Life Conditions
Installed the CD-RW / DVD drive last night but encountered a trouble that DVD could not work properly because one of the necessary decoders did not exist in my computer. It was the decoder that updates Windows Media Player to enable DVD to play properly. So I additionally purchased the decoder in the website and installed it. Then, now DVD can be played even in my laptop PC.
This is one of the things that I am always annoyed when we install something quite new. You have to always take care of the subtle difference of compatibilities and often encounter the case that you have to additionally install decoders, service packs and so on aside from the main application you purchased. The only good thing is that you can just buy and download such peripheral items. It seems the more things are complicated, the more you need peripherals. That is the truth in any computers and probably even in any societies and communities.
Anyway, since this drive can finally work properly, last night I just enjoying watching the DVD entitled "Leap into the Future." This is the seminar that Dr. Don Beck and Andrew Cohen conducted in Copenhagen, Denmark to explain how Spiral Dynamics could work and inspire people as one of the frameworks in order to face our present diverse worlds.
When I was watching this DVD, I got a phone call from Mr. O who is a student of community development and was also mentioned in my recent post entitled "SD and CD." He was just nearby my place and requested me to have a cup of coffee together in Starbucks that is also just a few minutes away from my house. Then, we meet each other, had a cup of coffee and mainly discussed the same topic I wrote in my recent post, which is the relation between SD and CD.
The reason, I guess, why he wanted to talk with me was my writing in this dairy. As I made the journal entry about SD and CD and he read it, it seemed, he wanted to conduct the further discussion with me on the same topic. The discussion was quite interesting and even for me it was so fruitful that I could see SD particularly from the point of view of CD.
Although I wrote that I did not have much expertise on the field of community development and wondered what kind of discussion regarding the definition of "development" had been done in this field, I just would like him and probably the readers not to misunderstand. I am neither saying that I am totally ignorant of the field of community development and nor insisting that I am indifferent. As being a friend of him and his many other friends for many years, I think I have been quite familiar with the diverse, profound, well-discussed, and naturally even practical definitions of "development" on this field of community development.
My point was just how such sophisticated definitions can be aligned with the definitions of development in SD. That was my query based mainly on my curiosity so far. And of course I believe that this must be also his query for the same reason or moreover in his case for the more urgent reason to apply SD for the real field of community development.
Incidentally, I told him (and again I would like the readers to understand) that my writings especially in this Blog Diary section are not (or not yet) the so-called academic articles. Or rather, what I am doing here is so-called journaling so as to put my everyday thoughts, reflections, and experiences on a piece of paper, I mean, a virtual piece of paper on the web. But of course, nevertheless our discussion or dialogue inspired by my recent posts was quite exciting and I enjoyed it a lot.
If you are not so familiar with Spiral Dynamics, therefore, I recommend you to visit the more appropriate sites. You can find a lot of them by using any search engines with the keywords such as Spiral Dynamics or Spiral Dynamics Integral. Or you can also read one of my Japanese writings in my website if you can read Japanese. What I am writing here is just journaling. So please do not consider it as a rigid academic writing, but rather just feel it as the stream of consciousness writings. This, in a sense, is one of the effective ways of how to appreciate someone's journal.
Agreed with such assumption, I just try to make a brief sketch about Spiral Dynamics here. Spiral Dynamics is a kind of mapping tool to simultaneously describe both human consciousness (micro) and socio-cultural / socio-historical (macro) evolutions in which how we humans could overcome all the challenges we have encountered so far and in doing so we can also anticipate the further challenges we will encounter in the future.
These challenges are called Life Conditions. And the stage, dimension, or paradigm that have emerged every time when we humans could overcome Life Conditions, is called MEME. To picture the whole range of such evolution, usually eight memes are presented (sometimes nine memes if we include Coral meme). They are starting from Beige to Purple to Red to Blue to Orange to Green to Yellow to Turquoise and to Coral. The six memes from Beige to Green are called the First Tier. Yellow and Turquoise are considered as the Second Tier that can balance and embrace all the dynamics and conflicts among the First Tier memes.
