Sunday Morning Musings on Raising Consciousness and Spiral Dynamics®.

I always have a problem with the term “raising consciousness”; first because there’s something subtly arrogant and hubristic about it, it presupposes that A) I, as a person, know exactly at what level everybody else is (rather unlikely), and that B) some are below me and they need to be lifted to my level. 😅😔 This is the vertical hierarchy of values underlying the mentality of colonisation, eugenics and commodification. God at the top, me and those like me just below, and the rest needing to be enlightened (or exploited) below me.

But also because it implies a view of the world that is imbued with the idea of infinite progress. This idea is so deeply pervasive to the western civilisation that we do not even question its validity. It’s important to do so though, because infinite progress is also the idea that validates a related concept: infinite growth. But while a beautiful concept, infinite progress is as unlikely as infinite growth. Progress is not a core idea to eastern philosophies or indigenous wisdom.

This goes back to the core of the Spiral Dynamics® model and how it’s been incorporated in philosophies and ideologies that have progress as their core value. As I understand it, Clare Graves developped his ECLET model not out of a concern with moving humanity up the hierarchy of values. He was more concerned about alignment within each level. His enquiry happened during a period of time when Maslow’s work became mainstream and the pyramid became an icon, but his question was very different. His driving metaphor was not the pyramid (a useful but somewhat basic shape). He was focusing on complexity, and more precisely, on the alignment between complexity in the environment and the capacity to deal with that level of complexity in one’s mind.

To reflect this balance, he did not use colours (which simplify but obfuscate important aspects of the purpose) but a set of two letters to describe the levels. AN for beige, BO for purple, CP for red, DQ for blue, ER for orange, FS for green, GT for yellow and HU for turquoise. One letter represented level of complexity in the environment and the other ability to handle complexity. “Capacity to handle complexity” is absolutistic for DQ (either-or, good/bad, us/them), pluralistic for ER (there is a range of different possibilities and I choose what’s the best one for me), contextual for FS (it all depends on context) and probabilistic for GT. He also said that from his research (and the research of some of his students after his death) very (VERY) few people were truly aligned at the second tier although higher tiers are attraction points for personal projections from lower levels. In other words, from an ER point of view, GT looks extremely sexy, and DQ will tend to see oneself as FS.

He wrote that a person would lead a more coherent and more fulfilled life if he or she was aligned at their level, regardless of where that level stood in the hierarchy of value. This model underlies his theory of change: when someone whose ability to handle complexity is thrown into a more complex environment, there is a transition period to adapt to the new levels of complexity. Similarly, one can be thrown to a lesser complex environment by life circumstances (say in the case of civil war for example when survival becomes key), and one’s ability to handle complexity can also go from more to less (as in the case of illness affecting cognitive faculties for example). There was no inkling of the desirability of a vertically upward moving progress in his work, and no mention of consciousness. For him progress was synonymous with alignment. It’s only later that his model was simplified into colours and it became easy to integrate into an integralist view of the world that takes vertical upward progress as its core value.

So, I would propose that we need new metaphors and a new vocabulary to replace “raising consciousness” which presupposes a vertical upward moving hierarchy. Metaphors and language that flatten vertical hierarchies into multidimensional complex networks. Fractals instead of pyramids. And then (and this is where the hard work begins! 😅😜), we need to fully integrate those metaphors and language, to get so familiar with them that they become like a limb, a full part of us and how we see the world. And maybe then, only then, will we have opened our “consciousness” enough to realise that what we projected onto the world was all within ourselves. Until then, it is probably safer to see ourselves on the less evolved side of the spectrum. 🙃