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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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I m thrilled about today s episode, which is an exploration of spiral dynamics with therapist Nicole Churchill.
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Hi, it s Elise Lunen, host of Pulling the Thread.
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On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live to understand who we are and why we re here.
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Pulling the Thread is about big questions.
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Why we do what we do, how we can understand our own experiences within a larger spiritual and historical context, the ways in which we might begin to understand ourselves and each other better, and what s required to heal ourselves and our world.
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I ll be joined in conversation by luminaries and wise elders, those who have laid tracks on their work and lives to help us bring meaning and understanding to a world that often feels chaotic and overwhelming.
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My hope is that these conversations spark moments of resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow.
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Turquoise is looking for how do we bring back the village?
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How do we live in community again?
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Why are we living in these separate houses?
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We re not sharing resources.
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Everyone on the street has a snowblower, a lawnmower, you know, like the design isn t elegant.
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It s not an elegant design.
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And so I think the mind of yellow joins into turquoise.
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And as it has studied systems, it contributes to that.
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And we are looking for more
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holistic, elegant solutions to give birth to a new culture.
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It s like we can no longer continue down the path.
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And at Turquoise, we re going to have to sacrifice for the whole.
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For those of you who follow me on Instagram or read my newsletter on Substack, you ll know that I ve been quite obsessed with spiral dynamics of late and see it as one way to explain our current cultural and political dilemmas, along with so much of our internalized anxiety.
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It was first developed by the late Professor Claire Graves, who was a contemporary and colleague of Abraham Maslow, and then advanced by Professor Don Beck, who worked on post-apartheid South Africa with Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk, and then further pushed by integral philosopher Ken Wilber.
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Spiral Dynamics can be heady stuff, and so I was thrilled when Nicole Churchill, a wonderfully grounded therapist and expert in Spiral Dynamics, offered to talk through the system with me for the podcast.
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Nicole and her husband John, who has also been a guest on Pulling the Thread, studied with Ken Wilber and both apply it in their therapy work with both individuals and organizations.
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If you all end up loving Spiral Dynamics as much as I do, Nicole has offered to come back and explore how she uses it in therapy.
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Please pass this episode on to any friends who you think might enjoy.
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I m convinced that there are some keys here that can help us see the world and ourselves more clearly.
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In the show notes, you ll find ways to go deeper as well.
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Okay, let s get to our conversation.
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Let s start at the very beginning.
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Take us there, Nicole.
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So we re talking about spiral dynamics today.
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And I ve been on this journey with spiral dynamics for 20 years.
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Wow.
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It s a friend for sure.
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It s been a friend of mine.
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I would say just developmental psychology in general has become a huge ally in my life of making meaning in the world.
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And I would say first and foremost, I use it for myself.
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in my human experience.
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And then I also use it as a clinician, I use it as a therapist, helping my clients make meaning of their world.
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And then I also use it as a teacher of the Dharma.
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So I would say it is a lifelong companion.
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Yeah, I m so excited to do this because I m very new to it, and have tried my best to articulate it in newsletters and tell anyone who will listen to me about it.
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And it s funny, I ve read Ken Wilber s work, but I don t think I d read anything that was specifically about spiral dynamics.
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But it s
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I think a very relieving system because as our world seems to become more fragmented, more chaotic, more polarized, it suggests that we re following an invisible pattern and that we re aligned individually and collectively and culturally in these developmental planes.
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And to me, it just started to make
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everything makes sense, or not everything, but it gave me a center to hold on to where I could anticipate.
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I mean, it s pretty prophetic, I think, when you go back into some of the earlier writings about spiral dynamics, and as they describe the memes, which we re going to get into now,
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you ll hear the language that s so resonant in our culture and recognize it as part of a meme state in a way that s like, I think kind of funny as a human, you know, where you re like, oh, all of this was anticipated and articulated that these would be our phrases and these would be our point of views.
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Yeah.
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But I found it to be complicated and also quite simple and a warm hug.
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So I m very excited that you re going to take us through it because you re so grounded.
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Yeah, and Ken certainly made it more popular because he was
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the more published kind of author and was writing from what we ll hear from later on, an integral level of development, which is yellow, that kind of encompassed all of the prior levels in what is called first tier.
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And we ll talk all about that.
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Ken certainly made it more accessible to those nerds who are interested in human growth.
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I think it is a medicine in a sense, like it helps us.
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I love the idea of keeping medicine simple.
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So if there s one little medicinal idea I will give to your listeners today, it s that human beings continue to grow.
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And so we re gonna take a look at this story and it s not just a story out there, it s our story.
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It s your story, Elise, it s my story.
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it s all the folks that are listening.
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This is our story that s kind of embedded in this review of what spiral dynamics is.
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I m glad you said that because not to throw like more terms, but for anyone who s familiar with the cosmic egg, it works on the me level, on the we level, and on
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the level.
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So it s a big enough system to contain our inner world and the way that we understand and relate how our culture is evolving and growing.
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And then I think on a, I would say a more mystical or spiritual level as well, but you don t even have to buy into that to find value practically in spiral dynamics.
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And I think it s worth mentioning before we start why this feels particularly pressing for this moment in time that Dawn Beck, who worked with Claire Graves, who created it, worked on post-apartheid South Africa with DeMille and Nelson Mandela.
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And that it has real world implications and utility to help us work with groups at various meme levels and create a nonviolent reality.
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So I ll just give a little bit of background on Claire Graves because he was the originator of this work.
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This is a theory of human development and it s constructed from experiential data.
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And so Dr. Graves was a doctor of psychology and conducted his research with his PhD students in the fifties and sixties.
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And basically his overarching question in the research.
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is what constitutes a mature, psychologically stable adult human being.
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So I m all for that, right?
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We want those beings walking on the earth, right?
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Yeah.
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Interestingly, the model was originally referred to as emergent cyclical levels of existence.
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And so you can see why we got that kind of spiral dynamics name later on.
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by Don Beck and Chris Cowan.
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I think it s worth noting, we re going to go through the colors of the memes.
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Apparently, they were arbitrary.
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They don t align with the chakras.
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And they wanted to do this so that it would be not associated with race, with religion, with any other system where people would start to rank them.
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or try to understand them in that way.
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Easy to remember.
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Keep medicine simple.
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Easy to remember the color-coded system.
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And actually, that color-coded system didn t exist with Claire Graves.
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It was later Don Beck and Chris Cowan who put the color-coded system in.
