Word count:16911
[Music] in this episode we're gonna be talking about spiral dynamics areas of application and you'll have to excuse me because I still have a cold that's why I sound kind of stuffy my nose is clogged up and I might need to blow my nose here and there as I'm talking so but anyways let's get right into the topic so at this point if you've watched my mini series my multi-part series on spiral dynamics you should have a very good understanding of the theory of spiral dynamics and that should help to explain a lot of stuff to you about your own life and about society but even though you understand that you still probably don't appreciate the full extent of the applicability of this model and how you can use it to solve many practical real world problems so I want to devote an entire episode to helping you to see the potential of this model and just how useful it is and in how many different areas you can apply it both in your personal life but also if you plan to go out into the world and have an impact on the world which hopefully you want to have a positive impact on the world whether you're pursuing your life purpose or you're starting a business or you're running for some government position or you're trying to change some social system whether in your university or in your organization or doing some sort of charity work all of this stuff would benefit enormous Lea from you understanding Sproul dynamics and from all the people in your organization understanding spiral dynamics remember fundamentally what is spiral dynamics about it's explaining human beings values and motives that's extremely powerful think about that what you're being given here is a scientific model that allows you to very accurately predict why human beings both individually and collectively behave the way they behave and what they're gonna do next think about how powerful that is think about what you can use that to do how you can use that to transform the world for the better think about how you can use that to do your art to do your business to improve your studies if you're a scientists or your nikodem occur you're a researcher to be able to know how these weird irrational complicated human beings you know were were chaotic creatures and usually when we think of human beings we don't think of like having clear-cut explanations for how human beings behave and yes smile and AMEX gives us something like that that's enormous ly powerful especially when dealing with social issues so let's now get into all the examples of the areas of application so firstly education this is a huge area of application for Spile dynamics and I put it as the first on my list because in some sense it's perhaps the most important it's one of those high leverage points that we have in society if we transform our education system and if we get our education system right both at the elementary school level the high school level and the university level if we if we get that right that will allow us to transform all the other problems we have in the world because fundamentally all of our other problems stem from a lack of proper education but of course if you understand Sproul dynamics you know that education is not just one monolithic thing every stage of the spiral every color has its own ideas and opinions and dogmas about what it feels is the best form of Education what education should look like so if you ask a stage blue person what should education look like to them it looks like religious indoctrination schools the kind of stuff that you see in the Middle East where you send your kid there and what they do is they they beat him with a stick and make him memorize the Quran every day for the next five years until he memorizes the whole Quran right that's their form of Education there that's a very hardcore deep blue staged approach to education and I mean we have a lot of religious education schools in America as well so we're not immune to that not at all I mean Christians and evangelicals want basically that same kind of theocratic form of Education here in the US that stage blue then their stage orange education which is also a lot of what modern education is in America for example stage orange being very kind of success oriented and this is the kind of education where maybe you go to a trade school and they teach you some sort of specific trade skills and basically they train you so that you become good at business they train you so you become good at a particular career maybe you become a lawyer a doctor an accountant a computer programmer some sort of physicist scientist whatever right it's just this sort of like straightforward rationalist form of Education and most people think that that you know that's like the pinnacle of Education is stage Orange Education but actually this is a very very limited form of Education which gets you chasing materialism because basically stage orange is a materialistic paradigm so it gets you chasing materialism chasing money chasing business chasing success but in the end this is all Hollow and it leads to many of the other social problems that we have environmental problems and so forth because our education of stage Orange Education doesn't teach you about environmental factors doesn't teach you about systems thinking doesn't teach you about higher spiritual pursuits doesn't teach you how to meditate doesn't teach you about shamanism doesn't teach you about self-actualization all these topics that actually I thought of talks about why wasn't it taught to you in your school because most people went to a stage Orange school which doesn't recognize these things doesn't recognize the value of spirituality because it confuses spirituality with stage blue dogma or theocracy which of course you need to be at a higher stage of development in order to see the difference between those two during the Bush administration we passed legislation in the u.s. called No Child Left Behind and this was a tragic legislation because what it did is it basically made most federal schools subject to very strict standards of like classroom testing and so there's a lot of standardized testing kids these days are put through a ton of testing I remember when I finished high school in 2003 already we had way too many standardized tests but No Child Left Behind kicked in after that I can only imagine how terrible it is now mostly what our education system is now it's sort of like a factory farming approach to educating our children the classroom sizes are very large we're taught the exact same curriculum to all the children there's no there's no customization given to different types of students there's no recognition for example that certain students need one from education while there's other students need another form of Education right certain students are more kinesthetic other students are more philosophical and abstract other students are more artistic and creative and artsy craftsy other students are more into like literature others are more into mathematics and computer programming and you have to you have to cake take into account for example that human beings have different brain types which means that we're going to resonate with different kinds of subject matters and right now our education system doesn't take any of this into account it's just a very cookie cutter system and it is all about like passing achievement scores so it's like can you read can you do math at a certain level it's like it's it's very very rudimentary and mostly we're training kids how to pass tests how to get good at answering multiple choices and guess the right answers rather than actually educating them for like deep understanding of what reality is and what life is and how life works and that's exactly what you would expect with the very mechanical sort of materialistic approach of stage orange but this is this is problematic because later in life what this leads to is this leads to a very materialistic form of living where the student can't really be connected to life can't really be passionate about things because they weren't taught how to be passionate they weren't taught how to find their life purpose they weren't taught the importance of life purpose they weren't taught the importance of meditation they weren't taught the importance of holistic health because stage orange doesn't understand these things yet so then you get to stay at Green Education which was one step better and and here they might start teaching you a little bit more about health a little bit more about sex and love and relationships and a little bit more about the environment and a little bit more about ecology and the sorts of stuff and this is mostly what a lot of universities teach these days and even so there's still a big backlash right now happening from various folks against stage green universities because they want them to be more stage Orange rather than green and this is the whole Jordan Peterson stick that he's all about is he thinks the universities are too green which of course is the opposite of the problem yes universities are green but the solution is not to drag them back down to orange and blue but to evolve them up to yellow so what would a stage yellow approach to education look like it would acknowledge for the first time that different students in different parts of the world and in different parts of the country are all at their own levels of the spiral so maybe for example what happened is you enter a university and they would give you a test but this wouldn't be a test for you to to do some multiple-choice you know passing some sort of government standards this would be a test to determine where you are at the spiral and then whether you're blue or orange or green or yellow or whatever and then they would recommend a curriculum that's gonna be right for you let's say you're at stage blue if you're at stage blue and you enter University then you go into the stage blue program the stage blue program is not just gonna feed you stage blue propaganda the stage blue program is gonna be designed in such a way that it evolves you up to orange and then from orange to green and above if you're a student who enters at stage orange there's gonna be a separate track for you which helps to evolve you into stage green and if you're a student who enters at green there's gonna be a separate track for you that involves you to yellow so this would be a Tier two approach to education this would be an understanding of the entire spiral seeing that education needs to be different for every stage of the spiral different ideas need to be taught different techniques need to be used and if you're designing education from a stage or a yellow perspective and you're designing it such that you're helping everybody evolve up the spiral at their own pace you see part of the problem with stage green education is that they try to push stage green on everybody below them and that tends to not work and actually creates that sort of jordan peterson ego backlash reaction which is what you're seeing when stage blue and orange encounter stage green they tend to not want to evolve up to green that's because green isn't properly explaining the situation to them it's not properly designed yet Sejal a stage yellow could be much better at doing that also if we're talking about education all over the world it's very important that when we're talking about underdeveloped countries like in the Middle East in Africa in South America and other places that you you need to take into account their level of the spiral and a lot of those countries they're people are at stage purple or red or blue like very very low on the spiral and so we need to tailor the education programs to work for those stages of