Tag Archives: Bruce Lipton

Critiquing Harari’s Latest: A Developmental Perspective on Our Future

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Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens captivated millions, and his 10th-anniversary edition, featuring The End of Homo Sapiens and new Afternotes, prompts critical reflection. Having been invited by a colleague to weigh in on these latest insights, this analysis expands upon my initial feedback, contending that Harari’s vision for humanity’s future, while provocative, often overlooks crucial dimensions of human psychological development.

Harari’s assertion that humanity has reached its biological limits, necessitating a new species, is sharply challenged by developmental psychology. Experts like Clare W. Graves, whose research underpins much of my own work, illustrate that Homo Sapiens has remained biologically consistent for 200,000-300,000 years. During this vast period, Graves identifies eight stages of psychological evolution, suggesting that while our biological form endures, our psychological potential remains boundless. Far from ending, humanity, psychologically speaking, is merely emerging from its infancy, continuously activating latent brain capacity as we ascend to higher developmental stages.

Regarding natural selection versus intelligent design, Harari posits Darwinian evolution as the zenith of humanity’s journey. Yet, he appears to bypass compelling research from evolutionary biologists such as Bruce Lipton and David Sloan Wilson, who present cooperation, not competition, as the primary driver of evolution. Harari argues that our future lies in scientific intelligent design—not divinely ordained, but engineered through biological, cyborg, and inorganic means.

However, his examples for biological/genetic advancement often draw from simpler organisms, seemingly neglecting the complex interplay of environment and mind when applied to humans. Harari attributes our scientific stagnation to species limitations, yet this perspective might instead reflect the confines of a specific developmental stage of the mind—what I identify as stage 5, steeped in Newtonian science. The advanced scientific paradigms he envisions actually correspond to humanity’s stage 7 development, not a new species entirely.

Similarly, bionic intelligence, while beneficial as a supplement (e.g., prosthetics, hearing aids), receives a narrower interpretation. Harari’s characterization of computers and cellphones as bionic extensions overlooks their profound psychosocial impact, contributing to isolation, tribalization, and institutional fragmentation. Moreover, the concept of a “bionic collective brain” isn’t novel; philosophers like de Chardin (noosphere) and scientists like Howard Bloom (global brain) have long explored collective intelligence, often accessible through meditation, altered states, or expanded consciousness. These deeper forms of intelligence, within my developmental model, belong to stage 8, again pointing to an evolution of *Homo Sapiens*, not its replacement.

His third category, inorganic intelligence, is a focal point of my own critique, detailed in Second Sapiens. The notion of continuously learning machines, or AI, inherently carries significant risks. A minor data misinterpretation, seemingly innocuous in an AI’s first iteration, could amplify exponentially over thousands of cycles, leading to dangerous deviations without crucial human oversight and ethical checks. Fundamentally, AI is restricted to mining existing information. When tackling existential threats like climate change, where much of the underlying science is nascent, human-led research and hypothesis formulation remain indispensable. AI cannot “mine the future” or accurately predict it when the necessary foundational science for its programming and training is still being established.

While I concur with Harari’s observations on technological singularity and its potential to surpass current human states, I diverge on the implications. Such advancements, from a developmental standpoint, need not signify the end of our species but rather an accelerant to higher stages of psychosocial existence. The caveat, however, is that this technologically-driven evolution, moving at speeds far outstripping collective human and cultural learning, risks creating profoundly imbalanced higher states, disrupting the 200,000-year patterns of human emergence.

Harari’s Afterword on Frankenstein’s Prophecy reveals similar blind spots, portraying the scientific quest as an unstoppable force, seemingly absolved of responsibility for its discoveries. This stance, which assumes science is inherently benign, overlooks the potential for unchecked scientific pursuits—often fueled by modern technology—to inflict immense damage. My own work traces the ecological crisis to this very scientific mindset, one that has consistently ignored the unforeseen consequences lying beyond its immediate conscious awareness.

