Is This Our Push Up the Spiral? (Monthly Solo Podcast)

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In this month’s solo episode, I’m sharing: The tools and people helping me to manage my fear right now. Thoughts on growing up versus waking up. The most important things I’ve learned from the Spiral Dynamics theory of human development, and Ken Wilbur’s concept of holarchies. What makes me believe there is a way for many of us to expand our worldviews and push up the spiral now. And more.

MORE ON SPIRAL DYNAMICS & MENTIONS FROM EPISODE:

Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness

True & False Magic

Carla Schwiderski: “The Law of Resonance”

“Finding Ourselves on the Spiral”

“Transcend and Include”

“Ascending and Descending”

Ken Wilber on Pulling the Thread: “To Transcend and Include”

Nicole Churchill on Pulling the Thread: “The Basics of Spiral Dynamics”

Spiral Dynamics Integral, by Don Beck (Audio Book)

A Post-Truth World, by Ken Wilber

Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change, by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

Oh, friends, you all I'm sure have heard this might be apocryphal, but that the definition of crisis in Chinese means that you live in interesting times and these are interesting times. I know regardless of where you may sit on a political spectrum that we are all being bathed in a lot of fear, a lot of fear, right? It's just a contagion within the culture right now, understandably. I think that's the point. I think that the administration is trying to sow fear because it's so incredibly paralyzing and this is also catnip of many of our media enterprises, which many of them do incredible journalism and we are within the social media algorithms being bathed in clickbait and just a lot of panic inducing news and some of the news is panic inducing.

I do not want to suggest that that's not true, but I've been thinking a lot about fear because I have been contending with my own anxiety and just want to offer a few comments about that before we dive into spiral dynamics, which I know I've talked about a fair amount, but every time I dive back into it, I find my bearings a little bit or at least a framework that I think helps me understand what's happening. But first on fear, I was talking to Thomas Hubl, we have a conversation coming out shortly about this dynamic and he made this point, which I think is so important that many of us feel that in order to be loyal to the collective in order to acknowledge what's happening that we feel we need to empathize to the point that we are holding the same energetic vibration, that we're going to share their fear.

I think it's common to have this loyalty to the energetic tenor of the time. Even if you may be in a place on the globe or in a population that's not directly affected, your nervous system doesn't really know the difference, right? And fear is just so incredibly contagious. And I've talked about this a bit how Carissa talks about imagining that you're standing in front of a switchboard and you get to decide, you get to dial up the energy that you're powering in the world because what you power is what powers you. So if you're going to power fear, you will be powered by fear and that's a really important choice. Fear is obviously an animating, maybe our oldest emotion, this animating survival instinct, this hypervigilance, and it's easy to stroke and it's easy to inspire and it's highly, highly, highly contagious. Just think about the people who are killed in stampedes when you call fire in a crowded movie theater, right?

The instinct to survive is so incredibly strong, it just takes over all of our other programming and many of you are familiar with the concept of being above and below the line. I will include everything that I'm referencing here in the show notes on Substack for this episode just so you don't have to worry or take notes. But the idea being above and below the line is that when you are below the line, which you are driven below the line generally by fear, whether you're conscious that you're being driven by fear or not. Most of the time we're not conscious that we're trying to keep fear at bay, but when you are below the line, you are in the drama triangle where you are looking for the victim, the villain, the hero, and what we're experiencing in our culture. I live in Los Angeles, so particularly with what's happening with ice, it's very easy in those moments to say, I clearly see the victims, I clearly see the villains and who are the heroes, right?

That's how we live. That's the reality of living below the line. And it makes a lot of sense. It maps to our experience, right? And you get a lot of certainty and feelings of safety when you can say, I know who the problem is I who the contaminating influence is. It's this. If this stops the fear subsides. Sure. And this is why this stuff gets tricky, because it's true and it is obviously overly simplistic and mired in certainty. I remember this father, Richard Rohr, he says that the opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certitude, which I think is so important. I watch myself all the time, where am I so certain that I know exactly what's going on? I might be kind of right, but I'm certainly not entirely right. And I think we get stuck when we just go in with so much certainty about exactly what's happening.

