Nicole Churchill: The Basics of Spiral Dynamics

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. It was first developed by the late professor Clare 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. 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. Nicole and her husband John Churchill, 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.

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—please pass this episode on to any friends who you think might enjoy. I’m convinced that there are some keys here that can help us see the world and ourselves more clearly. In the show notes, you’ll find ways to go deeper as well. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

MORE FROM NICOLE CHURCHILL:

Nicole’s websites: Samadhi Institute and Karuna Mandela

John Churchill’s episode on Pulling the Thread: “Our Collective Psychological Development”

MORE ON SPIRAL DYNAMICS:

My Substack Newsletter: “Finding Ourselves on the Spiral”

Spiral Dynamics Integral, by Don Beck

Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy, by Ken Wilber

Spiral Dynamics, by Don Beck and Chris Cowan

Trump and a Post-Truth World, by Ken Wilber

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE LOEHNEN: Okay. Let's start at the very beginning, take us there, Nicole.

NICOLE CHURCHILL: So we're talking about spiral dynamics today, and I've been on this journey with spiral dynamics for 20 years.

ELISE: Wow.

NICOLE: It's a friend, for sure. It's been a friend of mine, I would say, just developmental psychology in general has become a huge ally in my life of making meaning in the world. And I would say first and foremost, I use it for myself in my human experience. And then I also use it as a clinician. I use it as a therapist, helping my clients make meaning of their world. And then I also use it as a teacher of the dharma. So I would say it is a lifelong companion.

ELISE: Yeah, I make 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 because yes, 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. But it's, 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. And to me, it just started to make everything make sense or not everything, but it gave me a center to hold on to where I could anticipate, I mean, it's pretty prophetic. I think when you when you go back into some of the earlier writings about Spiral dynamics and as they describe the memes which we're gonna get into now 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.

NICOLE: Yeah.

ELISE: But I found it to be complicated and also quite simple and a warm hug. So I'm very excited that you're going to take us through it cause you're so grounded. Yeah.

NICOLE: And Ken certainly made it more popular, because he was 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, and we'll talk all about that. Ken certainly made it more accessible to those nerds who are interested in human growth. I think it is a medicine in a sense, like it helps us and I love the idea of keeping medicine simple. So if there's one little medicinal idea I will give to your listeners today, it's that human beings continue to grow. And so, We're going to take a look at this story and it's not just a story out there. It's our story. It's your story, Elise. It's my story. It's all the folks that are listening. This is our story that's kind of embedded in this review of what Spiral Dynamics is.

ELISE: 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 in the on the me level, on the we level, and on the level. 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, 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. And I think it's worth mentioning, before we start, why this feels particularly pressing for this moment in time, that Don Beck, who worked with Claire Graves, who created it, worked on post apartheid South Africa with DeMille and Nelson Mandela and that it has real world implications and utility to help us work with groups at various meme levels and create a non violent reality.

NICOLE: So I'll just give a little bit of background on Claire Graves because he was the originator of this work. This is a theory of human development, and it's constructed from experiential data. And so Dr. Graves was a doctor of psychology and conducted his research with his Ph. D. students in the 50s and 60s. And basically his overarching question in the research is what constitutes a mature psychologically stable adult human being. So I'm all for that, right? We want those beings walking on the earth, right?

ELISE: Yeah.

NICOLE: Interestingly, the model was originally referred to as emergent cyclical levels of existence. And so I can, you can see why we got that kind of spiral dynamics named later on by Don Beck and Chris Cowan.

ELISE: I think it's worth noting, we're going to go through the colors of the memes. Apparently, they were arbitrary. They don't align with the chakras. 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 or understand try to understand them in that way.

NICOLE: easy to remember. Keep medicine simple. You know, easy to remember the color coded system. And actually this, that color coded system didn't exist with Claire Graves. It was later Don Beck and Chris Cowan who put the color coded system in. So there's this thing called a value meme. When you read the books, you'll see this lowercase v with the word meme. And this comes from Richard Dawkins. He had written a book in 1976 called The Selfish Gene. So gene and meme kind of rhyme together. 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 in the minds of one or more individuals. And that this meme can replicate, 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. And so this is like way pre Instagram and memes going out there into the world and what we associate as a meme. I think it's also important to say that memes aren't necessarily factual. So, you know, we could adopt a meme that might not be completely True. And we'll get into truth.

