Episode 5 - Spiral Dynamics

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[Music] who or what is god god is a being and i use the word being loosely because he's bigger than a being that is not confined to our material world but can step in and dips into it he is the source of life and love and everything we know um who or what is god oh that that's a good one uh well jesus but also a trinity of persons so yeah i'm gonna go with trinity question but it's also really like broad god is the creator and sustainer of everyone and everything everything he's eternal infinite and unchangeable in his power and perfection the creator he made everything goodness and glory wisdom justice knows everything but personally nothing happens except through him and by his will i call him daddy he exists as three co-equal persons of the same substance and one being i tell him everything and he you know comforts me when i'm upset and i share my good news when i'm happy and great question i have no answer for you just kind of like that really good best friend that's there when i need him the thing that the universe depends on and and needs and the thing that i depend on in me how is it that there is no universal agreement on anything i mean if you conducted a poll that asked people should we use our nuclear weapons to annihilate all life on planet earth you would not get a unanimous human vote for no why is it that people can see the world through such vastly different lenses that's what we're going to talk about today i gotta be honest guys this is like for me the scariest episode we've done because although we've already talked about things that may be controversial or a little a little out there this one is potentially deeply deeply esoteric and although we definitely talk about different topics through the lenses of science art and faith on this program this lens is um like a spectrograph it's crazy yeah this is like the lens that we see the lens through [Laughter] i've actually been super excited about this episode from the day one of thinking about a podcast uh just because i mean this is a potential episode that will actually kind of shift uh the way some people see the world in some ways probably i mean when i when i first started hearing about this was kind of like whoa well it's potentially very exciting but uh spiral dynamics is also complex and potentially confusing and i know when i learned about spiral dynamics i had the fortune to be sitting in a room with someone with lots of white sheets of paper and markers and a lot of visuals to frame this new information with so we're going to do something a little different today for this episode uh if you go to the liturgist.com podcast and click on episode 5 there's going to be links to images in this show description so if i reference an image called the spiral just go to our webpage and click the link labeled the spiral and you'll be able to see an image of what i'm talking about what we are discussing uh is an integrated model to understand human consciousness and how it forms civilizations so just two things consciousness and civilizations no big deal uh now where this all comes from is there's this guy claire graves uh who years ago years and years ago like in the 70s did all this research and he had this uh he's a psychologist but he realized that his view of consciousness was limited because psychology in essence is a study of the human mind but human minds at least according to materialists are the result of human brains now that's the study of neurology which is a subset of biology and those are different disciplines and so dr graves realized that he needed to collaborate with and talk to experts in brains to get good insights into minds but then he also realized that brains and minds respond to an environment that has been shaped by other brains and minds and so he started to try to integrate sociology the study of groups and group dynamics into his model so it spiral dynamics or as it was originally called by dr graves the emergent cyclical levels of existence theory which is super catchy is is a way to integrate the fact that brains produce minds and minds produce civilizations and societies and not only that human animals are unique in the fact that they shape their environment we adapt our environment and then have to adapt to our own adaptations there's the cyclical thing i know this sounds super confusing don't worry it's going to get worse because after dr graves went through all his research two other guys don beck and chris cowan in 1996 released a book called spiral dynamics which sort of packaged all this research clarified some of it and made it a little easier to approach and a little easier to apply for non-academics and that was all well and good until beck and cohen got in a fight and basically uh beck hooked up with a guy named ken wilbur uh who's an intellectual and they sort of merged ken wilbur's integral theory which is a deeply spiritual thing with spiral dynamics which is not really a spiritual thing and then cowan continued on and started a an organization that's more pure spiral dynamics so if you're trying to get a hold of what we're talking about you start googling the first thing you're going to run into is there are two major competing schools of spiral dynamics now when you're looking at the first tier which you don't know what that means yet but you will in 20 minutes they're pretty similar when you start talking about the second tier they're really different so and we'll we'll try to try to explain those differences later but essentially when we talk about spiral dynamics we are talking about a unified model of how humans operate in the world now it's just a model part of what spirodynamics claims is that humans are fed information by their senses that information is incomplete and so humans can't form perfect high fidelity models of reality or existence that's implicit to the assumptions of spiral dynamics and spiral dynamics itself is a model it's not perfect a lot of people um kind of want to turn this into a utopian idea some people want to turn it into even a eugenic idea and read superiority into it it's not at its basic at its most academically pure spiral dynamics is nothing but a way to understand how people think in different circumstances so spiral dynamics is uh divided into things called v memes ooh what's a v meme some people call them levels i don't like to use the word level because it implies things are better or worse or stages which are earlier or later i like the word v meme a v meme is a values meme it's a container for memes this is this is so esoteric i love it uh memes memes we need we need to know we need to know so let's let's talk about memes uh every everyone knows what genes are i don't mean levi's i mean like in your dna you have genes a gene is a sequence of biological information that self-replicates right so brown eyes make more brown eyes essentially blue eyes make more blue eyes essentially uh memes are bits of sociological information that self-replicate so uh if at some point a man in