It took me years to determine what a spiritual journey might entail. I’m sure that many readers of Third Factor are on a similar search, with positive and negative adjustment and maladjustment in their past. But before I could help lead Third Factor’s new spiritual development group, I had to understand why and how I had made my own journey, at least so far.
Defining Spirituality
Spirituality, for me, is everything concerned with purpose and meaning. Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning comes to mind. As today’s still-predominant scientific view, materialism explicitly excludes purpose and meaning. This leads to nihilism, existential frustration, and—as Frankl observed in the Nazi concentration camps—death itself. On the other hand, as he says, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live can bear with almost any ‘how.’”
Spirituality adds this dimension of purpose. Spiritual development, then, is life itself—we can also call it spirit—calling each human being to answer the question of meaning and purpose. Frankl, again, puts it best:
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
You may say, and rightly so, that I am talking about meaning in life, not the meaning of life. But could the continual finding of meaning in life gradually uncover the meaning of life? Let me clarify the difference so I can better describe this pathway: I see the meaning of life as the reason for things, people, and especially me to exist in the first place. Meaning in life involves finding my place in the world as I understand and make sense of it.
Could the continual finding of meaning in life gradually uncover the meaning of life?
And that process of sensemaking is at the heart of spiritual development. To illustrate, allow me to share some of my own journey with you.
Through Assessments, Toward Meaning
About six years ago, I was a bored software architect and a confused lay pastor in a fundamentalist evangelical church.
Some health problems had me quarantined in my room. I felt better when I focused on some tasks and gave my brain a lot of things to process. My maladjustment to my job and pastorate led me to search for meaning, which soon became a foundational sensemaking quest.
I don’t remember exactly why I picked up on personality assessments, but I do remember why I was immediately hooked. For all my church life, my personality as a deep thinker and inquisitive mind had been challenged. They called it “old nature that has to die,” the “result of sin in your life.”
I was quite negatively maladjusted, so I believed those remarks and tried hard to become what people in my community expected of me. They called it “becoming christlike,” but they meant “becoming a carbon copy of the ideal your pastor thinks he mostly already is. Why else would he be the pastor?”
When I took CliftonStrengths, an assessment focusing on talents and strengths that set us apart to help us cooperate more productively, I was astonished that my personality was reflected so well by the results—or, really, that it was recognized at all. People like me existed, and could play a role! Why else would all those strategic thinking talents make it into the assessment?
A question arose from deep within me. What if I were a mirror reflection of God, one of many, expressing a facet my church could not see?
The Power of Spiral Dynamics
I grew to accept my personality after all those years, which was a tremendous relief. But while that brought peace, I still had many questions. One of them—actually, a whole category—arose directly from my new finding:
If there were a multitude of personalities, why would the church expect us all to become carbon copies of Jesus?
I tried so hard to communicate with my pastor: if the Bible was correct when it stated in Psalm 139:14 that we were made unique and beautiful, then the two words in the verse were not accidental: we are unique, and that is beautiful. But he did not see what I saw.
Around that time, I discovered developmental psychology. It started with the book God 9.0 by Marion Küstenmacher. Over the next year or so, I devoured books from and about Jean Gebser, Jean Piaget, Robert Kegan, Frederik Laloux, Clare W. Graves, Ken Wilber, and Don Beck. I dove deep into one model in particular. It was called Spiral Dynamics.
While developmental psychology usually focuses on an individual’s life, Spiral Dynamics proposes a stunning parallel: the individual grows through the same stages as humanity.
While developmental psychology usually focuses on an individual’s life, Spiral Dynamics proposes a stunning parallel: the individual grows through the same stages as humanity. What’s more, Don Beck consulted leaders facing tremendous real-life challenges, including Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Nelson Mandela, and offered them the model he had created to help them navigate the tumult. Have you ever wondered why South Africa handled the transition from apartheid surprisingly peacefully? Mandela used Spiral Dynamics to show people what they had in common across racial boundaries while differing within their race. And, interestingly, the model itself helped break down these boundaries: you see, because Don Beck had color-coded the different stages of Spiral Dynamics, that helped the South Africans shift their focus away from shades of white, brown, and black and to what really mattered.
