This post began as a response to comments made on the above image I posted which depicts the Spiral Dynamics model with the words: Burn your old ways of thinking. I had initially posted the image many years ago to my social media profile and decided to bring it back again today. In my opinion the tagline has become more relevant now in light of the planetary and societal collapse that only seems to accelerate with every passing day.
Meanwhile our community of practitioners continues to busy itself with the philosophical and intellectual underpinning of what our gurus taught us from the comfort of their air-conditioned, flood-and-fire-resistant bygone era called the Holocene ignoring any and all sense of urgency that defines our new reality. Most of the comments ask what happened to “transcend and include”? My question back to our community is “What if our sense of transcendence is way off?” Most of us, beginning with Wilber practice what I call “Transcend and ignore.” We have become an intolerant, elitist bunch with exclusionary behavior that can’t give a damn about inclusion unless those seeking it buy our seminars, come to our conferences, or speak our cultist language. 99.99% of the world has no clue as to what we do or how to use what we teach to affect real change.
Nowhere is this behavior of exclusion and ignorance more apparent than at the very top when Wilber in a reluctant way eulogized Beck a few months ago in a four-line statement, where he twice repeated “let’s not forget that his contribution was only to a values line”. The bruised and fragile ego of a far smaller man who couldn’t transcend the Red stage of being the Wyatt Earp of consciousness going all the way back to 2006. Where’s the transcendence, where’s the inclusion? Beck wasn’t much better in transcending and including much of what fell outside his worldview as well. This might sound like a harsh criticism for those who we admire, but their pre-occupation with their models that “explained everything”, left out that which requires a far greater degree of explaining; how to train our minds and our species to become an immutable part of nature again, and be in awe of her superior intelligence.
Our challenge TODAY is this: Can we transcend our teachers, add our own take on what they taught us, learn new existential models that factor in our new reality in order to help humanity NOW. Neither Wilber nor Beck spoke about how our models behave in the Anthropocene. Hint: We’re at the mercy of Mother Nature and her evolutionary process happens unconsciously and with utter moral indifference towards all species including the one that has been the most destructive, us. This reality will never fit on the Spiral or the AQAL models. Homo sapiens will become extinct as a function of Mother Nature adapting to a far greater system in collapse and as an automatic, unconscious way for her to reach balance. No Transcendence. No Inclusion. Sorry.
The idea for the word “burn” first came to me from Eastern philosophy. Rumi’s poem “I want burning” has more wisdom in it than anything Beck and Wilber ever wrote. It has everything to do with learning to die in order to live, an Eastern concept that is the polar opposite of what Western Civilization stands for. Are we ever going to start thinking for ourselves, or be in awe of the greater forces of existence, the mystery of life itself beyond any model the brightest human minds can create? Or will we always reduce existential challenges to whether we can fit them into our own unique understanding of our elitist models?
We are in an existential crisis and if we had “transcended and included” we wouldn’t be here in the middle of the Sixth Extinction. The dominant narrative that has defined who we are for the last 500 years is in collapse Will we ever create our own narrative that gives humanity a chance at surviving that collapse or will we remain wanna be armchair philosophers wondering if the next flood or fire will spare us because we’re special. Like Mother Nature I have an utter moral indifference about how special we are.
Elza Maalouf, Said Dawlabani and Don E. Beck presenting findings from our work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the UN Values Caucus in 2007
Published on Medium June 12, 2022
On Tuesday May 24th 2022, my friend and colleague Dr. Don Edward Beck passed away at age 85. It is impossible to fully state the influence he has had on the world at large, and on my life and on that of my partner and soulmate Elza Maalouf. Dr. Beck was our pinultimate guide on a human journey of mythical proportions. He appeared in our lives twenty years ago at a time when Elza and I had emptied ourselves from our respective pasts and were waiting for whatever the Universe had in store for us. I had exited the Orange stage of development after a succesful career in real estate and a bitter divorce from my first wife. I was questioning everything about the so-called American Dream and all its superfluous extensions. Elza who had been on a spiritual path for years, was also quetioning the nature of her spiritual practices that left so many unanswered questions in her life.
Don and his Spiral Dynamics model were the wrecking ball that shook our peaceful lives, our linear understanding of purpose and the nature of existence. It thrusted us both into a transcedant cause, a never ending quest that continues to burn brightly till this day. There are two websites that chronicle our work with Don Beck, The MEMEnomics Group which is dedicated to understanding the evolutionary aspects of economics, and the Center for Human Emrgence Middle East which is dedicated to understanding the evolutionary aspects of geopolitics and its applications in the Middle East. Both websites are dedicated to Don’s memory for whithout him, none of this work would have been possible for us and for thousands like us around the world.