the past held a door open for a woman and she thought that was classy and that made it more likely for that man to reproduce other men may observe that and start opening doors that's a meme at a very basic level a v me is a container for memes so your understanding of how the world operates limits the boundaries of your cognition uh if you are living in a tribal society and believe the world is controlled by magical forces we'll talk about this in a minute you're very unlikely to be an empiricist who follows the scientific method even though you're neurologically capable of that your v-meme container can't go there right so you'd have to go through a lot of different understandings of how reality operates to get to that point so that's kind of where this spiral comes in is these different levels that we move through both as individuals and as societies in order to function in the world i think it'd make more sense we just talked about the actual v memes now yeah let's get into it beige we all start at this kind of base level of existence that they label as a beige sort of color and uh everybody every infant is born into beige and and as well as human society began we well before human society were just humans early humans um beige is like survival right beige is like you need your essential elements to survive you need food and water and shelter and clothing and it is pre-ego it's pre like really thinking about much at all it can even be kind of pre-language you know a baby doesn't think about deep questions about its own existence doesn't it just responds to stimulus all all these colors by the way we all start with them and you move through them is the idea of spiral dynamics and you you gain this new kind of way of seeing the world as you as you continue moving through the spiral and but you don't lose what you had so we all started out beige and we all have beige in a still and if somebody comes into the room waving a gun around you're going to go beige back into kind of this survivalist instinctual you know reptilian brain sort of place we all have that and that's the beginning we all start in the beige state of consciousness beige so what you have with beige is anatomically modern human beings behaving almost like animals food shelter sex right warmth these are my priorities in life uh it's a homeless person in a lot of ways right someone really on the edges of survival like michael mentioned someone points a gun in your face you go beige your limbic system takes over but as you as are an anatomically modern human and you begin to band together with other humans you can start to increase your safety in the environment and begin to change it you can form [Music] tribes you start gathering and hunting in groups so about 50 000 years ago we did that at that point we changed our environment enough that we had to respond to our own environment we started to gain control right when when when a small band of individuals becomes a larger band and a tribe and you send out 10 or 15 or 30 human males you can hunt some big game and as you forge weapons you can fight some impressive predators so suddenly we felt we felt pretty powerful and then we started to plant seeds in the ground and when the rains would not come our tribe would starve and our control was not so impressive and we became purple that's the magical mystical stage of human development essentially our idea here is we keep the spirits happy the unseen forces and the tribe will be safe and okay the power player in a mystical society is not the chieftain it's the shaman it's the man who can appease the unseen forces so in purple society what do we value we value social connection it's important to be part of a tribe if you're not you die it's important that we obey what the spirits want and we follow the mystical signs if there is uh you know an eclipse maybe it's time to sacrifice a virgin right um the the elders are important the chief is important but the shaman he has the veto power there is no individualism here this is all about a social identity and rights of passage are important seasonal cycles tribal customs and you know all these things matter and we can prove that um not only does beige stay in us but purple stays in us because if you imagine football season what happens we paint our faces we beat our chest we sing the song of our people and we send our best warriors onto the football field of value and and and see who's whose warriors are the best and people love it it speaks to something primal and deep inside of human beings to go back to this form of social identity i am a seminal because i am a seminal there's no further justification required other than this is my tribe it's it's the emergence of tribalism which remains one of the most powerful drivers in human behaviors today [Music] so we all get to purple like it's not just those that are in tribal societies you know purple generally has sort of like a magical view of the world so um it's the unseen forces behind what you see so it's not you know it's your crop it's growing it's not just because of the nutrients from the soil or the sunlight and the amount of hydrogen atoms that you know it's it's the gods are angry with us this year and are sending us this pestilence or the gods have favor upon us and and this sort of thinking the kind of the unseen magical forces behind everything it is extremely widespread still you see it all over the place and we all go through that you know when you're a little baby you start developing language you start seeing uh and the world becomes magical i mean i have a little a four-year-old that has been pretty purple for a while i think i'm actually start we've started to see traces of the next color which is red uh creeping up for sure but the purple stage is it's meant the world is magic and superstition hangs out in this realm a lot of religious practices kind of hang out in this realm sort of purple magical tribal zone and by the way none of these things are inherently bad these you know these value memes they're again they're they've arisen in necessity to the environment and to the life conditions and to be able to come together as tribes and have these values really helped people that were in beige situations not get killed you know and survive and and purple becomes a very helpful survival mechanism okay so then red develops and what you'll notice in between each of these colors is they kind of alternate from from individual to communal on some level there's kind of i we i we there's kind of that back and forth so you have this kind of we that develops within purple and then all of a sudden you have these tribes of purple and somebody in the purple zone develops this ego and this power that they can dominate the purple people so red develops and that's like kind of the development of the ego development it's the the stronger winds you know like whoever has the bigger club all of a sudden uh becomes the ruler of the tribe and and it's kind of you know in the purple tribal zone the feared leader and red comes into the world as dictators