the spiral a common mistake is that educators from the US who are mostly a stage green will try to go to Africa and take teach stage green ideas to maybe some kids kids in rural Africa who aren't like stage purple and it just it's a complete disconnect it's not gonna work you can also think about if you're a teacher within education if you're a professor or a high school teacher or even an elementary school teacher you can think about how you might expose your students to spiral dynamics that would be a stage yellow approach you can also think about how to make yourself a better teacher by learning smile dynamics and also tailoring your own curriculum to different students even if you don't make them take various kinds of assessments to officially discover what color of the stage they're at you can still use Farley names as a model just to help you get a little sense of like well that kid is maybe stage blue his parents are very blue that kids very green that kids very orange and you're not doing this to judge them or to pigeonhole them but you're doing this in your own mind to help you understand what does that student need to evolve up to the next level and how can I help him to evolve up the next level so for example you can do this as an elementary school teacher starting with first grade you don't even need to tell the kids that you're teaching about Spile dynamics all of that can be just happening under the surface you know that you you're using this model but they won't know but the way in which you're teaching the way in which you're communicating to them the way in which you're explaining something to some kid who doesn't understand is informed by your understanding of Sproul dynamics and of course the same thing with in university and of course by understanding that the higher you are up the spiral the better you will be able to deal with kids and students that are lower on the Spile than you so right now if you're a stage green teacher you probably struggle teaching stage blue students whereas if you rent stage yellow you evolved yourself up to yellow and you understood the spiral more then you could deal more effectively with stage blue students and really any students on the spiral so there's a lot that can be applied to education and I'm really just scratching the tip of the iceberg if you're really serious about transforming our education system if you're serious about being a great teacher if you're seeing serious about running a great university SpA dynamics is absolutely essential for you to understand and if you're a government official who intends to pass legislation to improve education throughout the country it's even more important because part of the problem is that the legislation that's being passed is always being passed at whatever stage of the spiral the politician is at and because most of our politicians are stage blue or orange a little bit of green but not really much beyond that they tend to pass that kind of legislation so they tend to look at our education system in the US for example and tend to come up with solutions which are not really effective at educating people it's more about putting them through tests or putting them into the various religious indoctrination programs or you know stuff like that without really getting to the heart of what is necessary to educate people and the only way you're gonna really understand that is by ascending to stage yellow and and above for example if you really want to transform education system and this will happen in the next couple hundred years is we would start teaching children from first grade about meditation mindfulness yoga holistic health enlightenment non-duality spirituality not religion but spirituality and other personal development topics that I talk about with actualize I don't work basically if we took the entire actualised or a curriculum and we started teaching that from first grade all the way through twelfth grade we de-emphasized subjects like history mathematics and whatever else they teach these subjects are important we still need to teach them but they are not nearly as important for living a good life as the subject that I just earlier mentioned earlier and so really what we need to do is we need to radically change our system such that we're not teaching kids some standardized curriculum of math English and history which is mostly what the first 12 grades are but we rather teaching them wisdom we're teaching them how to be good human beings we're teaching them how to be conscious of their body and their mind we're teaching them how to understand ideology epistemology metaphysics he's very fun too mental topics so that when a student graduates tell 10th grade he has fully mastered everything that I talk about with actualized org all of the topics that are necessary for finding your life purpose for living a passionate life for dealing with emotional issues like depression or suicidal thoughts or ego backlashes or fear and anger and anxiety and addiction like students will know how to solve all those problems on their own by the time they graduate 12th grade and then if they need mathematics and history and and sciences this kind of stuff they can get that in higher education if they really you know if they really want to become scientists and mathematicians professionally speaking but most people are not going to be professional mathematicians or scientists so they don't need that much technical training you don't need 12 years of mathematics for the average person it's complete waste it's overkill what the average person needs is an understanding of practical psychology they need an understanding of how to manage their relationships consciously they need an understanding of what happiness is and what are the proper ways of pursuing happiness and what are the improper ways of pursuing happiness they need some spiritual techniques some very practical techniques like various kinds of meditation or self inquiry or yoga that they can just like do for the rest of their life that they were taught when they were young so that they can rely on those techniques to further build their level of consciousness so just imagine what a world would look like if we had that kind of education system in place right now that would be a very different world that would change everything that would trickle down into all the other areas in society that we have problems in this would eliminate the drug problem eliminate the opioid problem eliminate the gun problem eliminate political corruption problems eliminate economic problems eliminate people who hate their careers because they weren't find a good career eliminate poverty issues eliminate business corruption issues reduce stress on the on the prison system and the legal justice system right because all of these other problems basically stem from a lack of proper training in education but it'll take us hundreds of years to evolve up to that kind of level of education there's enormous resistance and inertia within the education system because the ego knows that if the education system was properly reformed then all of the egos games would be up see so of course stage blue and stage orange and sage green are gonna fight like hell to make sure that stage yellow education system has never put in place because that's what every stage in Tier one basically does it thinks it's the best it thinks it knows best and it wants to teach everybody its own stage and it wants to demonize all the other stages it's only a stage yellow that you transcend that so that was just education what about healthcare and medicine right now in the United States we have a terrible stage Orange health care and medicine system where health care and medicine is done mostly for profit the way health care and medicine is taught in universities is also in a very mechanical materialistic fashion such that a lot of holistic healing modalities are ignored the spiritual and psychological aspects of health are completely ignored your insurance company for example won't even pay for life coaching or for certain kinds of therapies for psychotherapy for other kinds of when we might call New Age healing modalities which are very very effective like perhaps like acupuncture chiropractor services or even more weird services like various kinds of psychic healings that you can get and stuff like that like none of that covered by the mainstream healthcare and medicine system because it's not recognized as being legitimate or valid because stage Orange is very materialistic and so our healthcare system is just like our education system where it's basically like factory farming where you just kind of put a sick human being through the system you set him to a doctor the doctor goes through the checklist of you know what he was taught to go through and then he prescribes pills and medications because that's all he's been told to prescribe that's what he's been indoctrinated with in his medical training is that hey if a person has this problem then you just prescribe this pill and of course the pharmaceutical industry is is making sure that death system stays that way because they they bribed the education system and they bribe all the doctors with good paychecks and good bonuses and incentives just to keep prescribing the medication and then of course what kind of medicine and health care is advertised all over the TV it's materialistic medicine which doesn't address any of the root issues it just is like a band-aid on a wound so very few health care professionals in the US whether they're surgeons doctors people who are trying to help you to lose weight or even mental health care professionals like psychotherapists almost none of them have a deep understanding of what human illness stems from from the incorrect psychology none of them have a spiritual dimension to health care into medicine which is one of the most important dimensions they just try to quickly treat a surface symptom rather than helping you to address the root cause and oftentimes this only makes the problem worse not better so what - stage green or stage yellow health care system look like very different first of all it wouldn't be done so much for profit there would be a lot better ethics in the health care and medicine system also it would open itself up to new modalities the new age modalities modalities that are not as hard-nosed scientific as we insist on right now it would open up to modalities from shamanism and from other parts of the world we would look for example at how to how do they do health care in Japan how do they do health care in South America how did the shamans do health care in little tribal villages how do they how do they stay thin in tribal cultures they don't have an obesity problem in many cases how do they do that yeah so we would look at all this stuff how do we use herbs and other kind of natural supplements not just pills but you know a lot of supplements are more effective than pills but of course this is not recognized by many doctors and by the big pharma industry we might also start to think very differently about psychedelics how can we use psychedelics as medicine and right now there's some really good research that's happening in the last 10 years where they will probably soon be legalizing things like mushrooms and MDMA and LSD for for clinical therapeutic uses because they're so effective at treating depression they're effective at treating PTSD they're effective at helping people cope with with end-of-life problems and so many other things you know so this is this is all starting to it's it's it's starting to come on board but it's still we're like really in the early phases and so if you're a doctor and your passion about healing