All of the stages come with both gifts and shadows. I will touch on the shadow side first. The part that is hurting and not working well. The part that is causing harm in the world.
The shadow version of this stage is what happens when we collapse down to survival mode. Only me and mine matter. Just like one of those Zombie apocalypse everyone else is just a monster to be dealt with. It doesn’t matter what happens to those other because they are not really human. Given a chance they would suck out our brains so we have to fight back with everything we have.
There is an enormous selfishness that can show up at this level. An incredible indifference to the pain of others. A lot of the world spends at least part of the time here. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, if you spend your life in constant fear you are living in survival mode. Unless and until we get people out of this hurt and lack we can’t expect them to do anything else.
People are desperately hungry for tribe. This is a driving need. If people can’t find a healthy way to express this need they will make do with an unhealthy way. Somehow, some way this need must be met. We are seeing a world wide resurgence of ethnic nationalism – which is an unhealthy expression of this tribal hunger. It explains some (but not all) of the attraction to Trump. His rallies were a potent drug. People felt part of a tribal whole and they were desperately missing that. How do we counter this? I will talk about deeper solutions in later sections, but possibly the simplest intervention is to get people to switch to a healthier tribe. The most successful way to get people to leave a white nationalist groups is to find a different group for them to join. The thing they really are looking for is that sense of group pride, belonging and togetherness.
This is the big one. For some reason in the U.S. when we reach for an example of ultimate evil we go to the Nazis. As if we don’t have something even worse (if that is possible) in our own history. Slavery. Genocide. And that slave owner mindset is still very much with us even today. This darkness has been with us a long time. We are taught to revere the Greek and Roman empires. Yes they had amazing achievements, but they were also brutal slave regimes. Just like us. We are all complicit.
I am writing this in the winter of 2021. It is not clear to me whether democracy will survive in the U.S. The Republicans are in the midst of purging from their party anyone who tells the truth about Trump’s lies. And the voters seem to be fine with this. The 2022 elections will almost certainly sweep in a Republican majority in the house, and quite possibly the senate as well. The majority of Republicans voted to overturn the 2020 election. After all these purges there is no doubt that they will be even more aggressive to overturn the 2024 election. Or they might not even need to. Like I said many voters seem to be fine with all of these shenanigans. And this is not unique to the U.S. Authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide. Russia, an emboldened China, India, Poland, Hungary, Philippines, Brazil, Turkey are examples of states either firmly authoritarian or succumbing to it just like us.
So we all have a front row seat to the shadow of Red. The first thing we notice are the lies. But Red doesn’t think of it that way. They think they are creating their own reality. Consider this conversation with a George W. Bush aide
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
“We are an empire now, and we when we act, we create our own reality.” That is the heart of Red. Truth as something greater than yourself is just not something that Red has online yet. So when Trump lies his followers celebrate it as a sign of strength. They applaud Trump for creating his own reality. And they laugh at the rest of us trying to study what he just did.
In the 1400’s China was the dominant world power. The emperor sent enormous fleets all the way to India and Africa. The size and technical sophistication of this fleet eclipsed anything the Europeans or any other country had. The Chinese knew about Europe, but it was much too poor to bother with. China could have ruled the wold if they wanted. Instead subsequent emperors disbanded the fleets and strictly forbade all exploration. It cost them. The empire stagnated and when Europeans finally managed to launch much, much smaller exploratory fleets of their own, they found a China easy to bully and ultimately colonize. Blue can be wonderfully stable and it can provide much better governance than despotic Red, but it can easily go stagnant and complacent. And even if it doesn’t go stagnant that inward focus holds back progress as Japan found out when those American “Black Ships” came barging into Tokyo harbor.
Blue encourages a kind of magical thinking. Everything is going to be OK because – fill in the blank. Everything is going to be OK because China is the center of the world and always will be. Climate change is OK because God will take care of us. Billions of people dying is regrettable but OK because Buddha taught us to accept suffering. Blue also expects unquestioning obedience. Go over to Vietnam and start shooting people. Don’t ask questions about why we are doing this just start shooting! Father knows best, no more questions. There can be a rigidity and intolerance. Anyone not following the True path is impure and needs to be purged.
Orange gets caught in the trap that only scientific thinking is valid. This kind of thinking ruthlessly splits the world into separate, dead parts. The universe is a cold uncaring place and you die alone. Progress is measured primarily in economic terms. Greed is Good. How much stuff do you have? How big is your bank account? There are many, many authors that do an excellent job of describing this mentality so I don’t want to spend too much time on this. Basically if you have read any environmentalist you should be familiar with this critique. I think the environmentalists are clearly right, but hopefully you already understand this.
