Going through the spiral

[Raphael]

Spiral Dynamics: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Triggers

Purple

• Healthy
  • Heightened intuition
  • Read emotional nuances in people and fine tune relationships
  • Ability to maintain harmonious existence in groups
  • Focus on contextual experience and social interaction
  • Create collective memory via storytelling & ritual to bond the group
  • Willingness to reciprocate
  • Excels at cooperative Interdependence
  • Willingness to sacrifice for others
  • Ability to thnk collectively & take care of each other
  • Strong connection to nature
  • Unconditional love for & devotion to others
  • Environmentally friendly
• Unhealthy
  • Dichotomous thinking: "my people" vs. "the others"
  • Inwardly focused on the safety & security of "my people"
  • Justifies violence and discrimination against "the others"
  • Inflexible toward alternatives to established group traditions
  • Inability to adapt to rapidly changing life conditions
  • Creates "my people" mythology that alienates "the others"
  • Superstitious, belief in ghosts and evil spirits
  • Attachment to the past via objects, heirlooms or symbols
  • Gender based division of labor and social roles
  • Nepotism
• Purple to Red Triggers
  • Exposure outside the "my people" group
  • Yearning for direct individual action
  • Finding weaknesses in "my people" group leaders
  • Challenging group mythology
  • A powerful individual can influence the world
  • Moving from group spokesman to opinionated leader

Red

• Healthy
  • Assertive ego and self-confidence
  • Creative & imaginative
  • Fun loving, exploratory & adventurous
  • Energizing and inspirational
  • Achievement & action oriented
  • Courageous
  • Overcomes obstacles & adversity
  • Risk taking
  • Ability to catalyze
• Unhealthy
  • Uses charisma to create cult following
  • Resists authority
  • Defensive, vengeful & violent
  • Contol oriented
  • Guiltless intimidation to impose individual will
  • Exploits superstitions to exert control
  • Manipulative
  • Does not tolerate constraints
  • Uncompromising, short tempered & confrontational
  • Blames others for personal circumstances
  • Impulsive, lacking discipline
• Red to Blue Triggers
  • Positive adventures to channel red energy (Outward Bound)
  • Yearning for a moral compass to overcome chaos
  • Desire to bond around positive things
  • Creating purple foundation key to avoid red rebelling against blue
  • Realization that one cannot solve all problems alone

Blue

• Healthy
  • Ability to defer gratification
  • Stable & orderly
  • Dutiful and obedient
  • Complies with, respects authority
  • Purposeful, guided
  • Dedicated to a cause
  • Sacrifice for, in service of the common good
  • Responsible, reliable
  • Trustworthy
  • Honerable, principled, mannered
  • Sharing & charitable
• Unhealthy
  • Self-righteous & judgmental
  • Shames the non-dutiful
  • Competes through fear
  • Justifies violence in service of higher purpose
  • Absolutist: right vs wrong. Black or white, no gray
  • Status quo orientation
  • Authoritarian
  • Discriminates by segregating people into social roles
  • Rigid and dogmatic
  • Punitive and punishing, wrathful
  • Uncompromising, intolerant, competitive
  • Fearful of consequences
• Blue to Orange Triggers
  • Begins to doubt authority
  • Desire for reform
  • Awareness of competing versions of the truth
  • Desire for freedom and autonomy
  • Desire to bend the rules to fit his/her way
  • Desire to be freed from constraints

Orange

• Healthy
  • Enthusiastic work ethic
  • Results, outcome oriented
  • Self starter, entrepreneurial
  • Multi-tasker, effiecient
  • Strategic
  • Opportunistic risk taker
  • Assertive, self confident, shrewd
  • Flexible and adaptive
  • Focused
  • Straightforward
  • Independent
• Unhealthy
  • Cold, not transparent or open
  • Clever, calculating, manipulative
  • Lacks empathy, justifies selfish actions
  • Competitive, partisan, adversarial
  • Workaholic
  • My way is best, controlling
  • Materialistic
  • Manipulate people toward bottom line results
  • Image over substance
  • Superficial, not authentic
  • Domineering, intimidating
• Orange to Green Triggers
  • Pangs of loneliness from constantly competing
  • Desire to be more open and authentic
  • Begin to care what others think
  • Desire to create solutions that benefit others
  • Desire to mentor others

Green

• Healthy
  • Empathetic
  • Warm, authentic
  • Warm, authentic
  • Caring, considerate
  • Spiritual
  • Accepts differences
  • Desire to be helpful
• Unhealthy
  • Fear of missing out
  • Appeasing, avoiding conflicts, soft and patronizing.
  • Sacrifice solution quality in favor of group harmony
  • Excludes others with differing values
  • Continuous search for consensus inhibits progress
  • Need to include everyone in the process
• Green to Yellow Triggers
  • Realization that complex problems facing humanity cannot solely be solved by consensus and a people-focused way of thinking and living
  • Green group process takes a lot of time and energy, which can be used in more useful ways. The need to take oneself and the world to the next level causes people to break out of the group and to offer their unique contribution to the world in a complete independent and free way.