ELISE: We'll get into truth because it has a big role here.

NICOLE: Yeah. So that's a little bit of background. 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. And there were some data patterns that emerged. And there were two overarching data patterns. Well, I'll preface it by saying we live on a polarity planet. We inhale, we exhale, North Pole, South Pole, individuals, collective. What they saw in those data patterns was this thing called the sacrificed self versus the expressed self. And we will see this going through the spiral dynamics and they alternate every other one. The cool colors are the sacrificed self, or the making sacred. Making the community sacred, sacrificing the self for the sacred community. That is a more feminine archetype of communion. And then the warm colors are the express self. And that relates more to what Wilbur would call agency, and it relates more to a masculine archetype. So that was data pattern number one. And then the other thing that they were looking at is the conditions which created the way in which We respond to the world, and there were two conditions, and the conditions were the external, existential life conditions impact the way we respond to the world, and then the inner conditions, what our psychological capacity is influences how we respond to the world. And so if you ever go into some of the books, you might see this visual representation of the double helix. This is where the two strands represent those two life conditions. 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.

ELISE: We're gonna 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? Where the current level cannot contain the complexity of experience, and we need, again, to quote Ken Wilber, to transcend and include. Although I know transcending and including isn't as much a part of first tier. So let's start. So let's start with beige.

NICOLE: Yeah, and I love that you said that because every stage will hit a wall, basically. So we start with beige. So I'd love for our listeners here today to imagine a world where there is no strip malls. There are no cars, there are no airplanes, there are no tools, really. We are in nature, and our reptilian brain is much more active. And so we are very instinctual, and we are very intuitive with the natural world. And so those senses and skill sets are much more heightened. And so beige is about survival and the first beige individuals, I mean, some people are saying it's like 300, 000 years ago, 200, 000 years ago, in some of the more common spiral dynamics literature, it's more like 150, 000 years ago, but this is pre verbal. It's pre rational, it's pre conventional, and it's very sensory motor, it's an existence that's in tune and in harmony with the earth, but it is also a very scary place.

ELISE: And this is newborns, right? This is like Eat, drink, sleep.

NICOLE: It's true. And what we'll find out is we can go down to this level in the stack. I think probably some of the people in Gaza right now are experiencing where am I going to get water? Where am I going to get my next meal? I don't have any shelter right now. I'm constantly in a threat. And so it brings on another set of skills that we have as humans. And so we do see this today in famine. We're going to see more of it, unfortunately, with climate change, homelessness, you will see this meme, there and newborn babies or people at, towards the end of life who might be suffering from dementia. So, it is still represented on the planet.

ELISE: and it's in each of us. We're each capable in that moment, in a moment of crisis of revisiting beige.

NICOLE: Yeah. And I think, you know, when I first learned this model, I admittedly wanted to know how far up the spiral I was, today, it's more like how low can I go down the stack? How more, how much more primal can I get? And so things like being in nature, earthing, being in communion with the elements, appreciation of water, fire, air, earth, quietness, meditation, going into the woods and being in nature. These are things we're trying to recapture. 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.

ELISE: And I also just want to preview a little bit of what's to come, which is that the six memes that we're primarily going to talk about are called first tier memes. And then we pop up into the second tier, if we're lucky. 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. 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? 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 across cultures and across the world. So I love that you're getting primal, Nicole.

NICOLE: 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. It's very self soothing. So it's what we do with our children. If we see our two year olds rocking in their cribs, humming or singing to themselves, that is like a beige level of music. At BEIGE we're just not like completely, because language isn't completely formed and because we're still developing cognitively at that point when it originally was on earth, we didn't value safety in numbers at the beginning, right? PURPLE graduates us to that understanding like we are going to be more safe if we come together. Where beige was kind of archaic, purple becomes more magical. And so if you can imagine, the earth still has like the same no strip levels, right? We're building structures at this point, but we're trying to interpret and make meaning out of the loud clashes of thunder, and the animals, and the cold, and going hungry, and things like this. And so this idea of spirits or gods or multiple gods and magical thinking comes into that purple meme. I wouldn't say purple is exactly like a family, right? You probably see a lot more sexual expression, right? There's no kind of moral code that's come online yet. 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. And purple has also been known for appeasing the gods with sacrifices.