Here's an important point about being below the line, is that you see yourself as being at the effect of the world. The world is happening to you. You are not empowered. You are in more or less a victim position where everything is out of your control and there's nothing that you can do that is the mental state of being below the line. This is all happening to you, by the way, just small plug. But this is something that Courtney and I go into in a fair amount of depth in the workbook, which is coming in August at the end of August, Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness. So you can pre-order it now. So that's below the line. Now, when you're above the line and you are feeling open, safe, you can play, you can engage, you see yourself as being a creator, you are creating your own world.

The world is happening through you and by you. It's not happening to you. It is happening through you and by you. You are empowered in your own experience and you are sitting in the driver's seat or sitting at that emotional switchboard and you see the world as something that you can affect, that you can change, that you can respond to or engage with in a really proactive, creative way. Most of us, to be fair, spend most of our days below the line. It's just part of what it is to be human. But we want to know that being above the line is possible and we want to aspire to that because that's the place of creativity can really only come online when we are out of fear and when we are feeling safe and we are playing and we are open to the unknown, we are open to uncertainty.

And creativity is so important, particularly in moments like this where it feels like we're being clobbered by this extreme, I don't want to say toxic masculinity because it's so trite now, but this extreme version of masculinity, which is really an authoritarian regime that would clobber the feminine clobber creativity, clobber life. So in this moment, we want to be able to respond with creativity. And Phil Stutz, my co-author on True and False Magic says that creativity is the antidote to evil, not goodness. Creativity. Creativity is the antidote to evil. And so when we are scared, when we are stuck, when we are paralyzed, it is really incumbent on us not to stay loyal to the collective energetic vibration, but to manage our own anxiety so we can get above the line so we can get into a creative space. And when I'm talking about creativity, I'm not talking about you need to go and write a book or you need to put out a podcast or you need to paint a picture.

Those things are all great, but policymaking is creative. Organizing is creative. Every movement forward is creative. So that's the framework in which to understand creativity. And I wrote a whole post about this, so I will include that in the show notes as well. So going back to fear for a minute and our tendency to vibrate at lower frequencies like fear, guilt, and to be in a perpetual state of stress that creates a resonance, that brings in other fear and guilt and energy that gets attached to us, that can bring us down. And so I did this q and a with Carla Schiwderski who I talked about in my episode with Satya. She's the one who miraculously made my lymphocytes colitis go away. She did this incredible q and a for my substack. I'll put it in the show notes, but I just want to share a little bit.

It's called the Law of Resonance. And she just talks about darkness in a really beautiful way, and I think we all feel this, right? She talks about building an energetic immune system, which is so important in the same way that you would want to develop your physical immune system. But then when we get porous, when we get scared and we're freaking out and vibrating at a very low level, low energy level, we become susceptible to darker energies, darker entities, they might not even have form. It can be she calls them thought bubbles or just clusters of energy and it can permeate and make us sick. So it's just something to keep in mind. And she offers a lot of really tangible, concrete advice for clearing out your space. And this is what she says about the law of resonance. She says, and here we must remember a fundamental law that governs both matter and spirit. The law of resonance, everything vibrates, everything, amids a frequency and that frequency attracts matching vibrations from the unseen realms. This includes spiritual entities, luminous or obsessive, who follow the patterns we carry. They're not random visitors. They're drawn by affinity, by habit, by energetic permission. So this is a moment to reflect not with guilt, but with honesty. How do you live within your environment? Is your home a temple of peace or a battlefield of noise? Fights and unrest, do arguments, emotional explosions or unspoken resentments dominate the space.

