A Case Study in Stage Orange’s Conflation of Stage Green and Blue Spirituality

[Pure Imagination]

I follow Secular Talk featuring Kyle Kulinski on YouTube, and he recently posted a video criticizing Marianne Williamson over a tweet she posted about prayer. I found this to be a perfect example of how Spiral Dynamics Stage Orange confuses the religion of Stage Blue with the spiritual teachings of Stage Green. I mainly wanted to comment on this video to show the dangers of demonizing spiritual concepts of Green as bullshit. There are many valid spiritual principles Marianne touches that I have experienced for myself as true.

Please note that I am not demonizing Kyle or Marianne here. Kyle produces a fantastic show that pushes for great policy proposals that will greatly benefit America, and he does so in a convincing way. Voices like his are important for advancing America’s political discourse. I would just like to clear up any confusion that Kyle’s line of thinking in this video may cause. Likewise, Marianne is an important voice in opening Americans up to Stage Green spiritual principles, but that doesn’t mean she always presents them in a realistic, pragmatic way that resonates with Stage Blue/Orange people.

 

 

Please watch the video before reading so I can avoid restating the video’s content. Here are my comments and critiques:

 

• In her first tweet, Marianne talks about how the power of the mind can influence external events, such as altering the path of Hurricane Dorian. Kyle dismisses this claim as religious, spiritual, new-age nonsense. Now many of you may reject this concept as Kyle does, but that would be a huge misunderstanding about how universal mind (aka God, reality, your true nature, etc.) works. Our beliefs create our entire reality; most people in the west hold the belief that our mind is separate from reality and it doesn’t have any influence on the so-called external world. This is simply not the case. Your mind created the idea of Hurricanes, along with the notion that we are helpless to them and that they cannot be altered by our minds. The fact is that if society at large believed thoughts can change their reality, then that would become our new truth. But we hold ourselves back and tell ourselves the story that our minds of no control over the external world, preventing us from tapping into our true creative potential. This is part of humanity’s innate sense of separateness.
• Kyle conflates Marianne’s claims with other unhealthy instances of religion/spirituality in politics. He puts her claims at the same level as sharia law and the Republic Party’s exploitation of Christianity to garner votes. Marianne’s claims are not the “left wing version” of religion. She is not preaching a doctrine meant to be taken on faith, and she is not weaponizing these truths for political gain. If anything, these claims hurt her chances with the Democratic electorate. She is speaking of principles that have been verified by many and are taught in many spiritual schools of thought.
• Kyle explains that Dorian destroyed the Bahamas and missed Florida. He says that if prayer worked, then that means that Bahamians didn’t pray hard enough to dodge the storm. This is a gross mischaracterization of how universal mind works. It is difficult to explain why certain things manifest physically in relation to thoughts because there are so many factors that play into manifestation. The Law of Attraction is misunderstood by most, even in spiritual communities. There are an infinite number of reasons why thoughts do or do not manifest physically, and I would love to flesh this out more with all of you and hear your perspective regarding manifestation. While I personally cannot pinpoint exactly why Dorian took the path it did, I can posit a couple possibilities:

1. The predominant belief of most who were impacted is that we are helpless to natural disasters, and that prayer won’t do anything anyways. This automatically disables almost any possibility of change through the mind.
2. Perhaps people more impacted by Dorian were hoping it would miss them, but they may have resisted getting hit so much that they manifested the reality they were trying to avoid. This is the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

• Marianne mentions that prayer is a power of the mind. Kyle responds by saying it is not, and it is just something that one does in the mind, and that things one thinks aren’t guaranteed to manifest. It’s true that thoughts aren’t guaranteed to manifest, but that isn’t because mind has no effect on the so-called physical world. Our mind creates all of reality; there is nothing external to consciousness. If something prayed for fails to manifest, it can be due to a variety of factors (see the point above).
• Marianne claims to have seen first-hand the power of prayer working with altering something like a hurricane. Now she may be right, but I get the sense she is believing this on faith rather than experience. Like I have said, manifestation is very nuanced and virtually no human has a good understanding of how it works. Marianne seems to be taking a Stage Green approach in understanding prayer, rather than a Stage Turquoise approach. I don’t sense humbleness in how she treats manifestation; rather, it sounds like overconfidence in beliefs she holds.
• Marianne claims the “overly secularized Left” are losing voters by shutting out religious/spiritual people. I strongly disagree. The Left by and large are accepting of most people. I am not convinced the Democratic Party is losing voters because of secularism; the vast majority of elected Democrats are Christians. Kyle more or less makes this point and I completely agree with him.
• Kyle claims Marianne’s comments are dangerous because people may avoid evacuating and just try to pray the hurricane away. This is ridiculous. No one is just going to change their safety plans because Marianne advocated for prayer. Almost no one believes prayer has that kind of power, even most devout religious people.

 

That’s about it. Let me know what you think and I am excited to hear y’all’s take on this!