In The Animal that Became God, Harari again demonstrates a lack of awareness regarding developmental stages. He frames “Homo Sapiens as God” as the pinnacle of our journey, a representation of the 5th stage of mental development—driven by objective analysis and scientific discovery, placing humanity atop the evolutionary ladder. His justification for needing a new species to “save us” stems from this constrained view. Physics, however, progresses beyond Newtonian models (stage 5) to relativity and quantum theory (stage 6), then to systems thinking and complex adaptive systems (stage 7), culminating in complex adaptive systems of life (stage 8). These are all evolutions *within* Homo Sapiens, propelled by higher purpose and consciousness, transcending the reductive “Newtonian god” that Harari implicitly presents as humanity’s ultimate state.

Harari’s concluding remarks in the tenth edition, acknowledging global challenges since Sapiens’ 2014 publication, parallel the opening of my own book, Second Sapiens. Both works identify a systemic failure among leaders to address existential planetary issues. However, where Harari’s Homo Deus (2017) envisions a transition to a data-centric society, placing ultimate power in AI—a manifestation of the 5th stage’s scientific/algorithmic mind—I see information run amok. Driven by profit, this path risks derailing human progress as much as it promises advancement.

Ultimately, Harari’s historical and species contextualization often lacks an informed perspective on the psychosocial and spiritual dimensions of human existence. He tends to conflate organized religion with our inherent spiritual nature, thereby dismissing a foundational aspect of what it means to be human. He exemplifies a “human exceptionalism” paradigm that positions stage 5 Sapiens as the evolutionary apex, precluding the recognition of higher psycho-socio-spiritual expressions. His scientific arguments, advocating for a data-centric god over human-centric life, lack the nuanced understanding derived from extensive studies of the human mind and ongoing brain research.

Harari appears to relegate consciousness and evolutionary thought to laboratory study or machine replication. While he excels as a synthesizer of history, philosophy, religion, and science, his approach to these fields, as integral philosopher Ken Wilber notes, reflects the “narrow sciences” of fifth-stage human development. The world now demands “sciences of higher order,” transcending the material and reductive frameworks of the past five centuries. My hope is that Harari, with sufficient faith in our species, will explore these higher stages of Sapiens’ development in his future writings.

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What Can Evolution and Spiral Dynamics Tell us About the Coronavirus?

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By Said E. Dawlabani

Published by Medium on March 29, 2020

The spread of COVID-19 has rendered many human development models inadequate if not entirely obsolete, and the models I’ve been using for the last two decades have not been spared. I’m one of several practitioners of Spiral Dynamics and Spiral Dynamics Integral, and today, we are all playing Monday morning quarterback trying to pinpoint exactly what went wrong on the developmental spiral. Although much of our analysis is true, it is also partial. The two theoretical frameworks Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory have been known for decades as “the theories that explain everything”, but today they seem to fall short on providing a sufficient answer to the only question the world is asking: How do we explain the audacity of the Coronavirus and how do we stop it.

Deliberations in our communities have varied along the entire spectrum of values on the Spiral and across all quadrants, states and stages of the Integral model. Philosophical and spiritual discussions seem to be very popular, as one expects when catastrophic systems failure takes place. The archetypal nature of the devil, the shadow and the unconscious played central roles in opening minds to larger possibilities and comforted some frayed nerves. These types of discussions remind us of the frailty of human existence and our persistent failure to understand ourselves at the molecular, cosmic and Holonic levels of being.

This virus has done the impossible; it has heightened the righteousness of every value system that has existed since the dawn of humanity. Blame is being assigned at every level of development. We project our fears and blame the archaic First and Second levels of human and cultural development in China. We blame its spread on the absence of effective leadership in countries with egocentric leaders who are in the Third level of development. We get angry at the continued erosion of governmental powers and the absence of emergency medical planning in the Fourth level of development. People in the politically correct Sixth level shame us all for not seeing this as a collective problem for all of humanity to deal with. But, very little of our attention has turned towards those who bare much of the responsibility in getting us here. Those are the so-called Masters of the Universe, the blind believers in Neoliberal economics, the bankers and the power brokers who run a globally ravenous economy driven by a narrow and dangerous view of the Fifth level of cultural and human development. In short, these are the world leaders who minimize the dangers of pandemic diseases and other existential threats through their reductionist views on everything other than the power of money.