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So there is this thing called a value meme.
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When you read the books, you ll see this lowercase v.
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with the word meme.
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And this comes from Richard Dawkins.
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He had written a book in 1976 called The Selfish Gene.
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So gene and meme kind of rhyme together.
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And the book introduces this term meme for a unit of cultural evolution, analogous to a gene, an idea, a belief, a pattern of behavior that s hosted
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in the minds of one or more individuals, and that this meme can replicate.
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It can jump from me to you, to our listeners, and that it has a cultural significance and a value significance in terms of what our center of gravity is, what we re attracted to, what brings meaning into our life, purpose, and how we view the world.
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And so this is like way pre-Instagram and memes going out there into the world and what we associate as a meme.
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I think it s also important to say that memes aren t necessarily factual.
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So, you know, we could adopt a meme that might not be completely true.
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And we ll get into truth later on.
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We ll get into truth because it has a big role here.
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Yeah.
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So that s a little bit of background.
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And then I ll just do one more geeky little piece, which is, these were essays when they were doing the research, it was these essays on what constitutes a mature, psychologically healthy human being.
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And there were some data patterns that emerged.
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And there were two overarching data patterns.
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Well, I ll preface it by saying we live on a polarity planet.
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We inhale, we exhale, North Pole, South Pole, individuals, collective.
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What they saw in those data patterns was this thing called the sacrificed self versus the expressed self.
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And we will see this going through the spiral dynamics and they alternate every other one.
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The cool colors are the sacrificed self or the making sacred.
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making the community sacred, sacrificing the self for the sacred community.
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That is a more feminine archetype of communion.
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And then the warm colors are the express self, and that relates more to what Wilbur would call agency,
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and it relates more to a masculine archetype.
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So that was data pattern number one.
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And then the other thing that they were looking at is the conditions which created the way in which we respond to the world.
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And there were two conditions, and the conditions were
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The external existential life conditions impact the way we respond to the world.
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And then the inner conditions, what our psychological capacity is, influences how we respond to the world.
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And so if you ever go into some of the books, you might see this visual representation of the double helix.
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This is where the two strands represent those two life conditions.
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And when they overlap in that double helix visual, it means that someone is graduating and moving on to and shifting into another value code.
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We re going to start with the spiral, and I m sure you ll explain this, how each level sort of ultimately kind of starts in one place, has a tipping point, and then births the next level, right?
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Where the current level cannot contain the complexity of experience.
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And we need, again, to quote Ken Wilber, to transcend and include.
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Although I know transcending and including isn t as much a part of first tier.
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So let s start.
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So let s start with beige.
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Yeah, and I love that you said that because every stage will hit a wall, basically.
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So we start with beige.
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So I d love for your listeners here today to imagine a world where there is no strip malls.
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There are no cars.
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There are no airplanes.
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There are no tools, really.
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We are in nature.
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our reptilian brain is much more active.
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And so we are very instinctual and we are very intuitive with the natural world.
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And so those senses and skill sets are much more heightened.
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And so beige is about survival.
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And the first beige individuals, I mean, some people are saying it s like 300,000 years ago, 200,000 years ago.
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In some of the more common spiral dynamics literature, it s more like 150,000 years ago.
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But this is pre-verbal, it s pre-rational, it s pre-conventional.
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And it s very sensory motor.
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It s an existence that s in tune and in harmony with the earth, but it is also a very scary place.
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And this is newborns, right?
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This is like eat, drink, sleep.
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It s true.
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And what we ll find out is we can go down to this level in the stack.
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I think probably some of the people in Gaza right now are experiencing, where am I going to get water?
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Where am I going to get my next meal?
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I don t have any shelter right now.
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I m constantly in a threat.
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And so it brings on another set of skills that we have as humans.
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And so we do see this today in famine.
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We re going to see more of it, unfortunately, with climate change.
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Homelessness, you will see this meme there.
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And newborn babies or people towards the end of life who might be suffering from dementia.
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It is still represented on the planet.
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And it s in each of us.
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We re each capable in that moment, in a moment of crisis, of revisiting beige.
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Yeah.
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And I think, you know, when I first learned this model, I admittedly wanted to know how far up the spiral I was.
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Today, it s more like, how low can I go down the stack?
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How much more primal can I get?
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And so things like being in nature, earthing,
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being in communion with the elements, appreciation of water, fire, air, earth, quietness, meditation, going into the woods and being in nature.
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These are things we re trying to recapture.
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So I really want to encourage our listeners, too, to find out, as we re talking about this, where we can reclaim some of these aspects of ourselves.
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Yeah.
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And I also just want to preview a little bit of what s to come, which is that the six means that we re primarily going to talk about are called first tier.
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And then we pop up into the second tier, if we re lucky.
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And it s only in the second tier that we re able to really appreciate and venerate and respect all the meme levels in the first tier.
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But when we re in first tier thinking, we think our meme level that we ve achieved is the best and that the other ones are the worst in many ways, right?
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So it s important in a way to say, like, how do I revere and respect not only what s present in me and all of these memes, but
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across cultures and across the world.
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So I love that you re getting primal, Nicole.
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Yeah.
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So before we just leave Beige, because I m a music therapist by training, music at Beige is humming, which we know now with like our vagal nerve studies, how much humming helps people.
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It s very self soothing.
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So it s what we do with our children.
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If we see our two year olds rocking in their cribs,
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humming or singing to themselves.
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That is like a beige level of music.
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You know, at Beige, we re just not like completely because language isn t completely formed.
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And because we re still developing cognitively at that point, when it originally was honored, we didn t
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value safety in numbers at the beginning, right?
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Purple graduates us to that understanding like we are going to be more safe.
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if we come together.
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Where beige was kind of archaic, purple becomes more magical.
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And so if you can imagine, the earth still has like the same no-strip levels, right?
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We re building structures at this point, but we re trying to interpret and make meaning out of the loud clashes of thunder.
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and the animals and the cold and going hungry and things like this.
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And so this idea of spirits or gods or multiple gods and magical thinking comes into that purple meme.
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I wouldn t say purple is exactly like a family, right?
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You probably see a lot more sexual expression, right?
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There s no kind of moral code that s come online yet.
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You might see much more polyamory in those tribes and you might see things like that where the family system isn t completely formed yet.
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And Purple has also been known for appeasing the gods with sacrifices.
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The sense of sort of causality, right?
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Like, there s trying to align sort of a superstitious, like, this gets this, sacrifice a child, good crops, right?
