Wednesday, March 31, 2010

The Immediate Challenge: Healthy Green

Andrew Cohen, in the summer 2006 issue of What Is Enlightenment? magazine, wrote that

[t]o consciously evolve is to surrender unconditionally to the truth that there is no other and at the same time to accept responsibility for what that means in an evolving universe—a cosmos that is slowly but surely becoming aware of itself through you and me. one without a second is simultaneously awakening to itself as it develops, as it evolves, and it is that one, as you and me, alone, that can now begin to take responsibility for endeavoring to consciously create its own future.
At the leading edge of this consciousness evolution, which is basically at the Green mature rational egoic wave, what is necessary for us to assume responsibility for how this evolution occurs? I assert that what we must focus on is consolidation of healthy Green, for that will lead almost immediately into the transpersonal waves and the integral embrace.

We face this developmental challenge even as Green must deal with assaults from its two junior stages. As I wrote in the “Three Blind Memes” series below, the world is enjoying an unprecedented collision of three powerful First Tier memes: Amber premodern (which can also be understood as the preconventional, traditional, mythic/membership, rule/role stage), Orange modern (conventional, rational/egoic, scientific), and Green postmodern (postconventional. vision/logic, sensitive self).

Amber, as the oldest member of this triad, arose as part of the shift in the human social and economic structures from hunter/gatherer to agriculture, some 13,000 years ago.

Orange first appeared as an identifiable feature during the so-called Axial Age around 600 BCE, but did not manifest in significant numbers until after the Italian Renaissance in the fourteenth century CE.

Green first appeared around the turn of the nineteenth century, but showed up in sufficient numbers only in the 1960s.

One of the characteristics of this evolutionary trend is the accelerating rate of new memetic emergence. It took Amber around 40,000 years to emerge from the previous Red magic wave, but it took Orange less that 13,000 years to arise from Amber. And Green required less than half a millennium to appear.