ELISE: A sense of sort of causality, right? Like, there's trying to align sort of a superstitious, like, this gets this, sacrifice a child, good crops. Right? Again, as you said, absent reason or morality, which is coming down the line. We still go there. We still, we have our sports teams and our lucky underwear and synchronicity and signs and I mean, I'm pretty purple.

NICOLE: I love purple. There was a point in my life where I'm like, I miss the ritual. I mean, I now think of my whole house as a temple, right? And that's the reclaiming of purple. I mean, you'll see it with kids. Step on a crack, you'll break your mother's back. That kind of magical thinking, so the purple level is often has a leader in it to that, you know, that the group is following, we would also see like shamanic culture at purple, where the kind of psychologists of today would be the shaman in the circle and I think the veil of the subtle, meaning the doorway, the portal into the spirit world is much more, permeable. And I think that those early purple tribes had much more of a connection to spirit. You know, the stars were their entertainment at night. The fire was their entertainment. Threading that music back through, you know, at beige, it was self soothing. And here, the music becomes ritualistic. It's like a ritualistic kind of Prayer or rain dance.

ELISE: Yeah. And then you think about sort of going back developmentally, too of what our brains were like or what they were doing. And you talked about the extra sense perception of beige, right? And this can be observed and the Hasda or someone who's tribes who live closer to those levels of the spiral, they have extrasensory perception. And the brain has evolved and pruned itself according to the inputs of today, right? So you think about that purple myth mythical level, and the thinness of the veil, and wouldn't surprise me at all if there was not reason to that causality, but a lot more perception of other of energy in a way that we just, we probably have lost that.

NICOLE: And there was a lot more psychic energy to be focused on that. It's difficult to fathom, actually. But there was so much more being tuned in to what berry is going to fix your stomach ailment and what berry might kill you. 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 and you wonder about, you know, our expansion of consciousness and how those infigence hadn't have had an effect on that. We were very in tune with. With the natural world and psychedelic plants were a part of that for sure. And so I'll just note beige was The expressed self and purple is the sacrifice self.

ELISE: 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.

NICOLE: Red would say and this is so red. It's like fuck the tribe. Like, I don't want to follow those rules anymore. 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 the tribal system or the family system, it's I want to think for myself, and I want to discover myself in relationship to this world in my own way. You know, when I first learned about Red, I think I framed it as a negative. And I think this is probably related to your recent book, Elise, like now I think I re frame Red is how do we reclaim our power?

ELISE: Yeah.

NICOLE: And power is a delicate balance.

ELISE: But this is like healthy red is healthy boundaries, right? And a healthy assertion of needs and wants and self expression 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. I have a boundary here, but it has a shadow side.

NICOLE: It has a big shadow. It has a big shadow. And there's an impulsivity to it and there's an unabashedly kind of out into the world to conquer and so historically we see a lot of kind of conquering happening and those means are still alive and well in some of the people who are on the world stage. In modern culture, again, this is express self. So we're moving back to individual, a warm tone, a more sense of agency and directedness. 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.

ELISE: Yes.

NICOLE: so, red is a risk taker. Red is willing to take risks and I think that there is probably a chemical correlation in red. There might be a dopamine hit from more risky behavior or taking chances and going into the unknown. And so we'll see red show up. I love this example of like punk rock, you know, in the seventies, it was like really against the system, the tribe, you see more of the negative red behavior and gangs, you know, gang culture. You know, the music traditionally in red was like war songs. It's like the beating of the drum. Like if you watch old Viking movies on Netflix, there's always this beating drum saying, Hey, we're coming for you.

ELISE: Yeah. We can identify it. I'm sure everyone is conjuring images of sort of like the futile lords of our time. Trump is very red. 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.

NICOLE: It's this place for us to look at where have I backed away from my own power? 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. And so coming into right relationship with power in reclaiming red, you know, that would be things like taking risks, or learning a martial art, or setting better boundaries.

ELISE: Question. Like the general idea is that you can't really skip these levels of development. But do you feel like red maybe has been off limits for women or not aligned with what we would qualify as feminine qualities that a lot of us rushed past it?

