Levels of Development: Week 2
Summary: Sunday, December 13-Saturday, December 19, 2015
Beige: Instinctive/Survivalistic — The basic theme is to do what it takes to stay alive, with a preference for pleasure over pain. There is a unitive absorption with one’s mother and an original innocence and naïveté. (Sunday)
Purple: Magical/Animistic — It becomes important to honor and obey the spirit-being presented and the group’s leaders, rituals, and customs. (Sunday)
Red: Impulsive/Egocentric — The individual realizes that he or she can be distinct from the tribe and can break free from group constraints; the heroic self. (Monday)
Blue: Purposeful/Authoritarian — The “true believers,” the concrete-literal fundamentalists, love certitude and knowing who is right and who is wrong. They presume they are right and will be rewarded. (Tuesday)
Orange: Achievist/Strategic — People who are self-reliant, rational, educated, and willing to take risks will “win.” Societies will prosper through competitiveness and technology. (Wednesday)
Green: Communitarian/Egalitarian— “Seek peace within the inner self and explore, with others, the caring dimensions of community.” Political correctness, human rights, and equality are the highest virtues. (Thursday)
Yellow: Integrative — Human lives and society are seen much like vibrant, resilient ecosystems where chaos and fluctuation are expected. (Friday)
Turquoise: Holistic — The entire world is “a single, dynamic organism with its own collective mind.” (Friday)
Practice: Tracing Your Journey
I encourage you to spend some time looking back over your life through the lens of Spiral Dynamics. With compassion and tenderness, notice how at various stages you were fixated on different priorities, different measures of right and wrong, different sources of meaning and belonging. Give thanks for the lessons you learned at each level that helped you survive, succeed, and become who you are today. Ask yourself what beliefs you may be ready to lay to rest, ways of thinking and acting that no longer serve your maturing awareness of reality.
You may wish to explore your journey in one or more of these ways:
- Journal or write a poem.
- Draw, paint, sculpt, or create a collage.
- Find a piece of music that illustrates changing moods and move to it.
- Talk to a friend, spiritual director, or therapist.
Gateway to Silence:
Transcend and include
For further study:
Richard Rohr, In the Beginning . . . Six hours with Rob Bell and Richard Rohr on Reclaiming the Original Christian Narrative (CD, MP3 download)
Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See
Ken Wilber, Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World