In the Beige meme people do not have their clear self-consciousness. Just like animals they are still part of environments. But then, the primary Life Condition takes place, which is that people need the agricultural skill for their survival due to the expansion of population. They can no longer survive with gathering and hunting alone. And in having such sophisticated skill of agriculture, people begin to possess the concept of time, which means, the concept of past, present and future.
For, they need to know that the fruits they can have now is the result of their seeding in the past and that the fruits they will have in the future must be the result of their seeding right now. That is the concept or the sense of past, present and future, the sense of time in short. Once they have their keen sense of time, their sense of self-consciousness need to emerge and become quite sharp in imaging themselves in their past and future, which means that they image themselves in their self-consciousness.
That is why, it is often said that the Birth of Consciousness is related to the Birth of Time in the human behavior. And the Birth of Consciousness inevitably leads people to the sense of separate self, which is called ego. Such ego consciousness feels that they are facing and have separated from their environment for the first time, just as Adam and Eva have realized that they were no longer the part of Eden. Animals became humans because of the Birth of Consciousness. And they can no longer stay in the Beige meme.
And the second Life Condition takes place, which is that people need to understand their environments (including God and their own ego) as to how they can or cannot control them. They need to understand what they are facing in the reality or what they think as "reality" in their consciousness. Actually this second Life Condition is the basis for all the memes in the First Tier that is related to their survival in this world.
To understand the world that is separate from them and giving them the mystery of controllability and uncontrollability, the first thing people used was the magic and mythic articulation. They made the tribal community in which they maintained the full of magic and mythic rules and explanations. Such superstitious rituals and practices could work well in the small scale tribal community. Then, people could overcome the first Life Conditions in a primitive way and achieve the Purple meme.
Again due to the further expansion of the population or some other reasons such as how to win in the warfare etc., however, each tribal community (the maximum number of the members is around 150 members) need to tie together so as to establish the larger scale community. But in such large community the primitive magical, mythic rituals and practices could no longer work effectively. What people in this Purple meme need is the supreme individual who can exceed or embrace such magic and mythical rituals. That is the emergence of the Red meme. In the Red meme the extremely powerful individuals such as Alexander the Great and Chinghis Khan, etc. can control the huge community. Or rather, the existence of such huge community required those supreme, charismatic individuals.
However, while because of such super individuals, the huge community was built, it was so unsteady and always threatened by the risk of devastation, particularly caused by the death of such Godlike individuals. Thus, the third Life Conditions took place, which is that people need the more metaphysical, transcendental God (on behalf of Godlike human). In the Red meme the ruler was the human being, so the community was always threatened by the death of this ruler. However, in the Blue meme the ruler is just a concept that never dies but rather considered as eternal. Thus, community was no longer threatened by risk of the ruler's death and then could achieve the more homeostatic balance.
However, in the Blue meme since the ruler was conceptual and transcendental, the members of the community tended to become too obedient; they blindly followed the authority that looked not so substantial. The community has become so bureaucratic, or else fascistic. People are willing to do anything if it is the order of the supreme doctrine or ideology or if it promised their supreme happiness in the next life, and so on. And one huge community (since it has been tied by the institutionally controlled doctrine and ideology) always fight against the other huge community that has the totally different doctrine but similarly institutionalized, just like the never-ending wars between Christianity and Islam. That is the mechanism of the religious wars. Among the same members they can love each other, but they can easily kill the people who are not their members. The negative side of the Blue meme has emerged. That is the fourth Life Condition.
Thus, to overcome this fourth Life Condition – the negative side of the Blue meme, or the mean Blue meme, what people needed was the so-called universal truth that can transcend all the Blue meme based antagonism (religious, ideological wars). Then what they could find was the fact that only the quantitative scientific articulations and interpretations can be the real truth that can convince anyone regardless of their religion, ideology or any kind of similar institutionalized doctrines. That is the emergence of the Orange meme – the age of enlightenment (in the sense of Western civilization).
As we know, the contribution of this Orange meme is overwhelming. Because of this meme – the way to understand and cultivate their environments and their lives, people have achieved the unprecedented material prosperity and for the first time they can experience the world at the same time because of the miraculously advanced communication technology.