as you still see this a lot of places in the world that have a fairly purple society left oftentimes they have a very strong militaristic even violent leader because the strongest you know the strongest gets to be at the top of the food chain isis is not out there making rational arguments about why they're right no they're red they're shooting guns yeah so red develops you know i think you start seeing in individuals you start seeing red you know a lot of times in toddler years kind of the they start pushing back against the the rules of the parents and against the tribe um and trying to find their own individual self and and these colors by the way they can be healthy they can be unhealthy and how they're developed because everybody needs to develop an ego at some point to be able to richard rohr said in reference to some of this uh something along the lines of you have to develop an ego before you can transcend an ego so that's true we all have to develop kind of this sense of self in order to move past that because otherwise you're just at the mercy in purple you're sort of just at the mercy of the powers that be behind everything and uh red comes and says i'm not just gonna be subject to just the whims of the gods and the forces and this you know i'm gonna i'm gonna make my own way in the world and there's sort of a rebellious nature to it it's a very individualistic place red um you know kind of rising above the tribe and finding yourself some people don't some people kind of get arrested at purple and don't really develop a healthy red and that creates issues later in life when they're in circumstances that red could be helpful that's red so red's a good deal if you're the biggest badass around it's a great deal your power stage your ability to impose your will over others is fantastic it benefits the individual at some point the weaker reds and all the purples that surround them get tired of being bullied and society develops again and we go into blue or their traditional mindset we think about this sort of societally we're talking about the emergence of the rule of law when we talk about the traditional mindset it doesn't matter if you're the biggest because blue is built around a sacred text which supports a single cause there is one story for our people so it's all about sacrificing the self to the greater cause right so if uh you had a red society that was based on the strongest warrior but suddenly a man comes down the mountain with stone tablets and laws on them it doesn't matter how strong you are because god said that these are the rules and a whole new order forms where you have a a ruling sacred text and this is an immense progress in human society because to some degree it protects the weaker it creates consistency it can certainly be abused but in general it produces order it produces societal stability it produces cohesion there's an encouragement towards righteousness uh traditional and blue v memes are fantastic at impulse control now it's mainly through guilt and everyone has their proper place but the the idea here is that these laws these rules they build character and moral fiber and some people find that restrictive but if again if you're in the mideast right now where you have chaotic red that has demolished what little blue structures there were and everyone's living in beige purple and red the order of blue looks like an oasis it's progress it it protects you and this is this is again it's a very collectivist it's a very we oriented idea we're going to sacrifice our individual you reds are going to become our best warriors but you're going to serve the greater cause we might send you in um to to beat our foes because blue very much if you're not with us you're against us but that's sort of where it lives and that's why we call it a traditional mindset the blue is where a lot of religion lives you know we've been handed these these sacred texts we've been handed these uh ways of life from god through the bible and i think this is part of why we've seen some anger flare up about some of our readings of the bible and stuff like that you know um which will make more sense when we talk about orange and green yeah but when you threaten but but thinking just from the terms of blue blue is what has saved you from red you know like blue comes into the world and like rescues us from horrible violent you know crazy over sexualized or ego driven culture that blue arises from and blue offers answers that bring order into the world and so as soon as you start questioning a certain reading of blue which is what starts happening when you get into the next color which is orange [Music] orange begins to look at the systems that have been handed down you know and this starts happening you know towards the end of the middle ages and then you get into early kind of enlightenment times in the 15th 16th century and you start more and more people start looking at kind of the authority of the culture which was the church at the time the christian church and a lot of western society and so much so that the church was dictating you know what kind of science was appropriate which kind of art was appropriate and and all of a sudden you have kind of this this swelling of orange start to happen which is basically uh again individualistic after the more communal collective of blue and orange starts questioning the authority and saying the earth isn't actually the center of the universe or that the earth isn't flat and all of a sudden the blue power systems that have had our view of reality handed down to us from god are very threatened because this orange questioning could potentially question the whole blue value system and without the whole blue value system we devolve back into red and into violence into chaos into you know so before moses comes down from the mountain with the ten commandments it's a rough scene and uh we need somebody to tell us do not murder otherwise we're gonna just be murdering each other you know so if you're questioning my blue values of why maybe the earth isn't six thousand years old like like my reading of the bible says you're potentially pulling us back into some very dangerous and dark situations it's a slippery slope it's and you start it's a very fearful place to be when you start having orange language come into a blue zone and it can make blue people go back being red actually you can like a gun will make us all go beige you start questioning blue and uh you'll get some people online going red very quickly you know so orange kind of develops and becomes a system of its own a v meme of its own where uh it's modernity essentially it's the development of the scientific method it's the development of the idea of you know rational objective kind of thought that can be tested and proved and analyzed and dissected and this kind of thinking has been very helpful in society like you take a sick person and uh a beige person wouldn't think much about the other sick person as long as i'm not sick the purple person would uh maybe cast out the demons from the sick person or uh you