Spiral Dynamics and Auroville

Spiral Dynamics is a model of the evolutionary development of individuals, organizations, and societies based on the emergent cyclical theory of Clare Graves. Graves, a professor of psychology, was interested in knowing how a wide range of different people would choose to define the values that a mature human being would exhibit. After doing extensive surveys and a ‘blind’ analysis of the results, certain clear stages of development emerged. His model describes an evolving double spiral, similar to how we usually represent the DNA helix, with one of the spirals representing individual development and the other the collective development, where both spirals actively coexist and interact.

Graves died while writing a book about this but two of his students, Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, built on his work and gave it the name Spiral Dynamics, assigning to each stage of development, both of the individual and the society, a particular colour (see chart). Later, Ken Wilber collaborated with Beck to take it in a more spiritual direction, incorporating some of the insights of Sri Aurobindo.

Aurovilian David Nightingale has been studying Spiral Dynamics for many years.

How do you see the usefulness of Spiral Dynamics for understanding our present situation, both in Auroville and the world?

Over the course of the last twenty years I have been using it to help me gain a deeper understanding of the world around me, but I have also been moving beyond both Spiral Dynamics and Wilber’s Integral Theory through my attempt to integrate these systems with the Integral Yoga. Spiral Dynamics is just a map, it’s not the territory. We have to live it, and that is where it meets the Integral Yoga.

Spiral Dynamics is obviously not replacing the Integral Yoga but simply adding some nuances which, at least in my reading of it, weren’t there before. I think it is important to take into account the evolutionary trajectory that has happened since The Human Cycle was written, especially taking into consideration the fact that evolution is also accelerating, and Spiral Dynamics helps to fill in some of those pieces.

For example, in The Human Cycle it is written that you have the symbolic age, followed by the typal, conventional, individualistic, subjective and spiritual ages (or infarctional, rational and supranational ages). The definitions themselves are still perfectly valid one hundred years later, but since Sri Aurobindo gives us the impression that they appear to follow on directly one after the next, there’s nothing really to help us understand the complexity of what we are living today, to the degree that the remnants of the last three of these previous stages are interacting with and fighting each other across all the cultures of the globe. In this way Spiral Dynamics helps provide another lens for understanding what is happening today, both in Auroville and in the world.

How did you become interested in Spiral Dynamics?

When I came across Wilber at the turn of the century it was an ‘ah ha’ moment. I had just run away screaming from Vérité because I had gone there wanting to experience intentional community but then I couldn’t relate to the endless sharing's. I wanted to understand why I was running away and Ken Wilber’s version of Spiral Dynamics made perfect sense, for I saw that the Green value-meme (promoting egalitarianism and consensus) along with all its drawbacks, including endless discussions and difficulty in making decisions, was unfortunately encapsulated in my experience of Vérité.

In those early days, Spiral Dynamics also provided me with a much needed stepping-stone towards understanding Sri Aurobindo, whom initially I had difficulty reading before. For example, I found a wonderful overlap between the stages of the spiral and the stages described in Sri Aurobindo’s The Human Cycle. How I interpret it, and this is a work in progress, is basically that what Sri Aurobindo terms the Symbolic Age would be the Purple value-meme in Spiral Dynamics (tribal, living in a sacred world), the Typal Age is Red (gratifying impulses, fighting to assert self), the Conventional Age or age of religions is Blue (imposing order through laws, religious conformism), the Individualistic age is Orange (striving for autonomy, rational), the Subjective Age begins in Green (exploring the inner being, egalitarian), and the Spiritual Age would begin, after intermediate Yellow (integrative, open to diversity) which is the first stage of the Second Tier, in the second stage of the Second Tier with Turquoise (blending and harmonizing a strong collective of individuals), finally progressing, through four higher levels, to that of Supermind in the Third Tier.

In social terms, each one of the First Tier stages has had its moment of flourishing and then it has tended to tail off, although the remnants of most of those stages are still very much with us today. There is also a compression happening over time. The predominant Orange value-system that we are living with in the world today only emerged after the Renaissance, while Green started to kick in around 1850 and peaked in 1968. Second Tier started appearing after the Second World War through the unfolding of Yellow, whilst the possibility of Turquoise was already coming online around the 1980s or 1990s. So it would appear that each of these jumps is happening in a shorter and shorter time-frame.

This seems to imply there is continual progress. But can’t there also be regression? Can’t we slip back down the spiral?

Absolutely. For example, each colour/stage has a tendency to lean back on the previous colour if things get difficult and can even drop down the spiral long-term if everything fails. So if things get difficult in Green it will lean back on Orange and look for some technological solution, and Orange will lean back on Blue and say we need more laws and a stronger adhesion to traditional values. Blue will lean back on Red and seek an authoritarian leader who will come to save them, which is why many Fundamentalist Christians in the United States ended up voting for Trump.