Don Beck and Elza Maalouf at the Aqsa Mosque at the begining of our work in 2004
Our relationship with Don and his late wife Pat became a personal one when Pat told Elza in 2004 that the work we were doing together on the Israeli-Palestinian issue had given his life new purpose. The quote below is from the dedication page of my 2021 book The Light of Ishtar, which is a memoir about my extraordinary journey with Elza, which would not have been possible without Don’s presence in our lives.
“To those who dispel the darkness with their light, to my guru and teacher Kirpal Singh, who taught me to live the life of soul, and to my friend and mentor, Dr. Don Edward Beck, who taught me how to fight like hell for a better humanity”
It is this presence of spirit and an unwavering commitment passed down to Don from his predecessor, Clare Graves which Don, in turn passed down to us to “do the work the world needs done” that represent my truth which will remain long after the messeger had gone.
In his last two years of life, Don struggled with health challenges, both physically and mentally. During the early stage of the pandemic, I had a rare opprtunity to speak to him, moments that I captured in the Epilogue of my book that give the reader a rare look at his genius. According to his family, that conversation was one of the last profound discourses he had before his death.
Below is an edited version from that last conversation from the book:
During that time of confinement, I had a rare lucid conversation with Dr. Beck. I wanted to tap into his reservoir of knowledge to see if I had missed anything in my writings about the virus. We discussed its meaning and the limitations of our models. He reminded me of one of our graphics that I have long forgotten. It depicts a top view of the spiral, which had an undifferentiated black mass and a simple coil at its center.
The Evolutionary Prime Directive. Copyright 2003 by Dr. Don E. Beck. Used by permission from Dr. Beck.
He had labeled it “The Evolutionary Prime Directive” specifically to capture the unacknowledged complexity of the evolutionary process that existed before humans differentiated themselves from it and evolved into the beige stage, the first level of existence in our model.
At the beige stage, which is still characteristic of some third-world societies today, people are preoccupied with sheer survival and the immediate gratification of needs with only minimal control over their surroundings. Dr. Beck and I speculated about how quickly the virus can bring us back to this beige level if we continue to ignore the warnings coming to us from our environment as well as from manmade threats. Together, we revisited findings of the research of CHEs from around the world that indicate humanity is still struggling to emerge from every level in the first tier due to the pervasive effects of the values of the Industrial Age―whether it’s our preoccupation with economic prosperity at the cost of our planetary ecosystems, our ongoing issues with globalization and world security, or the absence of a coordinated and sustainable global response to climate change.
Revisiting the research put our vulnerabilities in greater perspective. It showed that even the most advanced cultures in our model―Northern European countries―are struggling to exit the Green humanitarian level due to the high cost of social programs. China is attempting to enter the Orange level out of normal evolutionary sequence as it ignores human-rights abuses that place its 1.4 billion citizens at the mercy of leadership that is at the Red level. The United States and the United Kingdom seem similar in their inability to extract themselves from the corrosive values of the Orange level of financial capitalism. Findings also pointed to the struggles on the lowest levels of the spiral, which are the most concerning since they affect the least developed parts of the world: issues such as the unaddressed droughts that are keeping much of Africa and parts of the Middle East and South America at the beige and purple levels.
After that sobering reacquaintance with reality, Dr. Beck reminded me of a simple metaphor we had used at training events that depicted the mechanics of evolutionary change. It was a demonstration done on staircases with trainees in which each step represented an evolutionary stage or level of existence on the spiral. The point was that when we want to climb to the next evolutionary stage with both feet, to do it successfully we must bend our knees. The climb is made more difficult if the person or culture making it has been in an arrested or closed psychosocial state of existence.
Dr. Beck and I speculated that if the coronavirus were the existential threat that would move humanity to a higher level of consciousness, then all six value systems that humanity had experienced to this point in its history were simultaneously bending their knees with a great degree of difficulty and against the collective will to accomplish this monumental task. The death toll, the economic devastation, and the global chaos ensuing from the coronavirus were nothing more than the byproduct of a subsistent humanity being forced to bend its knees out of the necessity to survive.
