Color-coded confusion

One little pet peeve I have with the Integral community is the misuse of spiral dynamics stages based on the color scheme.  The problem is that certain colors already have a cultural significance for us, and I've seen several people, including even Ken himself, confuse the cultural... Read More

Fundamentalism: A critique of the standard SD view

I think most of us can agree that religious fundamentalism is one of the biggest problems in the world today.  In spiral dynamics, we tend to group it all under a single stage, which we refer to as either Blue or Amber(depending on whether you're using... Read More

Integral people, or Integral tendencies?

One common tendency in the Integral world is to describe people as being at Orange, Green, Teal, Turquoise, etc.  However, as Chris Cowan points out, Clare Graves never intended for his model to be used in such a simplistic, typological manner.  The spiral is not about... Read More

Has the American Right gone down a stage?

 Generally, the stage we most associate with conservatism is Blue:  law and order, God and country, the American way, etc.  But when I look at the Tea Party movement, I don't see much of the hard-nosed, principled orderliness that one would associate with Blue.... Read More

Integral flattery

One thing Ken Wilber says a lot that always kind of got under my skin is that the test for integral consciousness is if you're interested in integral.  This sounds more like a marketing ploy than an actual psychological insight.  Isn't just flattering the ego of whoever's... Read More

Meditation for development?

In this dialogue, Ken seems to hammer on about the developmental potential of meditation.  I'm certainly not going to argue against that, but it seems to me like he's absolutizing the upper-left quadrant while ignoring the role that the other three quadrants have in... Read More

Can stages become states?

In differentiating states and stages, Ken Wilber has talked about how you can't be at Blue and have a peak experience of Turquoise.  True enough, but what about those stages we have already gone through?  If we accept that stages are modes of thought, could it not be said that... Read More

Stage/Type problems

I've noticed that one problem in trying to apply spiral dynamics to the real world is that there's a temptation to think of different stages as personality traits.  Red is angry and out of control, Blue is conservative and dogmatic, Orange is rational and intellectual, etc. ... Read More