WHAT COLOR IS YOUR JESUS?

I recently listened to an interview with Bruce Sanguin and Rev. Kelly Isola in which Sanguin talked about how he’s applying the Spiral Dynamics model of human development to explain why Jesus means so many different things to so many different people. 

I have been a fan of Spiral Dynamics for quite some time.  Spiral Dynamics is a theory of human development introduced in the 1996 book by Don Beck and Chris Cowan which was based on the work of professor Clare W. Graves.  This theory explores the process of human emergence and how living systems evolve, grow and change.  Each new level transcends and includes all previous levels.

 The following diagram illustrates the different levels of development and their associated characteristics:

vMEMEs	COLOR	THEME	FOCUS	VALUE SYSTEMS
LEVEL 1 (A-N)	BEIGE	SurvivalSense	"ME"	Group bands together to stay alive
LEVEL 2 (B-O)	PURPLE	KinSpirits	"WE"	The sense of family-tribe with time honored
LEVEL 3 (C-P)	RED	PowerGods	"ME"	Power-action driven, egocentric
LEVEL 4 (D-Q)	BLUE	TruthForce	"WE"	Purposeful, absolutist, "one right way"
LEVEL 5 (E-R)	ORANGE	StriveDrive	"ME"	Entrepreneurial,materialistic, success-driven
LEVEL 6 (F-S)	GREEN	HumanBond	"WE"	Community,harmony, equality,relativistic
LEVEL 7 (G-T)	YELLOW	FlexFlow	"ME"	Natural processes, mutual realities; live for mutuality
LEVEL 8 (H-U)	TURQUOISE	GlobalView	"WE"	Harmony, holism, spirituality

In his book The Emerging Church, Sanguin applies these stages to how Christians see Christ.  Each stage's view has a positive and a negative aspect:

Purple--Christ is the Tribal Christ. "He makes the world go 'round when proper ritual is performed....He answers the prayers of those who are obedient." (p. 94).
The negative can be superstition: praying for football victories, parking spots, and miracle cures.

Red--The Warrior Christ. "Followers of the Red Christ go with him into battle on behalf of their tribe, nation, or belief system....In its most positive expression, following this Christ gives us the energy to "fight" for what we believe in--to take a stand."
But, "The Red Christ led the Christian armies in the crusades. He also led the U.S. army into Iraq." (p. 94)

Blue--The Traditional Christ, a Divine Scapegoat. "As part of the divine plan, God sends his only son to suffer and die on behalf of humanity, modelling sacrifice of self for a future reward....Christ's own sacrifice invites followers to led lives of self-sacrificial love, with the hope of eternal reward.
But...he can be used in a triumphalistic manner. He is the only truth, the only way, and the only life, and if you don't believe it you're going to hell." (p. 95 emphasis author's)

Orange--The Modern Demythologized Christ and Christ as CEO. "Christ is seen as the human one, a teacher of spiritual wisdom....In its positive expression, the Orange stage helps us transcend the literalism of previous levels....modernist values give us permission to think for ourselves.
But......In its negative expression, the Orange level leaves no room for Spirit." (p. 95)

Green--The Egalitarian-Postmodern Christ. "The postmodern Christ embraces multiple cultures and downplays the "Truth" of any particular religious system. The Green Christ draws the circle ever wider, so that it includes the outcasts, the left-behinds, and the marginalized.
But...In its negative expression, followers of the Green Christ are impatient and dismissive of all other value systems." (p. 96)

Yellow--The Integral/Ecological/Cosmic Christ. "The Yellow, integral Christ encompasses the universe and all cultures as an integrated ecology of systems....Followers of this Christ become fascinated by the world that the new sciences are discovering, and by how this world connects to the core metaphors and narratives of the Judeo-Christian tradition." (p. 96)
 But...elitist thinking and impatience with those perceived to be 'below' this stage.

Turquoise-The Mystical Christ. "At this level, the world is experienced--not merely conceptualized--as one. A follower of this Christ does not merely perceive the universe an integrated whole. She knows herself to be a form of the integrated whole, the part in whom the whole is manifest. The great diversity of life is also an expression of the Holy One. All of life is sacred revelation, for those with eyes to see." (p. 97, emphasis author)

(Thanks to John Shuck at Shuck & Jive, for this summary).

