As rising adults, we tend to go in one of two directions on a continuum. We can see this continuum as one of femininity and masculinity, the right brain and the left brain, the ideological Left and the ideological Right, or yin and yang. I call them our Nice Feelings Self and our Worldly Achiever Self.
The developmentalist Clare Graves (1914-1986) was the first to describe these two “stages” as part of his model of stages in human development. His protege, Don Beck (1937-2022) came up with the colors for Graves’s stages — and those colors were picked up by Ken Wilber (1945-), the developmental transpersonal philosopher who is arguably the leading thinker living in the world today.
So what I call our Nice Feelings Self is Green and what I call our Worldly Achiever Self is Orange.
Graves and Wilber decided that Green is superior to Orange. There is, however, a minority view in Wilber’s Integral movement that sees Green and Orange as equal. After several years, I came to my own firm conclusion last year that they are equal — that they lie along a continuum — after concluding that they are best aligned with rising adulthood.
(You’ll see the political implications right away, and those are obvious to me as well, but politics is not my focus here. My one observation is that it drives Orange folks crazy when Green folks think that they are superior to Orange folks, so considering them as equal modes on a continuum may help with political unity.)
One can see how a rising adult could merge the best of what is feminine and what is masculine, become whole-brained, draw from the best of Left and Right ideologies, meld yin and yang, and synthesize Orange and Green. But if an individual ever does this in life (most of us don’t ever do it), this tends not to happen until midlife.
Before proceeding, let’s consider masculinity and femininity. Can we agree on how we define these? Probably not, but let’s try.
From spiritual lore, from human behavior across history and across cultures, and from both psychology and science, we can see a universal pattern:
Masculinity favors autonomous individuality, enforcement of impartial rules and rights and justice, and the direct personal assertion of power. Masculinity involves rational moral wisdom, including judgment drawn from knowledge, information processing, and strategic and logical intelligence. We are especially masculine when we are bold, firm, and resolute, as when we hurt people’s feelings to enforce the rules or when we set aside love to promote truth.
Femininity favors caring relationships, nurturing, and taking responsibility for other people as well as indirect communal assertion of power. Femininity involves compassionate loving goodness, including relating with people from a sense of unity and a desire to connect and conjoin with them and bless them. We are especially feminine when we are tender, merciful, compassionate, and nurturing, as when we set aside the rules to spare people’s feelings or when we set aside truth to advance love.
Masculinity and femininity align somewhat with the continuum most of us navigate as rising adults. But we probably cannot get a clear picture unless we move away from this – and the brain and ideology and yin-yang dynamics – all of which also depend on enculturation and socialization.
These two modes on the continuum are much more complex than masculinity and femininity, so I refer to them as our Worldly Achiever Self and our Nice Feelings Self.
Let’s start with our Worldly Achiever Self. Our Orange Self.
This mode is all about personal achievement, performance, and excellence. We are proud of our individual skills and strengths, we prove our worth by competing and winning and career success, and we play the game to get ahead and make things better for ourselves. We are aspirational. We think positively, stay motivated, strive to be our best, take on challenges, generate value, and get results. We pursue our self-interest, material security, money, advancement, and status.
This mode involves a heavily pragmatic self. Our sense of self becomes rooted in our worldly roles, skills, intelligence, performances, achievements, and quests for achievement. Our thinking is pragmatic, objective, deductive, operational, transactional, and mechanistic. We excel at rational thinking and analysis. We may prize our natural reason. This has advantages, of course, enabling us to think clearly about many natural and worldly phenomena.
We usually shift into a pure performing self. Our life becomes primarily about performing well at our various tasks and in our various roles.
We need concepts and reasoning to find order in the universe and life. Reasoning well and achieving things in the temporal world is rewarding and even valuable. This mode has many advantages and often fuels our personal growth in important ways.
Second, let’s consider our Nice Feelings Self. Our Green Self.
This mode is all about warm and tender feelings as we interact with our fellow human beings. It’s about human bonds, harmony, unity, empathy, sensitivity, open-mindedness, tolerance, fairness, consensus-building, cooperation, teamwork, and mutually beneficial relationships and solutions. It’s about never hurting anyone or even hurting their feelings.
We are aware that we are traveling through this life together, and that there is richness within each person. We regard each individual as important and equal.
