SUMMARY OF LEVELS IN THE SELF
Infrared: Physiological / Sensorimotor Begins at Birth
Healthy Expression: Physical groundedness, physical strength, taking care of physiological needs (food, water, shelter).
Capacities: Sensory-motor intelligence (coordination, dexterity), ability to experience the world through the five senses, the capacity to experience rudimentary and primitive emotions such as anger and fear (healthy fight or flight response).
Description: This is your animal instinctual heritage. This is your ability to take care of your basic survival needs, such as the need for food, physiological needs, warmth, shelter, water. This begins in the first year or two of life. This is your ability to be in your body and connected with your vital life force.
Magenta: Emotional / Sexual Begins at around Age 2 Healthy Expression: Beginning emotional feeling-capacity, appropriate impulsiveness, in touch with feelings, healthy sex drive; healthy fantasy life.
Capacities: Instinctual emotions; the emergence of sexuality, lust, and jealousy, ability to sense mystery and magic. Description: As the self begins to separate from its environment, it believes it can control its environment and the people around it. This level is superstitious, fantasy driven, impulsive. Immediate gratification is all it wants.
Red: Intentionality / Healthy Power Begins at around Age 4 Healthy Expression: Normal power drive and self-empowerment; healthy self-promoting; opportunity-seeking; intentionality; safe boundaries; conceptual thinking.
Capacities: Concern and protection of one’s own self and security, service of one’s own needs or interests, self protection, self-interested power.
Description: Psychologists call this the egocentric level, because it is only concerned with itself. This is a first person view only, and is experienced as separate and isolated. At this level rather than believing that the magic (Magenta) self can change the world around it, the self realizes it doesn’t have these powers. Rather, greater beings, like supernatural gods and goddesses (or a child’s parents) do have these powers. Therefore, if the individual can appease the gods (or parents), they will get what they want or need. This is a stage driven by power, and the pursuit of self-interest. This is your ability to pursue what you want, and have healthy boundaries when you’re encroached upon.
Amber: Rule / Role Mind Begins 7-8 years of Age Healthy Expression: Can take the role of other (a second-person perspective); can understand and follow rules; can concretely operate on its environment; identifies with a group; feels belongingness; beginning ethnocentric love and care.
Capacities: Sacrifice of one’s own desires for the needs of the group, order, stability, caring for the group, belonging, conviction, behavior that is acceptable to the group.
Description: This level usually begins around 7 or 8 years of age, and lasts through adolescence. The growing mind can now begin to take the role of other; can now include a second-person view, and see through another person’s eyes. The identity expands from only self to include a group, family, peer group, etc. Belongingness needs begin here. The self’s values are identified with the group. It’s “us vs. them.” The individual at this level is very bound by his or her group identification, very conformist, black and white, right or wrong.
Orange: Rational Begins in Adolescence Healthy Expression: Capacity for introspection; capacity to think in “what if” and “as if” notions; can utilize objective thinking as a tool (3rd-person perspective); hypothetico-deductive reasoning (“scientific thinking”); awareness of historical time.
Capacities: Ability to “step back” and review oneself and world objectively, self expression, self discovery, autonomy, independence, introspection, self awareness, productivity, achievement, rationality, progress.
Description: In today’s modern world this level emerges at adolescence; which emphasizes self-discovery, where the individual begins to ask “What can I do to succeed, what can I do to contribute?” This individual becomes motivated by self-esteem, achievement, excellence, and success. This is a more autonomous level, where self-expression becomes important.
Green: Pluralistic Begins in Adulthood Healthy Expression: each situation has many perspectives or views; can take 4th-person perspective (can reflect on 3rd-person thinking); sees that meaning is context-bound; sees relational nature of all events; sees morality and aesthetic interpretation as relative; sees that aspects of “accepted” truth are culturally conditioned and subjective.
Capacities: Community orientation, sharing, considering all perspectives, ability to see many truths in a situation, inclusivity. Description: At this stage, a world-centric perspective is stabilized. Compassion and honoring of different voices, especially those which have been marginalized. The beginning of the self-actualization drives to experience one’s higher potentials; the postmodern self will focus on external problems. Seeking for wholeness, meaning and unity, inner realms, community, sharing, consensus. Values egalitarian society and equality for all. Disapproves of all ranking or hierarchy.
Turquoise: Integral: Newly Emerging Stage of Development Healthy Expression: Sees holistic interconnections everywhere; everything is part of everything else; thinks in terms of holons (wholes that are parts of larger wholes); sees one’s connection to all of Nature and the Universe; understands partial truths of all previous levels (“true but partial”); sees development as a “transcend and include” process (includes previous levels but also moves beyond or transcends them); sees systems within systems within systems.