NICOLE: Yeah. I mean When you look at the marketplace, and you see what it's run on, right? Like today's marketplace is run on things like oil, time, labor, things like that. Back at beige, purple, red, it was run on strength. Like muscle strength, that's how things were built and made. And it is true that men had more physical capacity than women. And there was no birth control there. I mean, people were sexual and women got pregnant and had children. And so our ability to be in that world was restricted 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 have been the battlefield, but for some reason, and then along comes blue, and we'll talk about that next, where everything just got squashed, like you can't do this, you can't do that, and yeah, I think It's been difficult for women to find their find their power. We're generalizing here, but I do think it's something that we have probably been disconnected from. And I think there's other factors. There's like hormonal factors. I mean, we know testosterone is a more aggressive hormone and testosterone gets stuff done. You know, you get stuff done when you have testosterone. And so women have less testosterone than men.

ELISE: But I think a lot of it is one, no structure in which to develop healthy red for women, but an aversion, right? Because women have been oppressed, for a long time, we'll just leave it at that, that there's this aversion towards shadow red, which is not a bad thing. Not a bad thing. But I think we never really were trained to embrace the healthy side of it, I do think that's why all of the boundary work is having its resurgence. It's like a boot camp for women of like, what am I giving up? And what do I need to learn and reclaim here in order to be more, not fit, but more equipped for this chaotic world.

NICOLE: 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, right?

ELISE: Yeah.

NICOLE: So, are we ready to...

ELISE: we're ready for Blue, the conformist meme.

NICOLE: The pre three prior stages we just talked about, beige, purple, and red, in Ken Wilber's work, this would be related to pre personal, so this is kind of pre Conventional, pre rational, there's no rules at this point, it's like a free for all, right? With Red kind of feeling all of its power, it hit a wall, right? There was too much pillaging, too much rape, too much killing, right? There was too much fighting, there was no order, and 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 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. And so there was this truth, whereas, you know, Red would say, like, the truth is what I say it is. Blue would say the truth is what the scriptures say or what a higher authority says. And so we move away from the more earth based 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, so there was some threat there around keeping people in line and following rules. So, I like to think about, like, some of us, we look at our parents to bring this into real life now, right? 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.

ELISE: Yeah.

NICOLE: You know, everyone was like sitting straight up, perfectly smiling for the camera. Where in today's world, it's just like...

ELISE: it's a hot mess. I can tell you as someone who sends two hot messes to Picture Day.

NICOLE: So blue is like structure, it's rules. I love this example, like in Industry, blue is kind of your assembly line, like you're not gonna really stray from the way that things are done. This is the way we make a car. It follows this set standards of rules. And so blue is very about very much about standards. And following codes and in children, as a stage of development, this is very important because kids need to understand this is how I become a participant first it's our family system, but later it goes on to the school system and then they will, obviously graduate into other systems like the workplace. But it is kind of quelling that it's all about me, and at Blue we get back to we. We get back to the sacrificed self for the sake of the whole.

ELISE: Right. What it is to be a citizen who abides by the laws and conforms to the standard that we all agree is appropriate, right? That there's a judicial system, and there's a police force, and there's a ideally functional government with free and fair elections. And, obviously, there are issues, which we'll get into, but it's a beautiful and essential functional basis on which we can exist on this planet together. And to not have it would be chaos. And there are obviously places around the world that do not yet have blue and I wouldn't want to live there.

NICOLE: Mm hmm. Well, I mean, I've never been to India, but I know people say, like, driving on the roads, right? There's no stop signs often or lights, right? Just taking that for granted and, and I think, yeah, I want to make this like practical for people 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.

ELISE: That's blue. And if for anyone who questions its validity, spend someplace, you know, with no paved roads and no ambulances and no hospital infrastructure and no police force. And it's a harder in many ways much harder existence and those of us who have strong blue have a lot to be grateful for.

NICOLE: It's true. And us kind of postmodern, you know, Gen X kind of down, right, 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 fifties. 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.

ELISE: Agree. God It's exhausting and there's so much counter programming which we'll get to which is like, you know, boo conformity and boo limits But I think Foundationally, and we're seeing this, that you really set people up, it's a massive disservice To not create any container for your kids and for the development of healthy psychology, right? Of this is the end of my body and the beginning of someone else's body and I'm not always going to get what I want. And that limit on that narcissistic red drive of this is my truth, I'm going to assert it. Blue is essential.

NICOLE: So, Ode to Blue.

ELISE: Because blue has a shadow side too.

NICOLE: It's got a shadow side. It can really lock people in, right? It's conforming. It's conventional. For those of us that like to express ourselves, the expressive self wants to break out of that just to keep our little musical kind of examples going, the music at Blue would be very devotional.

ELISE: Yeah. Some hymnals.

