Infrared (archaic): Infrared Altitude signifies a degree of development that is in many ways imbedded in nature, body, and the gross realm in general. Infrared Altitude exhibits an archaic worldview, physiological needs (food, water, shelter, etc.), a self-sense that is minimally differentiated from its environment, and is in nearly all ways oriented towards physical survival. Although present in infants, infrared is rarely seen in adults except in cases of famine, natural disasters, or other catastrophic events. Infrared is also used as a kind of catch-all term for all earlier evolutionary stages and drives.
Magenta (egocentric, magic): Magenta altitude began about 50,000 years ago, and tends to be the home of egocentric drives, a magical worldview, and impulsiveness. It is expressed through magic/animism, kin-spirits, and such. Young children primarily operate with a magenta worldview. Magenta in any line of development is fundamental, or “square one” for any and all new tasks. Magenta emotions and cognition can be seen driving such cultural phenomena as superhero-themed comic books or movies.
Red (ego- to ethnocentric, power): The Red altitude began about 10,000 years ago, and is the marker of egocentric drives based on power, where “might makes right,” where aggression rules, and where there is a limited capacity to take the role of an “other.” Red impulses are classically seen in grade school and early high school, where bullying, teasing, and the like are the norm. Red motivations can be seen culturally in Ultimate Fighting contests, which have no fixed rules (fixed rules come into being at the next Altitude, Amber), teenage rebellion and the movies that cater to it (The Fast and the Furious), gang dynamics (where the stronger rule the weaker), and the like.
Amber (ethnocentric, mythic): The Amber altitude began about 5,000 years ago, and indicates a worldview that is traditionalist and mythic in nature—and mythic worldviews are almost always held as absolute (this stage of development is often called absolutistic). Instead of “might makes right,” amber ethics are more oriented to the group, but one that extends only to “my” group. Grade school and high school kids usually exhibit amber motivations to “fit in.” Amber ethics help to control the impulsiveness and narcissism of red. Culturally, amber worldviews can be seen in fundamentalism (my God is right no matter what); extreme patriotism (my country is right no matter what); and ethnocentrism (my people are right no matter what).
Orange (worldcentric, rational): The Orange altitude began about 500 years ago, during the period known as the European Enlightenment. In an orange worldview, the individual begins to move away from the amber conformity that reifies the views of one’s religion, nation, or tribe. The orange worldview often begins to emerge in late high school, college, or adulthood. Culturally, the orange worldview realizes that “truth is not delivered; it is discovered,” spurring the great advances of science and formal rationality. Orange ethics begin to embrace all people, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal….” Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, the US Bill of Rights, and many of the laws written to protect individual freedom all flow from an orange worldview.
Green (worldcentric, pluralistic): The Green altitude began roughly 150 years ago, though it came into its fullest expression during the 1960’s. Green worldviews are marked by pluralism, or the ability to see that there are multiple ways of seeing reality. If orange sees universal truths (“All men are created equal”), green sees multiple universal truths—different universals for different cultures. Green ethics continue, and radically broaden, the movement to embrace all people. A green statement might read, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, regardless of race, gender, class….” Green ethics have given birth to the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements, as well as environmentalism.
Turquoise (worldcentric to “kosmocentric,” integral): The Turquoise Altitude marks the beginning of an integral worldview, where pluralism and relativism are transcended and included into a more systematic whole. The transition from Green to Turquoise is also known as the transition from “1st-tier” values to “2nd-tier” values, the most immediate difference being the fact that each “1st-tier” value thinks it is the only truly correct value, while “2nd-tier” values recognize the importance of all preceding stages of development. Thus, the Turquoise worldview honors the insights of the green worldview, but places it into a larger context that allows for healthy hierarchies, and healthy value distinctions.
Perhaps most important, a Turquoise worldview begins to see the process of development itself, acknowledging that each one of the previous stages (magenta through green) has an important role to play in the human experience. Turquoise consciousness sees that each of the previous stages reveals an important truth, and pulls them all together and integrates them without trying to change them to “be more like me,” and without resorting to extreme cultural relativism (“all are equal”). Turquoise worldviews do more than just see all points of view (that’s a green worldview)—it can see and honor them, but also critically evaluate them.
Turquoise is a mature integral view, one that sees not only healthy hierarchy but also the various quadrants of human knowledge, expression, and inquiry (at the minimum: I, we, and it). While Turquoise worldviews tend to be secular, turquoise is the first to begin to integrate Spirit as a living force in the world (manifested through any or all of the 3 Faces of God: “I”—e.g. the “No self” or “witness” of Buddhism; “we/thou”—e.g. the “great other” of Christianity, Judaism, Hindusm, Islam, etc.; or “it”—e.g. the “Web of Life” seen in Taoism, Pantheism, etc.).
White (Nondual Unity), that point where our subjective interiors and objective exteriors collapse into a single seamless experience.