Capacities: Comfort with paradox, holistic thinking, inclusion of competing perspectives, values human dignity, pursuit of self-responsibility, honest self-inquiry, ability to easily change and adapt to various environments and situations, sees themselves in growth process and comfortable with imperfection, the ability to integrate and take multiple perspectives
Description: At this level, you are no longer identified with just the body or just the mind, but a higher level where the self experiences unity or integration. You experience a unity of the entire world as intimately interwoven, interconnected, a unitary whole and harmonious being in a continuous state of becoming. Life becomes saturated with wholeness, meaning, value, and completeness. Thus, the motivation starts to shift from deficiency needs to being needs.
Clear Light: Super Integral: Newly emerging and very rare Healthy Expression: Structural unity with spirit and all reality; is fully aware of radiant subtle energies; enlightened, awakened, self-realized. Capacities: Awareness of awareness; stabilized non-dual unity consciousness; transcends and includes entire cosmos.
Description: A direct experience of unity with all things, all beings; supermind. This is your birthright, and it is your highest, widest, and deepest potential. Oneness with spirit, and the entire manifest universe. This is the result of embracing all levels within yourself and all states of consciousness.
SUMMARY OF LEVELS IN SOCIETY
Infrared: Archaic: This was our transition from apes to humans. This is our animal instinctual heritage, organized around basic physiological needs, such as the need for food, warmth, shelter, and water.
Magenta: Magic: The magic cultures were the first major human societies; hunters, foragers and gatherers. They swept across the plains of Africa beginning around 175,000 years ago and began to remake the planet with magical thinking.
Red: Magic/Mythic: This marked the shift between a present based hunting culture to a future focused farming culture, called horticultural, which can be done with a simple hoe or digging stick. This was done by women, and these are the famous matrifocal cultures. Today, the Magic/Mythic places in the world are viewed as filled with robbers, terrorists, gangsters, etc; it’s a dog-eat-dog world where power and power drives are the predominant emotion.
Amber: Mythic: This level was behind all the great major empires that swept the world. This is still a very common level today. Today 60-70% of the world is at this level or lower. At this level, mythic events are taken to be concretely true. This is the level of traditional values and conformist belief structures. Group affiliation is of primary importance, whether that is family, tribe, religion, peer group, or nation. Fundamentalist religions are at this stage; both in the East and West. These religions believe that they and they alone have the absolute truth.
Orange: Rational: This level began with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in the West. At this point a new type of thinking emerged; a 3rd person, worldcentric, universal, objective type of thinking. This level has the ability to take a third-person perspective, which allows the individual to take a step back, look at oneself and society. This allows them to dream up new worlds. “What would it be like if slaves were free?” And ask questions like “what’s fair for all people?” (not just my people). This was the birth of representative democracy, the ending of slavery, and the beginning of the inclusion of women throughout society. The 3rd person objectivity also introduced scientific thinking; this is where modern sciences were born.
Green: Pluralistic: This postmodern, relativistic, level began in the 1960’s. As with all levels, the emergence of this level is marked by a new and higher perspective. This level has the capacity to 10 © 2019 ACTUALIZE OS rise above 3rd person perspectives, and review them, reflect on them, and critique them. This is what 4th person pluralism did with the rational level. It reviewed the rational level, and found that universal science was too narrow to capture all the numerous truths across the world. Science was still a part, but not the only view. The pluralistic view is more multicultural; it includes spirituality, ethics, aesthetics, as well as the truths of other cultures. This level attempts to include previously excluded or marginalized cultures and people. The rise of feminism, the Civil Rights Movement, and the environmental movement are all the product of this pluralistic level. Parallel to an interest in including previously excluded cultures, was an interest in previously excluded parts of oneself. This is the beginning of the human potential movement, which introduced many new modes of knowing, feeling, and loving.
Turquoise: Integral: This level includes all of the previous levels, and has been emerging over the last several decades. Currently around 5% of the world’s population is at the integral level. All of the previous six levels believed that their truth and values were the only real truth. This new integral level sees that each level was important because it became an ingredient of the higher level. Each level, as a holon, transcends and includes everything before it. This allows for everything to fall into place, because suddenly there is room for everything. Never before has there been a society that was truly all inclusive, that included all levels of development as significant stations in life, that took all true but partial truths, to make a comprehensive map of life, and use that map to help plot their own growth and evolution.
Clear Light: Super Integral: There are very few people in the world today at this level, yet this is the human birthright. This is the most whole, unified consciousness yet to appear in evolution. It is spirit itself fully embodied in a human organism. This is the leading edge of evolution.