NICOLE: I love using this example, because we will go from, blue to orange now, if you're cool with that.

ELISE: Yeah.

NICOLE: It's like thinking about The footage of like Elvis Presley, you know, and he's like up there in his suit and he looks so handsome and he might be singing this ballad, but then all of a sudden he starts like shaking his hips and like gyrating and in that moment in like pop culture, we are seeing the shift from blue to orange.

ELISE: Or the Beatles with their sweet bowl cuts and their ties. Yes.

NICOLE: exactly. I mean, I love music and I think music has been such a great like tracker for the emergence of new value codes and memes. We see this kind of hitting a wall, this boredom with the conformity and wanting to, again, like red did with purple, orange to blue, orange is busting out of blue and saying, I've got to express myself. And so there's tinges of red in orange. You will see that kind of taking this need for power to the next level at orange. So orange.

The same way

ELISE: you see tinges of purple in blue.

NICOLE: Correct. Blue is literally all around us, but orange, we're really, really, really steeped in orange.

ELISE: Right. And so blue, I'm sure people can identify blue, but significant parts of the Republican Party are very blue. Big fundamentalist religious groups are generally quite blue. So it's probably easy for anyone thinking to figure out who's blue.

NICOLE: 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 gotten to yet, but they both have a center of gravity at orange. And so orange is very objective, it's scientific, and what we can say is that, you know, science really becomes the new religion at orange, and what we could also say is like, And this is kind of defined in like Ayn Rand's books where objectivism is this system of philosophy that rejects the idea of collective rights and instead argues that an individual's rights take precedent over the group. And capitalism certainly is the playground for that to live the American dream. and to really define the self. So where red was beginning that part of the story, Orange really takes it to an extreme. So 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. That is kind of a defining image of orange. What are other defining images? Wall Street, the bull on Wall Street is a defining image.

ELISE: and orange is very again in that scientific Rationalistic all truth is scientific or can be reduced to some sort of materialistic Ideal, right, that the world is here to be Mined that it's here for our use. But I think it's worth stating too, and this might be wrong, but this is what I picked up from one of Ken Wilber's books, was that you'll see these memes start popping up in small ways, so Orange felt relatively recent when it's become primary but that Enlightenment was the beginning of Orange, like, all men are created equal. The beginning of sort of some of those movements toward equality was early, meme. Is that accurate?

NICOLE: Totally accurate. I mean, Orange put a human being on the moon. I mean, if you ask a farmer in Kansas if we should put our tax money towards putting a man on the moon, that person might say no. You know, 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, you know, if God had intended us to be on the moon, he would have provided the ability for us to do that and orange would say it's important for us to go on this voyage and to investigate what is out there? So orange, you know has cured diseases, you know, I mean, it's helped people immensely on this planet.

ELISE: It's all medicine, science, technology, right?

NICOLE: Mm hmm, but you know what Ken so beautifully points out in his work Is that with orange what we see is called? scientific reductionism where you know, we have interiors and we have exteriors, and 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.

ELISE: this is the idea that someday we'll be able to explain the contents of the mind by studying the brain, 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.

NICOLE: Right. I think 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? And you would say, yes, I can see your brain, Nicole. And I was to say, but can you see my sense of self?

ELISE: Yeah. Can you see my thoughts?

NICOLE: My thoughts? Right.

ELISE: 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 or orange or bust. It's like so much is lost. And you can see right now how this orange materialist scientific reductiveness, reduction, however, can Wilbur 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. And you talked about this sort of with Purple, like how so many of us are 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 contemplate, you know?

NICOLE: That's right. And so you know, we just see a lot of excess with orange, you know, we've gotten bit out of control, not a bit like super...

ELISE: very out of control. This is the shadow of orange. Yeah.

NICOLE: The resources on the planet are just getting taken and taken and taken. We're in an unsustainable situation. And they have equal positives and negatives. But we're 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. And because the money is a currency, is a power, it's powerful, right? It gets back to red. Like, the things that we can do when we have money, It means that we have power and that power in a corporate state kind of where corporations have so many exceptions, you know?

ELISE: Yes.

NICOLE: It has gotten out of control. And so we're now in a state where we've become accustomed to a certain way of life.

ELISE: Rampant consumerism, growth for gross sakes, up and to the right, ad nauseam.