 I can see my own journey reflected in this spiral. Although it has not been a smooth journey (I'm more than sure that I've expressed both positive and negative traits at each stage!), I've traveled through magical thinking, dealt with anger problems and judgmentalism, escaped the bonds of fundamentalism, questioned everything I ever thought was true, and come to a place where I can embrace the Oneness and inclusiveness of the Divine.

I fully believe we need to have space for people to think for themselves and ask questions, but I've been puzzled lately by the attitudes of some (certainly not all!) skeptics that I've encountered on blogs and in comment threads.   So what was really illuminating for me was Sanguin's perspective on the unhealthy aspect of the Orange meme's worldview.  This seems to fit with what I'm encountering: a tendency to leave out spirit; a mindset that rejects the spiritual completely and reduces everything to the level of matter and empirical evidence.  Throwing the baby (spirit) out with the bathwater (mythic literalism), so to speak

In his book, Sanguin describes healthy Orange: "The orange value system embraces scientific rationalism...Within this system, Christ is seen as the human one, a teacher of spiritual wisdom.  The divinity of Christ is downplayed in favor of the flesh-and-blood human being...In the scientific era, we learned that Christ didn't actually walk on water, heal the blind, or raise from the dead.  These are rich metaphors, but not to be taken literally...In its positive expression, the orange stage helps us to transcend the literalism of the previous levels" (p. 95).

According to Ken Wilber in his book Integral Spirituality, both modern science and religion have confused the premodern mythic level with spirituality itself. He went on to say that religion itself needs to make room for and sanction the orange, or modernistic, interpretations of its religious messages.  Wilber recommended the works of John Shelby Spong, Marcus Borg, Stephen Carter, and F. Forrester Church as religious and spiritual writers who have emphasized the orange interpretation of Christianity without dispensing with spirituality (p. 178-179).

To disregard any level of development leads to rigidity and lack of growth.  Let us allow room for one another to retain a connection with the Divine at whatever developmental level we find ourselves.  May we encourage one another to grow and transcend each level in a healthy manner, and may each of us enter into the place where all of life is experienced as sacred.

PROPHECY AND THE GREAT FLOOD

The following article blew me away!  I found the perspective on Reality as viewed through the minds of primitive peoples to be fascinating.  The application for today is even more fascinating.  The article  is taken from The Doctrine of Oneness website.

"A Great Flood is coming...

“Just as it was in the days of Noah, so too it will be in the days of the coming of the Son of Man.”

Noah received Revelation to build a great Ark. He shared the message of the coming Great Flood with his people but the community heckled and rejected him.

Our Earth is 4.6 billion years old, and global temperature fluctuations have caused many changes in our environment. Floods are commonplace.

At the height of the last Ice Age 18,000 years ago the sea level was 394 feet (120 meters) lower that it is today. Ancient humankind, just like today… typically built their society near the sea. All of these outposts at the dawn of humanity where flooded as the ice melted. As the Glaciers receded, the sea rose 394 feet and destroyed everything in its path.

Thanks to science, we have a new Revelation.

We live in a time of great crisis, confronted the challenge of the ecological consequences of our own doing. The consensus is overwhelming: human activity is triggering environmental breakdown on a planetary scale.

Climate change is happening at an exponential rate, and threatens to cause the rise of sea level this century of at least 1 meter (3 feet). Not only sea levels will rise but the balance of life as we know is changing. We can already see it now: extreme earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, drought, flooding.

Koyaanisqatsi. Our Life is out of Balance.

Just like in the time of Noah, our naysayers heckle and reject the message. They are motivated by their own greed and self interests.

It is our collective responsibility to preserve humanity from this imminent disaster.

Future generations, and the other species that share the biosphere with us, have no voice to ask for our compassion, wisdom, and leadership. We must listen to their silence. We must be their voice, too, and act on their behalf.

Instead of an economy that emphasizes profit and requires perpetual growth to avoid collapse, we need to move together towards an economy that provides a satisfactory standard of living for everyone while allowing us to develop our full potential in harmony with the biosphere that sustains and nurtures all beings, including future generations."

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS?

A Letter From a 16 year old Oslo Survivor

Dear Anders Behring Breivik,

A lot of the friends I met at Utoya are dead and you are the perpetrator. You are the man who, by coincidence, didn’t kill me. I was lucky.

You might think that you have won. You might think that you have ruined something for the Labour Party and for people around the world who stand for a multicultural society by killing my friends and fellow party members.

Know that you have failed.