People in the Orange meme are rich, healthy and have their cosmetically beautiful look, or at least such worldly features have become their supreme values to be pursued. What they want was above all to be rich, healthy and beautiful in the external, physical sense. To be so, they never hesitate to utilize the environments; in fact they believed that they could do so because it seems the environments were totally controllable from their Orange meme's point of view. It is true in a sense but not totally.
Their sense of separation from the environments has achieved the peak and then intentionally or unintentionally they have started destroying their environments without noticing that doing so is also destroying themselves since they have been also part of the environments ever since. On the other hand, the gap between the rich and the poor has become so huge. For the first time in the Orange meme we have encountered the worldwide rich/poor gap – that is the North South Problem as we know very well.
And at last, some of people begin to worry about how to save our environments and human right and overcome such huge gap between the rich and the poor. That is the fifth Life Condition.
Thus, the Green meme is the paradigm that tried to overcome this fifth Life Condition. The Green meme people organized NGO and NPO that can focus on such particularly Mean Orange meme created problems. Some NGO groups tried to save the diverse kinds of the third world problems. Some NPO groups tried to help some dehumanized employees who had been depressed due to the work pressures. Still some NGO groups tried to solve the problems caused by the discrimination against the minorities, etc.
All these activities are basically conducted by the people who have achieved the Green meme consciousness level. Or, in the macro scale only those communities of which center of gravity is Green can have these activities. It seems that the mainstream of the value system is stilly heavily rested on the Orange meme in this modern world and what is tried by the Green meme is still considered a kind of post-modern. It seems that we might still wait for the further grow of this Green meme.
But now, as some of us might notice, there is the sixth Life Condition caused by the so-called Mean Green meme. That is the one of the latest problems we have encountered.
Another problem that the Mean Orange meme had created was the lack of spirituality. In the Blue meme the institutionalized religious power had been so overemphasized; hence, what the Orange meme tried to do was to stop thinking of anything about God and spiritual things – as the result, the Orange meme people had become too materialistic and hate any kind of religious, spiritual talks.
Then, what the Green meme people tried to do was to restore spirituality – the importance and the necessity of the soul and spiritual dimension. This is to say, not the quantitative accumulation of knowledge, but the qualitative deepening of wisdom. For, only because of the latter recognition, people can realize that they are part of their environment. This is of course the correct direction. There is nothing wrong to pursue spirituality and to embrace the diverse values from feminism to homosexual relation to alternative folk healing etc. etc. in the name of "saving minorities". However, once this direction has been overwhelmed and deviated, we have created the sixth Life Conditions that is called the Mean Green meme; and I would like to summarize this as two words – nihilism and narcissism.
Why is it nihilism? It is because in embracing all the diverse values, in other words, in being too kind for everything and everyone, people can no longer understand what is right and what is wrong. The irony is that in embracing all values, people in the Green meme has lost their own value or has lost their own criteria to see which value is right or wrong. Or more ironically the value they have is only that embracing all the values is right. This is also called idiot compassion.
And yet, in their deep inside they are even unconsciously eager to have their own particular value (even the Orange people did have their value – materialism). Then, what the Green people tried to do was establishing the religious cults to have the value, though these look like NGO or NPO groups at glance.
Sometimes or most of the times what is lacking in the Green based NGO or NPO is the clear sense of professionalism. They just wan to help people based on their sentimentalism. In the same way, those religious cults also lack a kind of professionalism and just as many of so-called New Age followers are so, they merely tend to indulge themselves with what they call spirituality by their own, that is, narcissism.
You can see this kind of narcissism everywhere the Mean Green meme activities take place. Because of their shallow understanding of spirituality, they always tend to confuse the difference between religion and science. Some cult groups try to insist their spirituality is scientific. And some New Age followers tend to overemphasize of the spiritual aspect of science or scientists. Then, in the Mean Green meme, religion becomes pseudo-science or New Age spiritualism; and science becomes pseudo-religion or scientism.
I think you have witnessed a lot of these cases in this post-modern world. What we need to know, then, is how to overcome this sixth Life Conditions to achieve the more integral communities and also how to handle the ever-existing the first to fifth Life Conditions. The recommended approach is of course to go about these six Life Conditions at the same time. To have this approach what we need is the leap to the Second Tier where Yellow and Turquoise are waiting. Or rather, having this approach can lead us to the Second Tier sooner or later, unless we fail to overcome these Life Conditions.