What I have described in the paragraph above are the values of a subsistent humanity that is limited to the first six levels of development on the Spiral. This is known as the First Tier of values. Healthy development of an individual or a culture usually alternates between individualistic psychological systems that thrive on competition and collective psychological systems that thrive on community and cooperation. The problem with the First Tier is that each level sees the world according to it’s own stage of development and resists the integration of other levels and their worldview. The higher this resistance is on the Spiral, the more the imbalance that effects personal and cultural development. In extreme cases, resistance can lead the entire Spiral to become arrested and beholden to the narrow values of one particular expression of a specific value system.

Today, that arrested expression is being defined by neoliberal economic policies and the blind global pursuit of wealth. We have all become subservient to a globalized capitalist system that is a grotesque outcropping of the modern values of the Enlightenment, the Fifth level on the Spiral, a highly individualistic value system empowered by high intelligence and the ability to manipulate the entire First Tier with little regard to community and cooperation. It ensnares you into the bowels of darkness whether you like it or not. It infects your mind and makes you think that competition in the pursuit of money matters above all else in life. It mutes the risk reported by top global scientists and epidemiologists about how dangerous the COVID virus was in 2007. It does so not by finding a vaccine, but by repressing the epidemiology research hoping the danger goes away on its own, or just long enough to maximize profits and exit the stage before it all comes crashing down. These are the individualistic competitive values at their worst and, as I argue in my work, they have overstayed their developmental welcome by a few decades as they have arrested the evolutionary movement up the Spiral and repressed all the communal psychological systems rendering the entire world vulnerable to everything that falls outside the pursuit of money and individual power.

It is at the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, our initial ascend to the individualistic/competitive Fifth level of development that we made the fateful decision to tame nature instead of working with it. With the dawn of modern science, philosophy, politics and economics, we became our own Gods empowered by our reductionist minds that see the entire Cosmos through the lens of the telescope and the basic building blocks of life and disease through the ocular lens of a microscope. Five Billion years of evolutionary intelligence got quantified through carbon dating only to be shelved away and forgotten. Today, every time Nature’s evolutionary impulse presents us with a challenge, or a disease our instinct is to fight it and to tame it through the innocuous lens of science that often excludes the deeper ecology in which we live and breathe. We dismiss all non-microbial causes that ail the body, the mind, the soul, the culture and the planet. We empower big pharmaceutical companies to create blockbuster drugs for diseases that they anticipate as a result of our poor diets and hectic lifestyles while reducing public funding for research on viruses and vaccines. By continuing to pursue prosperity while ignoring other matters, we have burdened the planet and triggered what scientist believe is the Sixth Extinction, and unlike the five extinctions before it, this one is of our own making.

I have dedicated the last fifteen years of my life to exposing the fallacy of global development based on the narrow definition of modern wealth at the cost of moral and ecological decay. I have preached all over the world to those who would listen about the dangers of economic policies that place financial success as the thing that matters the most while repressing all the other important things that matter just as much. In 2013 I created a platform for economic development the exalts the virtues of the Seventh level of values that sees the importance of integrating the virtues of all of humanity on a conscious trajectory that makes the world a better place. In 2018 I began to work on defining a world economy based on the virtues of the Eighth and highest level of human values, the values of a world that is ecologically aligned, highly conscious and regenerative by nature. A world that, by virtue of its existence aims to restore Mother Nature’s various ecosystems and brings humanity back into the fold of being one with nature not apart from it.

I could go on about all the great things these development models can provide to the world, but I won’t. I won’t because today, I feel the collective pain of our humanity and our failure to become what we can be. I can longer ignore the existential threat that we have created for ourselves, and because of that, I find the theories that explain everything, failing to explain much of anything.

