not by 100% from stage to stage), jumping up but you're sort of slowly inching your way up and this applies to societies as well( has more diverse elements in it than an individual, there are different regions, cultures, sub-cultures, cities, rural areas, some parts are more advanced than others)
- Individual psyche does quite have a bit of diversity and people are complex we can't boil them down to one single dimension/ color
- These stages stack on top of each other: every stage is necessary. In the same way that 5th grade stay on top of 4th grade. It's now like you get to 5th grade and throw away all information, knowledge from previous grades and demonize, ridicule them, because it's a progressive ladder that we're climbing it together. It's only by understanding the necessity of each stages, only then you can stop demonizing and judge them. E.g. what it means to be at stage green is that it incorporates the lessons from previous stages.
- When you evolve to a stage you transcend and include( not demonize) it and bring the healthy elements with you and leave behind the pathological, dysfunctional, limiting elements of orange
- Doesn't mean if you're on a higher stage of the spiral that everyone in the world can be: you need to be very cognizant of your own privilege and good luck received as a child growing up: decent family, decent economic situation, able to get education. By the virtue the advancement of society that you're in you're standing on the shoulders of giants, be careful not to expect the rest of the world to already be there
- Society and culture are always evolving their way up the spiral. We've had several thousands of years of evolution culturally. The only reasons you're on higher stages on the spiral is of the reason on how much society and culture has helped you. Society has a pulling up and down effect, this depends on the center of gravity of your society. Society, friends and family will pull you down to their level and think you're nuts for trying to go beyond, and in history that's how it always was.
- In order to develop individuals we need to evolve the culture and society but we can't do that because all the people who are voting and making decisions are at lower levels who create low consciousness society. It takes time and we have to bootstrap ourselves. Most people who are born in a 1st world country they are already in a an orange or green society and take it for granted and have the tendency to criticize blue people for being to religious or fundamentalist
What these stages represents:
Each color stage represents density of EGO:
- RED: more dense EGO than BLUE, ORANGE etc. Expanding on what you're identifying yourself with. The sense of void/ formlessness within you is identifying with more and more form. Starts with physical body, expands to your tribe and nation, beyond to entire race and part of the world, entire human species and in the end you identify literally with everything. Because generally that's what consciousness is doing: SD is not just a human thing is just 1 particular case or example of evolution as a whole by developing more complexity expanding.
Each color stage represents levels of cognitive development:
- Is how you think/ mind work. Every color of stage represents a more sophisticated nuanced and complex way of thinking about reality and understand it. A way of thinking that builds on top of older ways of thinking. E.g. Reptilian brain -> Mammalian brain( sits on top of reptilian) -> Human brain( sits on top of both); Like updating your software from 1.0 to 2.0 and so on
- Your cognitive development really determines your value system and also the needs that you have
Each stage represents the ability to take on more perspective:
- This is one of the keys to understanding how to climb the spiral quickly, it's about taking on more points of view beyond your limited egoic perspective
- The thing that keep people stuck at their level and not evolving is that they get stuck in one perspective or another
- A mistake that many people who are good at dealing with different perspectives and looking at the world through different lenses they assume that everybody can do this. Majority of mankind( 21 century) is incapable doing that.
- Looking at the world from multiple perspectives and being able to be mentally and cognitively flexible enough to jump and abandon your own perspective and look at different points of view that's like a skill
- Most of stages are not good at this: especially stage blue and bellow, they don't even acknowledge the existence or importance of perspective, for them it's just reality and the truth. That's why those people are so close minded: especially at stages like blue, orange or even green. E.g. don't be surprised if stage blue are not being able to see all the interconnectedness of all religions and culture in the world. It's ethnocentric and can be quite racist. This is just how that mind work at that level of development
- E.g. Stage blue: is the ability to see for the perspective of your civilization and culture. Blue stage is unable to step outside of the perspective of his culture, race, ethnicity, religion, his mind needs a software upgrade towards orange and by that becoming less ethnocentric and more world-centric but also get stuck in science and rationality.