Stages, Colors, and Values
Before I explain those colors, I want to offer a few caveats. First, this brief explanation will not do the complexity of this model justice. If you’d like to know more about it, join the Spiritual Journey group within the Third Factor Community, where you’ll certainly find me talking about Spiral Dynamics in palatable, piecemeal bites. Second, I speak here to make a case for this model to this magazine’s audience and not to frame it as fundamental to the Third Factor project; the editor in chief is on record as “interested but skeptical,” so I speak here on my own behalf. But that’s just it: Spiral Dynamics is important to the story of my spiritual journey, and the insights it sparks could be useful to someone else’s, too.
As an introduction, allow me to explain what those colors that Mandela applied indicate in Spiral Dynamics. Basically, each color indicates a set of values tied to the key concerns of an individual in a given place and time. For instance, the lowest level, Beige, indicates the values you might expect a person living in the Stone Age to hold; Blue, Orange, and Green, meanwhile, represent systems of values held by different cultural groups that are clashing in our current age.
So what are those values? Here they are, according to the model:
- Beige: survival and satisfaction of primary needs
- Purple: kinship, safety, security
- Red: willpower, action, passion
- Blue: stability, order, morality (Traditionalism)
- Orange: self-expression, success-driven, rationality (Modernity)
- Green: community, sensitivity, harmony (Postmodernity)
- Yellow: integral, synergy, systemic (Integral, Metamodernity)
- Turquoise: holistic
These stages are defined by those values, which spread within communities like viral memes. That’s why, in Spiral Dynamics, they’re called value memes. And while the same value meme might appear in different flavors in different areas of the world, these manifestations share a similar hierarchy of values, to use a term used by Kazimierz Dabrowski in his theory of positive disintegration, as well as by many others.
When I use this term, I mean to convey that my values are the conscious and unconscious framework through which I run all my decisions before acting on them. If there’s a conflict between two values, the hierarchy determines which value wins.
When I use this term, I mean to convey that my values are the conscious and unconscious framework through which I run all my decisions before acting on them. If there’s a conflict between two values, the hierarchy determines which value wins.
For each of the colored stages that I described above, the values represent the top of the stage’s hierarchy. In the Beige stage, people’s decisions would ultimately be based on what ensured survival, while those living in a Blue culture would run everything by its doctrine for correctness. People in an Orange culture would want to express themselves above all, even to the point of sacrificing belonging if necessary.
These value memes, and the clash between them, popped up at many points in my journey, as I suspect they will have in yours. For instance, Blue (traditional) values manifest in ideologies and religions like Christianity, Islam, communism, capitalism, patriotism, or feudal and caste systems. They are characterized by strong authority structures and an absolute truth that is to be followed.
You might expect capitalism to be an expression of Orange (modernist) values based on the keywords above, and it is—until it becomes an ideology. Similarly, communism and Buddhism might be considered Green (postmodernist) until their adherents begin treating them as absolute truths.
According to Spiral Dynamics, a society or person in the Yellow stage has transcended and included all of the previous value memes. Yellow’s purpose is threefold:
- To reach back and heal value memes that have manifested in unhealthy or destructive ways
- To integrate the previous value memes to address the pressing challenges of the time, since complex problems will tend to need to draw on all of them, just as Nelson Mandela and Don Beck did in South Africa
- To help people grow along the spiral
Some Basic Cautionary Remarks
I have to make some remarks to address both simplistic views and knee-jerk reactions to what I just explained. Not everybody lives through these value memes in this fashion. Those who live in an environment that embraces a given value meme will embrace it, not growing past that level. People in traditional churches usually do not grow past a Blue worldview, while woke people are usually stuck in Green; in some cases, they may never have developed past Purple with some Red, giving them an almost magical, tribal view of nature and an urge to fight for it.
In addition, we never wholly abandon the value memes we’ve lived through; instead, we transcend and integrate them. Think of it this way: an Orange businessman reaches deep into his Red side when at a game and, when coming home, lives out Purple values with his family. We are like guitars; we produce sounds that are a combination of all the value memes for which we have strings. We’ll probably prefer one in particular, and it doesn’t have to be the most complex in our repertoire.
