Reconnecting to Nature

Health and Healing

Socially Engaged Spirituality

1.The Emerging, Holistic Worldview
Historical Worldviews	The Emerging Worldview	Attempts at Manifestation	Science and Spirituality

Spiral Dynamics

Spiral Dynamics provides us with an alternative approach to understanding our civilization’s evolutionary development and the conflicts which arise among cultures and individuals and within individuals, and is worthy of further study.

The founder of spiral dynamics, Clare Graves, summarizes a major aspect of the model when he writes:

Clare Graves
"Briefly, what I am proposing is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiraling process, marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems as man's existential problems change."

One of Clare Grave’s colleagues, and after Grave’s death the leading authority on spiral dynamics, Don Beck, expresses concisely the holistic approach that this particular model offers, when he says:

Don Beck

“Spiral Dynamics connects everything to everything else. For example: The work shows clearly why attempts to deal with the HIV pandemic only through medical solutions fail dismally unless equal time and resources are spent on the interior, cultural dynamics that contribute to the spread of the virus. It also demonstrates why simplistic, fragmented approaches to international and domestic terrorism, crime and drug-related problems, education, economic and social development - the list is endless - and the complexity of challenges in the Middle East and other hot spots around the globe will continue to confound us unless we integrate, align and synergize the efforts of all these stakeholders.”

The basic model describes an evolution of the human psyche on an upward spiral towards a more spiritual, holistic worldview that has yet to see its culmination. Each stage is characterized by a particular worldview or value system called a “meme” in the spiral dynamics terminology, and a particular color, and in two tiers, of which the second has barely begun.

*Color*	*Meme*	*% of People*	*% of Power*
beige	survivalist	0.1	0.01
purple	tribal order	10	1
red	exploitative	20	5
blue	authoritarian	40	30
orange	entrepreneurial	30	50
green	communitarian	10	15
yellow *	integral	1	5
turquoise *	holistic	0.1	1

* Second tier memes

But it is not just historic civilizations that can be characterized in this way. Each individual also has all of the aspects present in some degree. Eventually, we all have to go through the whole spiral. Thus the possibilities for analysis and understanding of both cultures and individuals are quite deep. It is in some ways similar to the chakra system.

Spiral Dynamics Model.
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AQAL Collage.
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