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Again, as you said, absent reason or morality, which is coming down the line.
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We still go there.
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We have our sports teams and our lucky underwear and synchronicity and signs.
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And I mean, I m pretty purple.
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I love purple.
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There was a point in my life where I m like, I miss the ritual.
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I mean, I now think of my whole house as a temple, right?
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And that s the reclaiming of purple.
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I mean, you ll see it with kids.
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Step on a crack, you ll break your mother s back.
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That kind of magical thinking.
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So the purple level is
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often has a leader in it too, that the group is following.
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We would also see like shamanic culture at Purple, where the kind of psychologists of today would be the shaman in the circle.
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And I think the veil of the subtle, meaning the doorway, the portal into the spirit world, is much more permeable.
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And I think that those early purple tribes had much more of a connection to spirit.
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You know, the stars were their entertainment at night.
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The fire was their entertainment.
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You know, threading that music back through, you know, at beige it was self-soothing and here the music becomes ritualistic.
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It s like a ritualistic kind of prayer or rain dance.
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And then you think about sort of going back developmentally, too, of what our brains were like or what they were doing.
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And you talked about the extra sense perception of beige, right?
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And this can be observed in the Hazda or someone whose tribes who lived closer
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to those levels of the spiral, they have extrasensory perception.
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And the brain has evolved and pruned itself according to the inputs of today, right?
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So you think about that purple mythical level and the thinness of the veil, and it wouldn t surprise me at all if there was not reason to that causality, but a lot more perception of energy in a way that we probably have lost that.
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Well, and there was a lot more psychic energy to be focused on that.
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It s difficult to fathom actually, but there was so much more being tuned into what Barry is going to
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fix your stomach ailment and what berry might kill you.
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Not to mention, you know, at that point, those folks were probably eating a lot of magic mushrooms as they re walking down the path.
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And you wonder about, you know, our expansion of consciousness and how those entheogens had an effect on that.
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We were very in tune with
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with the natural world and psychedelic plants were a part of that.
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Yeah, for sure.
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And so just know like beige was the expressed self and purple is the sacrifice self.
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Lo and behold, people get tired of being in a tribe or in obeyance to a chieftain or whatever it may be, and we get red.
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Red would say, and this is so red, it s like, fuck the tribe.
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Like, I don t want to follow those rules anymore.
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If we do kind of think about the chakras and the third chakra and this sense of will that comes online and this sense of me and breaking out of
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the tribal system or the family system, it s I want to think for myself.
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And I want to discover myself in relationship to this world in my own way.
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You know, when I first learned about Red, I think I framed it as a negative.
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And I think this is probably related to your recent book, Elise.
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Like now I think I reframe Red as how do we reclaim our power?
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Yeah.
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And power is a delicate bound.
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It s complicated.
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But this is like healthy red is healthy boundaries, right?
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And a healthy assertion of needs and wants and self-expression.
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And it s an essential stage and something that we all need to be able to tap on and say, don t tread on me.
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I have a boundary here.
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Yeah.
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But it has a shadow side.
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It has a big shadow.
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It has a big shadow.
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There s an impulsivity to it and there s an unabashedly kind of out into the world to conquer.
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And so historically we see a lot of kind of conquering happening and those memes are still alive and well in some of the people who are on the world stage.
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In modern culture, again, this is express self.
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So we re moving back to individual, a warm tone, a more sense of agency and directedness.
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You know, kids go through the terrible twos, but they also kind of recapitulate this again at the level of a teenager where it s, I m going to leave behind my family and I want to like really find out who I am and define myself more.
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Yes.
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And so red is a risk taker.
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Red is willing to take risks.
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And I think that there is probably a chemical correlation in red.
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There might be the dopamine hit from more risky behavior or taking chances and going into the unknown.
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And so we ll see red show up.
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I love this example of like punk rock in the 70s.
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It was like really against the system, the tribe.
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You see more of the negative red behavior in gangs.
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you know, gang culture.
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You know, the music traditionally in red was like war songs.
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It s like the beating of the drum.
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Like if you watch old Viking movies on Netflix, you know, there s always this beating drum saying, hey, we re coming for you.
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Yeah, we can identify it.
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SPEAKER_02
I m sure everyone is conjuring images of sort of like the feudal lords of our time.
2
SPEAKER_02
Trump is very red.
2
SPEAKER_02
So you see this in sort of these like, resurgent red across the planet right now, often with capacity for some of these higher memes, but we can get to that and what that means in terms of having access to technology, but red can be quite scary.
2
SPEAKER_00
And it s this place for us to look at where have I backed away from my own power?
2
SPEAKER_00
I know a lot of women have this kind of question, and I m sure there s plenty of men too out there who do as well.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so coming into right relationship with power,
2
SPEAKER_00
in reclaiming red, that would be things like taking risks or learning a martial art or setting better boundaries.
2
SPEAKER_02
Question.
2
SPEAKER_02
The general idea is that you can t really skip these levels of development.
2
SPEAKER_02
But do you feel like red maybe has been off limits for women or not aligned with what
3
SPEAKER_00
would qualify as feminine qualities that a lot of us rushed past it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, when you look at the marketplace and you see what it s run on, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Like today s marketplace is run on things like oil, time, labor, things like that.
3
SPEAKER_01
Back at beige, purple, red, it was run on strength.
3
SPEAKER_01
like muscle strength.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s how things were built and made.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it is true that men had more
3
SPEAKER_01
physical capacity than women.
3
SPEAKER_01
And there was no birth control there.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, people were sexual and women got pregnant and had children.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so our ability to be in that world was restricted.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I do think that because we didn t have opportunities to play in that, to be in that arena of the marketplace, whatever that marketplace was back then, it might ve been the battlefield.
3
SPEAKER_01
But for some reason, and then along comes Blue, and we ll talk about that next, where everything just got squashed.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like, you can t do this, you can t do that.
3
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, I think it s been difficult for women to find their power.
3
SPEAKER_01
We re generalizing here, but I do think
3
SPEAKER_01
It s something that we have probably been disconnected from.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think there s other factors too.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s like hormonal factors.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, we know testosterone is a more aggressive hormone and testosterone gets stuff done.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, you get stuff done when you have testosterone.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so women have less testosterone than men.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I think a lot of it is, one, no structure in which to develop healthy red for women, but an aversion, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Because women have been oppressed for a long time.