You haven’t only made the world stand together, you have set our souls on fire and should know we’ve never stood together as we do now. You talk about yourself as a hero, a knight. You are no hero. But you have created heroes. On Utoya that warm day in July, you created some of the greatest heroes the world has seen, you unified people from all over the world. Black and white, man and woman, red and blue, Christians and Muslims.

You made your victims martyrs, immortals, and you have shown the world that when one person can show as much hatred as you have done, imagine how much love we can show when we stand together? People who I thought hated me have given me hugs on the street, people I haven’t been in contact with for years have written 300 to 400 words about how much it means to them that I survived. What can you say about that? Have you broken anything? You have united us.

You have killed my friends, but you haven’t killed our cause, our opinions, our right to express ourselves. Muslim women got hugs of sympathy from random Norwegian women on the street and your goal was to protect Europe from Islam? Your actions worked against its purpose.

You deserve no thanks; your plan failed. A lot of people are angry, you are the most hated person in Norway. I am not angry. I do not fear you. You can’t touch us, we are greater than you. We do not answer evil with evil, as you wanted it. We fight evil with good. And we win.

Ivar Benjamin Østebø, aged 16.

Thanks to Humanity's Team for this blog post.

HOW CAN WE KNOW WHAT'S TRUE?

It's been a long time since I posted.  I've been busy thinking about how we can possibly  know what is true and what is not.  And I'm stumped.  One scholar says this, another seemingly equally valid scholar disagrees.  One scientific study may demonstrate one thing, but if a person does further reading, research can usually be found that contradicts the results of the first study...Which one is true?  And how can I, a mere common person without formal scholarly or scientific training, hope to ascertain what is a reliable source among many which seem valid?

The same holds true in Christianity.  There's been a search for the historical Jesus, and many respected scholars have widely differing viewpoints.  Which is true?  There is even a whole field of study (epistemology) that studies how we know what we know, and they don't even seem to know how we can know what we know...

People who study consciousness and the brain maintain that we don't actually perceive the world around us as it really is.  They say, for example, that there is no actual color green, but that light (which has no color) is filtered by our eyes in a certain way that we perceive (with the limited tools at our disposal) as the color green.

Dr. David Eagleman "is a neuroscientist and a New York Times bestselling author. He directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action and the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law at Baylor College of Medicine. He is best known for his work on time perception, synesthesia, and neurolaw."  I recently listened to a  Brain Science Podcast interview with Dr. Eagleman which focused on his most recent book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. (As much as I can ascertain, both Dr. Eagleman and Brain Science Podcast are reputable sources :-). Dr. Eagleman shared the following information:

"In the book I spend a lot of time just sort of deconstructing reality piece by piece, and showing that, as we want to go on this journey of exploring what the heck we’re made out of, the first thing to do is to recognize that what you’re seeing out there is not actually reality. You’re not sort of opening your eyes, and voila, there’s the world. Instead, your brain constructs the world. Your brain is trapped in darkness inside of your skull,  and all it ever sees are electrical and chemical signals. So all the colors you see, and so on, that doesn’t really exist; that’s an interpretation by your brain.

"Just take as a quick example the fact that your eyes are always moving around in these rapid darting movements; and if you did that with a handheld video camera, it would look like a drunk person holding it, and the world would look very shaky. But our world doesn’t look very shaky, because all we’re actually doing is seeing an internal model of the world; we’re not seeing what’s out there, we’re seeing just our internal model of it. And that’s why, when you move your eyes around, all you’re doing is updating that model.  And for that matter, when you blink your eyes and there are 80 milliseconds of blackness there, you don’t notice that, either. Because it’s not actually about what’s coming in the eyes; it’s about your internal construction….

 "…[There’s also what’s called the ‘illusion of truth’  - where people think something’s true just because they have heard it before].  You give people statements to rate the truth value of, and then you bring them back a while later and you give them more statements to say whether they’re true or false, and so on. But it turns out that if you repeat some of the statements from the first time to the second time, just because the people have heard them before, whether or not it’s true and whether or not they even marked it as false last time, because they’re hearing it again—unconsciously they know they’ve heard it before—they’re more likely to rate it as true now.

Dr. Eagleman confirms some other authors I have read on our perceptions of reality. I have actually noticed this "illusion of truth" in myself - the tendency to think I know about a subject because I've done some reading about it previously.  (I'm glad to know that's normal - I think!)  But I guess the questions I'm really trying to answer are:  What is the nature of Reality? How can I know what's true?  How can I tell what's real?  And the answer, as near as I can tell, is that we really don't know.  Much of the time, things may not be as they appear to us with the limited tools of perception that we are equipped with.  So how can I, an untrained person, know what's true, or even which source is reliable? Anybody out there have any advice?