For weeks I’ve been asking myself: where does the Coronavirus fit on the Spiral or the Integral model? After researching writings on exogenous phenomena of this nature in both models and no convincing answers came, I thought, maybe the answer lies in the black void, the undefined and unarticulated black circular mass that is at the center of the Spiral and the Quadrants. This is the eye of the evolutionary impulse that began when single cell life form started billions of years ago. This required the expansion of my focus way beyond anything our models have articulated. This was a study of life that existed before we stood on our hind legs and proclaimed to all of existence “I am man!” Our developmental models labeled it the Prime Directive, which is a reference to evolutionary journey of all life forms that existed before the First level — the Beige system appeared 100,000 years ago. It is life that for 5 Billion years relied on the totality of cosmic evolutionary forces outside the influence of the human mind.

It is in the study of comparative evolutionary theories that I found some answers to my inquiry. Darwin’s theory of evolution explains 3.5 Billion years of life as an unyielding competition. It began with bacteria and single cell organisms that worked their way up the evolutionary ladder to mammals and Homo sapiens. The underlying theme in Darwinian theory is that evolution is determined by competition and through natural selection, random mutations and pure accidents, the fittest life forms survive and move on to perpetuate life in its next evolutionary form. The problem with that, as evolutionary biologist Bruce Lipton points out, is that when it comes to predicting the shape of the next evolutionary stage Darwinian theory says that because of the “random” claims in the theory, it is simply impossible to know.

It is in the work of evolutionary biologists like Bruce Lipton and Elisabet Sahtouris that I found more convincing answers for 3.5 billions years of evolution that we have dismissed since the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment. Both Lipton and Sahtouris believe that the game of evolution is more about cooperation than competition, and that it’s the balance between competition and cooperation that makes evolution possible. This is much like the oscillating movement of the Spiral, which led me to believe in the fractal nature of existence that includes one of the smallest fractals in all existence; our presence on the planet as defined by our developmental models.

Lipton describes the evolution of life along these lines: It took bacteria billions of years to evolve into a single cell organism. It took the single cell ameba 1.5 billion years to perfect being a single cell organism and when it reached the limits of it’s membrane, evolution stopped. To evolve to the next stage, single amebae (individuals) joined with other ameba to form simple colonies (community). Simple colonies became integrated colonies (intelligence of the collaborative whole) that share their intelligence through membrane awareness. This more complex community of organisms in turn grew to its limits before it began to form the next level organism (switching back to a higher complexity individualistic evolutionary system). This process continued through billions of years in leaps and jumps that define evolutionary biology. Lipton believes that humanity today is at the critical juncture where we can no longer evolve as individuals and that the next stage of evolution for us is a return to community where we identify not as individual humans, but as an intelligent, fully integrated organism called humanity.

To a culture driven by physical scientific evidence, Lipton’s assertion seems to be coming from the realms of spirituality and science fiction not from real science. To that, I say it is high time that we integrate all of our scientific knowledge back into the mysteries of life that fall outside the limits of today’s conventional scientific methods.

To bring this back full circle to the place of the Coronavirus in the evolution of life, there is a hypothesis in evolutionary biology called the “Virus first hypothesis” which basically says bacteria and viruses existed for billions of years before they differentiated themselves into single cell organisms that gave life to everything around us.

The Coronavirus cannot be about the failure of one value system or a specific culture. This is about the Universe reaching out from 5 billion years of evolution to remind us of our origins. We have repeatedly ignored messages from less threatening, defenseless sources about the damage we are causing to the totality of life that emerged since the universe came into existence. We became the most complex virus that was quietly killing everything around us. Yes, the Sixth Extinction is underway, and the Coronavirus became the necessary messenger to warm us of the dangers of our own ignorance. Our ignorance lies in our obsession to compete instead of cooperate with each other and with nature. Our ignorance is in our refusal to respect all forms life. Our ignorance lies in our persistence to quantify only that which is in our narrow worldview and call that science.

In the largest fractal of all fractals, at the center of the biggest spiral is the largest void, the one that existed long before we emerged as a species. It is an integral part of the largest evolutionary prime directive, and if we were to pinpoint the start of the biggest evolutionary journey, it points to viruses, the source of life before we determined what life was under the microscope.