Yellow

• Healthy
  • Combines different existing ideas, theories and models and distills new connections from them
  • Critical, curious without judging
  • Acknowledges all value systems
  • Distinguishes between essential and ancillary
  • Develops skills to become an instrument for the greater whole
  • Creative and innovative
  • Uses appropriate methods to realize strategies
  • Builds on already existing knowledge & models
• Unhealthy
  • Gets bogged down in complex analysis
  • invents beautiful futuristic solutions, which are not pragmatic
  • Not able to finish something because there’s always something new that requires attention
  • May seem cold and distant as it sometimes forgets to connect to people
• Yellow to Turquoise Triggers
  • Realization that one cannot solve all problems alone

Turquoise

• Healthy
  • See world and cosmos as an integral whole
  • Explore, feel and pragmatically work together to solve the large complex problems to serve humanity and the earth
• Unhealthy
  • Stay in spiritual/cosmic consciousness too long without taking earthly action

Edited May 16, 2021 by Raphael

[Raphael]

About My Spiral Development

Purple

• I'm very intuitive and I'm getting better and better at using my intuition.
• I'm able to see things collectively and see the necessity of people working together interdependently
• I have a strong connection to nature. I feel good, relaxed, and in peace when I'm in nature
• However, I have social anxiety. It has been the #1 most important issue of my entire life. I never had close friends, nor a girlfriend. I consider the people that I spent time with only as acquaintances. Even when I had some periods where I would spend time with some group of people, they were just acquaintances for me. I can function in life, but making friends has become more and more difficult since I discovered self-actualization.

Red

• This is probably the stage that I less properly integrate.
• I'm creative & imaginative.
• I took risks in the past, have been courageous, and I'm willing to take more risks if necessary. For example:
  • At 18, I quit my country to go study in France all alone by myself. I didn't know about anything there, but I did it anyway.
  • At 20, I moved to the UK for a few months. My English wasn't perfect (but better than other people from my group), so it was a bit challenging for me.
  • One day I did a speech in front of a theater entirely in English.
  • I quit my job to start freelancing, but this is a mixed experience as I'm currently living with my parents. I'm also currently working on another business.
• I'm not very assertive. Most of the time, I feel like it's useless to try to be assertive with people because most of them are too closed-minded so I tend to avoid conversations. I consider this to be true in many situations, but this also is delusional in other situations where I'm just afraid to stand up by myself and use my ego to re-comfort myself.
• As I'm so often in my mind and over-analyze things, I lack the red action-orientation attitude towards life.
• I have been vengeful in the past towards people who mistreated me.
• I have been very confrontational sometimes but not for the sake of doing it, but when other people would attack me. I almost never directly attacked somebody in my life. I'm friendly with friendly people and unfriendly with unfriendly people, but some progress can be made here by tapping more into Yellow.
• I did lie in the past and manipulated people a few times, but that was very rare.

Blue

• Even if I complained about this stage previously, if I look at things properly I think that I have rather healthily integrated this stage without falling into ideologies. Its integration varied depending on the period of life that I was in, but I think that most of the time it was healthy and a few times unhealthy.
• I can say that I'm disciplined. It's not perfect and there's still a lot of improvements that I can do, but if I compare myself to people of my generation (Gen Z) I think I'm doing better than average. People made fun of me in the past for being disciplined... well... I think that the consequences will be seen more and more in the future.
• I'm responsible and reliable, and try to be as honest that I can.
• I've always respected my teachers when I was at school, the authorities that I disrespected were the egocentric ones.
• When it comes to politeness, I have been a jerk at some times in my life but that was mostly when people attacked me. I'll say that I currently have a proper balance when it comes to politeness, I'm polite most of the time and vulgar sometimes. It's like 70% polite, 30% not polite, this is what feels most authentic to me.
• Being organized has always been a bit difficult for me, but this is not catastrophic.
• I never had strong biases against any group of individuals, the biases that I noticed recently were low in intensity.
• However, I never liked family values because my family is dysfunctional. Anyone who highly values family often feels hypocritical to me... But, this is a trap and families are actually important because healthy families are the basis of healthy societies.
• I did criticize homosexuals a bit when I was a young kid because I felt the pressure to be seen as a real man, but I outgrew that around 12. And if I'm really honest with myself I think that I have a more important feminine side than many other guys around me. I have a good masculine/feminine balance overall and I am very sensitive to the world around me
• I did follow religion when I was a kid but never hardly fall into dogmas because people around me have different religions. After 12 - 13, I started to outgrow religion and became more and more rational.
• During a period of my life, I started to be too much concerned about small details in my work which resulted in conflicts in the team.