know shake shake a rain stick and pour some goat's blood to make them better um or any modern equivalent of that the the uh red person probably once again i don't know what a red person would do maybe not have that much compassion just kind of use it as as an advantage to lord over them maybe um blue might have some scripture verses about how they can believe and be healed and orange would say let's uh let's look at your cells and see what's happening how can we get you the right nutrients how can we get you the right drugs and medicine and whatever that will make those you know it's a different way of thinking um and it's been effect it's been effective in in culture and society and sending us to the moon and giving us all of our devices and all of our technology but there are limitations with orange that you find and that's what um begins to emerge green [Music] yeah so we sort of see this back and forth where we go from warm colors to cool colors and uh as we build towards green that's important why you'll notice that a lot of our faith lives in the cool colors so when we talk about religion in modern society it's the cool colors at play in most faith which you can sort of see how that builds out we start beige thinking about ourself we realize we survive better in groups we go purple we form tribes the strongest guys realize that instead of the leader being selected by ritual they should be selected by fighting and suddenly we have lords and we have we have these sort of exploitive empires that live in red governmentally and then that doesn't work for everyone so we form nation states and we get authoritarianism and then we move into blue and then orange comes in and it looks at merit and it looks at competition competition is huge and orange but not competition based on physical strength but based on capability so when orange begins to take over civilizations what what dies traditional religion as a control structure and monarchies you get capitalism and democracy kind of ruling the day but that has a problem because orange in all its questioning and all it's searching for merit it realizes that other stories have advantages other stories have merit so for the christian who's been blue it begins to search for the merit behind their faith and they study buddhism and they understand that buddhists are very non-violent and they understand that a buddhist meditation has tremendous neurological benefits for individuals they go whoa whoa whoa i thought there was just one truth and they may have rejected their christianity in the process or not but if they did they start to realize that christianity has social benefits and they start seeing all these different belief systems have merit and when that happens green or world or global consciousness enters the scene and the idea of green is that all stories have value that everyone's perspective is important free love hippies are just as green as can be the idea in green is that humans have to be they have to transcend you know greed and dogma being divisive it really matters what people feel and that you're caring even it becomes more important than that you're purely rational it's important to honor the earth's resources and protect the environment our decision making we're suddenly against hierarchy hierarchy is the enemy we're all just going to do this thing together man and and green reaches back towards spirituality not necessarily religion but says you know there's this need here we all have to have spirit we don't want to control people through religion we just want to have spiritual experiences together and you can see this moves back towards a very collective mindset now remember when we talk about v memes we're not talking about your personality this isn't myers-brigg this is not the enneagram this is not skillfinder when you reach a v meme all the earlier v memes remain active in your consciousness you tend to look forward to to to newer v memes fearfully so blue looks at orange with fear but you tend to look back with disdain so green even though they're all stories have value well they look back at blue and shake their head right but you know there's different centers of gravity so the democratic party in america for example has sort of a green orange center of gravity the republican party has sort of a purple blue center of gravity now the leaders in both parties are going to individually be prone to use a lot of orange because it's effective so we've got to remember this spiral that it's very chaotic people listen to this and they tend to oh that's me that's my v meme no you don't have a v meme you have a highest achieved v meme and as responding to your environment it may change and really important here people tend to think later v memes are better and that's wrong there is no better here and i can prove it imagine being a orange or green individual a geneticist or a psychotherapist or or what have you living in a red society go to iraq you're going to be miserable this also explains a lot that happens in churches a lot of churches are very blue especially popular american churches are very blue well if you're an orange person or a blue orange transition person or orange green transition person and you go to a blue church you're going to be really frustrated because you're not going to understand how they can view this bible the way they do or how they can hold these ideas about god that they hold it's going to seem ridiculous to you but if you're a purple or a blue or a red and you go to a green church it's going to seem confusing and wishy-washy and indecisive and by the way these these these memes have different advantages a blue church can raise money and build a building and show up with clipboards and supplies to a disaster scene much better than a green and organization because blue is fine with hierarchy someone's in charge he's going to tell these people to do these things green's going to sit around and has status meetings and talk it out for three months without ever taking any action the the these all have different advantages and disadvantages and happiness lives in a healthy expression of a vimy that is in harmony with its environment we all kind of have v memes i think i don't know how personality necessarily plays into it but it seems that certain individual personalities bring out certain v memes more often than others yes you have favorite v memes yeah and i for science mike if you couldn't tell by his nickname it has a pretty strong orange v meme in his world and uh i love even your explanation and your like your proof your proof that uh your proof of v memes making your you individually happier uh depending on your environment it's a very orange orange thing to say about me memes um so this is what's so funny about this kind of things because you start you recognize it yourself and others you recognize it in systems you know these value systems and these uh ways of seeing the world and um and it's interesting how they start overlapping and playing with each other because i one thing i've noticed over the last couple months