This is one of the things that I am always annoyed when we install something quite new. You have to always take care of the subtle difference of compatibilities and often encounter the case that you have to additionally install decoders, service packs and so on aside from the main application you purchased. The only good thing is that you can just buy and download such peripheral items. It seems the more things are complicated, the more you need peripherals. That is the truth in any computers and probably even in any societies and communities.
Anyway, since this drive can finally work properly, last night I just enjoying watching the DVD entitled "Leap into the Future." This is the seminar that Dr. Don Beck and Andrew Cohen conducted in Copenhagen, Denmark to explain how Spiral Dynamics could work and inspire people as one of the frameworks in order to face our present diverse worlds.
When I was watching this DVD, I got a phone call from Mr. O who is a student of community development and was also mentioned in my recent post entitled "SD and CD." He was just nearby my place and requested me to have a cup of coffee together in Starbucks that is also just a few minutes away from my house. Then, we meet each other, had a cup of coffee and mainly discussed the same topic I wrote in my recent post, which is the relation between SD and CD.
The reason, I guess, why he wanted to talk with me was my writing in this dairy. As I made the journal entry about SD and CD and he read it, it seemed, he wanted to conduct the further discussion with me on the same topic. The discussion was quite interesting and even for me it was so fruitful that I could see SD particularly from the point of view of CD.
Although I wrote that I did not have much expertise on the field of community development and wondered what kind of discussion regarding the definition of "development" had been done in this field, I just would like him and probably the readers not to misunderstand. I am neither saying that I am totally ignorant of the field of community development and nor insisting that I am indifferent. As being a friend of him and his many other friends for many years, I think I have been quite familiar with the diverse, profound, well-discussed, and naturally even practical definitions of "development" on this field of community development.
My point was just how such sophisticated definitions can be aligned with the definitions of development in SD. That was my query based mainly on my curiosity so far. And of course I believe that this must be also his query for the same reason or moreover in his case for the more urgent reason to apply SD for the real field of community development.
Incidentally, I told him (and again I would like the readers to understand) that my writings especially in this Blog Diary section are not (or not yet) the so-called academic articles. Or rather, what I am doing here is so-called journaling so as to put my everyday thoughts, reflections, and experiences on a piece of paper, I mean, a virtual piece of paper on the web. But of course, nevertheless our discussion or dialogue inspired by my recent posts was quite exciting and I enjoyed it a lot.
If you are not so familiar with Spiral Dynamics, therefore, I recommend you to visit the more appropriate sites. You can find a lot of them by using any search engines with the keywords such as Spiral Dynamics or Spiral Dynamics Integral. Or you can also read one of my Japanese writings in my website if you can read Japanese. What I am writing here is just journaling. So please do not consider it as a rigid academic writing, but rather just feel it as the stream of consciousness writings. This, in a sense, is one of the effective ways of how to appreciate someone's journal.
Agreed with such assumption, I just try to make a brief sketch about Spiral Dynamics here. Spiral Dynamics is a kind of mapping tool to simultaneously describe both human consciousness (micro) and socio-cultural / socio-historical (macro) evolutions in which how we humans could overcome all the challenges we have encountered so far and in doing so we can also anticipate the further challenges we will encounter in the future.
These challenges are called Life Conditions. And the stage, dimension, or paradigm that have emerged every time when we humans could overcome Life Conditions, is called MEME. To picture the whole range of such evolution, usually eight memes are presented (sometimes nine memes if we include Coral meme). They are starting from Beige to Purple to Red to Blue to Orange to Green to Yellow to Turquoise and to Coral. The six memes from Beige to Green are called the First Tier. Yellow and Turquoise are considered as the Second Tier that can balance and embrace all the dynamics and conflicts among the First Tier memes.
In the Beige meme people do not have their clear self-consciousness. Just like animals they are still part of environments. But then, the primary Life Condition takes place, which is that people need the agricultural skill for their survival due to the expansion of population. They can no longer survive with gathering and hunting alone. And in having such sophisticated skill of agriculture, people begin to possess the concept of time, which means, the concept of past, present and future.
