Don Dulchinos

Integral thinkers Don Beck and Ken Wilber have both cited Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere as a model or metaphor for the Turquoise stage of human development.  Teilhard spoke of “a harmonised collectivity of consciousnesses equivalent to a sort of super-consciousness.” [1] I published a book entitled Neurosphere (after noosphere), in 2005, the same year I completed Don Beck’s Spiral Dynamics training.[2] In some ways, I think I would have written a different book had I the benefit of Dr. Beck’s deeper and more nuanced teaching.

My book had been influenced by spiritual seekers within the high-tech community in the 1990’s.  They argued that the Internet represented the emergence of Teilhard’s noosphere.  Recent problems – Facebook influence on elections, surveillance culture – have undercut that argument. In recent years, I have been working with a small working group of next-generation, self-styled Consciousness Hackers.[3]  I have some experience now in managing software development, and also perhaps a more mature, integrally informed viewpoint about what’s possible and what’s probable in terms of human development in our lifetimes. Our Consciousness Hacking working group investigations of technology and consciousness soon surfaced a common interest in brain-computer interface technology (BCI), in particular an emerging category of EEG headsets.

EEG medical technology began entering the consumer electronics industry about ten years ago, with the development of consumer-priced (under $1,000) headsets. These devices offer a relatively low degree of granularity in measurement of brain activity, but bring some excitement that current medical wonders like brain controlled prosthetic limbs might reach widespread availability.  The ability to progress from representation of motor skills to memory to higher consciousness, and to transmit and receive on that level, struck some of us as the building blocks of the emergence of collective consciousness; or even replicating the structure and function of the brain.  Again, this is a state proposed by some integral thinkers as a characteristic of the Turquoise level of human development.

Teilhard himself observed the emergence of radio communication as an initial sharing of minds. McLuhan and others have coined terms like global village as inspired by mass broadcast communications, and more idealistic thinkers (like me circa 1988) proposed that the Internet and its peer-to-peer, two-way nature was itself a noosphere and global mind in some physical sense. But our Consciousness Hacking working group was intrigued by the notion of a technology for the direct sharing of (at least some of) human consciousness itself. That certainly is an ambitious goal, but a momentous leap if ever there was one.  This paper then considers that notion through the lens of Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory.

Technology and Integral Theory

As a longtime telecomm and energy technology industry professional, I have applied spiral dynamics and integral theory to personnel management with some success, and to energy and environmental politics with somewhat less success.  Inspired by the applied work of Eliza Maalouf (in politics and international affairs) and Said Dawlabhani (in economics), I’ll present a brief discussion applying integral theory to technology.[4] This will allow me to consider technology development in the last 50 years, in particular the development of the Internet and then of BCI, in the context of the expected characteristics of a Turquoise stage.

I had previously felt that the Internet in and of itself was a Turquoise phenomenon. Recently, I spent a few minutes on the following exercise, which was more amusing than useful, but got me started thinking about where I had gone wrong 20 years ago.

Maybe more useful than that exercise is Michiel Doehrn’s recent work which used the lens of integral theory to focus users on more holonic approaches to technology. [5]  Doorn presented guiding questions, such as:

1. Who is likely to use it under what conditions?
2. What are the potential key impacts of this technology and how do they interrelate with existing and unfolding realities?
3. How can key impacts best be monitored?
4. Would this technology pass an ethics test?
5. Is this technology readily adjustable and adaptable when conditions change, and if not, can it be unplugged and decommissioned?
6. Does this technology allow for additional unexpected, emerging novelty?
7. Can this technology be integrated in other technological and non-technological systems (humans, society and other life, geo-bio flows)?

The sixth and seventh questions imply (to me) that we can exercise some control over emerging novelty, and Doorn observes that such control might require a second-tier center of gravity. But Doorn’s last question really struck me:

1. Does this technology further connectivity between minds in an open, transparent and non-hierarchical way?

This is something different than we have seen in the development of current generation social media. Doorn further writes, “While we are still in early explorations of the Turquoise worldview, the spiral dynamics and integral communities seem to agree that Turquoise is holistic, recognizing a single, global, dynamic organism with its own collective mind, where Self is both distinct and a blended part of a larger compassionate whole.” Doorn’s observation echoes Teilhard’s “harmonised collectivity of consciousnesses.”