That conversation sent me on a search for some of Clare Graves’s original research. It reminded me of his “six-upon-six”hypothesis and of how each of the six levels of human development represent one tier of values, or one flight of stairs. Furthermore, the hypothesis says that as we move up the developmental staircase to the next tier―or the next six levels―we experience a monumental upshift in human behavior from the preceding tier.[i] The first tier, or the first flight of stairs, contains the first six value systems, and they all identify with the values of subsistence that still define most of human behavior today. The second tier, or the second flight of stairs, Graves often referred to as the values of magnificence, what Spiral Dynamics practitioners refer to as the emerging values of humanity. He had also uncovered that the theme of each value system repeats as we enter each new tier, but at an exponentially higher level of psychosocial development. So, while the beige theme, comprising the first value system in the first tier, deals with the survival of the individual, the same beige theme of the seventh value system, which is the first level in the second tier―or the first step on the second flight of stairs―remains that of survival, but now as the survival of all life on the planet. To understand fully what is needed to save our planet, our psychosocial capacities need to recalibrate at an exponentially higher level from where the leading edge of evolution is today―somewhere between the fifth and sixth levels of the first tier.
In theory, unless all six value systems in the first tier remain in an open psychosocial state―meaning that they openly assimilate higher-level values―then the transition into the second tier will be mired with difficulty and unpredictability, subject to many wildcards that could destabilize life on Earth. Dr. Beck and I speculated that, due to humanity’s arrested state in the first tier, wildcards seem to be appearing in increasing intensity, the virus being the most intense so far. The result is a humanity spread on an entire first flight of stairs painfully bending its knees.
Also, Dr. Beck reminded me of the danger that Dr. Graves saw on the horizon if we were to continue to ignore the damage we’re causing to our planetary ecosystems. Dr. Graves had speculated that if humanity fails consciously to take the necessary momentous leap into the second tier of values, Mother Nature will do it for us at the cost of the earth’s population being cut by as much as half. Dr. Beck and I theorized that, due to humanity’s failure to think and act from the more inclusive values of the second tier, where we, individually and collectively, uphold the wholeness of existence over material possessions, our ascendence to them will come to us as a painful and unexpected fate. Mother Nature will do it for us as a way for her to regenerate, evolve, and adapt to the damage we have caused.
That conversation was the last meaningful interaction I had with the man who has always given me a glimpse of the simplicity beyond complexity, which remains the rarified realm where exceptional genius dwells. Rest In Peace my friend knowing that the world is in a better place because of your time in it.
Don Beck – or ‘Dr Don E Beck’ or ‘Dr Don Edward Beck’ as he frequently preferred to style himself – passed on Tuesday 24 May. He had been relatively inactive for at least a year or so prior to his death.
After my father, he was almost certainly the man who has influenced me most in my life. Yet I wasn’t close to him nor a confidante to any significant degree. I wouldn’t have called him a friend, more a professional acquaintance. However, his influence on my life has been truly profound.
In my tribute to his one-time business partner Chris Cowan – see Fare Thee Well, Christopher Cowan – who died in 2015, I recalled my first meetings with Don & Chris and how their Spiral Dynamics model transformed my life. It not only lead to resolutions of major issues in my own life but reignited and refuelled (with accelerant!) my interest in Psychology and the behavioural sciences. From there I took a deep dive into Psychology and Sociology, becoming an A-Level teacher in both disciplines. However, my explorations of the behavioural sciences were always underpinned by the first thing Don said that caught my attention at the first workshop of his & Chris’ that I attended in 1998. “You don’t have to throw away any of your favourite theories and approaches,” he said. “You can keep all your ‘isms’. They all fit along the spine of the Spiral.”
Don was not just the initial catalyst for all this but he functioned off and on as a sort-of mentor and allowed me to republish several of his writings on this site. He supported me practically too. In 2002, when I was struggling financially, he sent me $1000 to help keep the website afloat.
After the Beck-Cowan split Following the acrimonious split between Don and Chris in 1999, I endeavoured to keep in contact with and learn from both men. However, I never saw Chris in person again, our communications gradually diminishing until they effectively ceased after 2009.
Don, however, was heavily involved in the HemsMESH project (1999-2001), supervising it remotely and coming over from the US on several occasions to contribute directly. On one of those occasions, a public meeting with locals, Don debuted a ‘truth meter’ – a supposed electronic true-or-false voting system that could tell whether people were expressing their real views. He worked the PURPLE and RED vMEMES in the room like a magician delighting children with his ridiculous ‘meter’ – leaving Christopher ‘Cookie’ Cooke to put forward themes in a more cerebral manner for the BLUE, ORANGE and GREEN present. At another HemsMESH meeting, Don went totally off-track and started talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Off-topic he might have been but his exposition on why the PURPLE/BLUE vMEME harmonic led Palestinian kids to throw rocks at Israeli tamks, with the real risk to life of the soldiers firing back, left me sheerly marvelling. I felt as though my jaw was down on the floor!