NICOLE: and defining the self a lot around like what we look like, where we work, what our relationships are, 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, and we don't really know what it means to fuel ourselves, to fuel the self, that need to fill up from those other quadrants what it means to do that for ourselves in a very deep, unique, and meaningful way.

ELISE: And 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, long neglected. All right, so green, green says This is bullshit.

NICOLE: Yeah, I'm keeping my music thread, you know, music from being devotional to entertaining, okay, at Orange. And you'll see cars out on the road now, for our listeners who are driving, the Hummer, it's like this kind of gas guzzling, like unnecessary vehicle, which is like orange on steroids versus kind of your blue Cadillac.

ELISE: Oh, no, Cadillac. Sorry. We're not in green yet. Yeah.

NICOLE: And, yeah, the car of green would be the Prius. It would be, right? So at the end of Orange, at the end of this story of Orange, it's like your classic, like midlife crisis. Like I've got the car, I've got the job. I've got all this stuff that has created this "me" but actually I feel empty and I feel guilty about other people suffering on the planet. And I just can't stand by and watch another Negro not be able to drink from the water fountain anymore. This isn't right. And so green is epitomized by. The equal rights movement by the environmental movement by the community gatherings of the sixties of the music of the sixties, 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. I'm done expressing myself. I've completely mastered and actualized. The orange meme, and there's people who haven't even gotten the opportunity to master it. Like, they haven't even been able to get the education that it would require to play in this marketplace. And it doesn't feel fair. And so, at Green, We really start caring about each other again and looking around and saying, Hey, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going on, you know, to quote Buffalo Steel, isn't working anymore.

ELISE: hmm.

NICOLE: And so green is community based, green is moving from this sense of it's all about me to it's all about us.

ELISE: And it's all about the planet, right? This eco vision, egalitarian, one planet, one globe, one people.

NICOLE: And so these are the kind of recycling movements that we've seen, whereas in blue and orange, it was all about convenience and appliances and TV dinners 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? Green is kind of like circling back in again around community, ritual, and caring about other things other than ourselves.

ELISE: Right. And it's a beautiful meme. We're going to talk about its shadow side, too. But before we, 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, you can tell me if you think this is accurate, 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 almost exclusively on an anti green platform, and we'll get into sort of like how the levels pick on each other in ways that are deeply unproductive, and then as president became exceptionally red, looking to dismantle in some ways blue, and any checks on his power, while using the tools of orange, I will say too and you see this too with other leaders. around the country who are red, Putin, but have access to orange technology while ignoring blue are very concerning. Is that fair? Just to give people a like geopolitical context?

NICOLE: And now that we're getting higher up into the spiral, now we can look back and now that you've had just like a brief review, you can kind of see a chordal like quality. It's like a musical chord, right? So you could have some, a red, blue, orange chord and what that looks like, right? Or an orange, green, purple chord, right? and so It flicks switches as we, if we go back to the kind of original what constitutes a mature, psychologically healthy human being, right? 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, and we see where things are antiquated 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. And so I would say absolutely you can see with a human being like Trump, where the spiral is playing out and what's being highlighted in his psychology.

ELISE: can be sort of stoked and then you get within this first tier, you can see how he can provoke or stoke the red in a lot of people in this country, and then also say, not only am I going to turn you on by speaking into this red level, but I'm going to then show you how the green meme reviles you. 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. Let's talk about shadow green, because I think that that plays into this too. The mean green mean? Is that right? Yeah. And then let's talk about yellow and then we've done it.

NICOLE: We've done it.

ELISE: Solved it.

NICOLE: So, Green becomes skeptical about everything that we've been told as the truth. And so Greene 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 and it might not, at post kind of modern or late green, what's been handed to us has been constructed socially, and if it's been constructed, it can certainly then be deconstructed.

ELISE: Yes.

NICOLE: This is a skill, right? I mean, this is a reflective skill. But Green can come to the conclusion that there is no one truth and it's all contextual. And so this is what kind of pluralism or relativism is. It's this belief that there's no absolute truth and, you know, only the truths that a particular individual or culture happen to believe is true for them.

ELISE: It has the narcissism of Red, which is interesting, even though it would profess to be like at complete odds with Red, but it gets into this like, your truth is your truth, Nicole. My truth is my truth. So maybe it's different in that it allows other truths, but it's That's in many ways equally chaotic.

NICOLE: Well, and then that is a value judgment in and of itself, which Ken will so clearly point out. Like, the truth is, is that there is no truth, but that's a value judgment.