3
SPEAKER_00
We ll just leave it at that, that there s this aversion towards.
3
SPEAKER_00
shadow read, which is not a bad thing, not a bad thing.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I think we never really were trained to embrace the healthy side of it.
3
SPEAKER_00
I do think that s why all of the boundary work is having its resurgence.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like a boot camp for women of like, what am I giving up?
3
SPEAKER_00
And what do I need to learn and reclaim here in order to be more, not fit, but more equipped for this chaotic world?
3
SPEAKER_01
Right, just to honor also inclusivity, I would say, you know, we re talking about women, but there s certainly other communities on the planet who have also suffered from being in contact with their power.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
So are we ready to move?
3
SPEAKER_00
We re ready for blue conformist meme.
3
SPEAKER_01
I ll just say, the pre three prior stages, we just talked about beige,
3
SPEAKER_01
purple and red.
3
SPEAKER_01
In Ken Wilber s work, this would be related to pre-personal.
3
SPEAKER_01
So this is kind of pre-conventional, pre-rational.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s no rules at this point.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like a free-for-all, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
With red kind of feeling all of its power, it hit a wall, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
There was too much pillaging, too much rape.
3
SPEAKER_01
too much killing right there was too much fighting there was no order so then along emerges blue and blue is kind of the gateway to it s a little bit pre-conventional pre-rational there s still
3
SPEAKER_01
a bit of mythical thinking in there, but it was the introduction of, say, something like the Ten Commandments, like, thou shalt not, dot, dot, dot.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so there was this truth, whereas, you know, red would say, like, the truth is what I say it is.
3
SPEAKER_01
Blue would say, the truth is what the scriptures say or what a higher authority says.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so we move away from the more earth-based
3
SPEAKER_01
ways of worship into more of a kind of God is everywhere and everything and there are multiple gods to there is one God and this is the absolute truth and if you don t follow this word you re a sinner.
3
SPEAKER_01
So there was some threat there around keeping people in line and following rules.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I like to think about, like, some of us, we look at our parents to bring this into real life now, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
I can remember, like, looking through my mom s high school yearbook and seeing the photograph of all the kids in the 50s and how on picture day, like, everyone was dressed in their best.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, everyone was, like, sitting straight up, perfectly smiling for the camera.
3
SPEAKER_01
Where in today s world, it s just like... It s a hot mess.
3
SPEAKER_00
I can tell you as someone who sends two hot messes to picture day.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
So blue is like structure.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s rules.
3
SPEAKER_01
I love this example.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like in industry, blue is kind of your assembly line.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like you re not going to really stray from the way that things are done.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is the way we make a car.
3
SPEAKER_01
It follows this set
3
SPEAKER_01
standards of rules.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so Lu is very much about standards and following codes.
3
SPEAKER_01
And in children, as a stage of development, this is very important because kids need to understand, this is how I become a participant.
3
SPEAKER_01
First, it s our family system, but later it goes on to the school system.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then they will obviously graduate into other systems like the workplace, but it is kind of that it s all about me.
3
SPEAKER_01
And at blue, we get back to we, we get back to the sacrifice self for the sake of the whole.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right.
3
SPEAKER_00
What it is to be a citizen who abides by the laws and conforms to the standard that we all agree is appropriate, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
That there s a judicial system, and there s a police force, and there s a ideally functional government with free and fair elections.
3
SPEAKER_00
And obviously, there are issues which we ll get into.
3
SPEAKER_00
But it s a beautiful and essential functional basis on which we can exist on this planet together.
3
SPEAKER_00
To not have it would be chaos.
3
SPEAKER_00
And there are obviously places around the world that do not yet have blue.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I wouldn t want to live there.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, I mean, I ve never been to India, but I know people will say like driving on the roads, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
There s no stop signs often or lights, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
Just taking that for granted.
3
SPEAKER_01
And, and I think, yeah, I want to make this like practical for people.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like when you get out or if you re driving in the car right now, listening and you re stopping at a stoplight, that is an artifact of blue.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s blue.
3
SPEAKER_00
And for anyone who questions its validity, spend someplace with no paved roads and no ambulances and no hospital infrastructure and no police force.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s a harder, in many ways, much harder existence.
3
SPEAKER_00
And those of us who have strong blue have a lot to be grateful for.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s true.
3
SPEAKER_01
And us kind of postmodern, you know, Gen X kind of down, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
I would say, you know, Gen X, millennials, we lost, we didn t grow up in that blue structure that like the boomers did in the 1940s and 50s.
3
SPEAKER_01
I would say as a parent, being the disciplinarian and putting in blue structures is one of the most exhausting aspects of being a parent.
3
SPEAKER_00
Agree.
3
SPEAKER_00
God, it s exhausting.
3
SPEAKER_00
And there s so much counter-programming, which we ll get to, which is like...
3
SPEAKER_00
you know, boo conformity and boo limits.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I think foundationally, and we re seeing this, that you really set people up.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s a massive disservice to not create any container for your kids and for the development of healthy psychology, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
This is
3
SPEAKER_00
the end of my body and the beginning of someone else s body, and I m not always going to get what I want.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that limit on that narcissistic red drive of this is my truth, I m going to assert it.
3
SPEAKER_00
Blue is essential.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yep.
3
SPEAKER_01
So ode to blue.
3
SPEAKER_00
Because blue has a shadow side too.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s got a shadow side.
3
SPEAKER_01
It can really lock people in, right?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s conforming.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s conventional.
3
SPEAKER_01
For those of us that like to express ourselves, the expressive self wants to break out of that.
3
SPEAKER_01
Just to keep our little musical kind of examples going, the music at Blue would be very devotional.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, hymnals.
3
SPEAKER_01
I love using this example, because we will go from blue to orange now, if you re cool with that.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like thinking about the footage of Elvis Presley.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he s like,
3
SPEAKER_01
up there in his suit and he looks so handsome and he might be singing this ballad.
4
SPEAKER_01
But then all of a sudden he starts like shaking his hips and like gyrating.
4
SPEAKER_01
And in that moment in like pop culture, we are seeing the shift from blue to orange.
4
SPEAKER_00
Or the Beatles with their sweet bowl cuts and their ties.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I love music and I think music has been such a great like tracker
4
SPEAKER_01
For the emergence of new value codes and means, we see this kind of hitting a wall, this boredom with the conformity, and wanting to, again, like red did with purple,
4
SPEAKER_01
Orange to blue, orange is busting out of blue and saying, I ve got to express myself.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so there s tinges of red in orange.