Remember the Future – The Internet as Green Technology

Spiritual and even neurochemical visionaries were integral to the development and commercialization of the Internet in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and some Internet theorists were quick to cite Teilhard as inspiration.[6] Steve Silberman, author of Neurotribes, observed in the mid-1990’s:

The Net is “organic” because we who build it are organic and it is a reflection of its builders.  Not only its builders’ egos and ambitions, but the subconscious of its builders as well, and the parts of our own consciousness that lay beyond the flashlight of awareness.  We are building the infinitude inside ourselves outside ourselves, as best we can.  It is not surprising that the Net itself appears to be “alive,” even autonomous.  It’s sculpted of mind-stuff. [7]

Some of these more spiritual seekers within the high-tech community explicitly argued that the Internet represented the emergence of Teilhard’s noosphere, in a self-organizing fashion, or autopoiesis, like any other form of life. [8] (For that matter, so did 1960’s psychonauts, who discovered Teilhard as a model for their explorations of higher consciousness and interconnected minds without benefit of wires.)

But life conditions change.  Some argue that the Internet itself initially developed as a global solution to global threats, like thermonuclear war.  Just 20 years later, technology practitioners and theorists thinking along millennial lines were swept away in the tsunami of the dotcom era, including both those who were moved to make (or lose) fortunes and those, like me, who tried to preserve the line of thinking but could no longer get any attention for their theories and books. Those of us who did hold onto the dream were forced to seriously reconsider our theories in this current era of surveillance culture, Facebook influence on elections, and other unforeseen (by us) emergent phenomena.

For example, consider these observations from critical theorist Paul Virilio:

There is something in the synchronization of emotion [brought by social media] that surpasses the power of standardization of opinion that was typical of the mass media in the second half of the 20^th Century.  With the phenomena of instantaneous interaction that are now our lot, there has been a veritable reversal, destabilizing the relationship of human interactions, and the time reserved for reflection, in favor of the conditioned responses produced by emotion.  We are facing the emergence of a real, collective madness reinforced by the synchronization of emotions: the sudden globalization of affects in real time that hits all of humanity at the same time. [9]

Among Integral/SD theorists, Elza Maalouf articulated the flaw in my 1980’s-era thinking.  “Green often confuses its values with those of the Turquoise world-centric meme. Until egalitarians can respect assess and design for each of the first-tier value systems in the world, their efforts are not yet second tier.”[10]  Don Beck himself once wrote, “Just as the critical difference between Red and Orange is reflected in the discipline within Blue, and the element that differentiates Blue from Green is in the autonomous self within Orange, Green can only transform into Turquoise through the verticality, practicality, and ‘stuff that works’ qualities within Yellow. Beware of the large number of “Green” organizations, think tanks, movements, and alliances who are claiming that they have the codes to untangle the global knot.”[11]

And then, recent revelations about Facebook helped me to recognize the Green/Turquoise confusion, and point a way forward.  At first the reactions to the role of Facebook in the 2016 presidential election were predictably partisan and strident.  But I remember that Mark Zuckerberg, after a period of silence, finally granted some interviews about what happened and then appeared before Congress.

The latter appearance was scripted and unsurprising, but Zuckerberg’s affect in the early interviews was different.  He appeared genuinely confused and even scared when he became aware of these second order effects that he never anticipated, given the primary importance of his business model of data collection and monetization.  This is no longer the “Green” Internet he thought he understood better than anyone, but hints of a next level, a Turquoise. In my interpretation, Zuckerberg was scared by the autopoiesis that had just happened – as global mind slowly wakes up. (And by the way, it should be no surprise to Gravesians that the Turquoise stage would have its internal dystopian aspects, just like Green and Blue before it.)

Consider some of Zuckerberg’s public facing messages –the execution was strictly according to the business model, but the aspiration is Turquoise.

• “On our journey to connect the world…
• History is how we’ve learned to come together in ever greater numbers – from tribes to cities to nations. Facebook now stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community.
• The most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works of all of us.
• [Terrorism, climate change] need coordinated responses from a worldwide vantage point.
• Facebook can explore examples of how community governance might work at scale… participate in collective decision making.”[12]

That kind of utopian thinking still keeps trying to poke its way out of the Internet.  As another example, bitcoin and blockchain, whatever you may think of the underlying logic and overt hucksterism, certainly have made claims based on a return to a more idealistic view of the peer-to-peer, mesh nature of the Internet (MeshWORKS, anyone?) In that spirit, the next section explores the idea of whether BCI is a difference in kind compared to earlier applications of the collectivizing capabilities of the internet.

