A Theory Of Everything

Human development is not a linear ladder but a fluid and flowing affair, with spirals, swirls, streams, and waves. It appears to be an almost infinite number of multiple modalities.

Ken Wilber’s book A Theory of Everything is a game-changer. The book explains human development in basic terms. We separate humans by race, religion, political views, and the social-economic power we strive to achieve.

But those qualities and beliefs are not what distinguish us from each other. There are waves of awareness that mix and mingle with each other as we play the lead part in our life experiences.

Wilbur and other psychologists like Don Beck, Christopher Cowan, and Clare Graves developed a map of all the structures, stages, levels, types, and waves of human development within the human consciousness. The result is a comprehensive snapshot of what they call Spiral Dynamics. Spiral Dynamics explains the stages within our development and how consciousness continues to expand as we experience each wave. Each wave of consciousness overlaps as well as interweaves and meshes waves of beliefs together in multiple admixtures. The multiple admixtures create mosaic choices, instant probabilities, and blended states of unfolding awareness.

Spiral Dynamics labels these eight waves of existence with colors as well as names. The first six waves are first-tier modes of awareness or thinking.

The next two waves are second-tier or integral levels of awareness. Each level holds a degree of social power and a certain percentage of the global population.

The focus in Spiral Dynamics is on types in people, not types of people.

Each level of awareness has certain core beliefs that impact how people view the world around them. More than 98% of the world population falls into one or more of the first six waves or levels of awareness. Each wave plays a role in the whole spiral. We discount other waves that don’t meet our concept of reality at certain stages of our developing awareness. But each wave is a reality, and everything connected to that wave has value to the perceivers in that wave.