- If you want to evolve very rapidly through the spiral you have to become very good at dropping old perspectives and taking on new perspective
- Looking at the world from a new perspective is challenging, difficult, taxing for the mind to see a problem in a new creative way but you can train yourself to get good at this
As society evolves, survival needs change:
- Spiral Dynamics stages: responses to various kinds of survival needs. Each set of survival need corresponds with a particular environment that it needs to survive in
- Mankind creates and shapes its own environment which adds a very interesting extra layer of depth to this whole survival needs issue. Mankind don't survive in a dessert, tundra, we survive within the society and culture that we create most to suit ourselves, but as we do this we're becoming our greatest enemies because it's our changing social climate, changing technological advances that are happening that now creates new sets of survival needs, is no longer about physical dominance but how capable you are at socializing, playing politics that's what you need to survive in modern society.
- Having big muscles is not so important these days but knowing how to use your mind though that's very important: can earn you millions of dollars. Right skillset: program, socialize, network with people( soft skills) are more important than hard skills( lumber jack, cutting down trees, drive bulldozer)
- At big picture level consciousness is bootstrapping itself and building the infrastructure that it needs to facilitate more consciousness.
Distinction between stages, states, types and lines of development( Ken Wilber: visionary thinker) - additional dimension:
- SD: color stages - but don't explain everything
- States( additional layer of complexity): waking, dreaming, deep sleep, various mystical, non-dual, psychedelic, emotional states. Mystical states are possible at any stage, Any mystical experience will be interpreted through the lens of the stage you're at.
- Distinction between awakening and development: these are independent things but there is some correlation, the more developed you are the more likely you are to be awaken or be interested in it. You really want both. Awakening: waking up from the dream; Development: develop yourself - withing the dream
- Types: masculine vs feminine( various Myers Briggs personality types - 16 of them; Enneagram - 9 of them and other types): E.g. you can be masculine or feminine at every color of the spiral: this adds an additional independent axis, additional dimension
- As SD model as is becoming more complicated it gets better at explaining human behavior
Lines: human psyche has different facets to it, when we talk about SD we're talking about one line: cognitive development and values, but there's more. E.g. You can have a high level of cognitive development but a low level of emotional or moral development.
Types of development lines:
- Cognitive and values
- Emotional
- Moral
- Career and livelihood
- Health, nutrition & diet
- Interpersonal relationships
- Metaphysical and spiritual
- Education
- Political
- Psychosexual
- Kinesthetic
When evaluating: let's focus on the moral line( green? Orange? Blue?), how is their interpersonal development( these can be different)
E.g. Line an RPG character:
- Stage orange cognitive development but moral development stage red. How developed you are when you interact with other people?
- Metaphysical and spiritual very high but cognitive level of development will only be at stage orange or blue
- If you want to develop yourself you want to become a well-rounded human being, especially some of these lines are important to increase otherwise they're going to be sticking points for you and drag you down ruining your entire life. This doesn't need to mean that you'll be perfect in every line, in practice will be very difficult because raising even one of these lines will be very difficult to do
- Most people is lob-sided: nobody is the same color across the board
- What happens when we apply this model for collective groups like: corporations, nations, religions, sports teams and families: there are different lines there also. E.g. Country: lines there might be: economy, religion, culture, media, food, politics, science and technological development level, medicine system, education system, business and marketing, law enforcement, prison system, mental health, how family and marriage is viewed within that country, art. Each of these lines can have different levels of development. E.g. a country can be highly developed economically and at a low level spiritual level of development( America) or vice-versa( India)
- If you really want to apply SD to a complex problem( business, policy etc.) you would really want to break it down into all these individual lines. E.g. reforming legal system: at what level is our legal system at? Let's say orange: what would a green/ yellow legal system look like
E.g. Masculine/ feminine and moral lines at play in the real world:
Difference between masculine and feminine:
Masculine emphasis on value of:
- Rights
- Autonomy
- Individuality
- Agency
- Thinking
- Freedom
Feminine emphasis on value of:
- Care
- Connection
- Compassion
- Feeling rather than thinking
- Relationship
- Community
- This masculine feminine will play out at different colors of the spiral in different ways: What does autonomy plays out at stage red vs stage orange? Compassion for a women at: red, orange, yellow
How moral development line evolved:
3 cruel phases( orientation towards the world):
- Selfish
- Caring
- Universal care
3 finer phase:
When you're born your only care is about you
As you get socialized: it's about us( family, tribe, nation, city, corporation) - shift in moral development
Must include all decent human being: my levels of care extends to every human being that isn't evil
Care for all human beings without exception
Care for all living beings on earth without exception
Care for all sentient beings on all places on all planets and all realms
Care for all reality( past, present and future) - Gods perspective
E.g. Feminist: all war happened from men fault but that's not true because there's different flavors of masaculine
- These different color stages cannot be seen through introspection, sitting on a meditation cushion, they require wide scientific research, go out and study lots of groups of individuals across the whole world: different cultures, societies, races and compile all data and only them you see this model unfold
- Enlightenment itself has no stages, it's absolute. How you interpret it depends very much on what stage you're at
Spiral dynamics don't account for everything, there are independent factors:
- IQ
- Spiritual attunement
- Karma
- Genetics and environment
- Early trauma
- Physical/ mental illness: psychopaths, sociopaths
- Racial differences
- Class differences
- Economic status
Psychological factors and things which are independent of your stage on the spiral( can happen at any stage):
- Judgement
- Hatred
- Addiction
- Fear
- Demonization
- Projection
- Radicalization
- Ideology and dogma
- Paradigm lock
- Duality
- Justification
- Distraction
- Self-bias
- Ignorance
- Bad public policy
- Emotional reactivity
- Trigger
- Close mindedness
- Passion
- Lying
- Selfishness
- Abuse of power
- Fame
- Spirituality
- Crime
- Manipulation
- Hypocrisy
- Injustice
- Inequality
- Love
- Horniness
- Mistakes
- Business and wealth
- Denial
- Gender identity
- Victim mentality
- Laziness
- Pathology
- Group think
- Misunderstanding
- Miscommunication
- Reasoning
- Obesity
- Mental disorders
- Self-deception
There's literally no such thing as reality, you replace this notion of 1 reality with SD, which means every stage is a new reality where you live in your own bubble
Different at each stage:
- Love
- Spirituality
- Religion( E.g. there are green version of Christianity)
- Business
- Notion of family
- Health & nutrition
- Relationships and marriage
- Art
- Media
- Video games
- Movies
- Entertainment
- Politics
- Motivation: what motivates you/ nation/ team/ group of people?
- Fears & worries
- Criticism & analysis
- Reason and justification
What you consider good, bad, destructive, healthy, unhealthy, dangerous or crazy is relative to your stage. Every stage looks dangerous, crazy, criminal, insane, evil or deluded to some other stage on the spiral because of the lens you're looking through.
- E.g. How blue sees red: savages; how blue see blue: as a lesser civilization; how blue view orange: to materialistic, secular and to liberal; how blue sees green: relativists, nihilists, libertines, bohemians, communists and hippies; how blue views yellow: space cadets, elites, intellectuals, lost in the cloud intellectuals; how blue views turquoise: arrogant, heretics, nut cases
- How orange sees different stages red: dangerous, criminals; blue: religious fanatics who won't listen to reason; orange: competition; green: naïve idealists, hippies, snowflakes, social justice warriors, soy boys, to feminine; yellow: impractical philosophers, theoreticians, source of ideas to exploit; turquoise: new agers, fraud and religious nut cases
- How green sees other stages: red: victim of social abuse; blue: heartless medieval fundamentalist who lack compassion; orange: used-car salesmen and greedy capitalist or exploiting people; green: fellow comrades to build a social justice with; yellow: aloof elitists and intellectuals( way to much stuck in their head, not enough compassion, not enough community and relationship); turquoise: as already what green is doing
- How yellow sees other stages: red: dangerous narcissists; blue: closed-minded bigots and moralists; orange: myopic rationalists and sleazy business men and trap in the rat race; green: naïve emotional do-gooders; yellow: competent experts, values the expertise and intelligence of yellow; turquoise: wise masters, the example of mankind can aspire to
Whatever stage you're at you will pick up the facts that support and validate the correctness of your stage while ignoring other set of facts( confirmation bias - not limited to any stage).