Brain Computer Interfaces as a Second-Tier Phenomenon

Let’s begin this section with an invocation by Teilhard.  “A consciousness is that much more perfected according as it lines a richer and better organised material edifice.  [And if humanity is an organism,] we should endeavour to equip it with sense organs, effector organs and a central nervous system.  [Indeed,] thanks to the prodigious biological event represented by the discovery of electro-magnetic waves, each individual finds himself simultaneously present in every corner of the Earth.[13]

If the Internet 2.0 fell short of a predicted deeper physical interconnection of consciousness in a Teilhardian sense, then let’s consider what a closer physical interconnection might look like, where BCI fits in, and some possible implications.

As a technologist, I looked at ongoing Internet development, and in particular the continuous quest for a better user interface.  The recent trend away from computer mouses or remote controls to voice inputs is interesting, and yet in terms of interpersonal connection it seems a step back into the dial up telephone era.

As a student of consciousness, I started to pay attention to technology solutions in the field of neuroscience, and was struck by the emergence of neural prosthetics.  The field of prosthetics has in recent years has leveraged both brain mapping and understanding of nerve networks to enable, e.g. amputees to use wireless electromagnetic signals to translate EEG-mediated brain signals to bridge intention to operate prosthetic limbs.

Electroencephalographic (EEG) technology has been around for many years, and research continues to translate EEG measurements into a fuller map of the human brain.  The mapping correlates activity in particular brain regions to motor activity or physical resting states.  Memories tend to be encoded in more complex ways, with encoding and retrieval of memories associated with many different areas of the brain.  And there are some emerging theories about the neural correlates of the coherent feeling of one’s own consciousness, e.g. Global Workspace Theory, but these are still subject to much debate.[14]

I then discovered a new generation of consumer-priced EEG devices, for example the MUSE and the Emotiv, and found some fellow explorers through the Consciousness Hacking Meet-up group.[15]  Seeing some demonstrations online, we asked ourselves whether we could actually translate EEG-mediated mental commands, via Wi-Fi, into the movement of a wi-fi connected device?  After several months of study, our software experts connected APIs (application programming interfaces) which represent particular brain signals correlated with intention to move, with the APIs of a humble remote controlled vacuum cleaner, and used the brain signals to send movement commands.  After a day-long hackathon, we reported:

Successful testing of an initial proof-of-concept of using device output from mental commands to move a third-party device. This path has great potential to provide assistive technology solutions to the disabled community.  See the video here! [16]

Our working group’s next technology baby step is to apply these brain outputs to assistive technology devices or prosthetics used by disabled, paralyzed individuals in order to communicate or move. (This is already proven and deployed with very high end equipment.) But is it reasonable to extrapolate that further improvements to inexpensive EEG devices, beyond the motor skills correlation, could communicate one individual’s memories to another individual’s brain?  Is it reasonable to assume that one’s higher consciousness, or a fuller representation of that individual’s personality, can be communicated directly to the brain of another individual? (Identifying the neural correlates of consciousness is hotly debated – see the ongoing symposia facilitated by the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona.[17])

The answers to these questions are far in the future, but I am proposing that an even deeper integration of Internet technology with individual humans, through more fully developed BCI, will more truly constitute a literal noosphere.  This deeper integration may constitute a physical (in the sense of a nervous system) and societal infrastructure for the Turquoise stage of human development.  (Whether a “global brain” mediated by digital technology is metaphor or literal is explored in some detail by the work of the Global Brain Institute at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.[18])

Looking at the metaphor vs. literal question within the Spiral/Integral canon, Clare Graves cited research that found chemical changes in the brains of individuals as a result of life conditions, leading to individual progression to higher stages.[19] More recently, an intriguing study at the University of Cologne used fMRI research to find different sets of neural correlates for individualists vs. collectivist values.[20] The research protocol was based on Graves research, which had reported that “subjects would react faster to stimulus words in accordance with their own mindset than to works which do not belong to their own mindset.”[21]

Don Beck has not conducted brain science research per se, but has observed that “in the second tier, the [brain] hemispheres mesh more closely together.” Beck succinctly characterized the Yellow stage as “left brain with feelings”, and turquoise is “right brain with data…We look forward to a fusion in Second Tier where data and feelings are combined in a communal system that encourages individuality.”[22]

Integral commentary along these lines seems to move back and forth between metaphor and brain science. Maybe that’s inevitable in trying to characterize a Turquoise stage that is barely beginning to appear. In terms of my research group, perhaps the beginnings of electrical interconnection may be enough to say (or all we can say for now) about a tangible global brain.