4
SPEAKER_01
You will see that kind of taking this need for power to the next level at orange.
4
SPEAKER_00
The same way you see tinges of purple and blue.
4
SPEAKER_00
Correct.
4
SPEAKER_01
Blue is literally all around us, but orange, we re really, really, really steeped in orange.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so blue, I m sure people can identify blue, but significant parts of the Republican Party are very blue.
4
SPEAKER_00
Big fundamentalist religious groups are generally quite blue.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it s probably easy for anyone thinking to figure out, who s blue?
4
SPEAKER_01
What we could say is like the Republican Party in general is blue-orange, and the Democratic Party is more orange-green, which we haven t got to yet.
4
SPEAKER_01
But they both have a center of gravity at orange.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so orange is very objective.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s scientific.
4
SPEAKER_01
And what we can say is that, you know, science really becomes the new religion.
4
SPEAKER_01
And what we could also say is like, and this is kind of defined in like Anne Rand s books where objectivism is this system of philosophy that rejects the idea of collective rights.
4
SPEAKER_01
and instead argues that an individual s rights take precedent over the group.
4
SPEAKER_01
And capitalism certainly is the playground for that, to live the American dream and to really define the self.
4
SPEAKER_01
So where Red was beginning that part of the story, Orange really takes it to an extreme.
4
SPEAKER_01
you can think of like Madonna, how much she just kind of owned her sexuality and owned her success and was, you know, like something that we had never seen before on the world stage.
4
SPEAKER_01
That is kind of a defining image of Orange.
4
SPEAKER_01
What are other defining images?
4
SPEAKER_01
Wall Street, the bull on Wall Street,
4
SPEAKER_01
is a defining image.
4
SPEAKER_00
And orange is very, again, in that scientific, rationalistic, all truth is scientific, or can be reduced to some sort of materialistic ideal, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
That the world is here to be mined, that it s here for our use,
4
SPEAKER_00
But I think it s worth stating too, and this might be wrong, but this is what I had picked up from one of Ken Wilber s books, was that you ll see these memes start popping up in small ways.
4
SPEAKER_00
So Orange felt relatively recent when it s become primary, but that Enlightenment was the beginning of Orange, like all men are created equal.
4
SPEAKER_00
The beginning of sort of some of those movements toward equality was early.
4
SPEAKER_00
The beginning of Orange before it was a mass consensus or meme.
4
SPEAKER_00
Is that accurate?
4
SPEAKER_01
Totally accurate.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, Orange put a human being on the moon.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, if you ask a farmer in Kansas if we should put our tax bunny
4
SPEAKER_01
towards putting a man on the moon, that person might say, no.
4
SPEAKER_01
From a blue perspective, it might say, no, we don t have any business going on the moon, and I don t want my tax money being put towards that.
4
SPEAKER_01
If God had intended us to be on the moon, he would have provided the ability for us to do that.
4
SPEAKER_01
And orange would say, it s important for us to go on this voyage and to investigate what is out there.
4
SPEAKER_01
Orange has cured diseases.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s helped people immensely on this planet.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s all medicine, science, technology, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
Essentially.
4
SPEAKER_01
But what Ken so beautifully points out in his work is that with orange, what we see is called scientific reductionism, where we have interiors and we have exteriors.
4
SPEAKER_01
in the interior world of consciousness, emotion, this is the realm that psychologists or mystics might study, the validity of those realms or human experiences got collapsed into objective scientific reasoning.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is the idea that someday we ll be able to explain the contents of the mind by studying the brain.
4
SPEAKER_00
That instead of recognizing that maybe there s something else at play, it s this idea that everything can be reduced to consciousness is generated by your brain, not that potentially the opposite.
4
SPEAKER_01
Right.
4
SPEAKER_01
Like a great example is like, you know, if we cut open my human brain, we could say, you know, and I would say, Elise, can you see my brain?
4
SPEAKER_01
And you would say, yes, I can see your brain, Nicole.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I was to say, but can you see my sense of self?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, can you see my thoughts?
4
SPEAKER_01
My thoughts, right.
4
SPEAKER_00
And when we get into the way that in this first tier, when you re really stuck in first tier and you re orange, and you re deprecating blue, purple, red, orange or bust, it s like so much is lost.
4
SPEAKER_00
you can see right now how this orange materialist scientific reduction, however Ken Wilber says it, how we ve seeded so much of the mystery and the beauty and to either sort of the far right or denied its presence is so essential.
4
SPEAKER_00
And you talked about this sort of with purple, like how so many of us are
4
SPEAKER_00
desperate to regain ritual or to go back into a community, go back into synagogue or church or temple and have prayer or some foundational beliefs or creation stories that we can all agree on or...
4
SPEAKER_00
contemplate, you know?
4
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, we just see a lot of excess with Orange, you know.
4
SPEAKER_01
We ve gotten a bit out of control.
4
SPEAKER_01
Not a bit, like super out of control.
4
SPEAKER_00
Very out of control.
4
SPEAKER_00
This is the shadow of Orange.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
The resources on the planet are just getting taken and taken and taken.
4
SPEAKER_01
We re in an unsustainable situation and
4
SPEAKER_01
they have equal positives and negatives.
4
SPEAKER_01
But we are just at a tipping point here, where our ability to reflect, and I think this is developmental, I think it s our ability to reflect on the consequences in the future of our actions.
4
SPEAKER_01
And because
4
SPEAKER_01
The money is a currency, is a power.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s powerful, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
It gets back to red.
4
SPEAKER_01
Like the things that we can do when we have money, it means that we have power.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that power in a corporate state kind of where corporations have so many exceptions, you know?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_01
It has gotten out of control.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so we re now in a state where we ve become accustomed to a certain way of life.
4
SPEAKER_00
Rampant consumerism, growth for gross sakes, up and to the right, ad nauseum.
4
SPEAKER_01
And defining the self a lot around what we look like, where we work, what our relationships are.
4
SPEAKER_01
the definition of the self, of the human being, tends to be valued, I ll use Wilbur s work, in the upper right quadrant, in the lower right quadrant, and in the lower left quadrant.
4
SPEAKER_01
And we don t really know what it means to fuel ourselves, to fuel the self that need to kind of fill up from those other quadrants
4
SPEAKER_01
what it means to do that for ourselves in a very deep, unique, and meaningful way.