In Ken’s Words
Looking at the nonduality of Emptiness and Form, we can say that Enlightenment “transcends and includes” the entire manifest world. With Emptiness, the entire world is transcended, is let go of, is seen through as a shimmering transparency, is understood to have no separate-self existence at all, is seen as a seamless (not featureless) Whole — and thus we are radically free from the torment and torture of identifying with partial, finite objects and things and events (including a small, finite, fragmented, skin-encapsulated ego), all of which are typically and normally seen as separate and “other.” As the Upanishads put it, “Wherever there is other, there is fear.” Samsara is being caught in the hell of others (as Sartre might say). It is identifying with various ornaments of the Divine but without an awareness of the Divine itself — being in a genuine heaven but without a genuine Spirit (Emptiness) anywhere to be found. But recognize Emptiness, and then one’s identity with any particular, separate, isolated thing or event evaporates instantly, leaving an identity, not with the small, separate-self sense, but with the entire world of Form. Since Reality is the union of Emptiness and Form, to discover Emptiness is to be free of any specific or isolated Form, and instead to become one with ALL Form, a radical Fullness that is the Form side of the radical Freedom of Emptiness — with infinite and finite, nirvana and samsara, Emptiness and Form, Freedom and Fullness, all nondual. You no longer look at a mountain, you are the mountain. You no longer hear the rain, you are the rain. You no longer see the clouds float by, you are the clouds floating by. There is no “other” here, because there is no longer anything outside of you that could hurt, harm, or torture you, or that you could crave, lust after, or hungrily grasp. There is simply the entire timeless Now, the ever-present Present, containing the entire manifest world, and you ARE all that. To quote the Upanishads again, Tat Tvam asi — “Thou art That” — where “That” is the divine Wholeness of the entire universe. In Emptiness, radical Freedom; in Form, radical Fullness—and both are “not-two.”
Now, when it comes to the manifest world, where evolution is so prominently on display, Emptiness itself does not evolve. It has no moving parts, and thus nothing to evolve; it is the absence of absence of absence (if anything), and thus, again, nothing concrete to actually evolve. It is not apart from samsara or Form; it is the emptiness (or transparency or “wetness”) of all samsara and Form. A sage who, two thousand years ago, directly realized Emptiness would discover and “possess” the same, identical Freedom as a sage who experienced Emptiness today, even though the world has evolved considerably in the meantime. But when it comes to Form, to the world of Form — well, that is exactly where evolution has occurred. And the world of Form has indeed evolved over the last two thousand years, becoming (as all evolution does) more and more conscious, more complex, more caring, more loving, more creative, and more self-organized, containing higher and higher Wholes.
And thus, more truths have emerged. Two thousand years ago, humanity thought the earth was flat; slavery was taken to be part of the natural, normal state of nature; women were largely treated as second-class citizens, if citizens at all; there was no understanding of, say, brain neurochemistry and neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, GABA, acetylcholine, nor medical advances that have added an average of forty years to the typical lifespan. Likewise, new psychological and sociological truths have emerged and evolved, advancing considerably our understanding of what it means to be human. The world of Form, in short, has become considerably more complex and Full, and although an experience of Enlightenment — of the unity of Emptiness and Form — is no Freer today than it was two thousand years ago (Emptiness is the same, then and now), it is most definitely Fuller (Form has most definitely increased, grown, and evolved). Evolution itself operates by transcending and including, transcending and including, transcending and including — and thus a human being today transcends and includes most of the fundamental emergent phenomena going all the way back to the Big Bang. Humans today literally contain quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, a photosynthetic Kreb’s cycle, organ systems, neural nets, a reptilian brain stem, a mammalian limbic system, a primate cortex, and — as its own “transcending” addition — a complex neocortex (which contains more possible neural connections than there are stars in the known universe). All of this is “transcended and included” in a human being.
Likewise, across the board with goodness, truth, and beauty. The world today has access to all of the great premodern Wisdom Traditions (and their meditative access to ultimate Truth and Enlightened Awareness) plus all of modernity’s staggering advances in the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, hygiene — stretching from a cure for polio, to putting a human on the moon, to the invention of radio, television, and computers that now contain more information than the sum total of all human brains) plus all of postmodernity’s sophisticated understanding about the contextual and constructed nature of relative truths, and the central role of perspective in all relative ideas. Shouldn’t the world’s Great Wisdom Traditions keep up with the modern and postmodern additions to our knowledge and understanding? After all, what is it that is evolving in all of this? Why, of course, Spirit! Evolution is simply Spirit-in-action: Brahman, Tao, Buddha-nature, Godhead, Allah, YHWH, the Great Perfection, Ati, the Ground of all Being, One without a Second. Whitehead, we noted, divided Spirit into two dimensions: the “Primordial Nature of God” (timeless and unchanging; for us, Emptiness) and the “Consequent Nature of God” (the sum total of all evolution to date; Form). And while the Primordial Nature of God has not changed one iota from the Big Bang and before, the Consequent Nature of God has grown magnificently and substantially. There are commonly understood truths now that would have simply staggered the premodern mind, from the nature of brain activity (a brain that, as noted, has more neural synaptic connections than there are known stars in the entire universe) to the extraordinary unfoldings of a self-organizing and self-transcending evolution, to the nature of the Big Bang itself in its first nanoseconds. Not to mention the Singularity that is in all likelihood bearing down on us now in technology and will change the world more than any other single change in human history.
-Ken Wilber, The Religion of Tomorrow