people and hell you know if you have been passionate about being a doctor that's why ultimately you didn't become a doctor to enter some kind of bureaucratic hospital system or the health insurance industry you became a doctor because you wanted to heal people so that's what you got to focus on as a doctor and then your your question should be well if I want to heal people what are all the the most effective ways at healing people let me go and explore and research all the different modalities that are available all around the world throughout all of human history find the best ones experiment within myself and really be able to help heal people not just heal them physically but also help peel them psychologically help heal them spiritually recognizing that there's a deep connection between our physical ailments our psychological illnesses and our spiritual disconnection from the truth and so by taking this more holistic approach incorporating all of these elements together that's how you can really become an amazing healer but then of course you got to ask yourself but there's this giant bureaucracy of the insurance industry in the hospital system and all of this the education system for medicine how do we transform those systems such that they acknowledge all of these multiple dimensions of Health that's gonna take a lot of work you know if you're serious about being a good healer then that's your job is to figure out solutions to those problems and to help to reform these systems and to advance us to the next stage of healthcare and medicine from orange to green and then from green to yellow and beyond and you see that means going way beyond your traditional training so if you did eight years of medical school or ten years or whatever it is that's just really the beginning now you need to do another ten years into holistic health and then you also gotta experiment with yourself and see how this stuff works on you so it's not just about running clinical studies on rats and monkeys in in a cage you got to also understand that for you as a healthcare provider to be a good healer you need to yourself go on a spiritual journey to heal yourself mentally physically psychologically spiritually and only then will you able to really be will you really be able to help others so so you can see just by understanding spiral dynamics you start to see that someone who wants to be a healer or a doctor who understands for all dynamics it's gonna be a totally different healer or doctor than someone who doesn't who just goes through the motions of going through the standard bureaucratic system you see there's gonna be two very different doctors and this one is going to be 10 times more effective at healing people than this one is the next area of application is helping underdeveloped countries like the Middle East and Africa there are a lot of countries in the world which have all sorts of problems problems with infrastructure problems with disease problems with poverty problems with AIDS problems with their political systems problems with genocide and ethnic cleansing and warfare problems with just not enough clean water you know and there are a lot of nonprofit and charity organizations organizations in the US and in developed countries that are trying to help raise the Middle East and helped to raise Africa for example of the Bill Gates Foundation is helping in Africa with various vaccines and so forth and there's many of these kinds of foundations the problem though is that unless they take a spiral approach to addressing these problems then you can pour billions and billions and hundreds of billions of dollars into these countries without getting much return on your investment and especially when we're talking about dealing with the various political problems that exist in these societies what we're talking about is political problems that stem from a low level of development on the spiral so perhaps the most obvious recent example of this sort of blunder of not approaching underdeveloped countries from a smile perspective is what happens in the Middle East so the United States decides to invade Iraq thinking that by invading Iraq we're gonna liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein is terrible dictator except what's not understood is that Iraq is at a stage purple stage red level of spiral development which means that you cannot install democracy in Iraq just by deposing Saddam Hussein because in a stage red society was gonna happen is that you install democracy but the people there are not at a level of development where they can where they can buy into democracy see the majority of Iraqis are like a stage red maybe even lower so what they need is they need a strong leader and that's what Saddam Hussein was was he was he violent and bloodthirsty of course he was that's part of what it takes to be a successful leader at stage red because he has other people there who are gonna overpower him if he's not like that so what a lot of people in the democratic countries and I easily assume is that hey all we got to do is we just gotta like depose the dictators and we just kind of like distribute democracy and it's all it's all just gonna work out no it won't because first what you need to do is you need to raise the level of development and consciousness of the entire population including all the poor and sick people all the business people all the religious clerics and leaders you'd have to transform all of that which is going to take you hundreds of years of of education and and work to do that you need to build up various kinds of social and political infrastructure which don't exist there for example there is kinds of judicial systems legal systems you need a constitution you need like all these things need to be put into place you need to install secularism first because after stage red comes stage blue stage blue is theocracy so if you give a democracy to a stage red slash blue Middle Eastern country what's gonna happen is they're gonna create a theocracy out of that and then the religious might majority there who's gonna be running the theocracy is going to persecute and ethnically cleanse the religious minorities because stage blue doesn't acknowledge yet the validity of minority opinions and perspectives that only comes at stage Orange and above and really a stage green see so if our you know if our military leaders and political thinkers understood Spile dynamics they would have a very different approach to all sorts of geopolitical issues around the world also of course if they weren't just coming from a stage orange perspective where they were doing all of this out of personal greed and personal gain by benefiting the military-industrial complex and so forth you know if they themselves were leading from a stage yellow perspective where they were actually trying to help these countries and not just to exploit them for oil or to exploit them for various kinds of military contracts and so forth that would be a very different way to run the government and of course the problem is is that the United States leadership is not at stage yellow yet so the reason we're up in the Middle East is because we ourselves are not developed enough yet so the irony is that even though we as the United States like to criticize the Middle East for being so underdeveloped we ourselves are not developed enough yet in order to really be able to help the Middle East properly and if you think about problems like the israeli-palestinian conflict everything I've been saying applies to that problem as well if you really want to solve that problem what you do is take a spiral approach and that's actually exactly what dawn Beck has done Don Beck was one of the developers of aisle dynamics he actually has spent years in the Middle East working specifically on applying Spile dynamics to resolve the israeli-palestinian conflict and it's really illuminating to read about his work and his efforts in doing that and how much success he's had in doing that of course not total success because the problem there is it is very complicated and part of the problem is that the US leadership isn't acknowledging spiral dynamics isn't really applying Sproul dynamics to to the israeli-palestinian conflict because there's a there's various kinds of self interest and self dealing going on there they're not really taking an objective approach to the situation but if you really wanted to take an objective approach and to resolve that situation then you would study Sproul dynamics and you would follow the work of Don Beck and kind of take what he's been doing and just amplify that up the problem is that it's difficult for him to get enough funding in order to really do his work there and to have a big impact but I'll actually post a book on my book list in the future which explains all of the intricacies of how he was applying Spile dynamics in the Middle East to help resolve that particular problem and what that ultimately involves just in a nutshell because it's very complicated but in a nutshell what it involves is you have to recognize that in the Middle East with the Palestinians and the Israelis Israeli society has multiple strata of people at different development levels so you've got Israelis at blue you've got Israelis at orange you've got Israelis at Green the Palestinians are less developed and you've got Palestinians at red you've got Palestinians even at purple you've got Palestinians at blue you've got Palestinians at Orange and you've got some Palestinians at Green and so what needs to happen is you got a tea Sproul endemics to all these different stages and help them to understand that that this problem in in Israel and Palestine it's not just about yes Israel or no Palestine or vice-versa it's not just a simple kind of black and white good versus bad who's gonna win us or them that can't possibly be resolved what needs to be understood is that society is complex both of these societies are very complex and that there's different kinds of sources and motivations and value systems that work which are making it very difficult to reconcile what's going on there because what's happened is the lower stages those segments of society which are at purple or red or blue what they're doing is they're radicalizing the political discussion and their radicalizing to higher stages like orange and green and making everybody kind of ultra nationalistic and fighting only for their side and unwilling to see that they need to come together and to understand that there's kind of a Spile at work and that really there's more common factors between the Palestinians and Israelis than just their religious differences or their geopolitical self interests but it's really they're they're both evolving up the spiral but just at different rates and in different ways and if they understood that better than this situation could be resolved but the problem of course is that for every one person who's trying to explain the spiral to people and by explaining the smile that helps to de radicalize people there's a hundred others who are themselves radicals and ideologues who are trying to do the exact opposite thing which is they're trying to radicalize people and polarize them for their side and so what we need is we need more people teaching sprawl dynamics in a non-judgmental non condemning sort of way and that leads to depolarization and ultimately de-escalation because before you can get political violence first what needs to happen is you need to ideologically radicalize people and usually the ones who get ideologically Radl radicalized are the poorest the ones who are the lowest on the spiral the ones who have the least to lose because you know if you're living in the