4
SPEAKER_00
Those quadrants are the exterior objective, that s the brain, that s the projection of a personal image, rather than the inner life or the inner world, which we ve long neglected.
5
SPEAKER_00
All right, so Green.
5
SPEAKER_00
Green says, this is bullshit.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
I m keeping my music thread.
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, music from being devotional to entertaining.
5
SPEAKER_01
OK, at Orange.
5
SPEAKER_01
And you ll see cars out on the road now for our listeners who are driving.
5
SPEAKER_01
The Hummer is like this kind of gas guzzling, like unnecessary vehicle, which is like orange on steroids.
5
SPEAKER_01
versus kind of your blue Cadillac.
5
SPEAKER_00
Oh, no, Cadillac.
5
SPEAKER_00
Sorry.
5
SPEAKER_00
We re not in green yet.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
The car of green would be the Prius.
5
SPEAKER_01
It would be, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
So at the end of Orange, at the end of this story of Orange, it s like your classic midlife crisis.
5
SPEAKER_01
Like, I ve got the car.
5
SPEAKER_01
I ve got the job.
5
SPEAKER_01
I ve got all this stuff that has created this me.
5
SPEAKER_01
But actually, I feel empty, and I feel
5
SPEAKER_01
guilty about other people suffering on the planet.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I just can t stand by and watch another Negro not be able to drink from the water fountain anymore.
5
SPEAKER_01
This isn t right.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so green is epitomized by the equal rights movement, by the environmental movement,
5
SPEAKER_01
by the community gatherings of the 60s, of the music of the 60s, that this life that we ve created is unsustainable, and to use the language of spiral dynamics, I must make a sacrifice for the whole.
5
SPEAKER_01
I m done kind of expressing myself.
5
SPEAKER_01
I ve completely mastered and actualized the orange meme,
5
SPEAKER_01
And there s people who haven t even gotten the opportunity to master it.
5
SPEAKER_01
They haven t even been able to get the education that it would require to play in this marketplace.
5
SPEAKER_01
and it doesn t feel fair.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so at Green, we really start caring about each other again and looking around and saying, hey, what s that sound?
5
SPEAKER_01
Everybody look what s going on, you know, to quote Buffalo Steel.
5
SPEAKER_01
This isn t working anymore.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so Green is community-based.
5
SPEAKER_01
Green is moving from this sense of
5
SPEAKER_01
it s all about me to it s all about us.
5
SPEAKER_00
And it s all about the planet, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
This eco vision, egalitarian, one planet, one globe, one people.
5
SPEAKER_01
These are the kind of recycling movements that we ve seen.
5
SPEAKER_01
Whereas in blue and orange, it was all about convenience and, you know, appliances and TV dinners.
5
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, the woman of the household was free to do other things because she didn t have to cook meals so much anymore, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
Green is kind of like circling back in again around community, ritual, and caring about other things other than ourselves.
5
SPEAKER_01
Right.
5
SPEAKER_00
And it s a beautiful meme.
5
SPEAKER_00
We re going to talk about its shadow side, too.
5
SPEAKER_00
But before we sort of get into that and then yellow, what you can also see, not to focus on Trump too much in this conversation, but he s so, I think, such a perfect example of someone who, you can tell me if you think this is accurate,
5
SPEAKER_00
but who is very red, but originally, in his original presidential run, presented, used a lot of language of blue, right, appealed to evangelical Christians and more conventional Republicans, and then also spoke to Orange by saying, oh, I have all this business acumen and technical acumen, and then campaigned
5
SPEAKER_00
almost exclusively on an anti-green platform.
5
SPEAKER_00
And we ll get into sort of like how the levels pick on each other in ways that are deeply unproductive.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then as president became exceptionally red, looking to dismantle in some ways blue.
5
SPEAKER_00
and any checks on his power while using the tools of orange, I will say, too.
5
SPEAKER_00
And you see this, too, with other leaders around the country who are red, Putin, but have access to orange technology while ignoring blue that are very concerning.
5
SPEAKER_00
Is that fair, just to give people a geopolitical context?
5
SPEAKER_01
And now that we re getting higher up into the spiral,
5
SPEAKER_01
Now we can look back and now that you ve had just like a brief review, you can kind of see like a chordal-like quality.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s like a musical chord, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
So you could have some a red, blue, orange chord and what that looks like, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
Or an orange, green, purple chord, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
And so
5
SPEAKER_01
It flicks switches if we go back to the kind of original, what constitutes a mature, psychologically healthy human being, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
And these kind of life conditions and inner conditions, those switches are getting flicked on in arenas like politics, in arenas like religion or education systems or healthcare systems.
5
SPEAKER_01
And we see where things are antiquated
5
SPEAKER_01
And we see where, you know, like in terms of energy, how we re trying to be more solution focused and go into more green energy.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so I would say, absolutely, you can see
5
SPEAKER_01
with a human being like Trump, where the spiral is playing out and what s being highlighted in his apology.
5
SPEAKER_00
And how those memes can be sort of stoked and you get within this first tier, you can see how he can sort of provoke or stoke the red in a lot of people in this country.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then also say, not only am I going to sort of turn you on by speaking into this red level, but I m going to then show you how the green meme reviles you.
5
SPEAKER_00
So I m going to create sort of this extreme culture war by activating all of these memes, which maybe weren t as present or as visible to us as they are now.
5
SPEAKER_00
Let s talk about shadow.
5
SPEAKER_00
green, because I think that that plays into this too, the mean green mean, is that right?
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And then let s talk about yellow and then we ve done it.
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We ve done it.
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Just solved it.
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So Green becomes skeptical about everything that we ve been told as the truth.
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And so Green begins to look into some of the mythical, magical religions that they might have been raised in, and they re considering, does this feel like the truth for me?
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And it might not.
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At post,
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kind of modern or late green, what s been handed to us has been constructed socially.
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And if it s been constructed, it can certainly then be deconstructed.
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Yes.
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This is a skill, right?
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I mean, this is a reflective skill.
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But green can come to the conclusion that there is no one truth.
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And it s all contextual.
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And so this is what kind of pluralism or relativism is it s this belief that there s no absolute truth.
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And only the truths that a particular individual or culture happen to believe is true for them.
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It has sort of the narcissism of Red, which is interesting, even though it would profess to be at complete odds with Red.
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But it gets into this like, your truth is your truth, Nicole.
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My truth is my truth.
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So maybe it s different in that it allows other truths, but it s in many ways equally chaotic.
