With the World Cup starting today I’ve been called to share the meta context on the value of Sports through the lens of the evolution of human consciousness with the Integral Spiral Dynamic values framework.
With this scaffolding we can dig deeper into the many of the more granular issues the particularities of our societal attention on Sport brings forth.
Roughly speaking:
Mainstream america is at Orange (5) altitude consciousness, with edges around Blue (4) and Green (6).
You could say:
Blue separates people to saints and sinners
Orange into winners and losers.
Green into sensitive and insensitive people
And only post-green do you get a focus on holistic health.
Each altitude level literally feels like a different world space.
I want to live in a post-green integral world, but we don’t do that by throwing out sports, that would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
The transcend and include principle is very important to look at here.
As we make the move to play bigger *non zero sum* societal games we need to transcend and include values at each level of conscious altitude : (Purple- Wonder/Awe, Red – Aggression, Blue – Discipline & Work Ethic, Orange – Competitive Spirit, Green – Sportsmanship / Equal Opportunity for athletes with any pigment of skin)
But also the converse principle of Wilber’s transcend and include which is Hegel’s Negate and preserve. (i.e. these are things we need to get rid of) (Purple – magical thinking Red – uncontrolled violence Blue – authoritarian conformity Orange – self-centered egoity Green – unwillingness to recognize functional superiority)
Finally, watching sports is a beautiful microcosm for Orange’s transferable life lessons channeled by some of the most powerfully expressed and horizontally integrated Orange humans alive today.
Rick Reilly recently captured this well in last piece before retiring as a sports journalist subtitled “don’t ever let anyone tell you it’s ‘just’ sports:http://espn.go.com/…/_/id/11049946/rick-reilly-last-column
(post inspired by Anima & Juliahttps://www.facebook.com/juliaallison/posts/10100720489235605)