What becomes habitual in the environment becomes magnetic. Are substances like alcohol, drugs are compulsive behaviors used to escape. Rather than heal these patterns, distort your resonance and open portals to low vibration companions. Do you open spiritual gateways, carelessly, invoking forces without grounding protection or wisdom? Remember where intention goes? Energy flows and doors once opened must be navigated with clarity. Do you carry sadness, depression, or despair without seeking light? These are human emotions, yes, but when prolonged without spiritual care, they attract shadows. And finally, how do you nourish your spiritual field, your inner altar? Does your home breathe prayer, beauty, gratitude and conscious connection? Or has the sacred been forgotten? This is not a message of fear, it is a call to spiritual responsibility. You are not a victim of invisible forces. You are a co-creator of your spiritual environment. That is just a small snippet, but it's really a beautiful q and a and I think incredibly important because going back to this idea of the way that we're all being bathed and fear, I really think that that fear is contagious.

It breeds, it attracts other darker energies and it is subsuming. I think one of the acts of spiritual maturity and something that those of us who have the ability to do must do this. It is as she mentioned, a spiritual responsibility both to yourself and to the collective, to manage and process your own emotional weight and your own fear so that you are not spreading it or inspiring it or stoking it in the collective. And for those of us who are not being hunted by ice or living in Israel or Iran or Ukraine or Russia, it is essential that we do this work of managing ourselves because it helps the entire collective when we can stay grounded in what's present and clear and putting out emitting out a vibration of peace and love and holding that for the collective, it is actually a practical concern.

It's not spiritual woowoo nonsense. It is our responsibility to ourselves and to each other, which brings me to spiral dynamics and why I'm going to try and sell you on this and this idea of being as spiritually mature and grown up as we can be in these moments. So Margaret Mead has this quote, which I'm sure you've heard, never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. I'm sure you have heard that. And when it comes to Ken Wilber's work in spiral dynamics, he is not spiral dynamics, but he writes a lot about spiral dynamics and other similar frameworks. This idea that the tip of the spear, those of us who not only have maybe had a waking up experience, but more importantly have had a lot of growing up experience can lead the tip of the spear on the spiral. And he thinks, and obviously nobody knows, but that if maybe 5% or 10% of us can get to tier two integral stage of consciousness, that we can start to shift the entire center of gravity on the planet. And so that's a lot of us, but it's not that many of us, and I've come to maybe believe that one of the things that I want to do here on earth is help as many people grow up and climb the spiral as possible.

Ken Wilber's work gets quite complicated because he has all these different frameworks that he lays on top of each other, and it blows my mind too, but his point, and I've talked about this a lot, but that there is a very important difference between waking up and growing up. And a lot of people in our culture think that waking up is the goal to have that breakthrough experience where you feel yourself at one with the universe and a lot of people spend their entire lives while they're also growing up achieving states of being awake through meditation and intense study. But recently, a lot of people have been cutting the line and going straight to these highly intense psychedelic experiences, and I think it's creating a huge amount of distortion in our world. If you read any of the stories about Elon Musk and ketamine, for example, when people are having these waking up experiences and they are not grownup when they have the emotional capacity of a teenage boy, we are in trouble because you get the Messiah complex in very smart 13-year-old, and this is happening all over the place.

So it is more important really that we focus on growing ourselves up, which often happens through spiritual experiencing and going through big transitions and cycles of despair, but that needs to be the focus. Another way to think about it really is that waking up as the vertical, our connection to the divine, the universe, spirit unseen forces, all wonderful important things and growing up is how we live on the horizontal in our daily lives. And too often we also see within religion this split, you go to church on Sunday, you get absolved for your sins, and then you go out during the week and you are kind of a terrible person, and then you go back to church and you compartmentalize your religious life, your connection to the vertical, and you do not live it in the horizontal. And we are being called to live it, to spill it into the horizontal, to apply the vertical to the horizontal.

That's the primary axis that's so critical that we come to understand Waking up is wonderful, but if you aren't embodying it, if you aren't taking the divine and living it as a human in your daily interactions with the people you love in the world, you're missing the point. And I think in order to ascend the spiral of spiral dynamics, then you need to really be working mostly on your growing up, mostly on expanding your container, integrating your shadow, all of the things that we're going to talk about now with spiral dynamics. Okay, so spiral dynamics. I'm going to skip a whole history lesson. I've written about it before. Well, I'll give the brief one. It was put forward by this man named Claire Graves, who was a contemporary of Maslow and it had a very complex name and then it was picked up and institutionalized and made more popular by Ken Wilbur and others.