For, they need to know that the fruits they can have now is the result of their seeding in the past and that the fruits they will have in the future must be the result of their seeding right now. That is the concept or the sense of past, present and future, the sense of time in short. Once they have their keen sense of time, their sense of self-consciousness need to emerge and become quite sharp in imaging themselves in their past and future, which means that they image themselves in their self-consciousness.
That is why, it is often said that the Birth of Consciousness is related to the Birth of Time in the human behavior. And the Birth of Consciousness inevitably leads people to the sense of separate self, which is called ego. Such ego consciousness feels that they are facing and have separated from their environment for the first time, just as Adam and Eva have realized that they were no longer the part of Eden. Animals became humans because of the Birth of Consciousness. And they can no longer stay in the Beige meme.
And the second Life Condition takes place, which is that people need to understand their environments (including God and their own ego) as to how they can or cannot control them. They need to understand what they are facing in the reality or what they think as "reality" in their consciousness. Actually this second Life Condition is the basis for all the memes in the First Tier that is related to their survival in this world.
To understand the world that is separate from them and giving them the mystery of controllability and uncontrollability, the first thing people used was the magic and mythic articulation. They made the tribal community in which they maintained the full of magic and mythic rules and explanations. Such superstitious rituals and practices could work well in the small scale tribal community. Then, people could overcome the first Life Conditions in a primitive way and achieve the Purple meme.
Again due to the further expansion of the population or some other reasons such as how to win in the warfare etc., however, each tribal community (the maximum number of the members is around 150 members) need to tie together so as to establish the larger scale community. But in such large community the primitive magical, mythic rituals and practices could no longer work effectively. What people in this Purple meme need is the supreme individual who can exceed or embrace such magic and mythical rituals. That is the emergence of the Red meme. In the Red meme the extremely powerful individuals such as Alexander the Great and Chinghis Khan, etc. can control the huge community. Or rather, the existence of such huge community required those supreme, charismatic individuals.
However, while because of such super individuals, the huge community was built, it was so unsteady and always threatened by the risk of devastation, particularly caused by the death of such Godlike individuals. Thus, the third Life Conditions took place, which is that people need the more metaphysical, transcendental God (on behalf of Godlike human). In the Red meme the ruler was the human being, so the community was always threatened by the death of this ruler. However, in the Blue meme the ruler is just a concept that never dies but rather considered as eternal. Thus, community was no longer threatened by risk of the ruler's death and then could achieve the more homeostatic balance.
However, in the Blue meme since the ruler was conceptual and transcendental, the members of the community tended to become too obedient; they blindly followed the authority that looked not so substantial. The community has become so bureaucratic, or else fascistic. People are willing to do anything if it is the order of the supreme doctrine or ideology or if it promised their supreme happiness in the next life, and so on. And one huge community (since it has been tied by the institutionally controlled doctrine and ideology) always fight against the other huge community that has the totally different doctrine but similarly institutionalized, just like the never-ending wars between Christianity and Islam. That is the mechanism of the religious wars. Among the same members they can love each other, but they can easily kill the people who are not their members. The negative side of the Blue meme has emerged. That is the fourth Life Condition.
Thus, to overcome this fourth Life Condition – the negative side of the Blue meme, or the mean Blue meme, what people needed was the so-called universal truth that can transcend all the Blue meme based antagonism (religious, ideological wars). Then what they could find was the fact that only the quantitative scientific articulations and interpretations can be the real truth that can convince anyone regardless of their religion, ideology or any kind of similar institutionalized doctrines. That is the emergence of the Orange meme – the age of enlightenment (in the sense of Western civilization).
As we know, the contribution of this Orange meme is overwhelming. Because of this meme – the way to understand and cultivate their environments and their lives, people have achieved the unprecedented material prosperity and for the first time they can experience the world at the same time because of the miraculously advanced communication technology.
People in the Orange meme are rich, healthy and have their cosmetically beautiful look, or at least such worldly features have become their supreme values to be pursued. What they want was above all to be rich, healthy and beautiful in the external, physical sense. To be so, they never hesitate to utilize the environments; in fact they believed that they could do so because it seems the environments were totally controllable from their Orange meme's point of view. It is true in a sense but not totally.