is how even in a blue world in a religious blue world they're still living in a society that has very strong orange and green at play you know green started really developing in the society uh and becoming kind of the motivating v meme in our society in the 60s and you know with the develo and and all of the social upheaval and and you know it's not even earlier than that with women's suffrage and the abolition of slavery and all of all the sort of like human rights movements are all kind of headed towards green towards valuing of all human stories and not just the single human story that i'm part of in my group so you have that very active in hollywood the green v meme a lot of creative types are very green um and so everybody hears the language and everybody sees the movies and the stories that are all based on a very green v meme but even if you haven't fully adopted that and kind of experience that as a as a grand shift in your consciousness your language and little ways of how you think still get influenced so for instance a blue person takes an orange idea like an idea needs to be consistently logical and um and so you take that's a very orange thing to say but you take that and then you take that idea within the blue system and all of a sudden you have such ferocity with you need to believe a literal reading of genesis for instance um that's an orange idea coming into blue value system answers in genesis is blue theology with orange methodology yeah and you see this with a lot like i've seen it in conferences especially uh you know because it's kind of green is cooler in america now so uh so you'll have a blue organization or blue conference or something that really wants to kind of be relevant or you know to younger people to be cool and so they adopt green language and green uh ideas like the whole social justice movement within the church that's obviously an ancient and purely christian it is christian and it's old um but it's a value you know taking care of the poor has been something that uh in the orange world has gets forgotten about and so greens kind of remember oh there's all these other stories there's all these other people there's people in africa that don't have clean water and i'm here driving my you know suv and green starts having problems with that and starts thinking about the environment starts thinking about these other stories and so somebody that's still kind of operating primarily in a blue world sees that a lot of people are oh oh yeah there are these other stories and then they find some bible verses oh i guess our bible does say that we should take care of the poor and then you start they start trying to speak a green language even though they haven't actually gone to the place where they actually see the stories as viable you know the other the other stories necessarily um as viable and good they they adopt some green language to try to kind of be relevant to a green society from a blue place and essentially a lot of times it's trying to turn green people blue is what the mission of that becomes but you see you start seeing these colors kind of battle each other and it's uh it's quite fascinating well what's what's interesting about modern pluralistic society which is powered by the internet is all these memes don't get to live in geographic isolation anymore they're all mixed up they're all commenting on each other's message boards they're fighting below every news article with comments enabled and also interesting today they're working for the same companies and they are sitting in the same pews and churches you know companies tend to be very very orange green today religious organizations tend to be very you know blue orange and so you have staff and you have members that get alienated and confused because their dominant v meme just doesn't match the organization that they're in and we also have to remember like there's a lot of purple out there right like katy perry sells a lot of red records to purple people you're going to hear me roar um it's this sort of like ego development for mass society which don't hear me saying that's a bad thing i am not even embarrassed to say that i love katy perry and her music but she's serving almost this therapeutic role to help modern americans find their red it's amazing the same thing you would think atheists were mostly orange you know the people who have considered the merits of religion and rejected it but i have found online there's a tremendous number of people who are leaving purple and becoming red or leaving red and becoming blue in either adopting richard dawkins as their warrior or as their sacred text and those people will say a lot of things that sound orange on message boards but they're really not good at evaluating the merit of any given argument what they're doing is regurgitating the words of their leader or their sacred text it's really really remarkable how your first guess at where someone is coming from in a v meme can be completely wrong [Music] it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through betterhelp you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's better help h-e-l-p dot com slash liturgists it's really easy to misplace yourself on the spiral what's interesting is it also depends on the context if you're at a leadership conference people man they immediately try to say whatever what's the what's the newest color that's me immediately uh if you're at like um an empowerment event or or a life coaching or something suddenly people start pegging themselves down at purple or red right and i have i would love to do this experiment i don't i have no data to support this so for all my fellow oranges this is just a hypothesis but i wonder how much if you took the same person and put them in different rooms they would answer that they had different dominant v memes um no no i'm purple everyone here is broken like me no no i'm definitely whatever the highest thing is because i'm trying to change the world right so it's not even necessarily easy there's a real tendency with spiral dynamics to oversimplify it and boil it down and make it simple and it is not a simple theory one thing i think for anyone who's still scratching their head at these colors i'd like to take a shot at helping you understand them easily by talking about selling cars [Music] so how do you sell the different b memes a car beige doesn't buy cars beige might sleep in a car but beige really wouldn't buy a car at all if beige bought a car maybe they'd go to used car lot and take cash and or payday loan and buy the cheapest thing they could find because beige is on the edge of survival right if you want to sell purple a car you tell them what the most popular car is for their tribe so the best-selling car on the road is blah purple buys it right red is so overtly sexual and so much about virility that you put a model in a bikini and put it across the hood of a red sports car a corvette or ferrari whatever and red wants that car it wants to display its power in the world blue chevy runs deep this is the story of our people