It was used actually in Posta apartheid South Africa as a way to really understand the frameworks or the mental state of different groups of people and then how to communicate to them and how to move them forward. It also correlates, it has more stages and steps, but there are a lot of developmental psychology models in the world, some of which have more steps like ser, some of which have fewer steps. Like Carol Gilligan, I think she breaks it down quite elegantly into egocentric, ethnocentric and integral or world centric. And so her model is when you're egocentric, when you're a child, it's all about you. You don't really understand anything outside of your own remit. And again, these are all, this is it. This is what it is to be human. You move through these stages, they're all very natural. So that's egocentric. Ethnocentric is when you become concerned with you and yours.

And Robert Kagan, who's also a developmental psychologist at Harvard, he I think says that most of the world, 60% of the population is at an ethnocentric or lower level. So ethnocentric is when you are like, I only care about my community. My community is the community, right? So I only care about white men or white nationalism or those are all variations of an ethnocentric worldview. My guess is if you're listening to my podcast and you like what I do, you are not at an ethnocentric stage. Then her next stage, the final stage, integral worldcentric is when you have love for everyone. You see past those identity factors that might say, oh, this isn't my person. You care about the globe, you care about everyone. That's the integral. That's a very simple system that's quite elegant. But spiral dynamics is helpful because it's more granular and I think does a better job of describing some of the specifics of what we are experiencing right now in the collective.

And what's important to understand about the spiral is that as you move up the spiral, both in age and your own maturation, you can use it to look at yourself and you can use it to look at culture simultaneously, the center of gravity of different cultures and different times in history or at different points on the spiral. But with every shift up the spiral, there's an experience which he calls transcend and include, which is that as you transcend and include you, you understand the levels you're capable of moving into those up and down those levels, depending on the threat state that you are in, but you're getting the wider and wider aperture. So transcend and include Richard Rohr. I like this. He thinks that the growth mechanism of expanding your worldview means that it should actually be include and transcend that. That's a force that pushes you up the spiral.

Richard Rohr also likes spiral dynamics and wilber, so that's an important note. That said, most of us are living in tier one of spiral dynamics, which caps out at green. And the integral stage, which we're trying to push to is the first level of tier two, and that's where maybe 4%, 5% of us are. And we want to get to tier two integral. And it's at that integral level that you are really more of a master of the spiral in the sense that you are more pragmatic. You can see it more clearly when you are in a level of tier one, you tend to primarily see at the level at which you are at. That's your dominant ideology and worldview. That is an important point. And as I explained more of it, you'll be like, oh, right, I get that. So I'm primarily giving you, this is how it is translated or talked about from Don Beck and Christopher Cohen.

They're the ones who participated in the discussions that led to the end of apartheid in South Africa, and then they codified spiral dynamics. And then Ken Wilbur takes it farther and makes it a little bit more complex. But we're just going to stick with the most basic model. I'm primarily going to talk about first tier. We're going to start at the bottom of the spiral. So this is the first tier. It's called subsistence. They use colors that mean nothing because they just wanted to not spin up extra complexity. But the first level is beige. And this emerged maybe a hundred thousand years ago. And it is really about subsistence. You could say that almost everything in tier one is about subsistence though. So beige, this is the mindset of beige. It's archaic, instinctual, an instinctive drive to survive where food, water, warmth, sex and safety take priority.

There's really no awareness or focus on the distinct self survival bans are created to perpetuate life. This was seen with our first human societies, but you see it with newborn infants, senile elderly or late stage Alzheimer's, people suffering from shell shock. There's very little power congregated in this group of people. And it's not that many, but it does happen. And again, all of these live within each of us. So you could be shellshocked, we could all develop Alzheimer's, right? But most of us move past this stage. And what's interesting too about spiral dynamics is it switches from the eye to the we to the eye, to the we. So level two, they call that purple. This started 50,000 years ago. This is the magical animistic stage. At this level, the focus is on keeping spirits happy and adhering to mystical signs and spells. Chiefs, elders and ancestors.

