John: Yeah, well one of the models that we use and there's many developmental models, but it's spiral dynamics. The main guy that's pushing this in the world right now is Don Beck, and Clare Graves was the first guy that did it, and he died before the book was written. I think Don and Cohen took the notes and put it all together and put it out there in the world.
So you have different developmental levels in Christianity. A good friend of mine, Rollie Stanich, who is a devout Christian and also an integralist says that, "We see God through colored glasses." In spiral dynamics, all these levels are color coded, so at the very, very, very primitive…What's interesting about spiral dynamics, not only does it map our individual, moral development from infancy to as high as we get, it also maps the evolution of the human species. So you read history and you say, "Oh, that was very…" Rome was a very red, which is power related, I got mine, impulsive structure, and out of that, the higher levels developed. What happens is, and why these higher levels come online is that the current level or the prior level is just not sufficient to meet the needs of the times. The evolutionary tensions get so great that something new has to evolve.
So in Christianity, let's just start at the…there's three levels below that, but for the sake of brevity, we'll start at which we call blue in spiral dynamics, and that is the mythic, the fundamentalists level of moral development. The Bible is the truth, the King James Version is it in the Protestant version, every jot, tittle, and semicolon is the divine word of God, and that's all we need. There's often a looking back to the past, to the early church, the apostles and Jesus, how it was then, and that was seen as the model of perfection, and give me that old time religion, go back there and everything will be great.
Well obviously, that didn't work in a lot of ways for a lot of people because things happen like Bubonic plague, Black Death. Some thinkers and writers say that that was the catalyst that brought forth the next level which is orange, which is the beginning of…well it's the renaissance and the enlightenment, and science, and rationalism. Everybody was dying from this, it looked like it was the end of the world really. Depends who you read. It was a third or a half of the population of Europe, not to mention other countries were just dying in the streets because of the plague. All the prayers, and the censers, and the bones of saints, and all this stuff wasn't doing anything.
So you have different developmental levels in Christianity. A good friend of mine, Rollie Stanich, who is a devout Christian and also an integralist says that, "We see God through colored glasses." In spiral dynamics, all these levels are color coded, so at the very, very, very primitive…What's interesting about spiral dynamics, not only does it map our individual, moral development from infancy to as high as we get, it also maps the evolution of the human species. So you read history and you say, "Oh, that was very…" Rome was a very red, which is power related, I got mine, impulsive structure, and out of that, the higher levels developed. What happens is, and why these higher levels come online is that the current level or the prior level is just not sufficient to meet the needs of the times. The evolutionary tensions get so great that something new has to evolve.
So in Christianity, let's just start at the…there's three levels below that, but for the sake of brevity, we'll start at which we call blue in spiral dynamics, and that is the mythic, the fundamentalists level of moral development. The Bible is the truth, the King James Version is it in the Protestant version, every jot, tittle, and semicolon is the divine word of God, and that's all we need. There's often a looking back to the past, to the early church, the apostles and Jesus, how it was then, and that was seen as the model of perfection, and give me that old time religion, go back there and everything will be great.
Well obviously, that didn't work in a lot of ways for a lot of people because things happen like Bubonic plague, Black Death. Some thinkers and writers say that that was the catalyst that brought forth the next level which is orange, which is the beginning of…well it's the renaissance and the enlightenment, and science, and rationalism. Everybody was dying from this, it looked like it was the end of the world really. Depends who you read. It was a third or a half of the population of Europe, not to mention other countries were just dying in the streets because of the plague. All the prayers, and the censers, and the bones of saints, and all this stuff wasn't doing anything.