america right that's how you sell to blue orange you would say honda's are the most reliable cars on the road they get excellent gas mileage they're easy to service and they maintain their resale value you talk about merit right green of course you say save the earth by a prius so just this simple like visual of uh what advertisers do can help you understand the different ways that people see the world and let me tell you advertisers are excellent at identifying and exploiting these ways of thinking probably better than than anybody else including the scientists who came up with it [Music] god is outside of knowledge outside of anything that i as a human can comprehend both one of us and not one of us god is the projection of humanity's best and sometimes even our worst imaginations about ourselves and the world god is an entity that we are unable to comprehend god is the most excellent being the most powerful being i would say god is love and god is the god of the bible the most being that's it how about let's get into second tier then and this is where it gets ultra theoretical because historically you can see the first tier taking over society you can see ever you know every color it's pretty demonstratable um yes totally yeah like we have society has changed to green in its most you know forward thinking circles or whatever uh where we go beyond here is where they've started kind of saying we're seeing these other forms of thinking and being in the world that we recognize these certain characteristics about and so this is where you start really quickly getting a lot of divergence of opinions about what these next phases of consciousness will look like and it also it if you're looking at spiral dynamics integral or spiral dynamics the tiers are completely different one criticism of the integral approach is that it's kind of utopian it's saying that this spiral is building to some greater purpose the original research said that the spiral is nothing more than a response to environment i have friends who eat the integral stuff up and they love it uh the very dominant orange in me says show me your data of course then what the integral people say about the second tier that's been introduced by the spiral dynamics side is that it's a marketing trick that they're they're trying to convince people there's this new tier to get people to sign up for conferences and figure out how to become second-tier consciousness that said uh the reason i considered it all and the reason i find it interesting is looking at and here's my green coming out the stories of myself and people i know who it seems to describe our experiences but uh some some traditional sort of grave spiral dynamics folks would say what we're actually looking at is uh more sophisticated versions of orange green transitions or the green v me uh so i just i just for my fellow nerds out there i know a lot of people just rolled their eyes but some of us care about that kind of fidelity and knowledge so i just wanted to include that disclaimer before we jumped into the second tier [Music] so second tier uh and i probably skew a bit more towards the integral direction than mike does i i like both but i i find it interesting at least the integral way would see that all of these sorts of v memes all these sorts of ways of perceiving and being in the world with our consciousness of how big the world is and the universe is that we live in you start recognizing the depth of all these view memes within yourself and within society and you can start to integrate them into uh the idea is integral thinking so why they call it second tier um is because in the first tier so far historically every v meme has been kind of fundamentally opposed to the other v memes on some level right i mean everyone is sort of a violent transition it's like to go from blue to orange you know those those who have experienced when you start questioning your faith and you start experiencing doubt and what's been handed to you that's like it's a turbulent thing to move into orange from a blue zone and it's it can be turbulent everyone can be turbulent so this idea that there comes a point where you start to integrate all of all of what you've gone through in these v memes into something more holistic and more integrated uh is kind of the idea of the second tier so it the idea is they start kind of repeating the memes start repeating v memes start repeating sort of an octave up if you will so beige and octave up oh my gosh that is a fantastic way to explain that sorry i've been looking for an image like that for like a year and that is perfect um so or beige you know we're it's individualistic again but if you took a question like what is god to a beige person that's not a question that really would register much god is whatever is experience you know it's like you couldn't really put words to that for a beige person and i think there's again we're in total theoretical land here but i think once you go to like a yellow zone it's sort of it's it's almost like that again where it's like you can you can't limit something like the infinite to language you've seen this in green you've seen that post-modernism kind of deconstructs so much of our language and so much of our confidence in orange's ability to parse up the universe and we you know all of a sudden uh einstein and relativity and you know the most present scientific discoveries keep showing us holy cow we don't know that we are like little specks of dust on this pale blue dot and our science is great and useful but it's we're limited as human beings as what of what we know and what we can know and and so i think there's like there is once again a certain at yellow it's kind of everything is connected again on some level you know like as an infant everything is just connected everything is one thing one stimulus and then again at yellow it's far more complex than that but you're also you're back into this kind of unified system of reality that has all these v memes and memes present but use at yellow you hopefully start trying to find a way of moving forward and integrating all of those v memes into a new hole and it's ideally and hypothetically a non-violent transition it's actually uh an inclusive transition so yeah yellow kind of is is you start integrating all of these v memes into a new hole and you've seen the shortcomings of all these things you've seen how green is beautiful in creating compassion and uh you know moving towards taking care of the environment taking care of the poor but you also start recognizing that at green it's really hard to make value judgments to move forward into anything so you have something like the occupy wall street people that are very green in a lot of their values so much so that it becomes difficult for them to do anything you know like they want to value everybody's opinion and everybody's story um you know they'll get together and try to come up i heard the story of that they came together and tried to come up with some sort of value some sort of document like what are we gonna do and they couldn't