Integral Thinkers on The Nature of Turquoise

I had the opportunity to ask Ken Wilber at one of his recent appearances if he saw signs of the emergence of the Turquoise level.  He proceeded to chastise me for thinking I could see it from where I am – it is barely out there yet, and certainly I don’t live and operate at that level.  He’s right of course, but historically Wilber has allowed that higher states (as opposed to stages) do offer a glimpse and temporary experience of a higher stage of development.  He was an early advocate of eastern contemplative practices as a proven way to gradually work to achieve a higher stage, back when a significant percentage of the young adult population had experienced psychedelic states.

And so perhaps it’s reasonable to assume that some integral thinkers and even part-time mystics may have some insights into the contours of a Turquoise stage of development. Reviewing these insights, I am looking especially for their views of technology and human relations with, and affected by, technology.

For this exercise, I am inclined to think Turquoise elements may easier to apprehend, being aspirational (or super-ordinate in Beck’s formulation) goals or stages, and more likely to describe a tangible infrastructure or architecture of a second-tier stage. This as opposed to looking for evidence at the Yellow/Teal stage, whose primary contribution seems to be as change agents providing second tier integration of the various first tier stages. [23]

That said, I am mindful of a caution from Robin Lincoln Wood: “The power of second tier systems lies in their ability to integrate the first-tier systems in ways that promote health and thriving. Treating them as some kind of “uber-paradise”, some ideal state, is to profoundly misunderstand what complex, systemic, realistic thinking and being actually does.” I certainly don’t mean to characterize Turquoise as an “ideal” state – following Graves who from the beginning defined the spiral as a “Never Ending Quest.”

Following are some speculations on the nature of Turquoise from Graves and Beck, plus some contemporary or “third generation” Gravesians.  Intuitively, I would expect them to have some basis for speculation as most of them are successful practitioners in different fields, grounded in what appears to me to be a Yellow/Teal center of gravity.

Graves characterized Turquoise in a 1970 paper. “Through personal experience, these individuals show that – no matter how much information is available – not everything can be understood. Astonishment, awe, reverence, gratitude, unity and simplicity are appreciated. Reality can be experienced, but one can never be certain about it. There is an atmosphere of trust and respect. We stand up against constraints and limitations on a quiet and personal manner – never in a showcasing manner.  Avoid relationships in which others try to dominate – do not like to dominate others but rather specify a clear direction insofar as it is necessary.” [24]

I have long been intrigued by Beck’s statement that Graves “was looking for chemicals that activate the next (latent) system in the brain”[25].  Remembering Graves was in his prime in the high flying 1960’s, I wonder if the reference is to LSD. During my own undergraduate encounter with Graves, I was seeking to make sense of my own neurochemical explorations, and Graves’ work was the first system to speak to my experience.[26] I later found Wilber’s state vs stage formulation to be very helpful and on point.  Even Timothy Leary said something similar about the “activation” element of LSD. Most forget that Leary was a peer in humanistic (and behavioral) psychology circles in the 1950s, and later posited his own 8 stage adult developmental model.[27] This discussion is a little tangential, but raises a crucial question about all Integral/Spiral/Developmental theories – are these philosophical constructs overlaid on behavior, or are there physical mechanisms in the brain or the physical environment that may be discerned or measured?  This is an important question, and I hope BCI may serve as a useful part of an experimental approach.

In his own writings, Beck has characterized the Turquoise (H-U) stage as Holonic.  “The stage appears early on as a strong urge, more so among those of us centered in Green.”[28] The problems of the Turquoise stage “cut across all classes, countries, and are characterized by global catastrophes.”  (Note that in 2005, as he wrote those words, global climate change was still only beginning to reach a wider awareness.) “While Yellow G-T legitimizes all of the vMeme codes, and works to keep each happy, Turquoise H-U:

• detects holistic energy flows that bind everything together
• constructs large scale mandates in acting on behalf of all life
• nurtures all human manifestations that contribute to “the whole” while possessing big picture perspectives and comprehensive initiatives.”

And two final characterizations of Turquoise:

• Congruent Leader Style: Spiritual Counselor
• Organization Structure: Holistic Organism

Beck’s characterization of Turquoise structure as an organism evokes a Teilhardian flavor, and a less theoretical and more physical interconnection.  Beck also calls the second tier “self-organizing” (citing Prigogine) which is congruent with Varela and Maturana’s concept of autopoiesis as a fundamental property of the development of human consciousness.

