| Color | Nickname | Social construct | Cause worth dying for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beige | FirstAwakening | Family and Kin | My family |
In the very beginning, our ancestors somehow had the first awakening. We stepped into a higher stage of consciousness. Imagine a caveman dad sitting on a rock with his son looking up at the full moon. The son says “Dad, what is that?”, And the dad says, “I don’t know. We call it the moon” And both feel the awe and wonder of the world. This is where it all started. We have been using fire and primitive tools for maybe a million years. We don’t know when we started to use language and when we first awoke to I, You, and Us. But awaken we did. We now had a higher vantage point of consciousness. Using imagination we could now travel into the future and the past.
This is my favorite stage. It is a reminder that we at our core are animals. Thinking animals, yes, but always and forever animals. Here we revel in the delights of our bodies and feel at one with our world. This is what I strive to return to when I go backpacking. We are meant to be part of nature not separate from it. There is a powerful spirituality in simply letting in the full beauty of the world. This is the stage with the best sex – primal and in the moment. This is where we go when we sit in front of a fire in the dark with friends and family and tell stories. This is the place we return to when we fully surrender to sweaty ecstatic dance.
The deep work of healing our traumas has to start here. In the body. The body keeps the score. Animals like deer, instinctively know that when something traumatic happens, like after getting chased by a mountain lion, they have to take a moment and shake it off. The body has a deep wisdom of its own. But what a miracle to find a conscious mind inside our bodies. What a delicious thing it is to look out at the world and be a part of it yet separate.
This stage is the satisfying itch people scratch when they watch a Zombie Apocalypse movie. A small band striving to survive in a hostile world where everyone is trying to kill them. This is the stage survivalists and preppers are living in – in the end you can’t trust anyone else to keep you and yours alive.
And just like in a Zombie Apocalypse series this survivalism eventually starts to pall. It is not enough to simply survive. We need something more. We crave meaning and purpose. And we start to look to others and begin to see the outlines of a bigger vision.