E.g.
- if you're at stage blue in America you will think that Muslims are taking over the world and are the greatest threat and using confirmation bias your mind will cherry pick all the facts in order to support that narrative: look at the news that you need to look at, talk to the people you need to talk to in order to only see the facts of how Muslims are going to take over the world
- If you're at green you think that global warming and capitalism is killing us all, you're going to ignore green technology( electric cars, solar panels etc.) just to confirm your bias
- If you're yellow you think: tier 1 of spiral is going to kill us
- If you're turquoise you think: it's perfect and find the facts to confirm that perspective
All tier 1 stage hates each other because at low levels of development the more hate, fear, bigotry, arrogance, selfishness, closemindedness, demonization, projection, emotional reactivity is in you. These forces are the source of much suffering and violence around the world that could lead to massive destruction. The benefits of having a high level of development is that you transcend fear and hatred, bigotry and closemindedness, that produces an objectively better society. It's not going to be an straight linear path because there are going to be all sorts of interests( every stage believes is the best).
- If you still judge any stage bellow you it means you didn't integrated fully that stage, you're still missing something and need to go back and relearn
Insights about humanity and people:
Stages bellow green don't care about the environment
Stage blue and orange will NOT understand and appreciate psychedelics
Stages bellow green will NOT appreciate non-dual or mystical teachings
Is it possible to move backwards:
- Generally speaking not: if you're solid at a stage or there's a temporary regression from some threat from environment or powerful negative emotions
- If you're at stage green and you have to survive at a stage red environment you'll have to go back to RED just in order to survive
You cannot see more than 1-2 stages ahead:
- If you're at stage orange you can see stage green, a little bit of yellow but stage turquoise you won't be able to understand
- The best teacher helping you to evolve is roughly 1-2 stages higher than you. If teacher is 3 stages is above, you won't be able to resonate with him
You cannot get to higher stages through logic:
- It's like a discovery/ insight which is tricky
- If you want to get from Orange to Green that's going to happen by opening your heart
- If you want to get from Green to Yellow that's going to happen through other new unforeseen paradigm shift
Every stage has 4 phases:
E.g. Solid stage orange:
- 1st phase - Pre-entry phase: you don't take green seriously or has any worth of value by judge, demonize, ridicule green
- 2nd phase - Entry phase: it feels like you discover a new world, you feel refreshed and enthusiastic of possibilities by telling everybody about it
- 3rd phase - solid in green and feels rather familiar, there's growth left but you kind of getting get to the plateau
- 4rd phase - the point where you've been green for a long time and get frustrated with the limitations of it and start to look for something new and admit that this wasn't the holy grail
You don't want to take shortcuts with working with these stages, but don't rush yourself because there's lot of material to learn within each stage. Keep going back to stages and ask: what have I failed to embody from this stage? What healthy function does this stage serve that I haven't integrated yet? There's a lot to learn about tier 1 stages. Try to exhaust the stage until you're sick of it. It's hard to do the higher level stuff when you don't have basic stuff( shelter, food etc.)
How to fully integrate a stage:
Find a healthy role model from that stage and study their work, how they think, system of values that guide their life, emulate them, model them, satisfy those needs and make sure you don't get stuck
Best techniques to move up stages quickly( without the following techniques it will take the average human being 10-20 years to move just 1 stage):
- Meditation: people who meditate move up 2 stages withing several years of meditation
- Mindfulness practice
- Psychedelics: the most powerful tool to move up stages
- Meditative yoga
- Contemplation
- Journaling
- Reading: reading material from stages above you
- Having higher consciousness friends
- Solo retreats
- Workshops and seminars
- Travel and exposure to new culture, cuisines: expands your perspective
Stages are a concept, they are relative, the absolute/ consciousness/ being is just 1 thing.
Pathology is possible at every stage, possible to screw up in the way that you're executing these stages