Among other Beck checklists of Turquoise elements, I see more elements (not all) that take on that flavor (highlighted in italics):

• Blending, harmonizing strong collective
• Focus on the good of all living entities
• Expanded use of human brain/mind tools
• Self is part of a larger, conscious whole << (especially this one-DD)
• Global networking seen as routine
• Acts for minimalist living, so less is more

Communication strategies:

• Experience of discovery
• Learning in communal network
• Holistic conception of multiple realities
• Reawakened deep brain capacities
• Reliance on holistic consciousness

Motivators:

• Experience of being above self-interests and group pressures
• Find unity in ideas and goals of whole-earth impact
• Complex, multidimensional thinking

And Beck also offered the following list of Models and Metaphors of Turquoise Thinking:

• Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere,
• Chaos and complexity theories,
• Universal systems thinking
• Integral-holistic theories
• Mandela’s pluralistic integration,
• Gandhi’s idea of pluralistic harmony,
• Gaia hypothesis
• David Bohm, wholeness and the implicate order
• McLuhan’s global village
• Ken Wilber’s work

As to the last item on that list, Wilber has recently cited the existence of ongoing group mind explorations among his Integral circle; e.g. establishing a “we” mind during group meditation.  Wilber’s writing on Turquoise seems more focused on the contemplative traditions of east and west, leading to the ultimate Non-Dual stage. This stage certainly implies unity and collective consciousness, but Wilber consistently states that practitioners who are at that stage know what they mean by the state, and you have to practice to observe and share the same understanding. There seems to be no objective observer, upper right quadrant (science) way to characterize that stage and resolve the paradox.[29]

Moving on to the third generation Gravesians, Elza Maalouf in Emerge!, amidst a cogent, Yellow approach to the politics of the Middle East, described the Graves/Beck models and noted that “Turquoise is also anticipated to include elements of what Teilhard de Chardin describes as the noosphere, the sphere of human thought that is a lexical analogy to the atmosphere or biosphere.”[30]  In her view, Teilhard’s Omega Point was “an already existing, unifying, transcendent, autonomous intelligence.”

Remembering that Teilhard was a loyal Jesuit trying to reconcile faith and science, Maalouf’s observations and prescriptions may be situated in that tradition. “The Turquoise system can have spiritual values, but the tenets of its spirituality are to have respect for all – recognizes religious Blue as the next healthy stage of emergence for many parts of the world – e.g. religious schools. …Unlike Green which criticizes religion as an instrument of control, Turquoise views it as an essential moralizing stage to facilitate respect for life and continue the emergence of the first-tier systems.”

Other Maalouf observations relevant to the theme of this paper:

The eighth level is another order-seeking communal system, but it is the first one that searches for the macro view. Wants to see everything at once before doing anything specific. Similarly, non-dual meditative states view life as road to higher consciousness regardless of how we assess our personal accomplishments.

Keith Rice, management consultant and teacher of Spiral Dynamics, posits Turquoise as bringing forth a “Global brain of interconnected individuals to solve global scale problems.” (e.g. climate) They are “[i]nterconnected on a deeper level than social media, maybe even physical. [A] global brain must include a global body.” [31]

Robb Smith, more of a second-generation “Wilberian” (I guess), writes in The Great Release that a “teal operating system will have to enable new forms of global coordination on trans-national threats: climate change, nuclear proliferation, bioterror, oceanic health, ecological deterioration. We need coordination across many different layers of the evolutionary stack –  which I suggest will be the global governance model of Teal, new levels emerge anytime the existing level passes a threshold beyond which it can no longer adequately organize and sustain existing structures.” [32]

This is mostly a Yellow/Teal analysis, but then Smith states “Green and Teal technologies – from Facebook to the blockchain – [are] new sources of power that are changing the deep structures of human life itself, which is why I called it the transformation age to begin with.” One can debate where to classify certain technology emergence, but I think Smith’s view is consistent with my notion that different aspects of the Internet comprise elements that may be associated with either Tier 1 or Tier 2.

It appears to me from this review, hardly exhaustive but hopefully representative, that Spiral/Integral thinkers dating back to Clare Graves himself have congruent interpretations and expectations of the Turquoise stage, in individuals and societies. The stage is expected to be holistic, with individuals and societies acting collectively and displaying very close integration at least bordering on the unity of an organism, a global brain, a noosphere.  This is the future stage we seek and expect to map with our BCI technology experiments.

