Worldviews (eBook)

What They Are, How They Change, Why They're Important

Alia Aurami (Autor)

Jakob Possert-Bienzle (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
280 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
9780000813428 (ISBN)

Infos

What if your deepest assumptions about life, reality, and identity aren't facts-but filters?

This illuminating book explores worldviews as subconscious lenses that shape everything we think, feel, and do. Drawing on decades of life experience and over fifteen years of engagement with Spiral Dynamics, Rev. Alia Aurami illustrates the framework for understanding how human consciousness matures-gradually, cumulatively, and often invisibly.

It delves into the dynamics of worldview change, introducing readers to the idea of worldviews as developmental stages of consciousness that unfold cumulatively and mosaically over time. Along the way, it explores the limits of ideologies, paradigms, and belief systems, and proposes a richer lens for understanding how humans grow.

Whether you're new to Spiral Dynamics or have been walking the spiral path for years, this book offers a meta-perspective: not a catalog of specific worldviews, but a guide to the very concept of worldview. With its blend of personal reflection, interdisciplinary rigor, and invitation to introspection, it helps readers recognize the patterns in their own maturation-and, crucially, how to tend that growth.

More than theory, this book is practical philosophy. It doesn't aim to be 'true' in every worldview's eyes-it aims to be useful, especially for those working to co-create a wiser, more compassionate world. Rather than mapping individual worldviews in detail, it illuminates the nature of worldview itself and how it shifts through lived experience.

Insightful, accessible, and quietly radical, this book is a call to notice the maps we carry.

Textauszug

PREFACE

 

Are you seeking to bring more harmony, empathy, and collaboration where there is discord, antagonism, or divisiveness? Understanding people by using the idea of worldviews could offer you a key. What if out of hundreds of conflictual differences to try to harmonize, there are only a handful that matter the most because they source the rest?

 

Nearly all of people`s consciousness, experience, and behavior can be seen as consequences and expressions of different foundational and pervasive worldviews. Worldviews can be understood as the source of most problematic differences. By understanding half a dozen or more different worldviews, we have a key to understanding and better dealing with the hundreds of resulting disparate religions, ideologies, paradigms, beliefs, values, attitudes, and positions that are giving rise to so many challenges in our world.

 

If you picked up this book to check it out, you`re likely to benefit from it. If you`re attracted and interested, then it could prove very useful to you. For many other people, the concept of worldviews might not make sense or seem interesting or useful.

 

How Each Worldview Might Regard This Book`s Ideas

 

The most obvious reason for this appeal or lack thereof is that the concept of worldview itself makes sense only for later worldviews, not for earlier ones. I say a bit about this in Chapter Two, but some of my manuscript readers wanted to see specifics, so here is a brief superficial look at how each Spiral Dynamics worldview stage might regard this book`s ideas.

 

If you are not already familiar with the developmental spectrum of worldviews in the Spiral Dynamics framework, the following won`t make much sense for you at this point. You might get a general feel for it now and/or you might revisit this footnote when you finish the book.

 

Since I don`t regard it as valid to speak of “a person in the Blue stage,” all of what I say here is to be understood as very general and about consciousness, not about people: “The X stage of consciousness views this this way.” And wherever I say “X consciousness” I mean that worldview stage.

 

PURPLE and RED worldviews/consciousness would not be any more interested in this book than they would in a book on civil engineering or cell biology. The concepts involved are simply opaque, meaningless sounds. In the PURPLE and RED worldviews there simply doesn`t exist anything that corresponds to worldview; there is no referent for the term in those realities, even if the person predominantly in that stage is literate. Those stages of consciousness development don`t have the capacity that enables the objectification of one`s own consciousness required in order to understand the concept of worldview. They can`t view their own minds as objects of attention or things to understand.

 

BLUE consciousness, being often very religious or ideological, has the abstract capacity to get that there are religions or ideologies different from one`s own. Hence the great interest from Christians in the concept of worldview. Indeed, much of the best historical and philosophical examination has been done by Christian thinkers. Their motives have been, it seems, both evangelism and intellectual curiosity.

 

I say, however, that BLUE worldview/consciousness is not capable of a fully comprehensive and deep understanding of the depth and pervasiveness of a worldview in a person`s consciousness. BLUE tends to interpret the concept narrowly and shallowly as meaning a religion or ideology and to see all of what they call a worldview from within their own, to be evaluated and judged by their own, and used for purposes of convincing others of The Truth, namely their own.