Middle East and you've lost your family to some drone strike and you don't have any good job prospects and mmm the economy is doing bad and then you're listening to your religious cleric who's a radical who's radicalizing you about you know how evil the other side is who has caused all these problems for you scapegoating some other group of people then what are you gonna do I mean you're gonna just you're gonna accept that as a dogma as an ideology you're gonna get radicalized and polarized and then you're gonna go and you're gonna commit vile also understanding for example that if we want to solve terrorism in the Middle East that's not gonna happen through military combat a much better approach would be through funding education programs funding healthcare genuinely helping their economy not just trying to leech off their oil supplies but actually helping their economy get off its feet or get on its feet rather through these kinds of efforts by actually improving the quality of their society by helping to meet their basic needs that's gonna help to evolve them up the spiral and in this way people will stop wanting to be terrorists they're only terrorists really because their societies is such a low level of development it has nothing to do with Islam per se it has nothing to do with with religion and that's another very useful thing that Sproul dynamics will show you if you really study this model because a lot of people even in the US there's a lot of intelligent people here who tend to blame Islam or to blame religion for the problems that are happening in the Middle East when really that's not what the issue is the issue is their level of spiral development when you understand the spiral and all the stages then you understand that Islam can exist at stage red which is a very violent power-hungry version it can exist at stage blue which is a little bit more peaceful but still very dominant and theocratic it can exist that stage Orange which will be very materialistic and business oriented it can exist at stage green it could even exist at yellow and even at turquoise but see most people they think of Islam is just one monolithic thing and then they have an opinion about it like oh it's bad or oh it's good without having a more nuanced understanding of like no there's different levels of Islam certain levels of Islam are very aggressive and repressive and other levels of Islam can be very advanced and very beneficial so what the middle-east needs is not to eradicate Islam in fact if you try to do that you're actually just gonna provoke an ego backlash from the Middle East and they're gonna hate you because you're taking away something that's so so cherished by them it would be like taking away your business or taking away your Constitution or taking away your gun rights right you don't want you don't like that as an American if we try to do that so that's the same thing as I can try and take away Islam from some Middle Eastern person it's gonna backfire on you instead a much smarter approach would be understand that know there's there's healthy forms of Islam unless helped to evolve them and to see the differences between the unhealthy versions and the healthy versions and then you know once we get them to that level then they will be ready to move to more secular worldviews and then beyond that there will be even higher more spiritual world views but of course to take that approach we ourselves as Americans would have to be evolved enough to be able to understand that there's there's validity within all the different religious traditions we can't just dismiss them all as childish nonsense because there is something valuable within these religious traditions and that's why people cling to them so adamantly because there is something of value there which means that you can't just throw them away because you'd be throwing the baby away with the bathwater and they're not gonna let you do that see but good luck explaining that to an atheist because the stage orange atheist won't understand that because to him his worldview says that all religion is just childish nonsense and there's no validity to it whatsoever it's completely unscientific and it's just mythology and just complete superstition and gibberish so if you take that approach then you're never gonna really be able to resolve the Middle East issues you're gonna turn into some sort of Sam Harris type of person who just points his finger at Middle Easterners without really contributing to a to kind of like a broadening of perspective and helping us understand each other so a lot of these problems that happen around the world in geopolitical problems are simply due to lack of understanding each other lack of seeing through other people's eyes lack of being able to take higher and higher perspectives and that's all that spiral dynamics is basically about is about how to take higher and higher perspectives that's what moves you up the spiral so by being able to take more perspectives yourself you will be less judgmental and you will be able to help other people take more perspectives as well which will help to reduce violence and misunderstanding and animosity and racism and hatred and genocide and all that kind of stuff that we don't like but it starts with you you got to sort that out first for yourself then you can help others otherwise what you're gonna do is you're gonna turn into a devil yourself and you're gonna be polarizing people against other people which is exactly what someone like Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson does is watch what and why I'm so critical of them is because they're contributing to polarization but of course I also understand that they can't help it it's just happening out of ignorance the level of development at they're at they can't do better in the same way that a terrorist the level of development of terrorists is at he can't do any better that's how ignorance works so so on the one hand I can criticize them but but also on the other hand I understand why they're at where they're at and why they're having the ego reaction that they're having see so it's that kind of understanding that you only get a stage yellow and above all so another area of application is with economics economics is a super important field I actually have a whole book that I'm reading about spiral dynamics and economics how to take a spiral approach stage yellow approach to economics right now especially in the US and basically all around the world our economic system is stage Orange it's very capitalistic it's all about maximizing profits that's that's mostly what Wall Street's doing that's what the stock markets are doing all around the world that's what most corporations are doing uh-huh they're just spreading themselves like a cancer these corporations have no ecological awareness they don't recognize workers rights they don't recognize the importance of unions they don't recognize hmm the damage that their marketing and advertising has on the world they're just going purely for maximum profits that's what big farmers doing that's what Big Oil is doing that's what the fast-food industry is doing that's what the entire food industry basically is doing that's what I mean most businesses a lot of the a lot of the Silicon Valley tech businesses are also falling into this trap right now Facebook Apple Google these companies especially Google for example is a bit more of a stage green company but still a lot of stage orange is running the show that's why you see all these legal battles between these big companies over patents and all sorts of stuff so we have a very very stage orange economic system and there's an enormous resistance right now to stage green economic systems which would look more socialistic which doesn't necessarily mean socialism I just mean they look more socialistic they have more socialist elements in them they are more concerned about equal distribution of of resources more progressive taxation scales and holding corporations more to account higher wages for employees more say that employees have in how the organization is run so that these these organizations and corporations are not functioning like like dictatorships which a lot of them are where the boss the top tells all the employees what to do but it's more of a cooperative corporation where the employees have more of a stake they have more of a say there's sort of a representative corporate board and all of that and the corporation is not just pursuing maximum but the corporation is conscious about it's an impact on the economy on the ecology on the environment on governments like all this sorts of stuff right this would be a huge step up if we can get our economic system up from orange to green and that's sort of the battle that you're seeing right now between many progressives who want a more socialistic economic system and then those who are sort of the die-hard capitalists and libertarians and conservatives who are dead set against that ideologically and so that's being hashed out right now in our political system in America very interesting to see how this works but there's even higher perspectives on economics than just the green one that I was just explaining there's also stage yellow for example and what does yellow economics look like well that's a very technical subject I'm reading a whole book on that I'll post that book on my book list when I'm finished reading it so you can read about that yourself but but just realize that again most people when they think about economics for example they have a very static one-stage view of economics they think of economics is like well capitalism is good socialism is evil or vice-versa socialism is good capitalism capitalism is evil without recognizing that know there's there's various stages there's like stage blue orange green and then above green and that it's not about just imposing socialism on everybody or imposing capitalist on everybody it's about finding the nuances in-between and finding you know what's the right mix of various capitalistic and socialistic policies and systems and structures such that we maximize what what are we maximizing well that depends what stage you're at if you're at stage Orange you're maximizing money so of course you want capitalism at stage green you're trying to maximize relationships and fairness and equality so of course you're going to lean more socialistic and a stage a stage yellow you're going to be trying to help everybody move up the spiral so you're going to take a very nuanced perspective a very kind of systems thinking perspective about how do we engineer our economic systems to make sure that we're not just having equality and we're not just helping to eliminate poverty but we're helping to evolve everyone up the spiral what kind of eke an economic system would we need then C so that's a that's a very fertile ground to mine speaking of government in politics spotlight Amex is very helpful for evaluating political candidates who are running for office for evaluating political parties and for understanding the culture wars almost all political conflicts especially those we've been seeing in the United States recently and in Europe are perfectly explained by Sproul dynamics in the u.s. it's basically staged blue / orange fighting and staged green / orange and Spile endemics for example for me has been very helpful in being able to evaluate political candidates so when I see somebody running for office I just ask myself well what stage are the Spile are they at which stage is a spiral are they trying to enable how ideological and dogmatic are they about what stage they're at and that helps me to evaluate how good of a candidate this would be basically the best