Lead rituals and cycles are essential, and the group is more important than the individual. So this is all over our culture. I have a lot of purple in me, I'm sure many of you do as well. I'm looking around and I see all my favorite crystals. I have a piece of black tourmaline in my bra, not going to lie. So that's where we see it today. Belief in voodoo like curses, blood oaths, ancient grudges, good luck, charms, family rituals, magical beliefs and superstitions, strong in the developing world, gangs, athletic teams, and corporate cultures. 10% of the population, 1% of the power. So there's still some part of our population. This isn't, when did they write this? Maybe in the eighties. That still lives at this level, but it's quite rare. But yeah, when you're putting on your lucky underwear, that's your purple coming out. When you are doing a full moon cycle, that's your purple coming out.

And again, all of these tears have a lot of beauty. They have a shadow side and a light side. You can probably infer that from what I'm describing. So that's purple red level three started 10,000 years ago. This is Wilbur on red. First, emergence of a self, distinct from the tribe, powerful, impulsive, egocentric, heroic, mythic spirits, dragons, beasts and powerful people. Futile lords protect underlings in exchange for obedience and labor. This is the basis of futile empires, power and glory. The world is a jungle full of threats and predators, conquers out foxes and dominates, enjoy self to the fullest without regret or remorse. We're seen. This is the terrible twos, rebellious youth, frontier mentalities, feudal kingdoms, epic heroes, James Bond, villains, soldiers of fortune, wild rock stars, atill of the Lord of the Flies. And it's 20% of the population, 5% of the power. It's interesting time because again, this is Trump, this is governments in the Middle East. There's a ton, a surging of red on our planet right now. This is Putin. There's a lot of this in America, right? This is tribalistic, nationalistic, ethnocentric to go back to the Gilligan model in force, right? And it's quite dominant right now. It's surging. And as mentioned, many of us have this, we have this instinct, but right now it is really taking over the main stage.

That's the power gods. The power gods level, which is red.

Okay, then we get to blue, which started 5,000 years ago. This is called conformist Rule. This is Wilbur again, who I'm reading from. Life has meaning, direction and purpose with outcomes determined by an all powerful other or order. This righteous order enforces a code of conduct based on absolutist and varying principles of right and wrong. Violating the code or rules has severe perhaps everlasting repercussions following the code yields rewards for the faithful basis of ancient nations, rigid social hierarchies, paternalistic one right way, and only one right way to think about everything. Law and order. Impulsivity controlled through guilt, concrete, literal and fundamentalist belief. Obedience to the rule of order. Often religious, but can be secular or atheistic order or mission. Okay, here's where it's seen. Puritan America, Confucianist China, Dickensian England, Singapore discipline codes of chivalry and honor, charitable good deeds. Islamic fundamentalism, boy and girl scouts, moral majority, patriotism.

40% of the population with 30% of the power. And obviously today we see this with Christian nationalism, far right thinking, evangelicalism, et cetera. The blue is surging. And what we're also seeing is that cons between red and blue in our country. So particularly with his first term, Trump did a really good job. I think he was bolder this time, but did a really good job of pretending to care about blue or to pretending to be blue. So Mike Johnson, blue, blue, blue, blue, Ted Cruz, blue through and through that is blue. Also very ethnocentric. We are the saved. Jesus only cares about our people, the chosen people. We are the ones. Everyone else is an infidel. Everyone else will need to repent and convert or die. That is the far right. That's the Christian nationalism. By the way, I'll include this in the show notes as well, but Ken Wilbur did write a book.