The other part is that just as the shadow of Red continues the mindset of the slave owner, the shadow of Orange continues the mindset of the imperialistic colonizer. The mindset of take anything I want. The mindset of the white man’s burden. This mindset of appropriation without giving credit is still very much alive today. For example the otherwise very good Dialectical Behavior Therapy makes almost no mention of the enormous debt it owes to Buddhism. The heart of the practice is clearly ripped straight out of Buddhist practice, but you would not know that if you read any of the descriptions of it. This is the arrogant mindset that until the enlightened scientist came along none of this mindfulness stuff was true. Oh sure those primitive Buddhists might have accidentally stumbled onto a couple of useful things, but it is the scientist’s burden to get all of this properly sorted. What nonsense.
When I first drove to the Evergreen State University, I was dumbstruck by all the trees. Even after I got to the school boundary I still had to drive through several miles of trees before I got to the main campus. We didn’t have trees like that in Illinois. Land is so valuable for farming that very few trees are suffered to live. Lots of trees on a property were a display of conspicuous wealth. With all those miles of trees surrounding us, the campus felt very safe. I felt very protected from the outside world. Until a female student got raped right on campus. It badly shocked all of us. How could this happen? How could that happen here? Where was our protection?
The community did not handle the event well. Unfortunately as is all too common in trauma, hurt people lash out. Evergreen was one of the most liberal colleges in the country and it attracted a sizable number of radical feminists. That part was good. What was not so good was that many of these women believed it was OK to be angry at men simply because they were men. So the response to the rape was to organize a take back the night march, but no men allowed. All men were strictly forbidden to even be on campus during the march. Getting lumped in with the rapist hurt me to my core. I wasn’t the only one hurt. Years later a close friend of mine confessed that he had (disobediently) chosen to stand in silent support along the march route and he received glare after glare of angry hatred. It hurt him deeply, and that hurt stayed with him all his life. I imagine that many of those glaring women had been victims of assault so their anger is very understandable. Anger is necessary, but we need to learn to be more skillful with it. Otherwise we just continue the cycle of pain. Hurt people hurt other people. But that is not what we want. We want a world with more love not less.
Time for confession. I know all about lashing out in anger because I do it too. During the pandemic I found myself crunching the numbers to see how many people dying from Covid were Trump supporters. I wanted to see if the number of their deaths would change anything politically. The super dark side of this? I was hoping it would. Just to be crystal clear on this, I was secretly hoping for vast numbers of people to die based solely on their tribal identity. The more the better. Do you know who else had this kind of mindset? Hitler. Pretty dark, right? I can’t just point my fingers at others, this shadow lives in me as well.
Green is supposed to help us out of our misguided stereotypes, but it can end up still stuck there. For example, I present as male, but the reality is a lot more complicated than that. As a child I was very gentle and sensitive. I remember one summer morning thinking about the two boys next door methodically experimenting with different ways to torture insects. Yuck! If that is what it meant to be a boy maybe I was really a girl? It seemed like a real possibility. I cry easily. I’m unusually aware of people’s emotions. I read a huge amount (which is way more common for women), and most of my favorite authors are women because they tend to do relationships much better. I have serious womb envy. For a while it was actually painful for me to see pregnant women because I envied them so much. I got caught in grade school experimenting with cross dressing and got publicly humiliated for it. I could go on. And yet. In high school I found out that I love to wrestle and play football. So there was that. Later on I seriously investigated whether I might be gay, or at least bi, because internally if felt a little weird that I was not. But nope. Very clearly I am hetero. I once confessed to a gay friend that I felt most comfortable with gay men even though I am hetero. I was a little afraid he would not understand me, but he just laughed and said, “You have no idea of how many men have told me that. I think there should be a third sex”. That hit me like lightening. Yes! A third sex! That fits. All of this has been hard for me. We have gotten much better about not holding gender stereotypes against women, but many people seem to be completely unaware that it is equally not OK to have gender stereotypes against men. For example, my crying tends to make people uncomfortable. Men still are not supposed to cry. This runs really deep, even with people who have done a lot of work. In my Medicine guide training many of my fellow students were astonished to find out how strong I am because they were holding the stereotype that men who cry are weak. It took them going way deep into a journey before they could really see me.
The shadow of Green is that sometimes it encourages us to stereotype each other by what group we belong to and leaves us even more divided than we were before. We seem to be hard wired to “other” each other. To treat each other as the enemy instead of as part of the solution. We are all too quick to put each other in boxes and judge them. And what a tragedy it is when all we see about a person is their labels. In my Hakomi therapy training a vibrant gay woman took on the challenge of introducing diversity and inclusion into the organization. She did it in a very beautiful way. She first brought in a guest lecturer to teach us how cognitively we are hardwired to “other” each other. We “other” people faster than thought – scientists can actually measure this. She then talked about her personal experience of going into groups where people were not like her and how she immediately “othered” that whole group. Held her heart separate from those others in an attempt to protect herself. But that is not what she really wanted. She was working towards a world where people felt safe to love each other. My heart flung wide open and I was eager to listen to everything she had to teach. Not all diversity training are done so skillfully. Most of the other training I have attended were quick to put people into boxes, and people left the training feeling separate and divided, not more loving and whole. Certainly we can’t just pretend that deep prejudice and unfair privilege are rampant. That part is so true. But we can’t just end there. We have to somehow find our way back to each other. That vibrant Hakomi woman was teaching from a place of love so big that it included everyone. Unfortunately Green does not always find its way there. Maybe gets caught in the hurt and doesn’t find its way to that bigger place of love that we are all longing for.