Orange

• This one is maybe 50/50 in terms of healthy and non-healthy manifestations by reflecting on my life.
• I've been enthusiastic about my work. I had periods in my life where I really valued high-performance (I'm actually in one of these periods because of survival necessities) and did really well during a period at school and well at some periods in my work.
• I'm strategic, flexible, and adaptable.
• I like to be straightforward when it comes to getting things done.
• I'm very independently minded and always question things in order to improve them.
• I never fall for materialism, it never make any sense for me. I always saw this as incredibly shallow. I'm a minimalist when it comes to my material needs.
• I can get a bit annoyed when people aren't straightforward enough, that's a shadow to inspect here.
• I fall into the libertarian ideology in the past. I took it to the extreme, I wanted to be seen as this incredible successful guy who does everything by himself. This mindset almost killed me and I started to have panic attacks because I was so much obsessed with productivity and performance. I had a period in my life where I would wake up at 4:30 AM, go to the gym at 5 AM, take the bus to go to work at 6:45 AM, work, work, work, work again and again until I go to bed.
• I did have some hate of religion in the past.
• I have been cold and unemotional most of my life because I valued career over human relations.
• I did lack empathy and had been too cutting with people.

Green

• What's funny is that the stages that I mostly lived in are Orange and Green who are the complete opposites. Some of the things here are going to contradicts what I've written about my integration of Orange.
• I always valued multiculturalism and diversity. My family is multicultural and I lived with very diverse people, so all of this was natural for me. When I was a kid, it didn't make sense that most people stay stuck in their own culture without the curiosity of exploring different cultures.
• I quickly understood that people grow up in different cultures which affects how they perceive the world. I understood that my perception would have been different if I was born as a woman in Kenya, or a man in Brazil, or a transsexual in China.
• I always resonated with the need to take the environment seriously and have always been concerned about ecology.
• I am concerned about animal suffering. In fact, I have been vegetarian for an entire year in the past because I was so concerned about the animals.
• I want everyone to be treated fairly: men, women, kids, homosexuals, heterosexuals, transexuals, no matter their ethnicity.
• I want peace on earth: enough stupid wars, enough discriminations, enough racism, enough hate.
• I had enough with money/success-obsessed cultures.
• I want authenticity and want to be close to people
• Recently I started to become more and more aware of how emotions work and how to handle them.
• However, I never tried psychedelics, I don't know anything about chakras, etc. I don't do deep spiritual practices. I'm currently not meditating because I'm focusing on healing my traumas.
• I have been a bit ideological about how I eat in the past to the point where I dismissed everything that people would propose to me. A Yellow approach would have been to sometimes accept a bit of dirtiness to still being able to go to restaurants with people.
• I fall into the trap of seeing everyone as good and thinking that it's possible to help anyone by giving them some kindness.
• I have been reactive against capitalism, materialism, overconsumption especially when I was around 18 - 20. I did a speech in front of an audience about that, I'm now a bit ashamed of this because that was very immature.

Yellow

• I started to peak into Yellow 2 - 3 years ago when I was 21 - 22. Even though I was already following actualized.org , just the theory wasn't enough until I got myself into very stage blue (or at best low stage orange) environments. These environments were so radically different from what I knew that my world exploded into pieces. I experienced intense depression and was clashing with people. It felt like I was losing my sanity, like I had no ground in life. This is when I really became aware of how much different people are, that all people aren't at the same level, that we cannot just give love to people to change them, that people won't value orange or green values as much as I did.
• I more and more try to see things from different perspectives without being attached to any of them.
• I judge less people and accept that they are how they are and that they are where they are.
• I see more and more things as systems where all elements are interconnected.
• I'm better and better able to handle paradoxes.
• I can notice strange loops.
• Nothing is sacred nor precious for me, I question everything and most importantly I question myself.
• I see the human specie as an evolving, self-regulating meta organism, where everyone has a role.
• I'm more and more aware of my biases and I'm willing to correct them not matter how painful it is.
• However, I do get too much stuck in my mind to the point where it's sometimes difficult to handle. I've always been a mind-oriented person and always had this issue, but this is becoming worst.
• I am cold and distant from most people.
• I isolate myself too much from society.