It's now been renamed, but it was about Trump. Now I think it's just called Post-Truth America, but it's short and it's a really good primer if you want to understand some of these dynamics in action because you'll start to be able to diagnose it and see it very clearly. Alright, so that's blue, then we get to orange. Orange started 300 years ago. It is scientific achievement. Here is Wilbur again. At this wave, the self escapes from the herd mentality of blue, because again, blue is another we phase, and now we're back to an I phase. So the self escapes from the herd mentality of blue and seeks truth and meaning in individualistic terms, scientific in the typical sense, the world is a rational and well-oiled machine with natural laws that can be learned, mastered and manipulated for one's own purposes. Highly achievement oriented, especially in America, toward materialistic gains, the laws of science, rule, politics, the economy and human events.

The world is a board on which games are played as winners gain preeminence and perks over losers, marketplace alliances manipulate earth's resources for one's strategic gains basis of corporate states where seen the enlightenment, Ayn Rand's, Atlas Shrugged, wall Street, the Riviera, emerging middle classes around the world, cosmetics industry, trophy hunting, colonialism, the Cold War, fashion industry, materialism, liberal self-interest, 30% of the population, 40% of the power. So this is tech. This is grow, grow, grow emergence. What's really interesting about orange, as mentioned, it's also enlightenment. It's when that moment in time when we realized, we came to this collective awareness of, oh, we don't enslave people. We don't do that, right? And again, each meme code is, it emerges, has its shadow and its light. But orange brought about medicine and blue, let me tell you, the light sides of blue. It brought about legal systems and infrastructure and order and planning.

And there's a lot of beauty to blue red brought about, let's say strong boundaries and an idea of don't tread on me. Okay? So beauty of orange is technology, medicine, that problem solving, rational mindset, which can also go into shadow, but certainly ushered in a lot of prosperity and an age of information and accessibility. So this is an interesting point. This is from the original piece that I wrote on spiral dynamics. This is Don Beck, and I think that this point is really important and also why we need to respect the spiral while trying to get our center of gravity up into the integral stage. So he says, if we don't like capitalism or consumerism, those are hallmark orange states which are expressions of the orange meme code. It's not the same thing as the meme code itself, which is the capacity to engineer things to make things better.

The creativity and ability to engineer that are inherent in that same orange meme code can now be used to clean up the environment. That's why we can't afford to bash any of these mimetic systems. We can challenge a manifestation of it, but without the orange thinking system, we couldn't solve medical problems. We couldn't figure out how to clean up the water or the air and we would sink back to the myth and mysticism of blue. I don't think anybody wants that to happen. So those are all really fair points. And then when you think about the political alliances of today, you've got Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, people like that are orange, orange, orange, orange, orange and some other expressions of that as well, but completely orange. So you start to understand what makes this moment in time really scary is that you have, let's say if you look at a country like Iran and you say, okay, the center of gravity of the Iranian government, not the people, is red and they have access to it's red, blue, right?

Red, blue, the fundamentalism of blue, and they have access to the technical capacity of orange. They have nuclear weapon technology. Same with North Korea, right? So it starts to get really scary once this capacity is unlocked, but it's not inhabited. The center of gravity is not at that level. Okay? So that's orange. And what's also interesting is that orange used to be the soul of the Democratic party, and now it's shifting to the Republican party. Interesting to map that. Okay, this is green, which started 150 years ago. There are a lot of people on this planet and the US in particular. A lot of people are in green. Green is very beautiful. We're going to talk about regressive green when green goes to red in a minute, but green is the sensitive self. This is Wilbur communitarian, human bonding, ecological sensitivity, networking. The human spirit must be freed from greed, dogma and divisiveness, feelings and caring, supersede cold rationality, cherishing of the earth.

Gaia life against hierarchy, establishes lateral bonding and linking. Permeable self. Relational self group interm, meshing, emphasis on dialogue, relationships, basis of collective communities. IE freely chosen affiliations based on shared sentiments, reaches decisions through reconciliation and consensus, downsides in terminable processing and incapacity to reach decisions, refresh, spirituality, bring harmony, rich, human potential, strongly egalitarian, anti hierarchy, pluralistic values, social construction of reality, diversity, multiculturalism, relativistic, value systems. This worldview is often called pluralistic relativism. Subjective, non-linear thinking shows a greater degree of effective warmth, sensitivity, and caring for earth and all its inhabitants, which is lovely, okay, where it's seen deep ecology, postmodernism, Netherlands, idealism, gerian counseling, Canadian healthcare, humanistic psychology, liberation theology, world Council of churches, Greenpeace, animal rights, eco feminism, post-colonialism, Fuco, Dota, politically correct diversity movements, human rights issues, ecos psychology, 10% of the population, 15% of the power. So I'm going to read to you a bit about green from Don Beck.