candidate is the one who's highest up the spiral ideally we'd have stage yellow candidates but there's so few of those to go around these days stage green is is often the best you can get and even that most people oppose vie evidently because it's it's too high above their own current level the way the government in politics works is that voters generally only vote for their own stage they're not smart enough to root to to vote for a stage above the one that they're at so if you're at stage blue that's who you're gonna vote for if your stage Orange you think the perfect political candidate is the most orange guy if you're a stage green you're gonna want the most green Bernie Sanders type of candidate that there is so in a sense you're very unimaginative and you're very very predictable with your political choices whereas if you're a stage yellow you'll be a little bit more nuanced but also there probably won't be very many candidates that you'll like so spiral dynamics is useful for that it's useful for evaluating political parties for example if you don't know sprouted hammocks then you might be tempted to do a false equivalency between the Republican Party in the US and the Democratic Party but if you understand spiral dynamics then you understand and actually the Democratic Party they're not just two sides of the same coin the Democratic Party is more cognitively and spiritually evolved than the Republican Party that's just a fact that you will understand if you understand sprout than damage now you might not like that fact if you're in the Republican Party of course you won't and that's precisely why you won't want to spoil study spiral dynamics in this case but you know if you're open-minded you really care about the truth and you care about really understanding what's going on then you will be able to see that even though the Democratic Party has many problems it's certainly not perfect it is certainly superior than the Republican Party right now now that doesn't mean it's always going to be this way you know in the next hundred years that might change political parties are always changing but but see without sprawl dynamics you might be tempted to think that like wow but you know Republican or Democrat they're kind of similar or they're just like two opposite poles but they're not two opposite poles there's a spiral and there's the Democrats but then the Democrats can involve higher up the spiral as well so the Democrats are not like the endpoint there's hired to go above the Democrats and the Democrats have a lot of work to do because they're really not that evolved but the Republicans are less evolved and that's important to recognize that's important to know see no one on TV no one who's doing political analysis will tell you this part of the reason why is because it's it's it's very controversial you know good luck getting a CNN anchor like Wolf Blitzer for example to tell you that that liberals are cognitively more developed than conservatives and that would be extremely extremely polarizing and radical position and if he said that he would be called a liberal but that's not a liberal position that's something that's coming from a deeper understanding of spiral dynamics the culture wars if you're trying to understand what those are about that's all about spiral dynamics stages fighting against each other and it's very unproductive it's a huge waste of time the culture wars distract us from actually doing good government actually improving the systems that are creating the results for people so by understanding the Spile you're gonna see that this the culture wars are just different stages judging each other and the sooner we can transcend that the quicker we can improve our government and the better off most of us will be there's all sorts of other governmental problems that we face like prison reform environmental problems civil rights issues poverty racism terrorism crime the drug war immigration issues all of these issues are made so much clearer if you understand spiral dynamics the solutions to all of these problems will really only come at stage green or yellow they will not come at the current stage that we're at which was mostly blue and orange approaches to many of these problems for example when we're talking about the environment the destruction pollution of the environment and global warming these are very serious concerns that many people are starting to catch on to now but still we're struggling as a society we're struggling to really get leverage and to really start to take action on these environmental problems why is that well if you're stood Sproul and AMEX you would understand that's because in order to care about the environment and to take ecological issues seriously a person has to be at stage green or above at stage blue the person is too preoccupied with their dogmas and their religious traditions to care about any kind of emerging ecological crises because those weren't present in their traditions so of course to them it's just a fantasy and to stay George people they're too preoccupied with their own self-interested gaining of success pursuing personal achievement and money and business success that they don't have time to worry about ecological problems they don't care about looking at how their strive for achievement and business success is actually causing massive economic ecological problems they don't care about that because hey me first I got to take care of myself first before I worry about the environment before I worry about the animals before I worry about other people's kids drinking mmm polluted water or before I worry about some sort of rising sea levels like to them that doesn't compute because I stage Orange all I care about is just advancing me and my family financially so by understanding this we can go and we can we can reconfigure our education system such that our education system helps to move people up to stage green and then once they're at Green they'll be much more environmentally conscious and then we can actually start to take action on the environment see then those stage green people can vote in stage green politicians who will then also actually care about the environment because most the politicians we have right now they're stage orange or below so they don't care about the environment as long as some corporation pays the money they'll look the other way but if they were at stage green they would be too conscious and too developed to be able to just look the other way so all these issues drug war immigration the solutions are really stage Green and stage orange salute stage yellow solutions and many of the solutions that are being proposed right now are stage orange solutions which just won't work they're unsustainable or even worse stage blue solutions which are regressive and and then there's a lot of bickering back and forth and you know when you're listening to political commentary on the news or reading it online somewhere never are the real solutions discussed to these issues never is the real solution to racism or poverty or healthcare or terrorism or crime or the drug war or immigration or the environment ever discussed what's discussed is just the surface level cultural war bickering back and forth the judgments that each side throws at itself now we're at the other side a stage yellow approach has never taken a stage yellow approach would focus on the solutions to these problems solutions that are grounded in in empirical data in facts in science in various research in actual testing and trial and error that's what we really need we need to have more scientific approach to our government rather than sort of this knee-jerk ideological approach which we've been taking for a long time in the area of hmm psychotherapy coaching and consulting spa that Amex can be very effective most coaches and consultants and psychotherapists don't know skyline Amex so when they give their advice where they try to guide people or guide companies to get certain kinds of results how helpful would it be if you understood where your client is at like if you're a therapist or a coach or consultants to understand that okay this CEO who I'm coaching he's at stage orange and he's stuck at orange and he's dealing with all the orange limitations and fears and problems that exist and you as the coach could be able to to point those out to him and to to show him why he's resisting moving up to stage green and help him to make a transition up into green to see that Green is not as bad as evil as he's always portrayed in his mind or that you could see that this client here that you have is is steep and stage Orange Norah's sorry in stage green you have a very stage green side setup a hippy client but you can see as your as his coach you can see that this client's problem is that he jumped to stage green way too early and he didn't master stage orange yet so he has maybe he's very spiritual and he's into yoga and all the sorts of stuff but he hasn't really mastered his livelihood so he has trouble keeping a job and paying the bills and so you could help to point out to him that hey yeah you're agreeing and that's great but you've got more stuff at orange that you haven't fully integrated let me help you it's a to see those elements of orange that you've been demonizing and denying help yourself to integrate those and then we can move you up even beyond green to yellow or if you've got a client that's at yellow you could help to share with him various kinds of maybe spiritual techniques and spiritual insights and more advanced kind of non dual teachings that will help him to evolve up to turquoise how helpful would that be that would completely transform your coaching practice your therapeutic practice and if you're a therapist who's dealing with all sorts of very dysfunctional people you might get a person into your into your office who's like regressed to stage red you know very very sort of primitive narcissistic self-centered sorts of motivations and values and you as the therapist are probably at stage green yourself so if you're at stage green and you're trying to teach stage green teachings to a stage red person that's going to create such a huge disconnect for you that your therapy will not be effective and in fact you'll burn out because you'll be wondering why do why do all my stage green techniques not work on this stage red person well because they're not there yet and you as the coach or the therapist could also tailor your communication style to whatever level your client is at so this does not mean that you need to give your client a formal test when you really understand this model you'll be able to just like look at people talk to them for five or ten minutes and get a really good idea of where they're at especially in a therapeutic or coaching setting where people can be very honest about their motivations and values you can get a very quick understanding of what's driving the person and then once you understand that to help to move them up the spiral you can now communicate to them in a way that fits with their value system so for example if I was coaching a stage orange client who's very business oriented and I wanted to explain to him the benefits of stage green I wouldn't be talking to him about how oh but if you change your business to a more stage green business then you're gonna help save the polar bears he doesn't give a about polar bears all right and I understand that so what I can do is I can I can dumb down my communication a little bit I can say look don't build a more green business for the polar bears build a more green business because in five years you yourself will evolve to stage green if right now you're gonna invest all this time and