While he may have been able to expound at length and in real depth from the 2nd Tier, from what I knew of him I felt he was often personally more comfortable thinking and interacting in PURPLE and RED. Loyalty was very important to him and I suspect he struggled with dissent from his perceptions. I well remember him threatening to throw me of the Spiral Dynamics integral list-serve when I challenged his assertion that George W Bush might be operating from YELLOW in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war. The late Tom Christensen told me in 2015, just before the publication of his Developmental Innovation compendiums, that Don had refused him permission to use the term ‘Spiral Dyamics integral’ in the title because he thought Tom was trying to take over leadership of the ‘constellation’, as Don liked to call practitioners who had trained with him. How true that was I can’t say, but certainly Tom gave the impression Don thought Tom was being disloyal to him.
Don often talked about the difficulties of being an introvert in an extravert’s world. I, too, am an introvert. So when we met again in 2009 at his one-day London workshop, ‘Spiral Dynamics in Action: Dancing the Integral Vision’, we of course hugged, delighted to see each other again after so many years. And then what? We sat side by side at lunch, barely talking, 2 introverts with limited social skills caught up in our own individual thoughts!
After the spurt of activity later in that year which produced the short-lived Centre of Human Emergence UK, I didn’t see Don again for close on 9 years. However, we remained in sporadic contact. He contributed artifacts and recollections to my chronicling of his work in South Africa and his role in the dismantling of Apartheid; and there was (very briefly!) talk of me accompanying him on a trip to a peace conference in Jerusalem. There was even idle talk of me writing his biography.
I last saw Don in May 2018 at Said E Dawlabani’sSpiral Dynamics Summit on the Future in Texas. At 82 years old, a survivor of heart surgery a few years before and with his wife Pat terminally ill with cancer, he seemed frail and, at times, distracted. But he managed to get up on to the speaker’s platform and spoke as powerfully as when I had first heard him 20 years before. Like the disciple of a guru, I was thrilled to bits when he congratulated me on my presentation.
Don with the new ‘Spiral Dynamics in Action’ book (Photo courtesy Said E Dawlabani)
Don Beck’s Legacy There are others who know Don’s history much better than I do and are far more qualified to evaluate his legacy…but here are some thoughts.
His work in South Africa is arguably his crowning achievement and yet you won’t find much, if any, mention of him in any of the Nelson Mandela biographies or other books on the early 1990s transition. Don is not even indexed on the Nelson Mandela Foundation web site – though, after much searching, I did find an article in which he is discussed. Yet he was commended by both Mandela and political rival Mangosutu Buthulezi; and honoured by a joint resolution of both houses of the Texas Congress for his work in South Africa. Could it be that Don simply was not good at raising his own profile?
It could be argued that Beck & Cowan were poor custodians of Graves’ legacy in that they largely failed to get academic recogntion of the criticality of Graves’ work to understanding human nature. However, both men would have argued that they were more concerned with making a difference in the ‘real world’ with practical applications of Graves’ concepts. Don, though, did succeed in getting German researcher Marc Lucas to include Gravesian materials in his groundbreaking fMRI studies into neural activities when making values-based decisions. (Lucas’ work is discussed in A Biological Basis for vMEMES…?)
Though he was later to dissent from the way Ken Wilber tried to develop Spiral Dynamics in a less scientific and more ‘spiritual’ direction, Don’s post-Cowan partnership with Wilber introduced Graves’ work to a whole new audience of those who subscribed to Wilber’s Integral Theory concepts. Hence, Spiral Dynamics integral. Don also took Wilber’s All Quadrants/All Levels model and ‘spiralised’ it into the powerful analytical tool 4Q/8L.
Don’s passing feels like the end of something. There are plenty of people using Graves/Spiral Dynamics who have been trained by or worked with Don who will keep those concepts alive. As well as those already mentioned, key figures include Jim Lockard in France, Jon Freeman in the UK and Peter Merry and Auke Van Nimwegen in Holland. Then there are those who have trained with Chris Cowan and still subscribe to his widow Natasha Todorovic’s very management consultancy-oriented take on Spiral Dynamics. But Don somehow gave his constellation hope, vision and a sense of unity which seems to have faded a little over the past year or so. Hopefully some of those key figures mentioned will emerge into leadership to take Don’s vision forward.
For me, while I’ve had my criticisms of him and we’ve certainly not seen eye-to-eye at times, my memories of him and the differences he made to my life are precious and indelible.