He says, our science left us numb without heart and soul and with only the outer manifestations of success. The good life was measured only in materialistic terms. We discovered that we have become alienated from ourselves as well as from others. So green, this fairly recent EDTA code began emerging green begins by making peace with ourselves and then expands to looking at the dissonance and conflicts in society and wanting to make peace there too. Addressing the economic gaps and inequities created by orange and also by blue and by red to bring peace and brotherhood so we can all share equally, gender roles are derigidified glass opened. Affirmative action plans are implemented and social class distinctions, blurred spirituality returns as a non-denominational, non-sectarian. Unity Green has accomplished in a very positive sense, the cleansing of the spiral, declaring inequality of all the different experiences of life.

It weakens the control of blue and orange, allowing the purple and red indigenous people to have their place in the sun and their time on CNN. It works, you see to find equality and sameness and sensitivity, and it is doing so for a very good purpose because without green we could not get to the second tier, but green is expensive. It absorbs rather than contributes. It is expensive to provide for everyone without requiring some kind of contribution other than being present for the handout. Most noble great society programs have not worked, and those who have tried socialism as their version of green are finding that that is not the answer either. Green uses the resources that orange has built, but because it dislikes orange, it backs away from growth. Growth and consumption are bad. It wants to use resources already available and redistribute them so everybody can catch up.

Green is a wonderful system, but ironically it assumes that everyone enjoys the same level of affluence that it has. Only those people who have been successful in Orange, who have good bank accounts, who have some guarantee of survival, who don't have the wolf at the door will begin to think green. But unfortunately, when green starts launching these attacks on blue and orange meme levels, the nuns with rulers and the fat cats in corporate suits, it's like a person who climbs the top of a house and then throws down the ladder that got him up there. All right, so that I think is all really important and it speaks to some of the shadow of green that I think many of us have experienced particularly in the last couple of years.

So green works until it really starts to fracture. For all those reasons that Dom Beck just mentioned. When it becomes anti-growth, when it becomes insistent, and this is where we get into this idea of regressive green, which is I think one of the reasons that we find ourselves the political predicament that we do right now, where we feel sometimes like the far left is as polarizing as the far right. And that makes sense. They're in some ways balancing each other out. Their aims and goals might be very different, but their tactics start to look quite similar. And this is where green fractures, and I want to believe that the fracturing of green is this shock point that individually as we start to reconcile with this and recognize what we're up to both in ourselves and collectively will be the shock point that pushes more of us to two integral where we're like, this isn't working.

And again, I want to remind you that tier two integral is the only point at which you can actually really see the entire spiral. And tier two integral is far more pragmatic about what is happening and is able to make concessions and say, I see this and I see this. And it's much more, not contextual necessarily, but much more expedient, much more about building effective alliances without getting lost in the ideology of each spiral point below. And I had Ken Wilber on the podcast and we talked about this. He has a lot of thoughts about this and is quite angry at Regressive Green, which I understand and I see it amongst my own friends where they have these beautiful green values and then I hear them and they have this sort of anti hierarchical view. Fine, although we need hierarchies, we need hierarchies of wisdom, for example.

We don't need dominance and oppression based hierarchies, but we need hierarchies of wisdom and experience and we need to reinstate healthy growth-minded hierarchies in our culture for sure. But green is very anti hierarchy. And yet if you were to say, okay, so then you're saying you're not better than Trump or you're not better than a MAGA person, they would say, oh no, no, I am, I'm definitely morally superior. So they do believe in hierarchies, they cut off their own feet and that's where they get into trouble and that's where it fails to be integral. And I would hear this from my friends. They start morally excluding. They start identifying the contaminating influence just in the same way that people at the blue or red level do they have a different target and they might be morally more advanced or it might not seem so veil in hate, but it is just as exclusive, right?