money building a stage orange business imagine what's gonna happen once you yourself evolve up to stage green you're gonna have to abandon your business because all of your managers and all of your people are gonna be stage orange and they're all going to be money hungry chasing sex and fast cars and success and you by that point will be into psychedelics and spirituality and yoga and all the sorts of stuff and your business is going to be much lower it's gonna be dragging you down so for your own personal development which is what say George cares about for your own personal development as the CEO of this orange company start thinking about how to transition your company already into green so you don't hold yourself back and also I would challenge you that you can make more money building a green business than an orange business and see to a stage orange person now that resonates because he's still all about money so if you can convince him or show him an opportunity for how he could actually be on the cutting edge of his industry by building a stage green business you could you could that that's gonna create a bridge from orange into green see and that's really what understanding sprawl dynamics will allow you to do is it'll allow you to be a great bridge builder for example to be able to show how spirituality is not in conflict with business but how you can actually build a business that also promotes spiritual development of yourself and everyone around you so there you're creating kind of a win-win scenario where as you know if you take a stage orange person and tell him something like hey your business is just capitalistic garbage all you're doing is just exploiting people and you need to quit your business and just go like go to meditation retreats and just like smoke pot and do psychedelics you know that's not gonna work for a stage orange person they're not ready for that they need to evolve to that level so to this person you might want to frame it as look I understand that right now you're really passionate your business and that's great and you need to develop your business in order to kind of you know take care of your finances take care of your family all these are basic needs you have so yes put that into place nothing wrong with that it's not evil it's not bad but also start to look towards the future because you're a person who's already into personal development so you know you're not gonna be you're not gonna be satisfied chasing money all the time you've what you already got a bunch of money be honest with yourself did it satisfy you that it make me happy did you make you happy no so what you really want is probably more love than money so start to plan your business in such a way that you're moving more towards not just earning money but also contributing love to the world and that will actually make you more satisfied with the money that you're earning and that will actually make you more motivated to work harder and then that actually help you to earn even more money so it'll be a win-win you could frame it like that also another area of application is with developing and managing communities so if you ever want to be a leader of a community whether it's gonna be an ashram a religious community a business community a business organization a non-profit anything like that it would really help you to understand spiral dynamics because when you're leading people it helps you to understand what drives and motivates the person that you are leading or talking to or in a relationship with or who's your business partner see and that's why Sarala NamUs can be so valuable for business and for management is because in business you're always making hiring decisions firing decisions you're choosing business partners you're choosing which companies you want to work with which kind of clients you want to attract and all of that and how useful would it be to have a clear picture in your mind of like what stage of the spiral you want your business partner to be or you want your next hire to be that can be that can be huge because in business when you're running a business you want to be clear at what stage your business is at what stage your business is targeting like your clients who's gonna be buying your product or your service is it going to be stage blue people orange people green people yellow people turquoise people that makes a big difference because that informs your entire marketing strategy if you're new to business you might make the foolish mistake of trying to market stage green solutions to stage orange people and then you'll wonder why it didn't work it can be very useful when you're starting a new business to understand spiral dynamics to understand what level your business is at what level you yourself are at what level your employees are at and what level your customers are at and try to align all of those together because look if your customers are aged blue and your business of stage orange and your stage green then you're gonna have chaos on your hands it's very important when you're leading an organization that you have a common set of values and that's exactly what's about dynamics is about don't make the mistake of thinking that business only happens at stage Orange business happens at every level of the spiral their stage red businesses that's mostly criminal enterprises and mafias and stuff like that and there's a there's stage turquoise businesses of course the most common businesses that all of us know our state orange businesses these were the McDonald's is the Facebook's is and the the Microsoft's of the world and then you know you have a few more evolved businesses I would put Google around stage orange half orange half green maybe Apple is kind of half out half orange half green and then there are some smaller businesses who are solid orange but but you probably haven't heard of them because they're not advertising themselves all over the place as much as McDonald's er or Walmart or Facebook is when you're developing your marketing strategy and you're trying to find your niche and business it can be really useful to understand what stage you want to target when looking for new business opportunities if you're trying to invent a new product or a new service it can also be extremely useful to think about it from the perspective of okay what stage are my at and what stage do I want my product or service to target and also like what are the opportunities so right now maybe you get a sense that okay in your society right now maybe your society is that stage blue let's say you're in the Middle East somewhere stage blue Society okay but you can see that your society is also evolving in that in the next 10 or 20 years it'll start to move a little bit more orange so you can already look ahead and say okay so what are the opportunities in my society for stage orange products services infrastructure that I could create and invent and build I could be a leader I can be at the cutting edge business is all about being at the cutting edge or if you're in the United States you know you want to start to look towards the future what's coming in 10 or 20 years those business opportunities are probably gonna be the next stage up so right now we're very orange probably be towards green or towards yellow and you can look at that from the perspective of like if you're a software developer you can look at okay what are the next stage a spinal stage of software development if you're a filmmaker what's next spinal stages of filmmaking or if you're a an author or you're an artist or you're a teacher you know whatever business you're running here's some examples of business ideas that are connected with spinal endemics think about creating a stage yellow education platform an online platform that serves stage yellow that could be a multi-million dollar business in the future in the next 10 20 years I guarantee you that some smart person is going to create a stage yellow education platform and make millions of dollars doing this that could be you that could be your life purpose right there or how about creating a stage turquoise community what if you were a visionary person who wanted to create a stage turquoise community what would you have to do to be able to lead such a community what kind of people would you need to attract to sustain such a community what kind of infrastructure would need to be developed for this community what would a sage turquoise community even look like you could do that you could build that and you could earn good money doing that that could be your whole life purpose I guarantee that over the next 20 years there will be many new stage turquoise communities that are started and a handful of them will fail because the people starting them don't have a solid of grass was feral dynamics how about as an opportunity if you're a consultant and what you do is you help businesses transition from stage Orange to stage green and that's like your niche and that's your life purpose because look we've got so many stage green stage orange businesses in the United States for example but they're also starting to hit the limit of where you can go with stage Orange they're hitting various kinds of environmental limits are hitting various kinds of limits with their employees and so forth and it's actually starting to hurt their bottom line and also the leaders who are leading these these businesses they want to go themselves evolve beyond orange into green but they don't know how to do that what if you were a business consultant who already went through that process learned everything there is to know about that all the traps and pitfalls and problems and you were able to provide specific solutions and coaching and guidance to other entrepreneurs who are interested in transitioning their existing orange businesses into green that could be a very viable and successful market for you or here's another opportunity how about creating a stage green marketing company because there's a lot of stage orange marketing companies out there but you know these people who are running stage green businesses they stents they tend to start to not like stage orange marketing anymore they want stage green marketing which is a more soft more eco-friendly approach to marketing it's not as cutthroat your marketing higher consciousness products and services how do you do that there's a whole set of challenges and problems with developing stage green marketing and you can create a company that will help people to do that to figure that out to offer training or seminars or solutions for that and that can be a very viable niche you could also earn a lot of money millions of dollars doing this of course you would have to train yourself to know what you're talking about to actually offer legitimate solutions here here's another opportunity how about you start a stage turquoise University what would that look like a stage turquoise University it's hard to even envision that you know because that's so advanced you have to really jump a few steps to even get to that but if you're a visionary ambitious person you can already start to think about this you know what would a stage turquoise University look like hmm what would the curriculum be what were the textbooks look like what kind of teachers would I hire would they be professors or would they be shamans who would they be would they be Indian gurus that I that I hire from India where do I get find these people and would this be a physical brick-and-mortar university or would it be a digital online university maybe both or maybe one or maybe the other you know so you can you can figure all these things out and then you can go and actually construct it and through trial and error