Their sense of separation from the environments has achieved the peak and then intentionally or unintentionally they have started destroying their environments without noticing that doing so is also destroying themselves since they have been also part of the environments ever since. On the other hand, the gap between the rich and the poor has become so huge. For the first time in the Orange meme we have encountered the worldwide rich/poor gap – that is the North South Problem as we know very well.
And at last, some of people begin to worry about how to save our environments and human right and overcome such huge gap between the rich and the poor. That is the fifth Life Condition.
Thus, the Green meme is the paradigm that tried to overcome this fifth Life Condition. The Green meme people organized NGO and NPO that can focus on such particularly Mean Orange meme created problems. Some NGO groups tried to save the diverse kinds of the third world problems. Some NPO groups tried to help some dehumanized employees who had been depressed due to the work pressures. Still some NGO groups tried to solve the problems caused by the discrimination against the minorities, etc.
All these activities are basically conducted by the people who have achieved the Green meme consciousness level. Or, in the macro scale only those communities of which center of gravity is Green can have these activities. It seems that the mainstream of the value system is stilly heavily rested on the Orange meme in this modern world and what is tried by the Green meme is still considered a kind of post-modern. It seems that we might still wait for the further grow of this Green meme.
But now, as some of us might notice, there is the sixth Life Condition caused by the so-called Mean Green meme. That is the one of the latest problems we have encountered.
Another problem that the Mean Orange meme had created was the lack of spirituality. In the Blue meme the institutionalized religious power had been so overemphasized; hence, what the Orange meme tried to do was to stop thinking of anything about God and spiritual things – as the result, the Orange meme people had become too materialistic and hate any kind of religious, spiritual talks.
Then, what the Green meme people tried to do was to restore spirituality – the importance and the necessity of the soul and spiritual dimension. This is to say, not the quantitative accumulation of knowledge, but the qualitative deepening of wisdom. For, only because of the latter recognition, people can realize that they are part of their environment. This is of course the correct direction. There is nothing wrong to pursue spirituality and to embrace the diverse values from feminism to homosexual relation to alternative folk healing etc. etc. in the name of "saving minorities". However, once this direction has been overwhelmed and deviated, we have created the sixth Life Conditions that is called the Mean Green meme; and I would like to summarize this as two words – nihilism and narcissism.
Why is it nihilism? It is because in embracing all the diverse values, in other words, in being too kind for everything and everyone, people can no longer understand what is right and what is wrong. The irony is that in embracing all values, people in the Green meme has lost their own value or has lost their own criteria to see which value is right or wrong. Or more ironically the value they have is only that embracing all the values is right. This is also called idiot compassion.
And yet, in their deep inside they are even unconsciously eager to have their own particular value (even the Orange people did have their value – materialism). Then, what the Green people tried to do was establishing the religious cults to have the value, though these look like NGO or NPO groups at glance.
Sometimes or most of the times what is lacking in the Green based NGO or NPO is the clear sense of professionalism. They just wan to help people based on their sentimentalism. In the same way, those religious cults also lack a kind of professionalism and just as many of so-called New Age followers are so, they merely tend to indulge themselves with what they call spirituality by their own, that is, narcissism.
You can see this kind of narcissism everywhere the Mean Green meme activities take place. Because of their shallow understanding of spirituality, they always tend to confuse the difference between religion and science. Some cult groups try to insist their spirituality is scientific. And some New Age followers tend to overemphasize of the spiritual aspect of science or scientists. Then, in the Mean Green meme, religion becomes pseudo-science or New Age spiritualism; and science becomes pseudo-religion or scientism.
I think you have witnessed a lot of these cases in this post-modern world. What we need to know, then, is how to overcome this sixth Life Conditions to achieve the more integral communities and also how to handle the ever-existing the first to fifth Life Conditions. The recommended approach is of course to go about these six Life Conditions at the same time. To have this approach what we need is the leap to the Second Tier where Yellow and Turquoise are waiting. Or rather, having this approach can lead us to the Second Tier sooner or later, unless we fail to overcome these Life Conditions.
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