ELISE: Right. That's a statement of a truth, ironically, right?

NICOLE: And so, we end up in this kind of negation, 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, and there's a lot of negation that happens and we can get into nihilism.

ELISE: Yes. And 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. And then when you start deprecating all other 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 can see how that can be co opted by other parties and then turn to create even more fracture, 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 sees everything through a racial lens, through the lens of the colonizer and the lens that there's an oppressor. And there's the oppressed, and then it goes back through history and re litigates. these previous levels of development when where that wasn't present, necessarily that level of development or consciousness wasn't present and so you start tearing everything apart in a way that's not actually very helpful.

NICOLE: Green can get rather soap boxy 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, it's like, hang on, let me check myself here. You know, we can get very angry and we saw this play out during Covid, for example, like to mask or to not mask, to vaccinate to not vaccinate. 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. And so you could see why some people would get bent out of shape for that. And then on the other hand, you could see how people would say, well, this is saving lives, right? 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. This is that there is a partial truth in both of those that can be honored. Right?

ELISE: Before we pop to yellow, green hates Hierarchy. And so it hunts hierarchy down and this idea that, this interpretation of it, that it's always dominant and always oppressive. 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? They would say, well, mine is, obviously, certainly, and then that's inherently it. Again, we're just pointing out other, that's a hierarchy, right? You're saying that, it doesn't hold, but it holds us, I think, as someone who is probably very green. I'll say that.

NICOLE: Yeah, I am too. I probably hit green when I was in high school, and was very influenced by green from the music that I listened to.

ELISE: yeah.

NICOLE: Those those singers of the 60s, Were my heroes. They were kind of my teachers.

ELISE: Yellow. Do we have time for yellow?

NICOLE: we do have time for yellow. The last thing I'll just say is like, you know, Wilbur talks about this kind of flattening of hierarchies. And so we get this kind of flatland situation in orange and green. Green is working towards finding more meaning. But it's difficult. It gets in its own way at times, right? And so, you know, this all of these up to green are what we would consider first tier and I'll just review, you know, beige, purple, and red in Wilbur's model would be considered pre personal, and then blue, orange and green would be considered the personal level of development or conventional or rational. And so that kind of constitutes, That first tier then we begin to move into yellow and to quote Coldplay, it was all yellow and so suddenly what happens at yellow is it's yellow says, Oh, my gosh. 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? That this yellow or integral level of development is coming into the mainstream more 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. I can see it. I can see how it's all at play and I can see how they're all in conflict with one another.

I think what I have learned through this journey is to have more compassion and to really honor different stages of development. That's not to say to not speak out and make value judgments of when things are harming humans and humanity. We can't just remain neutral, there has to be value judgments had 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 and we're looking at hierarchy in terms of its original meaning of sacred order. And Ken Wilber is the quintessential author around an integral level of development and the ego structure of the human being is still in place. It's kind of the ego's last stand at yellow whereas Orange was saying, who am I? And it was looking at things on the surface to prop itself up and as an identity, yellow is saying I can see that that's beginning to fade. I can see that my ego structure, I'm going to be giving birth to a new self 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.

ELISE: Yeah. Or thinking of it from a story perspective, orange being, who am I? And that essential more balanced assertion of self and wants and needs. And then you get into green that says, well, every story counts. Every story matters. Which is a beautiful idea, but you get, again, you kind of can end up in a bit of narcissistic, like, whose story is, there is actually, some people's stories are more important, particularly those stories we haven't heard. But then yellow to me feels like, well, how does my story actually serve? 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.

NICOLE: Mm hmm. Yeah, one of the questions at Orange is, you know, who am I? But at Yellow, it's who am I really?

ELISE: Mm.

NICOLE: 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, and in our culture certainly doesn't foster interior contemplation or exploration, and we hear in, pop culture or wellness communities like, you've got to love yourself, we hear this, but I don't know if people really know what that looks like in terms of a behavior. 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 my attention in this precious human birth? And there's like a generativity aspect to it, which is left over a little bit from green in a good way. It's like, how am I contributing to the world?

ELISE: And then it feels like from a service perspective, that yellow is slightly more practical. Again, you mentioned recognizing necessary hierarchies, social media, which I guess is maybe not green, but this idea that everyone's an expert, right? Everyone has something to bring to this conversation and that yellow maybe is a reconstitution of actually some people are elders in our culture. Some people have turned knowledge into wisdom. Some people do have the knowledge that we need in this time, but maybe we don't on every issue need to be relying on pop singers and tick tock influencers for how we make decisions or think about complex issues. And we need to reconstitute a culture where we're leaning on people who have insight. I don't know.