actually create it and you can have one of the first stage turquoise universities then you get a lot of recognition for that if you make make it successful and you can earn good money from that and people will come and visit you from all around the world because there's not a lot of stage turquoise universities around the world and think about maybe what kind of careers people might start after they finish your university what kind of diplomas would you offer that would be pretty cool think about how rewarding that would be to because you would have a university would be which would be like a visionary University that is a hundred years ahead of its time which is basically where all the other universities need to go but you will be one of the first to actually demonstrate that it works and then once you do that you can maybe travel around the country or around the world and write books and talk about and help those universities who are right now sage green to evolve more towards turquoise you might talk about what the challenges are you might help them create a transition plan change their curriculums change their textbooks change their funding sources and all this kind of stuff here's another opportunity for you if you're an artist how about you become a stage turquoise artist most artists these days or stage orange artists or maybe stage green but what would a stage turquoise artist look like of course that means you yourself would have to evolve up to stage turquoise but then what kind of art would perpetuate and promote and aggrandize the values of stage turquoise mmm that's very interesting there's so many opportunities for artists when it comes to the intersection of art and spirituality and psychology there's a lot there because there's a lot of different types of art we could be talking about painting sculpture filmmaking video game making music making I mean you name it entirely new forms of art staged turquoise values probably require a new medium of art to be invented in order to really express those values maybe it's not going to be through video maybe it's not gonna be through paint maybe it's not going to be through books maybe it's gonna be through virtual reality or some other new technology and so you're gonna have to find that intersection point between turquoise values artistry and so maybe some new technology and how do you combine all those together to create some cutting-edge new thing here's an idea for you how about you become a stage turquoise scientist what would that look like a stage turquoise scientist that's really interesting if there any of you who are scientists in the audience I challenge you to think about that for a week try to imagine what that might look like how different that would be from most scientists and universities today and what kind of breakthroughs you might make maybe you'd be studying the mind maybe you'd be studying spirituality maybe you would be combining those things with neuroscience or psychedelics and shamanism and God knows what else there are so many possibilities but also don't just limit it to spirituality turquoise is not just spirituality in itself every field of science can be turquoise science biology chemistry mathematics well mathematics isn't really a science but you can think of it that way if you want um social sciences history I don't have all the answers here I'm just I'm giving you opportunities I'm trying to get your mind jogging right I'm trying to show you that there's so much stuff to mind here if you're really interested and if you're looking for a life purpose you're looking for something really valuable to do that's what's brother dammuz can show you is the next stage of the cutting edge of what mankind is gonna be doing in the next hundred or two hundred years it's this stuff here but it's precisely because it's so cutting edge and new we don't even know what it looks like yet perhaps which means that you're gonna have to build it you have to imagine it go through a process of trial and error and then invent it speaking of invention how about you become a stage turquoise inventor what might that look like or what if you wanted to start a stage turquoise hospital what might that look like that would be a very different Hospital than the stage orange hospitals that we know of today think about what kind of doctors would work there think about what the financing and insurance system would be like in a stage turquoise hospital think about what the funding sources would be like think about the kind of clients you would have it would be very different kinds of clients your whole to healthcare would be very different at that stage spa at Emma's can also be very useful to help you evaluate teachers if you're watching material on YouTube or you're listening to some guru or you're listening to a professor at your University or you're listening to me and you're trying to figure out who do I believe who do I listen to who are the most advanced teachers and which ones are the less advanced ones which ideas and ideologies should I be taking seriously and which ones shouldn't I be well use spiral dynamics to quickly judge where the teacher is at what level are they talking from what level values are they trying to promote and that will allow you to isolate the best of the best teachers and teachings and to ignore all the lower ones the ones that are beneath you so to speak also can help you to evaluate stuff that's way way way above you that you're not at that you're not developed to enough yet to to really make use of so you can kind of put a pin in that and come back to it ten years later same thing with evaluating spiritual and religious teachings religion happens at all stages of the spiral basically so if you really want to understand religion you need to take a spiral approach to that if you're evaluating books spinal enamels can be very helpful there it can also be helpful for evaluating media entertainment art and analysis so if you're listening to a talking head on YouTube or on TV or anywhere else or you're reading it in a journal somewhere like the Wall Street Journal or New York Times you're reading an op-ed some analysis about politics about government about health care about universities about sexuality whatever it is some analysis always ask yourself what stage is the analysis coming from that's super useful to know when you're analyzing a situation if you're in a business meeting and you're doing analysis on some business marketing problem always ask yourself what stage of the spiral is this analysis coming from you can also apply Sproul dynamics within relationships sexuality and dating for example who are you sleeping with are you sleeping with the right type of person at your level of the spiral or is the person that you're falling in love with an about to marry are they too low on the spiral for it to work if you're a stage green woman and you're about to marry a stage mm blue man is that really gonna be a smart move are you gonna make that work and not just romantic relationships think about all your relationships your friendships your family your work relationships how useful is it to understand the values and motives that are driving the person that you're relating with its enormous ly useful you can use Sproul an Amex to evaluate your friends to understand where your friends are coming from to understand where your family is coming from spiraling Amex will oftentimes explain why you and your family don't get along so well or why your friends are holding you back or why your spouse is holding you back and that doesn't mean that you have to just judge them for being too low too beneath you you can actually use smilin areas to help you to resolve the problem first of all you can discuss and teach Spile dynamics to your friends and family if they're open enough and patient enough to listen through it but you could you can help to to expose them to the spiral then you can you can help to build bridges you can use a spiral to build bridges between you and their value system even if their value system is below yours less developed than yours you can still build bridges you can still understand where they're coming from so maybe your parents are very religious and dogmatic and even though you're not that way you can still understand it more from the Spile perspective and maybe you can even learn to communicate with them in a way where you help to move them up and open their mind to new perspectives maybe you can frame some of the more advanced spiritual stuff that you're learning for me in a way that will make sense within their traditional Muslim or Hindu or Christian context that they're used to another way that Spile animus can be applied is when you're thinking about the kind of environment that you want to surround yourself with what kind of city do you live in what kind of country do you live in what kind of friends and people are around you what kind of job do you have or all of these pulling you up or pulling you down on the spiral and how could you change your environment how could you move to a city or a country or a part of the world or into the kind of organization that will actually pull you up maybe right now you're at stage green and really what you need to evolve higher is you need to change your environment and put yourself in a more yellow environment so how could you find yellow people maybe that means you have to move to a different city because in your city there aren't any yellow people there are no yellow organizations you're come eunuch Asian skills can be greatly improved by understanding Spile dynamics if you're a public speaker if like I said you're a teacher or you're even just trying to teach people one-on-one something to be able to communicate your ideas clearly it helps a lot to understand the value system of the recipient of your communication then you can tailor your message and your ideas in such a way that they understand it and it resonates with them and it can motivate them spar the names can be applied to raising children what stage of the spiral is your child at right now and how can you communicate with him or give him the resources the websites the books the the videos the courses that the schooling the tutors that he or she needs in order to evolve to the next stage so maybe right now your child is at orange and you want to help them to evolve to green and then to yellow and beyond and it would be a mistake just to overwhelm the child with a bunch of turquoise yellow knowledge where the child isn't at that level yet historical analysis also benefits from understanding the spiral enormous Lee if you really want to understand history go back through all the stuff you learned in school about history and reevaluate it from the spiral lens look at every war at every conflict at every political upheaval throughout all of human history going back to the ancient Romans and Egyptians all the way through today and just take a look and try to analyze it from these different colored stages and you'll be amazed to see that most of the human conflicts and misunderstandings and disagreements were simply a a Mis smashing between the different stages was like a stage blue society comes into contact with stage purple tribal people in South America and then they wiped them out something like that or maybe it's like one stage blue society the Europeans and another stage blue society the the Arabians you know during the crusades they come together and they're duking it out to major civilizations duking it out for supremacy and you could analyze like everything like that you can even it'll analyze individual historical people like Abraham Lincoln or George Washington in order Richard Nixon or Julius Caesar and