Speculations on the nature of the Coral Values System

I have been thinking about this for a long time. I have no research beyond my observations of what I believe I am seeing at what I think of as the leading edge of human development and what maybe resonates a little in my own explorations.

I have voiced a little of this before, though I am very hesitant to do so since we have not yet established a strong Yellow in the world, still less a base of Turquoise. Therefore the limiting life conditions which might generate the dissonance to produce Coral are not clearly identifiable. With that caveat, and an attempt to follow the Graves mode and its trajectory with some consistency, here goes.

Yellow sees the systemic needs of the human world, integrates first tier stages, reshapes them so that they have more upward-supporting versions of their priorities (e.g. an agile Blue that supports Orange and Green as well as containing Red) and encourages flexibility, health and balance into the global meme-stack. Its limitations are, that it is excessively human-centric (the “I” of the species) and propelled by the species need to survive. It remains constrained by its belief in an outdated, fragmented, transactional, material, Orange scientific model. While it has embraced Green in its desire to correct some of the human alienation that Orange excess has created, it does not yet have a grasp of planetary wholeness. It cannot yet see any connection in the non-material or contextual realms that shape human meaning-making. Nor does it have a frame for the significance of connection in the realms of consciousness and “spiritual” connection.

These are the conditions that stimulate Turquoise into existence. As I have articulated in “The Science of Possibility”, Turquoise grasps the significance of what Orange dismissed as primitive in the shamanistic Purple world and raises it to second tier relevance. It also recognises more explicitly the need to engage with the intrinsic biological connectedness that we have neglected in our view of Beige. Although Yellow revisited Beige in its priority on survival, it remained limited in its view of humans as firstly biological mechanisms and secondly as psychological functions. It did not fully connect.

Turquoise finally begins to pick up on the Green explorations of our sensory world, both internal and external senses, on intuition and felt-sensing and the incorporation of these levels of awareness into our recognition of the ways that we connect not only with each other but with the remainder of creation. It is modern, scientifically literate shamanism. In doing so it finally jettisons the limited scientific materialist reality and transcends that technology, incorporating it into a bigger picture of the planetary holonomics (loosely defined as the laws of wholes). The wholes that are connected at Turquoise seen at multiple levels and in multiple ways, integrating many different types of sensing, a wide variety of contexts for meaning, and an interest in what Nora Bateson has described as “warm data”.

Coral arises from this base, from a knowledge of the whole and its interconnectedness, and from a deep respect for the contribution that each component in creation makes to the dynamic and emergent living creativity of the world. Turquoise has also gone further than Yellow in its ability to embrace the paradoxical and non-linear ways of being that are required to surf the complexity wave of existence. It has jettisoned command and control, not because it sees it Green-style as hierarchically authoritarian and wrong, but because it is too slow, clumsy, limiting in its communication dimensions, constraining of information flow and ultimately dysfunctional in a fast-changing and fractal, VUCA world. Coral has all of this as its base and if it has assimilated and included it adequately, has a deep respect for it all.

So what are the Turquoise limiting conditions that stimulate Coral? Even with all of its deep and collective awareness, there are still individual humans involved. These are authentic selves, inventive and creative. These individuals will have a sense of themselves as choiceful. They will know that to push against the flow of creation is ineffective and will recognise the need to work with(in) it. At the same time the human impulse remains - to find and push the “outside of the envelope”, to discover what “I” uniquely can choose to be and to contribute to, and to express that creativity to its fullest extent. This is the resonance of Red, arising from healthy selfhood (use the word ego if you insist). It is EMPOWERED at a level that was not available back in Red, knowing all of the subsequent dimensions of itself and of the world in the terms both stage-related and scientific, psychological and post-post conventional layers of information that have become available. All of these are potential contributors to its self-expression.

That self-expression will be unconstrained in its quasi-heroic willingness to stand for itself and forge an independent path. But it does not seek power over others. When it leads it does so from authenticity; it does not care who follows and does not require enforcement except under exceptional conditions, because it knows that all enforcement brings its own backlash. (You can see this as “karmic” or Newtonian mechanics in the psychological and energy-consciousness realms, it really doesn’t matter which.)

Coral has learned on the way to this point the dangers of the hubristic belief that it (or anyone) can see all of the system and can make arrogant interventions with certainty of outcomes. At the same time it will push the system and observe the ripples it creates. It will adjust its choices, working from awareness of as much as it can see of “what is”, and without attachment to whether a choice was “right” or “wrong”. It knows that right and wrong are always contextual.

If I attempt to put this in the original Gravesian language, Coral is an “Express self” system. However, it has by this time such a deep sense that “self” is an expression of internalised contexts, of a being that is a creation of its history, its culture, of its shared beliefs and meanings with others. The polarity that has been accepted in earlier stages which sees self as boundaried, as what happens inside this bag of skin and in the grey matter between my ears, has now been found wanting. The view that everything which is not within that bag and cranium is “other” or “not I” has shown up as drastically, even toxically over-simplified. Coral is “Express Self as part of a co-creative whole”.

Coral has learned from biology that the whole of life consists of semi-permeable membranes. It has embraced the notion of oneness, not merely as an idealised spiritual metaphor, or as a cosmic “everything is energy” soup, or even as a numinous experience of mystical connection but as a contiguous material reality of permeable living holons, all the way from the smallest to the largest.

Lastly, part of Coral’s exploration will be to discover more about the boundaries to this creative expression. It has learned that many of the perceived limitations in earlier systems are just that – perceptions. It has seen the exploration of what is possible in the material realms through (old) scientific technology. Now, seeing much more of the connectedness in the non-material realms, it will explore what is possible.

• What can be created in the realms where consciousness meets matter?
• What more can we do through the embedded consciousness of our physical bodies?
• What more can we do with intuition and psychic capacity?
• What can we do through our new-shamanistic relationships with the other forms of consciousness that form this planet?
• What can we connect to and explore systematically in our relationship with the wider conscious universe – an exploration which applies the disciplines of the old scientific mindset to the new realms?
• What more can we know about our share context, meaning-making and bring into our awareness when making personal choice?

So the themes I would postulate as a starting point for Coral, extending the dynamics of the Graves / Beck & Cowan model (see P.47) are:-

CORAL ‘Differentiative” MEME 9th Awakening Graves Code: I-V

Basic theme: Experience the fullness of individual contribution within the whole Characteristic beliefs and actions

• Life is a co-creative process engaged in by interconnected holons of existence with semi- permeable boundaries
• Self is a point of choice within the blended whole: “I am the experience and the exploration”
• “Being” is an action – an exercise in embodied awareness and choice-making
• Awareness and choice-making are meaningful only in the context of the connected whole and healthy only when the whole is respected
• Our co-creation and emergence arise from the exploration of the boundaries and our willingness to discover what else is possible.
• I will serve myself without over-consideration of other’s feelings, but not at the expense of others or the unitive whole

Jon Freeman September 2018