Each level of consciousness brings forth not only a new worldview but (related with its contextual social world) a specific set of emotions. The emotions have the purpose of modeling a behavior that should help us thrive in our social environment. Our emotions are grounded in our physiology, but in our culture too. Our culture and our physiology are both deeply influenced by our level of consciousness (how we perceive and engage the reality).
What could be the emotions of Beige-Magenta?
It was a society based mainly on clan/tribe surviving. The basic level of human emotions and morality is inextricable linked with collaboration and cooperation. Of course, besides collaboration, it needs to be an aspect which enhances the individuality and uniqueness of each human being: Inside your tribe you have to collaborate and you can not afford to lose your reputation. Enhancing or losing your reputation is one of your main social priority. If you will lose your reputation, you could be mistreated, discredited, disrespected, excluded from sharing etc.
If somebody does or says something to low down your reputation, you can not afford to remain passive and not to respond, even aggressively. Our basic set of emotions, forged in Beige-Magenta times, are related with being moral and responsible in our tribes and not allowing to lose our reputation.
In Red ranked, war-like societies we have had to increase our aggressiveness to be able to conquer others and, inside our tribes, to defend our reputation or to lower others’ reputation, because now reputation is even stronger linked with our ranks. Collaboration inside our clans gets stronger, driving us to be immoral even with other members of our society in order to enhance the power of our clan. We have had to survive in war-like times and this was the best strategy: exploit and weaken the others to enrich and empower ourselves. These were unconscious epochs, based on fear and fight. We will continue somehow similar with Blue and Orange’s specific set of emotions, observing that we became more and more individualistic. In competing times the best strategy still remains: exploit and weaken the others to enrich and empower yourself.
The Beige-Magenta set of emotions kept us alive during our tribe times; the Red, Blue and Orange set of emotions kept us competing in competitive quasi war-like societies. But now, in our social environment, pressed by the ecological challenges, the old sets of emotions are not useful anymore. When we are forced by evolutionary priorities to evolve toward a conscious and cooperative society, we can not achieve this remaining rooted in our old set of emotions that are more adequate for competition and predict-and-control kind of life strategies. In order to overcome our challenges, we have to evolve, besides better tools and technologies, a better social architecture and a new set of emotions and a symbiotic behavior – able to bring to life our new social architectures, able to use intelligently and peacefully our new technologies, able to foster a higher level of cooperation.
In order to thrive in a VUCA world, we have to evolve a Yellow-Turquoise level of consciousness /set of emotions/symbiotic behavior.
A Yellow-Turquoise person is able to welcome the unknown and the unexpected in his life, to integrate them into an ever-emergent life design. Only this level of psychological development is able to manage the ambiguity of life, to collaborate in stigmergic correlation with others. Only at this level of reflectiveness we can perceive the unexpected as an opportunity to go further, the uncertainty as a dialogue, the world as a playground, the Life as a rite of passage. Universe-centered consciousness (or Yellow-Turquoise on Spiral Dynamics) is our necessary step further in our evolution as individuals and as a species.
The new set of emotions perceives reality from a collaborative perspective. Seen from a collaborative perspective, the others superior qualities/skills/resources are perceived as a blessing, as complementary with our own toward a common project and not as a threat. Because we are not anymore in competition with others, but in collaboration.
For a Yellow-Turquoise person, each act of life is seen from a sense-and-respond perspective, hence the new set of emotions will evolve to sustain this kind of life strategy. The new set of emotions does not feel (compulsively) to have us in control. If the outcome is not as we predicted it, an old emotion will make us feel frustrated, betrayed and even not secure. The new set of emotions, fitted for a sense-and-respond life strategy, will help us to deal constructively and adequately with every life situation, though we will not own its control. A Yellow-Turquoise person sees and feels from an ecological perspective, being able to integrate into the equation the others’ needs, their possibilities and modalities of collaboration, their contextual situation, their perspectives.
The dynamic processes of Life are so hard to be managed through the predict-and-control strategy because Life is beyond control. Life comes forth through synergy. The old self-centered set of emotions prefers the predictable and known situation. It prefers not to “get out into the unknown”, not to evolve. Because it can not feel secure when it can not control the desired outcome. The new Universe-centered set of emotions feels somehow secure even in the middle of the unknown. Because it feels connected with a “greater order of things”.
A Yellow-Turquoise person perceives each Life process as an invitation, an opportunity for something new to come to life. It understands that each act of life is a chance for us to evolve, a chance for Life to make another step forward.
From a synergistic perspective, after you have found your authenticity, you don’t feel to compare with others or to compete. All you want is to synergize with others. Life should be a continuous metamorphosis: getting out from your old shell to embrace the new, the others, to bring forth with others a new reality. This is the only way for the Universe to go further.
But how to evolve a new set of emotions?
I discovered that you can not renew your emotions toward more cooperative life strategies when you struggle in a capitalistic world. We will be able to evolve a new set of emotions, fitted for a conscious cooperative society, when we will start to perceive life as a synergistic endeavor and hence to live in collaborative ways. As long as we continue to choose individualistic ways of living, for sure we will continue to strengthen our old set of emotions, based on fighting and ranking, predict and control.
We have to cross the invisible threshold between self-centered and Universe-centered worlds: to choose collaborative-generative life strategies. I proposed you to co-create the Butterfly Communities, a place where we can consciously evolve a new set of emotions, based on empathy and cooperation.
We can consciously remodel our emotions. Let me give an example. If you already managed to develop a reflective attitude, you could observe your emotions and reflect on them. You will see that your emotions prepare you mainly for competing with others. You will probably feel not very well, even frightened or inhibited when you will realize the superior abilities of others. But this is precisely because you feel from a competitive point of view. You can use your mind to convert in trust and joy these frightening emotions in the face of others’ superiority using the simple understanding that, in a cooperative environment, their superior qualities are not competing with you but are complementary with your qualities.
In a competing model, first we observe others’ superiority as a threat because our old set of emotions evolved to prepare us for competing with them. In a collaborative model, first we observe the complementarity between us. Feeling connected with others, we see first how we could complement each-other with our resources and abilities, how we could help each other, how we could co-create something in a stigmergic way. This new set of emotions is available to us as a consciously modeled one.
(further readings: here)