An Orange businessman reaches deep into his Red side when at a game and, when coming home, lives out Purple values with his family. We are like guitars; we produce sounds that are a combination of all the value memes for which we have strings.
Last but not least, none of the value memes is better than any other. Each value meme addresses a class of problems with a certain complexity that did not exist before. Thus, the best value meme is the one that has answers to the problem at hand. While a person in a modern city needs access to Blue organization and probably to Orange success strategies, he’d also be lost and dead in a day in the jungle without access to Purple knowledge.
To put it another way, you would never say that a university graduate is more valuable than a preschooler. The graduate simply has more tools available to solve increasingly complex problems.
Spirituality at Each Level
But back to my story. It became apparent to me that my church was a typical expression of Blue thinking. Authorities were set by God and hierarchically organized. The truth was found in the literal interpretation of the Bible, the written Word of God. They were motivated by external rules and regulations, and living one’s individuality was an aberration—sinful behavior that had to be overcome. Yes, we were an extreme poster child of Blue values.
The thing is, I had joined the church to heal the lack of Blue values in my life. I had been brought up with anti-authoritarian parenting methods. I was always allowed to live out my individuality in school because I was an excellent student and my teachers had enough problems on their hands.
I also wanted to help the church grow along the Spiral. When I had my first church experience as a seven-year-old and again when I joined the church for good, I had a vision: it was about helping the church reach a stage of individuated unity, a stage where I was fully myself yet in unison with everything.
Can you see the problem? My understanding of spirituality was at a completely different place than that of the church I joined.
When I explained what I mean by spirituality at the beginning of this article, I likened it to the search for meaning. We find a hierarchy of values at the core of every value meme in Spiral Dynamics. Hierarchization of values is an expression of meaning, assigning weight to specific values.
When we talk about spirituality today, some values that come to mind might be acceptance, compassion, connection, grace, humility, authenticity, and truth. Every value meme defines those terms and orders them within its hierarchy of values.
The Two Strands: I vs. We
At this point, I need to explain something else about the value memes in Spiral Dynamics. Like a pendulum, the values in this spiral swing from self-expression to self-sacrifice, from a lone-wolf mentality to group cohesion. With each half-turn of the spiral, authenticity and connection trade places in the hierarchy.
Self-expressive value memes like Beige, Red, Orange, and Yellow place authenticity over connection, often sacrificing belonging. Connection and belonging are valued more in self-sacrificing value memes like Purple, Blue, Green, and Turquoise. People led by those memes more easily adapt to fit in with their group. The pendulum can only swing so far between these two poles before the focus is brought to the other one.
When we talk about spirituality today, some values that come to mind might be acceptance, compassion, connection, grace, humility, authenticity, and truth. Every value meme defines those terms and orders them within its hierarchy of values.
Moreover, these are two interwoven growth paths, like DNA strands. One is focused on developing the I and leads from the unconscious instinctual survival of the Beige meme to the ego development of Red, getting this ego under control more and more as individuals in the Orange stage, or even, at the Yellow integrative stage, as mentors showing how to live as individuals.
The other strand focuses on our capability to form groups—the We. As we go up that strand, we move from Purple families and tribes to Blue interest groups, Green humanity, and all kinds of being in Turquoise.
Healthy spirituality is possible in all of these value memes. We can define it as strengthening spiritual values in the confine of the value meme at hand. Remember, the value meme answers the problems our environment poses to us and determines which values should guide us.
In short, humanity and the individual journey along the Spiral doing ego development and community building in bursts to grow into the individuated unity I had dreamed of when I joined the church.
How does such spiritual development progress from value meme to value meme, especially when nobody has walked this path before? This is where Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration really comes into the picture. Now that you have this framework to understand value memes and how they shift, can you think of times in your life when you moved from one value meme to the next? You’ve lived through some of these, like everybody. Was it painful?