come up with anything at the beginning um you know it was like we could they couldn't put anything to paper because somebody would disagree and we don't want to be violent to that person and you know there was even a apparently one suggestion like the only thing they could almost come up with was what we're not we're non-violent but then there was like but i mean that might alienate some people that are you know they have they are violent or they have you know it's actually you can't at green it's hard to like you can't alienate anybody right like how valid is the story of a pedophile is that really the story we want to lift up and honor just because it's a story yeah so you it's hard to make any value judgments at green so at yellow apparently the idea is you've recognized even green's shortcomings in that and you start integrating towards something new in terms of something in the future the more i think about it green is so young i wonder if it's i myself wonder if it's a more advanced or not even you know a later green that is more nuanced more developed because all these other v memes developed over centuries right i mean like until green and all of a sudden like 50 years later now we're in a second tier of human consciousness uh it does it it did but let's look at let's look at some numbers to to to score um to look at the feasibility beige cranks up a hundred thousand years ago purple fifty thousand years ago right red ten thousand years ago blue five thousand years ago orange 300 years ago green 150 years ago so the time but between memes is shrinking dramatically because of technological and societal change now again i'm i'm still not saying there's like great experimental support for yellow they're trying to to do the surveys to sort of find these things but i think if you look at yellow in the right context of this echo of beige essentially what happens with yellow is you have this awareness intuitively even if you've never heard of spiral dynamics observation using the internet using much larger social webs than people have had in the past gives you insight into the world and you become aware on some level of how these memes are operating the world and operating in yourself yellow instinctively understands what each v meme is looking for and what it's afraid of so what yellow realizes is number one i'm vulnerable because if red or orange or blue figure out i think this way they'll consider me a threat so yellow tends to hide and two yellow tends to exploit the other v memes for their own gain a yellow will hide itself in an organization wherever it feels most comfortable whether that whether that's leadership or not and we'll emulate the other v memes as needed to get the outcome that yellow wants think about that yellow will manipulate it will chameleon itself to appear as whatever v meme it needs to to get the outcome that it wants that means if yellow needs something from red yellow will act red if yellow needs something from orange yellow will act orange yellow can speak in blue language and green language and purple language that's what yellow does but yellow is afraid yellow feels isolated and alone yellow uh tends to think maybe i'm the only person like this and tends to hide uh its most fundamental views on reality from everyone including the people closest to it yellow is tough so a lot of people talk about yellow and they talk about this elevated state of being if yellow is scientifically valid it should actually be pretty scary yeah now the reason this we say this is maybe echoes of other tears i bet i know a lot of orange worship leaders and pastors in the world who are in blue churches and afraid to talk about that so that probably feels a lot like yellow so how do we know the difference between a blue orange transition and a true yellow i'm not sure that we do that that's the crazy thing about it and then you know technically there's this idea that these second tiers build too so at some point yellow finds each other they become turquoise and they start to group together to find solutions to problems and to try to help people live at a healthy expression of whatever their dominant v meme is that is completely theoretical you might somebody might give you some great stories anecdotes about it but the sociological research doesn't exist to support its existence and turquoise i mean people would argue with that ken wilbur would absolutely disagree with you i'm sure um but the turquoise from what i've read and what i think i may have experienced um and at least experiencing parts of of what this view meme can be is a return so it's purple remember the second purple echoed up an octave um and it's it that mystical quality kind of again to everything comes back and there's this sense and understanding of the connection of all things and how you start seeing things more like in universal systems and and as a whole as like everything is connected and and as all the ebb and flow of within the entire universal living system you're connected to it and and and there does yeah going back to a wii um sort of you rather than the isolated yellow who can see value in all the v memes and see ways of using those v memes um to an integrated future integral future turquoise becomes more integrated with others and it's not so isolated anymore and it's a this again like i said i've i feel like i've experienced moments where i just see all of everything in this sort of like non-do you know non-divisive non-dualistic deeply connected way and uh i don't feel like i live there but i you know you can when i've experienced seeing that it is a it is it is a kind of a fundamentally different way of seeing so that's what actually makes me kind of believe that there is some merit to these later uh vmus because i just i feel like i've experienced a little taste of them um and from what i've read you can you can have experiences with these things and have certain parts of your mind and psyching consciousness influenced by these vims without actually fully existing in those v memes yet um and so i think there are a lot of people that have like yellow uh intellectual capabilities and have taken you know because at those high at those levels it's like uh contradiction doesn't doesn't do the same to you as it would at an orange level or like a so take communion at a purple level this this is the body and blood of jesus right i mean it is like it is it and then and then in a blue level it's more like well it's it becomes more symbolic it's more part of the tradition that's been handed down to you and then the orange would kind of say well you know you look at it it's molecularly yeah of course it's not the body and blood of jesus it's you put it under a microscope it's bread and it's wine and i think for me it got to a point after the yeah i put it under the microscope where it was like no i think this is the body and blood of jesus and that was like not it not in a simplistic purple way but not in a reductionist orange way a way that embraced the purple as something beautiful within the purple that saw the absurdity