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MEMEnomics; The Next-Generation Economic System –The Book

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Friends and colleagues, after more than 10 years of working closely with Dr. Don Beck, hundreds of presentations and training seminars, 5 years of research and three years of writing, I am happy to announce that my new book MEMEnomics; The Next-Generation Economic System was launched on September 30, 2013.

I am grateful to all my colleagues and thought leaders for supporting the framework for the sustainability philosophies outlined in the book. I am  humbled by the compliments it continues to receive  from both the integral consciousness community and the business community. I’m especially thankful for Don Beck of the Global Center for Human Emergence for writing the brilliant foreword,  to Deepak Chopra, the sage and the scientist for his beautiful words of endorsement, to Howard Putman, former CEO of Southwest Airlines for his Big Picture view of the book, to Jean Houston, one of the founders of the Human Potential Movement for her relentless support and for Dr. Bruce Lipton for acknowledging its evolutionary nature.

My gratitude also goes out to Economist Hazel Henderson, Founder of Ethical Markets for her endorsement, to Cindy Wigglesworth, author of SQ21  and to John Steiner and Margot King of the Tranpartisan Center in Boulder, CO for their support of our work over the years.  The enthusiasm the book is receiving echoes the need for better business values around the world. Its success is a celebration of the emerging values of business consciousness that give us all hope for the future.

memenomics jacket option ns edit 3- 8.5

Below is a publishers preview from amazon.com

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 2013

Books about subjects like economics are rarely written from the perspective of human or cultural evolution. Seldom, if ever, does a reader come across a narrative with pioneering methods that reframe a specialized discipline through a wide-cultural whole systems approach. This is precisely what Said E. Dawlabani does in this revolutionary book, Memenomics: The Next-Generation Economic System. This is a book that reframes the issues of competing economic and political ideologies and places them into an evolutionary new paradigm. This is a book about change done right.

It is no secret that today we are dealing with a great political divide that threatens many of our democratic institutions. Right and left ideologies have becomes polarized camps that seem to be worlds apart. If we were to do a content analysis of all the speeches, books, and articles from the last few years, we would see several clear and distinct patterns which seem to point us in several different directions. There is a formidable challenge that awaits thinkers who are shaping the future of humanity. One of monumental proportions that will call on our collective ability to create political and economic systems that can best handle the complex conditions confronting life on our planet. When the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith penned his views on the evolution of human morality and trade over two centuries ago, he captured the hearts and minds of people the world over. But today, after guiding the free enterprise system to unimaginable heights, his teachings are being questioned at their core. Current global economic and governing systems can no longer run on fixed or rigid ideologies regardless of how virtuous or inspiring they were in the past. In order for new leadership to emerge to answer our challenges, new paradigms must be created.

One new paradigm for human and cultural emergence is beautifully detailed in this book. Memenomics makes the case for how artificially imposed systems in economics become closed and toxic. By using processes that were pioneered through five decade of research and global applications Said repeatedly makes the case for why the future of economics must consider a values-systems approach if the field should emerge into a whole-systems form of leadership in the future. Through technologies such as Natural Design and life cycles of values systems, Said pioneers a fresh reframing of economic history that uncovers the blockages of trickle-down approaches of the past. He then offers remedies that set a new standard for sustainable practices, ones that are based on functional platforms designed to address the needs of people and cultures at their particular level of economic emergence. This book is a brilliant primer on the application of the values-systems theory to economics. It is a field guide for anyone looking to establish a cultural values-systems understanding not only to economics but also to the applications of the theory of Spiral Dynamics and the seminal work of Clare W. Graves. It represents the evolution of the Gravesian model into a field that rarely considers the different needs and motivations of the different stages of human and societal development.

To buy the book on amazon, please click on this link

You can also read the Foreword, Introduction and Chapter One for free on Amazon Kindle Preview here 

I’m quite pleased with the success of the book. It has been consistently in the top 100 books on Economic Theory for the Kindle version.  Although the Library Journal doesn’t consider it a part of mainstream economics, it was never intended to be as such. Change, rarely, if ever comes from within the system; a view that this theoretical framework made clear over four decades ago.

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