Turquoise

• I had a few experiences in the past where my mind became so crazy that it started to collapse. In these moments, I was trying to keep my identity by repeating to myself my name, my age, my place of birth because I was so afraid of losing my mind. However, one day I choose to let it go and experienced a bit of nothingness. It was clear, they were no thoughts, but it didn't last long.

Edited May 16, 2021 by Raphael

[Raphael]

I think that people often see me as doing much better than I'm actually doing.

[Raphael]

About My Life Purpose

When I was 17-18, I was clear on my life purpose: I wanted to create a multi-million dollar tech company. Then, had an awakening and my world exploded into pieces. I realized that the only reason why I wanted that was to have power, dominance, and revenge on all the people who treated me so badly in life.

I currently don't know my life purpose. However, I can intuit that it will be related to systematically rising human development.

[Raphael]

If think that if people were honest about how they feel, 80% of them would fall down in tears.

[Raphael]

Quote

Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again, come, come.

Jelaluddin Rumi

[Raphael]

Let go of the pain before it consumes you.

[Raphael]

Stage Yellow without proper integration of previous stages leads to unhappiness.

[Raphael]

I think that I have shadows at all stages.

[Raphael]

[Raphael]

 

[Raphael]

 

[Raphael]

I remember wanting to kill myself one day.

I was trying to sleep, but couldn't. I wasn't making progress, nor making money, then this idea pops up in my head: "I'M GOING TO KILL MYSELF". It burst out of nowhere. It wasn't the first time that I had suicidal thoughts, but it was a bit stronger than usual (I never had strong suicidal thoughts in my life, but just small ones). I got out of my bed and felt the need to kill myself, to jump out of the stairs, or to take a knife. It was my ego coming back in this difficult situation, it wanted to kill itself because it was suffering too much. But the ego is inauthentic, the ego is not the true self who wants to be delighted from living an authentic life.

I came back to reason a few seconds later, I thought: "No, no, no, no, no, no. Something is wrong here. This is fine, this is fine, this is life, I want to live a deep conscious life. I want to be happy.". I took some deep breaths and went back to bed to sleep.

The recent suicide from a member of this community made me think of this.

[Raphael]

Not Solid

I'm not solid anything. Not solid Red, nor Blue, nor Orange, nor Green, nor Yellow, nor Turquoise. It's better to not be solid anything. Being too stuck in one color causes an inability to deal with diverse challenges. I'm mostly at Orange/Green with some Yellow and some Blue. It's important to be honest about where we are life, rather than being obsessed with being this incredible stage Yellow thinker or this cutting-edge stage Turquoise saint.

[Raphael]

How we play the dream is important.

Life is useless, yet we live it. The moments when I experienced the most happiness in life were when I excelled at playing the dream. My most depressing moments were when I was stuck thinking: "Nothing matters. Everything is the same, they are no meaning to life."

Both sides of the paradoxes are true, yet integrating them is tricky. Being conscious that we create meaningless meaning (in the absolute) to have a meaningful life (relative to the condition of being human) is tricky.

Often times being spiritual feels like living exactly at the intersection between life and death, yet many times we have to balance ourselves on the emotional scale to deal with the challenges of an imaginary precious life that doesn't matter in the end.

Edited May 22, 2021 by Raphael

[Raphael]

I've been too stuck at the same place since two years now. I feel the need to move and travel again. I feel the need for novelty and the need to discover the world.

However, the main issue that I'm facing is my family situation. My parents are old and we have animals to take care of. I cannot currently just change country without taking that into consideration. If I ever choose to move in the future, I will have to find a system to handle that. My dad will certainly cause some issues as usual because he doesn't trust anyone... So even if I find someone to take care of the house and the animals and if I pay for everything he will resist it unless he knows the person and already trust him/her... which is rare even for family members.

[Raphael]

Are you having thoughts about having thoughts? About having thoughts? About having thoughts? About having thoughts...

?

Edited May 22, 2021 by Raphael

[Raphael]

If I ever have a kid, he will be listened to and taken seriously way before popping out of his mom's vagina.

[Raphael]

Any intimate relationship that I'll have will be an interracial relationship.

[RendHeaven]

This whole journal is so beautiful.

And oh my God those wordless photos!

Edited May 23, 2021 by RendHeaven