I COULD BE WRONG

Lately, I’ve been pondering the direction of the spiritual path.  My own journey is taking me from the fundamental toward the liberal.  And from what I read on the internet, many others seem to be on this same trajectory.  But I’ve encountered a few who seem to be traveling in the opposite direction.  In fact, “Religious fundamentalism has risen to worldwide prominence since the 1970s” (Annual Review), and "in March 2009, TIME magazine ranked the new Calvinist movement as one of the '10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now.'"  What to make of these, and other, movements of the Spirit in apparently opposite directions?

When I first began to see from a different perspective, I thought I had been misled.  I had believed lies, I thought, but was now seeing the truth.  Those fundamental beliefs I had previously held were wrong, but now I was on the right track.  Truthfully, the only thing that really happened was I moved into a new place of being judgmental!  Yes, I admitted I’d been wrong.  But, I reasoned, it wasn’t my fault – it was all those lies I’d been taught! NOW, though, I was following the Spirit, and I was RIGHT.  Truth with a capital “T” once again! Meanwhile, of course, some of a more liberal bent across the country and throughout the world had been discovering new-found truth in conservative ideas…

Gradually (and thankfully!), I moved into an understanding of the stages of spiritual growth and that we’re not necessarily right or wrong, but at different places along the path.  From that perspective, I’d like to present a possible explanation for these movements of the Spirit in seemingly opposite directions. 

Growth cannot take place without change, and change is a prerequisite for spiritual growth as well. So, whatever camp we’ve been in, whatever our beliefs have been, there has to be a willingness to change our previous positions before we can progress!  So (and this is a biggie!) we must admit that we’re wrong!  I think this is the toughest thing ever to ask our egos to do - admit we've been wrong, leave that ground of certainty, and strike out into unknown territory.

After error is finally seen and admitted, the next response is usually (like I did) to stake out a new “right” stand, and the process must begin all over again.  It’s very painful to admit error, and I believe that’s one among many of the reasons that the transition between stages can be a excruciating time on the spiritual journey – so much so that they’ve sometimes been termed “dark nights of the soul.”   These are “dark nights” because they’re a period of leaving behind what we’ve known and been sure of to enter into uncertainty (or unknowing, as the author of the Cloud of Unknowing put it).  Hopefully, we emerge from this process with a new humility, a fresh realization that we must hold our truths loosely, and a new-found ability to embrace mystery.

At this point it would seem to me that the greatest asset on the spiritual path is humility – the ability to realize I could be wrong.  Then again…I COULD BE WRONG!

Have you ever discovered that you had been wrong?  Did it lead to growth?

SCIENCE AND SPIRITUALITY

I don't have a scientific background, but I am very much interested in the topics of science and spirituality.  I recently watched a program on Global Spirit TV (lots of good programs there, by the way) in which Peter Russell was interviewed on the topic of exploring consciousness.  Intrigued, I followed up by visiting his website (which can be found here) where I found a wealth of informative material.  Today I'd like to share the following video from his website titled "Science and Spirituality." While I don't even begin to have a working knowledge of the topic, I do find it facisinating.  And I believe that science and spirituality are not in opposition, but that both can give us glimpses of how to better relate to Reality.

Fast forward to minute 2:45 if you want to skip the intro.







Do science and spirituality oppose one another? What are your thoughts?

LOVE YOUR ENEMIES

"How do you kill your enemy in a way that puts a stop to violence rather than escalates it?

"One of us is gone, one apparently horrific, terrible, vicious one of us...is gone...I'm regretful for the rest of us who are now left thinking that this is a cause for celebration.  It is not.  It is a cause for sorrow at our continued inablility to realize that there is no such thing as us and them; that whatever we do to cause harm to one will harm us all.

"When we hate, we cause hate.  When we think we have won by vanquishing our enemy, we have lost.  In killing Osama bin Laden, 'they' lose because one of their leaders is gone.  But we lose too, because we have deepened the causes and conditions that lead to more hatred and its consequences."

"...when you do not produce another force of hatred, the opposing forece collapses."  - Chogyam Trungpa

Excerpted from: "Osama bin Laden is Dead One Buddhist's Response" by Susan Piver.  Read the entire post here.