NICOLE: Yellow strives for a more elegant design. I think yellow is stepping back more. In assessing and looking at multiple systems at the same time and looking at how they can better serve one another and leverage one another in a more holistic way. So yellow is definitely more holistic.

ELISE: Mm hmm. And understanding the gifts of every meme level, the technology, science, medicine of orange, the order and structure of blue, the boundaries of red. Is yellow really the moment when transcend and include or this idea when we think about how totally chaotic and fractured we are, 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. Is that what yellow is capable of doing?

NICOLE: Yellow and I would say, you know, beyond yellow is turquoise. Yellow is still an expressed self. As I said earlier, it's like the last trails of the ego. We're really actualizing ourselves at yellow, but we're able to take stock in ourselves. I think a good example of someone moving from like, orange, green, into yellow would be somebody like Oprah Winfrey. Turquoise is looking for how do we bring back the village? How do we live in community again? Why are we living in these separate houses? We're not sharing resources. Everyone on the street has a snowblower, a lawnmower, you know, like the design isn't elegant, it's not an elegant design. And so I think the mind of yellow joins into turquoise and as it has studied systems, it contributes to that and we are looking for more holistic, elegant solutions to give birth to a new culture. It's like we can no longer continue down the path. And at Turquoise, we are going to have to sacrifice for the whole. I know it's hard to say, but we might be faced with giving up some of the conveniences that we have had because things will collapse in such a way that we just won't have them anymore, 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, you know. These bands of value are on the horizon. I would say that yellow and turquoise also want to see, they understand this pattern of emergent, this emergent cyclical levels of existence, and we, Want to see each level of development to be as healthy as they can where they are at. 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, it's healthy.

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 at this point, we have to choose it. We have to choose to grow and evolve and contribute to this new world. It's calling us to participate in it. 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.

ELISE: Mm hmm.

NICOLE: it's not like a norm in that culture to keep growing in there. They might be in socio demographic areas where, you know, learning about other cultures or other ways of life isn't available.

ELISE: Well, I think you opened by saying that these are essentially contagious, right? And the more that we can express them in healthy ways, ideally, the more it becomes possible.

NICOLE: I just want to say for the heck of it too, there is a shadow to this too. There's criticisms of spiral dynamics or of integral theory. There's too much jargon. There's, you know, too much around hierarchies. There's too much intellectualizing a reality that we're boxing in, naming, categorize, unnecessary complexity. I think it's important that at every stage, there is a light and a dark shadow. There's the beauty and the goodness from that stage. And there's also where we're not seeing our own shadow in it all.

ELISE: well, thank you for this. This was an excellent primer. I'm excited for you to come back on too and we'll employ it 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?

NICOLE: Yeah. And I just want to encourage our listeners today to just if this piques your curiosity, you know, go deeper, like learn more. This is your birthright. I think it's important for people to know that like our birthright is to grow and to evolve and to have a greater capacity of compassion but to also sharpen the sword of discernment, and to be able to use our intelligence in such a way to discern things. We need healthy human beings inhabiting this planet. Humanity has so much potential. We really, really do and it is up to us to contribute to that. I mean, it is one drop in the ocean. But boy, when that happens, it adds up. Right?

ELISE: Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you.

Thanks for hanging out with us for an extra long episode. It’s hard to adequately describe the spiral with less time, but foundationally, if you can get the basics, it becomes one of the most useful lenses for understanding culture, yourself, relationships, businesses. I know in Don Beck’s time, it was widely coached within businesses, not only because their are different meme value functions, you can imagine there’s accounting, legal, creative brand, but also because there are certain companies that are very value meme specific and they market and seek to consumers in very specific ways. And we didn’t get into it, but I’ll include in the show notes an audible original with Don Beck where he talks a little bit about his work and post apartheid South Africa, which fascinating. And within that, there was a lot of consideration from Mandela and how they use spiral dynamics to speak to different coalitions. Because ultimately, if there is a way to take these first tier levels and include them in the spiral—because guess what? They are included in the spiral—then I think 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 and get on side with each other, while we bring our different gifts which will probably be present in different memes within us. I will see you next time.