 

ORANGE consciousness can take a broader, more general, more abstract perspective, but doesn`t get the subconscious aspect of worldviews, and usually doesn`t see past interpretations of worldviews as paradigms, ideologies, or mindsets. An ORANGE consciousness might have a vague interest in this book if it sees the promise of better communication to achieve one`s goals, but it couldn`t do more than apply formulas for communication strategies; no deep empathy would be involved. ORANGE would use the information in this book for practical results, for success. The greater inclusiveness of ORANGE compared to BLUE could enable the use of some of the ideas in this book to bolster ORANGE agendas such as civil rights for minorities. The ORANGE worldview thus might feel an interest in some aspects of this book, but many of the ideas would seem wrong, irrelevant, or too airy-fairy.

 

GREEN consciousness would find this book very appealing for the empathy, inclusiveness, and relationship-enhancing possibilities that GREEN could sense and would value, but GREEN is still very limited in these capacities. “If you`re not like me, you need fixing!” GREEN can begin to get the subconsciousness and pervasiveness of a worldview but is still very limited. GREEN has very limited empathy for or acceptance of differences in values between GREEN and earlier or later worldviews, even though GREEN thinks that all values are relative, that everyone`s opinion is as good as anyone else`s, and that all voices need to be heard. At the end of the day, the GREEN values and views are the only ones acceptable. Hence GREEN consciousness might read this book and reject or argue with much of it.

 

This book would be like finding a pearl among stones for YELLOW consciousness. YELLOW could immediately sense and be curious about the relevance, value, and usefulness of the concept of worldview for a wide variety of ways to improve life for everyone. YELLOW also understands the concept of worldview as just one map of the territory of human consciousness. This is all because YELLOW is the first worldview that has the capacity to look at its own consciousness as an object, to study it and form categories related to it.

 

Within the Spiral Dynamics worldviews later than YELLOW, this book might be of less interest simply because “been there done that.” Unless a person is picking up on some YELLOW capacities and skills they haven`t quite mastered yet, the social and interpersonal dynamics they are interested in and learning about are far more subtle, abstract, and intangible than even a worldview is.

 

The Purpose of This Book

 

This book`s passionate purpose is to be supportive and helpful to anyone whose purpose is a better world for everyone. If your purpose requires greater skill in empathetic communication with diverse people, use this book to uplevel your skill. Perhaps you`ve always been curious about how people can be so very different—how they can have such different values, different attitudes, different beliefs. If you want to understand yourself and perhaps your loved ones better, this book would love to serve you.

 

The guiding purpose for this exploration of perspectives on worldviews is to make it easier for readers to apply the ideas to their own purpose for improving life on any scale, from individual to planetary (or beyond).

 

This book on worldviews began life as a chapter in a much longer book which has become a series of three books. Each book in the series provides the necessary foundation and context for appropriate understanding of the next. The second is tentatively titled Ten Worldview Stages in Living Color, containing lengthy descriptions of my interpretations of all the maturational stages of worldviews in the Spiral Dynamics® (SD) framework.2 That framework is introduced in the Introduction. The third is Sexuality from Beast to Buddha: Sexuality of Ten Worldview Stages, exploring my descriptions of how each SD worldview expresses sexuality (including inner experiences, behavior, cultural expressions, social systems, and technology.) So part of the purpose of this book is to serve as an introduction to those two later books and give readers the context necessary for a full understanding of them.

 

I also have other purposes in writing this lengthy exploration of the concept of worldview. I`ve noticed that people who have learned something about Spiral Dynamics` stages idea tend to be unclear that the stages are of worldviews and form a maturational sequence. Sometimes people think only of the particular arena of their interest, such as organizations, and—despite careful, accurate presentation by authors such as Frederic Laloux—see the stages as being paradigms or mindsets or models which can be freely shifted among by anyone at any time.3 I made at least one attempt in the context of organizational models to set out a more accurate view, but more education is needed among people who know something about SD and other models of development.4 My hope is that this book will serve this educational purpose.

 

Most fundamentally, my purpose for writing this book is captured in the Dedication and in the opening section of Chapter Two: “How is the Notion of Worldviews Valuable?” The potential of this one concept for helping us co-create a better future merits it far more attention than has been granted so far despite the global conversation about worldviews touched on throughout this book. My hope is to contribute to that conversation and broaden the perspectives available to many who might otherwise fall into polarization and stereotyping. This book is my ministry, my sacred gift to the world.5

 

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Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 26.5.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Esoterik / Spiritualität
• ISBN-13: 9780000813428 / 9780000813428