Next Steps

Brain sensing equipment has entered the digital age, which enables rapid growth and development and dropping prices. In addition to the assistive technology potential, a lot of money has been invested in recent years in exploring EEG headsets as virtual reality interfaces.  Whether or not that particular application pans out, the accessibility and granularity of the EEG technology will become widespread in the next few years. This digital transformation will bring the kinds of dramatic changes that, for example, smart phones and applications have undergone.

I have proposed that the brain-computer technology that is now emerging is a characteristic, component and consequence of a just-now emerging Turquoise stage of development.  That is, BCI enables a deeper and more holonic stage or type of behavior. If one believes that the Internet and social media correspond to Green emergence, and that BCI and its implications signal a Turquoise level of emergence, then it may be interesting to ask whether existing life conditions are as yet bringing forth the emergence of Turquoise individuals or communities, and whether that transition is also happening, or can happen, at “Internet speed.”

References

[1] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man,1959, p. 251.

[2] Donald P. Dulchinos, Neurosphere, 2005.

[3] See Consciousness Hacking Meet-up Group.

[4] Elza Maalouf, Emerge! The Rise of Functional Democracy and the Future of the Middle East, 2014; Said Dawlabani, MEMEnomics; The Next Generation Economic System, 2013.

[5] Michiel Doorn, “Emerging Technologies Guidance from the Past and for the Future,” Integral Leadership Review, August, 2018.

[6] See for example Stewart Brand, Two Cybernetic Frontiers, 1974.

[7] Posting on The Well computer conferencing system, Fri, Nov 24, 1995.

[8] Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, The Tree of Knowledge, 1987.

[9] Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear, 2018.

[10] Maalouf, 2013, p. 92.

[11] Don Beck, “7th Level Code- Yellow in Spiral Dynamics Integral,” Posted by: Dr. Don Beck Sat Sep 30, 2006 5:34 pm (PST); accessed July 11, 2010.

[12] https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634/ – accessed March 28, 2019.

[13] Teilhard de Chardin, 1959, p. 240.

[14] http://cogweb.ucla.edu/CogSci/GWorkspace.html

[15] Consciousness Hacking Meet-up Group; MUSE Web Site; Emotiv Web Site

[16] Consciousness Hacking Facebook page.

[17] http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu

[18] https://sites.google.com/site/gbialternative1/

[19] Clare Graves, The Never-Ending Quest, 2005; see for example pp.180, 367, and 412-416, citing various academic physiology studies.

[20] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0018451

retrieved 3/23/19. Thanks to Said Dawlabani who referenced the study in Memenomics.

[21] Graves, “Levels of existence: an open system theory of values.” J Hum Psychol 10: 131–155, 1970.

[22] Don Beck, “In Search of 2d Tier,” essay posted by Dr. Don Beck to the SDi discussion group on Yahoo listserv on January 17, 2002.

[23] The author has no preference in the color terminology for the 7^th stage or level between Yellow as the Beck/Cowan proposal or Teal as the Wilber proposal, and so refer to Yellow/Teal throughout.

[24] Clare Graves et al, “The Congruent Management Study,” unpublished paper, 1970; quoted in Graves, 2005, p. 398.

[25] Don Beck in lecture, from Dulchinos notes during Spiral Dynamics training session in Boulder Colorado in 2005.

[26] I took exactly one course with Graves at Union College, Organizational Psychology, where he explicated his broader theory over several class periods.

[27] Timothy Leary, Exo-Psychology, 1977.

[28] This section adapted from Beck’s handout materials from a Spiral Dynamics training session in Boulder Colorado in 2005.

[29] The Wilber reference appeared in Beck materials at the height of his partnership with Wilber.  The relationship appears to have cooled not long thereafter, and so one should be cautious in holding the Wilber reference to be part of Beck’s long-term characterization of Turquoise.

[30] Maalouf, 2013, p. 94.

[31] Keith Rice, Dulchinos transcription of Rice presentation at Spiral Dynamics Futures Summit conference, May, 2018.

[32] Robb Smith, The Great Release , 2018.

About the Author

Don Dulchinos is an experienced technology industry executive, and is currently focused on consulting on Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology. He is the President of the Neurosphere Institute, a non-profit organization organized around the long-term trend of an interconnected human population.  Such interconnection is leveraging technology developments in the Internet, social media, and BCI.

d.dulchinos@comcast.net

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dondulchinos/

Spiral Dynamics Certification Level 1 and 2

Co-organizer Consciousness Hacking Denver/Boulder Meet-up