You probably saw some as the natural way of development. Your Purple family provided your first set of external expectations, helping you to grow out of Beige and into Purple. (In Dabrowski’s language, those external expectations were the second factor of your development, alongside the first factor of your natural endowment.)
Others probably weren’t so easy. Puberty is a challenge for virtually everyone; but a community is waiting for you on the other side of it, providing a more or less healthy second factor.
Spiritual Development and Positive Disintegration
But what about growing into a value meme for which you have no examples to follow? Some people might have gone before you, but their wisdom is not within your reach. This is where I see positive disintegration as the only means to progress. Only people capable of developing a third factor that draws them toward their ideal—first stumbling, then with direction—will go where no man they know has gone before.
The purpose of churches like mine is to provide a healthy second factor—a beneficial environment to ignite a journey through the levels of TPD in people. Traditional religions succeed in drawing people from Beige through Purple and Red into Blue with some specks of Orange. Liberal churches help people grow into Green, but like traditional churches, they usually fail to provide pathways for further growth.
Churches provide this healthy, beneficial nurture even to people who do not have the prerequisites for positive disintegration, lacking intensity and complexity of thinking, emotions, and imagination. Thus, churches will always exist in some form and, at their best, will nurture people who would otherwise follow more nefarious influences to be their best selves.
A spiritual journey is synonymous with traveling upward through Dabrowski’s levels. The ideal we try to reach from the point of spontaneous multilevel disintegration onward is the meaning we search for on our spiritual journeys.
A spiritual journey is synonymous with traveling upward through Dabrowski’s levels. The ideal we try to reach from the point of spontaneous multilevel disintegration onward is the meaning we search for on our spiritual journeys.
I anticipate one more question that I should clarify: Do I equate Dabrowski’s five levels to the value memes? By no means. I equate Dabrowskian disintegration with the change process that occurs as we progress from one value meme to another. Contrary to an orthodox understanding of Dabrowski’s theory of positive disintegration, I do not believe that somebody reaches secondary integration only once in a lifetime.
Let me explain. Being rooted in a value meme can be seen as primary integration. At a certain point, we will start the change process—maybe a positive disintegration—and end up in a secondary integration, now aligned with the values of the following value meme.
Some time later—maybe thousands of years historically or some years in the case of the individual—what used to be the ideal becomes the new primary integration, and the journey starts anew.
Dabrowski’s positive disintegration describes the Spiral Dynamics change process when nobody is waiting for you to draw you upward, and you must walk the path alone.
The Need for Spiritual Community
Life is relational. Iain McGilchrist, in his book The Matter with things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, calls the primary existing things in-betweenness. Think of music: a note on its own does not make the magic and emotionality of great music, nor do the pauses. It is the in-betweenness of their relationship that brings forth the music.
Sensemaking and meaning, the motor and definition of spirituality, are void if they do not involve other people.
On the path of development to becoming a self-authoring person, we will have stretches and periods during which we go at it alone. We have an ideal that demands us to break free from standards, basic needs, and external expectations to express our authentic selves.
Despite this need to go it alone sometimes, much of our growth requires community. The Bible tells us that “iron sharpens iron.”
But despite this need to go it alone sometimes, much of our growth requires community. The Bible tells us that “iron sharpens iron.” In community, we will have people that can serve as examples or even mentor us without wanting to turn us into mere copies of themselves. Others will guide us by modeling how to become self-authoring people.
On the flip side, we’ll also have people we can invest in, sharpening our values and ideas by turning them into memes and archetypes that others can apply.
A community will also help us see our false beliefs and self-made limitations. In my case, I functioned as a Yellow lone wolf before I started to connect with others, forming a gang of four with very similar yet individually different journeys. Our lengthy and intense Zoom meetings every third week are more of a church and a community than I’d ever had before.
In the end, we need all three: peers, mentors, and mentees. This is why Alexis Obernauer and I have launched the Spiritual Journey group in the Third Factor Members’ Community. If you’d like to learn more, have a look at our introduction, which includes instructions on how to join the group. We’d love to have you there. If this article has left you with more questions than answers, let’s go on a journey to explore them together.
Header image by TomasSereda / iStock
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