Whether they're participating in chance saying that Israel has no right to exist or participating in wanting to eradicate far right people or exclude certain people, that's a regressive green. If you are trying to live into green and its values, then you see the inherent goodness and lovability of every single human, which I recognize can be very, very hard. But that's the shock point. That's when you get into a more integral framework where you can say, I see this. I'm going to try and hold. It doesn't mean that you're not dipping down. This is not an act of perfection. This doesn't mean that you're not going into different parts of the spiral and getting in touch with that regressive green from time to time, et cetera. But it is the ability to say, man, I'm finding this completely unacceptable and out of alignment with my values.

It is that ability to say, I don't love what this person is doing, and yet they are also a person and they deserve to be here too, and I don't agree with them and we are not on the same side of most issues. And I can hold that. I don't get to exclude them and I don't get to send them elsewhere, and I don't get to sanitize the world of their presence and I don't get to make them not exist, right? It's hard. It's really super hard. So all to say, I'm going to give you the definition from Wilbur on integrative because he probably says it better than I do.

Life is a kaleidoscope of natural hierarchies. He calls them hierarchies. I've written about this. The hierarchies are very cool. It's a simple example to essentially a hierarchy of more complexity. So a hierarchy would be you have a letter and that letter makes up a word which is one level up, and that word makes up a sentence and that sentence makes up a book that would be a hierarchy where it gets more complex as you go up. And what's interesting about a hierarchy is you could get rid of books, the top of the hierarchy or the hierarchy and it wouldn't matter. But if you destroyed letters, the whole thing collapses. And so when you think about it through consciousness and the building blocks of life, it doesn't matter if we go away, the world will be just fine, but if we destroy our atmosphere, it all implodes, right?

So it's just a way of understanding that's a hierarchy. Alright, so he says life is a kaleidoscope of natural hierarchies or hierarchies. Systems and forms, flexibility, spontaneity, and functionality have the highest priority differences and pluralities can be integrated into independent natural flows. Egalitarianism is complimented with natural degrees of excellence where appropriate knowledge and competency should supersede rank, power, status or group. The prevailing world order is the result of the existence of different levels of reality and the inevitable patterns of movement up and down the dynamic spiral. Good governance facilitates the emergence of entities through the levels of increasing complexity and nested hierarchy key. So this is interesting too, before I going long, I apologize. But this is from that same Don Beck interview, which is from 2002. And he writes about how again, we experienced these different shock points and we're definitely in a shock point right now and I think I'm hoping that this blasts us more of us, enough of us into integral where we can start to shift the culture.

But he talks about nine 11 as one shock point. He writes, “Green starts with the search for self. I want to get to know myself. I want to deal with the hidden child in me. I want to make peace, I want to find tranquility. So I go into a sensitivity training session where I get feedback, I go downward inward to look at all my life experiences and try to remove the guilt. Green hates guilt and at once to deal with the rage from what happened to it as a victim. But green is a relativistic system and much of green is so naive thinking all people are good people. It's society that makes them bad. There are no bad people, there is no evil. That's all a myth. Everyone is going to love us.” It's funny, just side note, as I'm reading this, I'm like, this sounds like me.

Back to Don Beck. “Well, September 11th was a wake up call and for the first time green began to see the ugly face of red and blue. Ever since that point, a lot more people are becoming interested in the work we are doing. And so I think what's happening right now, shock point wise, is that green is also starting to see a little bit of the ugly face of green sometimes and also orange.” And we recognize we need a larger paradigm and that larger paradigm, I promise is there for us if we can get to the other side. Alright, this was a big one. Thanks for sticking with me again. I'm going to put a bunch of links in the show notes on Substack, which you can find over there. If you like this episode, please rate and review it. It really matters and helps people find the show and share it with a friend. Alright you all, I'll see you next time.

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