of existence and the magic and the wonder and the miracle of existence and the miracle of bread and wine and this and this tradition that's been handed to us and said no that like this is the body and the blood of jesus and the contradiction holding the contradiction within the system as a beauty and not in a way that that needs to reduce it into something that's empirically provable but in a way that says maybe there's a deeper truth than what can be empirically provable at times in certain things like religion well i mean i've definitely like i'm with you experientially right like totally um i'm just saying i understand the idea well maybe what you're just talking about is really healthy orange and green like i understand what they're saying maybe maybe these aren't actually completely new forms of consciousness but again i don't think you can discount what a tremendous catalyst the internet is in terms of bringing tremendous breadth of information and input into a given you know neurocognitive system i just i just the the the orange in me which i can never let go of still says show me the data uh and then i'll buy it even as the yellow and turquoise in me says i'm just gonna enjoy this beautiful holistic experience i don't really care if it's proven or not i'm aware of the value of evidence but i don't care this episode to me kind of shows some of our hand as the liturgists and what we're trying to do because i think we're trying to integrate what we've experienced in christianity into something healthy and to try to find some communion with other people in systems that maybe aren't so dominated by earlier uh v memes you know like uh have a place that's safe for an orange person a person that primarily will get steer clear totally classifying somebody's an orange person because we've all are have different things happening well you can say orange person as a shorthand for a orange v meme highest expression person is essentially what you're saying yeah um i'm just trying to avoid the potential hubris and pride of looking down at others who we perceive to be of some sort of lower vehicle than us because that's a danger in this sort of situation um but to have the literature just like when when we started talking about this sort of thing there are a lot of people out there that feel lonely in their spirituality and potentially that's at a yellow level maybe that's at an orange level coming out of blue but a lot of people that feel alienated from the systems of religion because again the systems of religion in our culture tend to operate in a couple different colors and other colors tend to alienate them so the academic system for instance primarily operates at an orange level and at that level religion stops having value because you take away the authority and and then you so you have a lot of kids that go to college and go into an orange zone they lose their faith they leave their faith entirely because there's no orange expression of religion for them there's no way of being an orange person and still following jesus that they're seeing and i like the idea of jesus being something someone that is big enough to handle all the v memes you know the idea of christianity uh is ancient enough and big enough and beautiful enough and inclusive enough to be a sort of conveyor belt if you will of as as you move along and seeing the world differently that jesus can be there with you you know like jesus to the purple person might not resemble the jesus of the yellow person or of the orange person but maybe there could be expressions of christianity and of the church that that leave openness for people in all of those places and and maybe god is big enough and bigger than all of our v memes and as we talk about the infinite that uh we we find ways of using language that is not just so oriented towards a single v meme um but leaves openness you know for for everybody to be able to experience it so if literature could be a place where yellows can find some community and and we start forging into some turquoise and so but also all all colors are welcome to uh find an expression of spirituality and and and to love jesus in a way that their world can make sense of um so anyway that's kind of showing showing our hand a little bit i think but so let's talk about you beloved listener of the liturgist podcast where are you what do you feel if as you heard these v memes did purple speak to you did you feel red or blue how about orange or green did the second tier light you up now ask yourself this when you think about spirituality and community where does your spiritual community live on this spiral where is its center of gravity i hope some of you have realized that you're going to a purple church or a blue church or you have a red pastor but your orange or your green or maybe someone listening has realized that they're blue and they go to a green church and that's why they walk out of church confused and befuddled every week because how can you people say that this is the gospel a lot of the conflicts we have as people what i love what i love most actually about spiral dynamics is the way that it explains conflict between people and people groups what i would hope you get out of this podcast is an understanding of where a path of less frustration and more growth may lie for you if you're orange and you get a paycheck from a blue organization that's going to be a lot of existential angst and do not when we talk about pride we talk about elitism this is what i think is elitist to be an orange leader who believes it's your job to turn a few hundred or a few thousand blues orange that i don't i don't think that's leadership i think what a blue organization needs is to be shown how to be the healthiest blue that blue can be so what does that mean what does that mean for you know ideological diversity i don't know i don't know but if you die a little every time you encounter your spiritual community i want to encourage you to find a spiritual community whose v meme is more appropriate for where you are that may mean your spiritual community happens around someone's dining room table for a while that's okay that may mean you're in the wrong denomination but what i don't want to have happen as often as it does is for people to go through these consciousness transitions as predicted by spiral dynamic and in the process lose a faith or a faith community that they love because they don't understand what's happening the best thing that could come out of this episode is for you to understand that these transitions are normal that they're just part of reacting to an environment and that as michael so beautifully illustrated the story of jesus is active in all of these v memes not one of them jesus doesn't live it blue he doesn't live at purple he doesn't live at turquoise he transcends this whole category and it's possible to have genuine spiritual expression even in the context of christianity at every single v mean from the heart of science mike amen i loved it thanks for listening everybody i'm michael gunger i'm science mike you