People are sometimes surprised when I tell them people at Yellow tend towards wild arrogance. Just because someone has done deep work does not make them perfect. And because Yellow does in fact see clearer on some important things than the other levels, it can lead to a false sense of superiority. Sometimes this is blatant. For example, Hanzi Freinach self identifies as Yellow and has some interesting things to say in his book, The Listening Society, but oh my goodness does he have a strong attachment to ego. He talks approvingly of the coming aristocracy of Yellow – it will be people at Yellow like himself (and his billionaire patron presumably) who rule the world.
This sense of superiority also shows up in more subtle ways. For example at this level you will likely hear talk about “evolutionary” leaders. This is the belief that evolution started with slow, gradual genetic changes, but now evolution is showing up as culture change and it is accelerating as our minds go through new stages of consciousness. This way of thinking holds that people at Yellow are literally, not just figuratively, but literally more “evolved” than, say, people at Purple. That progress has been a steady evolution from bands to tribes to villages to empires to nation states. And that there is an evolutionary impulse that is bringing us to these higher and higher states. Substitute “god” with “evolution” and this argument should sound familiar. Ken Wilber is a proponent of this viewpoint. He is hugely influential and his writings form some of the foundations of my thinking. Without him I probably would not be writing this document, but he also suffers from ego inflation. This article does a brilliant job of summarizing his immense contributions but also how ultimately his ego got in his own way.
And because Yellow is such a strong pendulum swing back to individual focus (tick), it just doesn’t seem to do groups well. This can sometimes be disastrous. Let me give you an example. Aharon Grossbard and his wife Francoise Bourzat trained people how to safely sit for people as a Medicine guide. A community of practitioners grew up around them. Francoise and Aharon then trained other people to be the teachers and set up a formal curriculum. There were high standards required of the guides. You did not necessarily have to be a credentialed therapist (although that was preferred), but at a minimum you were required to do at least two years of intensive training on how to be a therapist. And you were to hold yourself to the same high ethical standards that a therapist does. That is how I came into the program. I am not a credentialed therapist but I spent two years learning the basics of how to be one. After that you had one year of practical medicine training and after graduating you were required to have at least two years of both group and individual supervision. The community had an executive group and an ethics committee. And the community was thriving. Therapists were reporting back that their patients were making exciting breakthroughs that just did not seem to come with just talk therapy. And then this article by Will Hall came out alleging that Aharon had abused him both sexually and emotionally. That opened the flood gates. It turns out that Aharon had been abusing a large number of male clients. And it emerged that Francoise had not disclosed that she had been kicked out of Hakomi because of multiple ethical lapses. Unfortunately this is all too common a story. The founding guru/teacher gets caught up in their own ego and goes badly astray.
The community’s initial response to all of this was surprisingly good. Almost immediately the community asked their guru founders to step down and refrain from any Medicine work. They also brought in a very strong restorative justice team to help clean up the mess. This is the strength of Yellow – most groups would not be able to be as honest with themselves. But then it emerged that the community had an even bigger problem. It was not just Francoise and Aharon who were crossing sexual (and other) boundaries, but some other rogue guides as well. And some guides had been graduated who probably should not have. In at least one case a guide had raped his clients and the community had not properly dealt with this. Horrible. What was the reaction to this even bigger problem? The leadership disbanded the entire community in a single email. Just like that. No group discussions, no effort to grapple with the deeper problems here they just ran away. This is about the worst possible outcome I can imagine. Now you have all these scattered Medicine guides practicing on their own with no group to hold them accountable. No group to help them continue to learn and grow. Nothing to protect people from rogue bad guides. Nothing to protect people even from well meaning guides who just need more guidance. It was a deeply immoral, irresponsible decision. This is the shadow side of Yellow. It can so easily disavow any greater responsibility for its actions.
I don’t know enough about Turquoise to know what shadows it will have, but it will definitely have them. It is super important to recognize this and have compassion about the fact that we are all very imperfect. We all have blindspots (except me of course). Any movement inspired by Turquoise will need to welcome all voices, and to be especially careful to listen and respond to feedback. Especially when the feedback is hard to hear. Hopefully, Turquoise will learn from Yellow and not get caught in the trap of ego attachment, so that when Turquoise fucks up – and it will fuck up – the movement can self correct with compassion for all involved.