I think we are coming to a point globally where it is really make or break, and it could go either way. As a species either we will make it through or there will be a collapse, at which point I’ve no idea how far down the spiral we may slip. But if we make the jump collectively, because it has to be collective, then the jump will happen across the board and it could be a mass shift across all the stages.

How do you view the present situation in Auroville?

I think the communitarian values of the Green stage have basically been our collective ‘centre of gravity’ for the past 50 years, but many of the other levels are also actively present. In fact, if we include the local villages, I don’t think there is anywhere on this planet that has so many levels of the spiral in operation at the same time. This gives us an incredible playing field to work with to create the true human unity that Mother envisioned.

Yet it could be argued that we are reverting at the moment, that the feeling that some people have that we are stuck in Green and progress is arrested is creating a reaction which is strengthening Blue.

Absolutely. The values of Green, which in many ways have entrenched themselves in unhealthy ways over the years, have created a lot of frustration in many Aurovilians centred at other levels of the spiral. They might well be welcoming the government intervention because the next stage has not emerged yet to help counter this frustration. However, there’s a nice analogy which Beck uses, which is when you have to make a jump, you first have to drop down and flex your knees. So maybe that is what is happening now.

Do you agree that we are stuck in Green? And that this is hindering our evolution?

Yes. All of these stages can turn ‘unhealthy’ when they are no longer at their peak, and then we see their negative aspects. One of the challenges for Green is that it says we are all equal and everybody is the same, but then it tends to be dismissive of everybody who doesn’t think like them. So Green, because it is generally anti-meritocratic and anti-authority, often tends to look down on Orange and Blue – and, unfortunately, often by default on Yellow, too!

In Auroville, Green as a collective energy has degenerated into being in a comfort zone. After 20 years of observing it, I am still shocked that we are collectively so addicted to this feeling of collective togetherness without craving something more. There are many positive things about it, but I’m very disappointed that we haven’t made that leap to the Second Tier (Yellow and Turquoise) as a collective without needing to receive a kick up the butt, which unfortunately is what we are getting now.

Of course, that leap is not easy. For Graves, the leap into second-tier is bigger than all the other shifts put together because it involves a significant dropping of fear and of stepping back from the ego. In fact, he personally felt that the leap is so extreme that Yellow and Turquoise will only emerge in a life-and-death situation within a society.

For many years I was thinking that in Auroville the goal would be to just get to Yellow, because Yellow understands the qualities of every stage that has gone before, and sees the need to integrate them. But one of the patterns in the spiral as we move through the stages is this I-We-I-We oscillation between the individual and the collective. For example, the focus in Blue is collective, in Orange it is on the individual, while Green is the last collective stage of the first-tier. But Yellow, as the first stage of the Second Tier, is individual again. So if we are here for a collective evolution, we need to set our sights on the next stage, Turquoise, rather than Yellow, because Turquoise is profoundly intuitive and this would put us on the threshold of entering another stage of the collective yoga.

My latest intuition is that Auroville has in fact been a hotbed for developing Yellow – but more from an individual perspective. I think there are a significant number of Aurovilians at a Yellow centre-of-gravity, and these people have come together, at different moments and at different times, to try and test out new models like, in my own case, Dreamcatching, Dreamweaving, Citizens Assemblies etc. They are like Yellow flowers which have popped up in the Green field of Auroville, exploring new ways of working and decision-making.

But what comes next? I can feel the potential for these Yellow seeds to start to bring out Turquoise. This is why, when last July Omar, Mona and myself made a presentation about the next steps after the Dreamweaving experiment, we came up with a diagram in which we depicted an empty central circle surrounded by different initiatives that we believe embody the Yellow value-meme as it relates to planning. We wanted to leave the space in the middle free for some magic to occur, for Turquoise to emerge from these Yellow initiatives. This is what we are trying to encourage people to do now: to take the individual Yellow petals and translate these into a collective Turquoise with regard to how we relate to each other, formulate new ideas and make decisions.

As far as I am aware, nobody has been able to make this shift before, anywhere, but we have an incredible opportunity to do it in Auroville because we’ve got 50 years behind us of building the framework and the culture, which allows for the possible emergence of something new.

However, now the government has stepped in, and the danger is that if the Governing Board continues to be too heavy-handed, even though that elusive Second Tier emergence might be primed to happen, it won’t be able to, and then Auroville may simply become a government-run project, albeit one with a spiritual focus, that is centred in the traditional, yet bureaucratic, Blue centre of gravity.

However, if there are enough Aurovilians who choose to leap into the unknown and embrace the possibility of a wider collective transformation, the lack of which having been the Governing Board’s original claim for its intervention, then perhaps all is not lost? The next year or two will determine whether we finally progress as a collective or fall back.