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Well, and then that is a value judgment in and of itself, which Ken will so clearly point out.
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The truth is, is that there is no truth, but that s a value judgment.
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That s a truth.
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Right.
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That s a statement of a truth, ironically, right?
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And so we end up in this kind of negation
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You know, where this is where we kind of hit the brick wall, where it s difficult to make meaning and it s difficult to find purpose.
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And there s a lot of negation that happens and we can get into nihilism.
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Yes.
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Wilbur talks a lot who is would I think probably himself say that he s green or has been green or is quite progressive, but he has a lot of criticism for what happens to a culture when one you devalue all truth or deconstruct to the point that there s no sort of core story
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And then when you start deprecating all of their memes, right, and saying, screw orange, screw blue, not that there s not healthy criticism that s part of that, but it s a creation of a chaos where then you
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see how that can be co-opted by other parties and then turn to create even more fracture.
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And I ve heard other, you know, writers about this from decades ago, but it feels appropriate to this particular moment, talk about how the language of green, which is accurate to some extent, but it sees everything through a racial lens, through the lens of the colonizer, and the lens that there s an oppressor.
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And so, and there s the oppressed, and then it goes back through history and re-litigates
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these previous levels of development, where that wasn t present.
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That level of development or consciousness wasn t present.
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And so you start tearing everything apart in a way that s not actually very helpful.
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You know, green can get rather soapboxy.
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At this kind of extreme, when we re not taking a perspective on our perspective, because at Green we re capable of doing that at this point.
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It s like, hang on, let me check myself here.
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you know, we can get very angry.
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And we saw this play out during COVID, for example, like to mask or to not mask, to vaccinate, to not vaccinate.
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And well, it s interesting, I was thinking about this, like, you know, when we were masking, we were covering up, you know, our ability to breathe, which is a very beige need of survival, right, just to breathe.
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So you could see why some people would get
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bent out of shape for that.
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And then on the other hand, you could see how people would say, well, this is saving lives, right?
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So it s this kind of back and forth between, you know, the express self and the sacrifice self, you know, what s good for me or what s good for all of us.
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This is that there is a partial truth in both of those that can be honored, right?
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Before we pop to yellow, green,
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hates hierarchy.
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And so it sort of hunts hierarchy down and this idea, this interpretation of it, that it s always dominant and always oppressive.
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And so you also end up in, but then when you ask someone who s green, like, do you think that your worldview is more evolved than Trump s?
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They would say, well, mine is, obviously, certainly.
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And then that s inherently it.
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Again, we re just pointing out other, that s a hierarchy, right?
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You re saying that it doesn t hold.
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But it holds us, I think, as someone who is probably very green.
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I ll say that.
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Yeah, I am.
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I probably hit green when I was in high school, and was very influenced by green from the music that I listened to.
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Yeah.
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Those singers of the 60s
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were my heroes.
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They were kind of my teachers.
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Yellow.
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Do we have time for yellow?
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We do have time for yellow.
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The last thing I ll just say is like, you know, Wilbur talks about this kind of flattening of hierarchies.
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And so we get this kind of flat land situation in orange and green.
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Green is working towards finding more meaning.
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but it s difficult.
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It gets in its own way at times, right?
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And so, you know, this, all of these up to green are what we would consider first tier.
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And I ll just review, you know, beige, purple, and red in Wilbur s model would be considered pre-personal.
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And then blue, orange, and green would be considered the personal level of development or conventional or rational
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And so that kind of constitutes that first tier.
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Then we begin to move into yellow and to quote Coldplay, it was all yellow.
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And so suddenly what happens at yellow is yellow says, oh my gosh.
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And partly it s this kind of inquiry, this kind of conversation that we re talking about that is becoming much more available to people through podcasts, through books, through movies, right?
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That this yellow or integral level of development is coming into the mainstream more.
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and is influencing us, but yellow is the first time where we can take a perspective on our perspective and we can say, my gosh, look at this spiral.
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I can see it.
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I can see how it s all at play and I can see how they re all in conflict with one another.
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I think what I have learned through this journey is to have more compassion and to really honor
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different stages of development.
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That s not to say to not speak out and make value judgments of when things are harming humans and humanity.
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You know, we can t just remain neutral.
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There has to be value judgments had.
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And that s where we get into yellow where we bring back that it s okay to have a hierarchy, that there is a hierarchy,
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And we re looking at hierarchy in terms of its original meaning of sacred order.
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Ken Wilber is the quintessential kind of author around an integral level of development.
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And the ego structure of the human being is still in place.
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It s kind of the ego s last stand at yellow.
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Whereas Orange was saying, who am I?
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And it was looking at things on the surface to prop itself up as an identity.
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Yellow is saying, I can see that that s beginning to fade.
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I can see that my ego structure, I m going to be giving birth to a new self.
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And it s not going to be organized around so many things that represent me on the exterior, it s going to have more representation on the interior.
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Yeah, or thinking of it from sort of a story perspective, orange being, who am I?
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And that essential more balanced assertion of self and wants and needs.
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And then you get into green that says, well, every story counts.
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Every story matters, which is a beautiful idea.
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But you get, again, you kind of can end up in a bit of narcissistic, like,
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whose story is there is actually some people s stories are more important, particularly those stories we haven t heard.
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But then yellow to me feels like, well, how does my story actually serve?
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And how is my story part of a bigger story where there is a little bit of a disillusion of like, who am I and how do I start my story into how do I recontextualize myself into a whole?
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Yeah, one of the questions at Orange is, you know, who am I?
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But at Yellow, it s who am I really?
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And so this is where we see more of an interest in interior development and interior exploration, whereas we ve been so preoccupied with what s happening out there.
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And our culture certainly doesn t
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foster interior contemplation or exploration.
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And we hear in pop culture or wellness communities, like you ve got to love yourself.
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We hear this, but I don t know if people really know what that looks like in terms of a behavior with themselves.
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And so it s beginning to make an assessment on what has the most meaning in my life, what really brings purpose to my life, and where do I want to focus
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my attention in this precious human birth.
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And there s like a generativity aspect to it, which is left over a little bit from green in a good way of like, how am I contributing to the world?
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And then it feels like from a service perspective,
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that yellow is slightly more practical.
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Again, you mentioned recognizing necessary hierarchies, and I would say like a social media, which I guess is maybe not green, but this idea that everyone s an expert, right?