you can read their biographies and get a sense for what their value system was and what their motives were and then match that up with their spiral level and then see how effective were they had how did they lead their their troops and their and their fellow citizens how do they communicate to them from what from what value system to what value system and then based on that you'll see whether they were successful or whether they were failures you can also apply spiral dynamics to help predict future trends whether in business or in society what's coming in the next ten twenty fifty or a hundred years within education within healthcare within government within politics within science within medicine with in other countries developing countries what's happening what's happening economically what kind of political system will we have well with spiral dynamics you can get a pretty good idea of that you can also get a good idea of what the obstacles will be what the resistance will be what the ego backlash will be if you're trying to lead stage orange people into a stage green environment then you can already predict using Sproul dynamics what all of their fears and worries are going to be and you can address those preemptively science is another area application for spell dynamics science isn't just an orange activity science also occurred at blue science occurred at red and even at purple there's there's a version of science and there will be verse of science at green yellow and turquoise and beyond so what does that look like how do we evolve science right now science is mired in the stage orange materials in paradigm very very limiting for scientists if you want to be a cutting-edge scientist you better start thinking ahead looking to stage yellow and even turquoise really science will be utterly transformed if it gets upgraded to stage turquoise but this is something that one individual can't do this is a collective effort it's going to require systemic changes in the way that science is taught understood even what the word science means culturally that will need to change there's so much to say about science I'll have episodes in the future about how science works what science is and how to advance science into the future I already mentioned art as an area of application let me just point out for example like just with one subfield of art with video games most video games these days are staged Orange video games but if you want to be a cutting-edge video game developer you could start thinking about how to create staged green or yellow video games or even turquoise and what that might that even look like what is a stage turquoise video game honestly I don't even know yet but I know that there's gonna be something there just like a question mark but you need to go and you need to explore that and you might find some very cool stuff there and you might be one of the first stage turquoise video game developers but really this applies to any art any medium whether writing moviemaking music or anything like that if you're teaching spirituality if you want to be a spiritual teacher it's very important you understand spiral dynamics because people will come to you from all levels of the spiral you'll have stage blue people coming to you for advice and stage orange ones and green ones and yellow ones and they will all have their own unique fears and objections and questions and concerns depending at what stage the spiral they're at and if you're let's say gonna be at turquoise you're this advanced spiritual teacher and you got a stage blue person coming to you you got to know how to connect with that because that's many stages in between blue and turquoise that's a big gap that you need to bridge and if you want to be an effective spiritual teacher you can't just be spouting the same old non-dual stuff all the time you got to be like connecting with with whatever level the person is at and lastly the area of application is your life purpose if you've taken my life purpose course and you're trying to figure out what your life purpose is you can use smile and AMEX to help you to find a higher life purpose than you otherwise would I feel like a lot of people who take life purpose course end up kind of like setting their sights too low and they end up having like a stage orange life purpose which is just basically starting a business of some kind and making it successful but like I challenge you to actually create a stage yellow or a turquoise life purpose and just to even spend time ruminating and imagining what that might even look like in your particular chosen field so maybe your life purpose is to be a great teacher or a great speaker or a great entrepreneur well yeah it's nice to have a life purpose of becoming a great entrepreneur but I challenge you to become a turquoise entrepreneur or a yellow entrepreneur that's so much more interesting than just becoming a cookie-cutter orange entrepreneur another one of these Silicon Valley CEO types and you will be so much more connected with that life purpose than you will with an orange one so whatever life purpose you have right now let's say you took my course and you came out with your life purpose I want you to look at that evaluate it and ask yourself what set of values is that life purpose serving on the spiral is it orange green yellow or turquoise and then wherever you peg yourself ask yourself okay how could I kick it up another notch what would that look like what if I had basically the same life purpose but it was one level higher so there you go those are some of the areas of application as you can see there's a lot here it's exciting stuff really this whole episode is all about opportunities opportunities for our society our opportunities for developing countries and around the world opportunities for yourself and your life purpose in your business so in order to apply Spile dynamics what you need is three steps first you must learn it and it'll take you a good 2030 hours of studying the theory reading the books listening to my talks about it to learn the theory number two is that you must stop judging all the different stages on the spiral don't get lost in the judging and the pigeonhole pigeonhole of people but rather set aside your biases be open to the entire spiral be open to exploring and building bridges across the spiral and looking at the world from different perspectives and number three is that you got to develop yourself at least two-stage yellow because it's only at stage yellow that now you're at tier two and now you're really we're able to to move up and down the spiral and see the world from all these different perspectives and then you can really start to apply this model to transform your life and to transform society around you remember that of any human invention or system you can always ask number one which stage was it created by and number two which stage is it enabling and also number three which stage is it suppressing or demonizing or judging and that's a very helpful and tool in analyzing various systems and human creations so finally just remember that spiral dynamics is a scientific theory it's not just something I pulled out of my ass spider dynamics is based on real-world research all around the world not just Western societies but all societies various cultures across many generations we have been studying and looking at the psychological development of human value systems and so just like Newtonian mechanics is a scientific theory which is effective at helping you to understand how objects move and helping you to make predictions well likewise you can use spiral dynamics as a scientific theory to help you to grow yourself to architect a more functional society to create amazing innovations to get a glimpse into what the future is gonna hold and you can also very simply use it to earn lots of money fame praise and fulfillment if that's what you're after if your stage Orange and all you care about is money fame praise and fulfilment well this probably never is just a tool that will enable you to do that but of course I challenge you to use it more responsibly than that I challenge you if you're creating a business to create a business that is at least staged green or higher such that your business is not just fulfilling your own personal needs and making you rich and successful but is actually helping to elevate all of mankind helping to raise the consciousness of mankind in some way so that it's a win win you're winning but also your environment is winning as a result of your work and your business in your life purpose alright sit I'm done here please click that like button for me and come check out actualize that'll work that's my website on there you will find various exclusive resources that will open your mind further so some of my deepest insights I post on my blog check that out check out my life purpose course if you haven't already check out my book list where I will be posting some additional books on spiral dynamics applications coming soon and come check out the forum where you can discuss all this and lastly I'll just say this imagine what a stage yellow society might look like spend some time over the next week just letting your mind wander and kind of a vision into the future what would a stage yellow society look like and all the different elements of society we've been talking about from health care to education to politics to our legal system all of that what would that look like that's a really good exercise maybe spend a few hours actually trying to write it out it should inspire you because what you're looking at is you're looking at the next 200 years of human development right there that's where we're headed whether you like it or not we're headed there you can help to consciously create that though you can play a role and what role do you want to play there are so many different roles to play there's hundreds thousands of different roles whether you want to be a teacher or a doctor or a lawyer or a politician or in the military or whatever you want to do there's a way you can do that such that you help to advance society up to this vision of yellow wouldn't it be cool to align your life with that such that you're working with the larger forces of evolution because what society is is society is much larger than you and me no one individual is creating it no one individual is in charge of it it really just is an offshoot of the entire evolutionary process that has been going on from the very beginning of this planet for four billion years or however long the very same mechanism that gave rise to your body and my body is giving rise to this society that we're in but also that very forces within you it's inside of you and it's running your mind and you can you can channel that force and you can use it consciously to create for the greater good and you could enjoy that process and you can derive deep meaning and satisfaction from doing that rather than just working at McDonald's flipping cheeseburgers for somebody or being a secretary doing somebody's dirty work or working in some sort of giant Oil Company you know making money but at the cost of harming the environment that's not nearly as fulfilling as what I'm trying to point you towards here so think about that let your mind wander a bit dream a bit and then from that is where you get the motivation and the passion to then want to go create something amazing before you can create something amazing you got to be able to imagine it and it has to be able to inspire you so whatever that means for you whether it's within art or within business or within government or within healthcare it doesn't matter find what that is for you and turn that into your life purpose you