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Everyone has something to bring to this conversation and that yellow maybe is a reconstitution of actually some people are
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elders in our culture.
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Some people have turned knowledge into wisdom.
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Some people do have the knowledge that we need in this time.
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But maybe we don t on every issue need to be relying on pop singers and TikTok influencers for how we make decisions or think about complex issues.
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And we need to read a culture where we re leaning on people who have
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insight?
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I don t know.
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Yellow strives for a more elegant design.
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I think yellow is stepping back more in assessing and looking at multiple systems at the same time and looking at how
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how they can better serve one another and leverage one another in a more holistic way.
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So yellow is definitely more holistic.
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And understanding the gifts of every meme level, the technology, science, medicine of orange, the order and structure of blue, the boundaries of red.
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Is yellow really the moment when transcend and include or this idea when we think about how
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totally chaotic and fractured we are.
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If enough people can move to yellow that instead of culture wars where it s green against red and it s easy to stoke those divisions, but that yellow can say, how do we like reintegrate red so they feel validated, heard, seen, included, not maligned, not sort of basket full of deplorables.
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Is that what yellow is capable of doing?
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Yellow, and I would say, you know, beyond yellow is turquoise.
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Yellow is still an expressed self.
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As I said earlier, it s like the last trails of the ego.
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We are really actualizing ourselves at yellow, but we are able to take stock in ourselves.
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I think a good example of someone moving from like orange green into yellow would be somebody like Oprah Winfrey.
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Turquoise is looking for how do we bring back the village?
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How do we live in community again?
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Why are we living in these separate houses?
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We re not sharing resources.
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Everyone on the street has a snowblower, a lawnmower, you know, like the design isn t elegant.
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It s not an elegant design.
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And so I think the mind of yellow joins into turquoise and as it has studied systems,
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It contributes to that, and we are looking for more holistic, elegant solutions to give birth to a new culture.
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It s like we can no longer continue down the path.
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And at Turquoise, we re going to have to sacrifice for the whole.
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I know it s hard to say, but we might be faced with giving up some of the conveniences
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that we have had because things will collapse in such a way that we just won t have them anymore.
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Or we re going to get directives from the top down, which says by a certain year, we re not going to be able to drive, you know, standard engine cars anymore or something like that.
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You know, these bands of value are on the horizon.
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I would say that yellow and turquoise also want to see, they understand this pattern of emergent, this emergent cyclical levels of existence.
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And we want to see each level of development to be as healthy as they can where they are at.
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I think that is, you know, one important point to make, not just like that we get people up to a certain level, but where they re at is healthy.
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At this point, I think there s a certain level of development where we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors and that we inherit capacities, interior capacities, growth in evolution of humanity.
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At this point, we have to choose it.
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We have to choose to grow and evolve and contribute to this new world.
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It s calling us to participate in it.
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A lot of people top out at a certain level of development because they re not surrounded by a culture where growth is talked about.
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It s not like a norm in that culture to keep growing.
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And they might be in sociodemographic areas where learning about other cultures or other ways of life isn t available.
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Well, I think you opened by saying that these are essentially contagious, right?
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And the more that we can express them in healthy ways, ideally, the more it becomes possible.
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I just want to say for the heck of it, too, there is a shadow to this, too.
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There s criticisms of spiral dynamics or of integral theory.
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There s too much jargon.
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There s, you know, too much
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around hierarchies.
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There s too much intellectualizing a reality that we re boxing in, naming, categorize, unnecessary complexity.
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I think it s important that at every stage, there is a light and a dark shadow.
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There s the beauty and the goodness from that stage.
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And there s also where we re not seeing our own shadow in at all.
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Well, thank you for this.
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This was an excellent primer.
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I m excited for you to come back on, too, and we ll employ it.
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And we ll talk about some of your other work, too, which I guess in some ways is about healing the spiral in people anyway, right?
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Yeah.
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And I just want to encourage our listeners today to just, if this piques your curiosity,
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go deeper, learn more.
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This is your birthright.
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I think it s important for people to know that.
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Our birthright is to grow and to have a greater capacity of compassion, but to also sharpen the sword of discernment
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and to be able to use our intelligence in such a way to discern things.
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We need healthy human beings inhabiting this planet.
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Humanity has so much potential.
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We really, really do.
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And it is up to us to contribute to that.
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I mean, it is one drop in the ocean, but boy, when that happens, it adds up.
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Thanks for hanging out with us for an extra long episode.
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It s hard to adequately describe the spiral with less time.
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But foundationally, if you can get the basics, it becomes one of the most useful lenses for understanding culture.
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yourself, your relationships, businesses.
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It s actually, I know in Don Beck s time, it was widely coached within businesses, not only because there are different meme value functions.
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You can imagine there s accounting and legal and creative brand.
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but also because there are certain companies that are very value meme specific and they market and speak to consumers in very specific ways.
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And we didn t get into it but I ll include in this show notes an Audible original with Don Beck where he talks a little bit about his work in post-apartheid South Africa.
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which is fascinating and within that there was a lot of consideration from DeMille and Mandela about how to use spiral dynamics to speak to different coalitions.
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Because ultimately, if there s a way to take these first tier levels and include them in the spiral, because guess what?
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They re included in the spiral.
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Then I think that there s potential, even though it feels so far away, for a more unified future where maybe as a collective we can punch up to second tier integral thinking.
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and get on side with each other while we bring our different gifts, which will probably be present in different memes within us.
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If you liked today s episode, please rate and review and tell a friend.
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You can find show notes and full transcripts of the episodes at EliseLoonan.com.
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While there, please sign up for my sub stack.
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I send a short note every Wednesday about topics that are aligned with this show and a deeper dive most Sundays.
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Or follow me on Instagram at EliseLoonan.
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And finally, if you haven t already, please consider picking up a copy of my New York Times bestselling book, On Our Best Behavior, The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good, available wherever you get your books.
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It s an exploration of how women have been conditioned for goodness, men for power, and all the ways we ve been programmed to police ourselves and each other according to these cultural ideas of what it is to be a good woman.
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I d also like to give a huge thank you to my sponsors who make this show possible.
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Please support them the way they support this podcast.
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This has been a presentation of Cadence 13 Studio.
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Available now for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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I want to give a shout out to Phil Svitek, Lauren LaGrasso, Mary-Kate McDonough, Ali Brockman, and the entire Kedans13 team for producing these episodes, and to Valero Duval for my key art.
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Take care of yourselves.
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I ll see you next time.