Once we realize that “my people are not the only people”, our moral and social development can go on to the next level.
Freeing ourselves of absolutes, we are free of divisive differences – so we can be in harmony and unity with others. We now join together with people in the caring dimensions of community.
Our awareness and our affinities expand beyond our self and our group. Our self is rooted in the goodness that we sense in human beings.
Another advantage of this stage and mode is multi-perspectival awareness. As early as age 8, we may have begun to understand that two people with the same information can arrive at a different point of view. As teens, usually, we may have become aware that we are interpreting events — attaching meaning to events. And now we know that our interpretations may not be a precise rendering of the event. We are aware that we are filtering reality through our beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions.
Our Nice Feelings Self is usually emotionally warm — a self that lives from human relating, caring, bonding, linking, and networking. We strive to relate with people emotionally, to understand people’s points of view, and to make decisions through dialogue, reconciliation, and consensus.
Our Nice Feelings worldview is egalitarian and communitarian and usually emphasizes human rights, liberation, diversity, pluralism, multiculturalism, and multiple-perspectivism.
This mode involves a noble quest for human harmony and care.
Next, let’s consider the problems that arise with our Worldly Achiever Self (Orange).
The problems are problems of worldview that leave us with an absence of spiritual meaning.
In Worldly Achiever mode, we try to remove subjectivity from our life. We turn too objective, ignore our inner life, and repress values, quality, goodness, beauty, truth, and the genuine worth of each soul.
Staying stuck at the Worldly Achiever stage and mode, we may become exclusively worldly. We may become too interested in money, perks, property, possessions, power, preeminence, status, and our career. We may even become materialistic and selfish, thinking only of our own favor and purposes.
When we reduce social life to a game of winners and losers, everything becomes merely a means to an end. We live merely to win the “game”. We learn the rules and strive to outfox, conquer, dominate, or even manipulate the world for our own ends — usually for our material self-interest and personal gain.
We may become self-aggrandizing. Our life may become mostly about our own power, material gain, superiority, specialness, and other self-gratifying goals.
If we are theists, we tend to think of a God prosperity and worldly achievements. We think that God helps us become high-performing and high-achieving in our worldly roles – and to gain jobs and job promotions, money, assets, wealth, or secular power. We think that God wants the sports team we are playing on to win each game and be champions. We have a pragmatic, transactional, and somewhat selfish relationship with God in which we focus on our worldly goals.
If we do think about spiritual matters in this mode, we may admire God as the Great Designer, become a rational Deist, and believe in a remote God. While we may believe in universal ethics and even believe in the benevolence of Providence, we usually believe that God is impersonal.
At its worst in this mode, our ego may run our spiritual life. Usually we view Deity as some kind of cosmic Super-Ego — a Being Who can help us succeed, prosper, and fulfill all our worldly wishes and desires.
Just as often, a worldly view may involve atheism, agnosticism, naturalism, or secularism.
Achievement is amoral; achievements can be good or evil. From most faith and spiritual perspectives, our natural and worldly self is amoral. And even our natural reason is amoral; it can be used to rationalize and justify almost anything.
Living purely for our worldly achievements, we do not truly love other people and we either lose or never gain our full spiritual awareness and connectedness. Leaving ourselves too unaware of consciousness or interiors, we leave ourselves in a meaningless Flatland in which nothing is truly satisfying. And so we tend to get stuck in a state of existential angst, dread, despair, and fear.
And let’s consider the problems that arise with our Nice Feelings Self (Green).
If we are theists, we are likely to believe in a God of pure Mercy and Compassionate Embrace. If we are Christians, we are likely to view the Lord as an instructor of a loving morality and ethics. This is helpful, as far as it goes, and contains vital truths.
We also hold the positive view that the Lord can redeem us on Earth and in Heaven even while others can be redeemed while holding beliefs that are different than ours – something that 70 percent of American Christian now believe. All good people go to Heaven.
But we see so much goodness in humanity and in people – and we see all people’s experiences and beliefs and perspectives as equally valid. Our relationships with what is good is rooted too heavily in diversity, harmony, and inclusion.
Genuine spirituality is rare in the Nice Feelings mode. Many people in this mode have a vague, weak, or second-hand faith. If they go to church, they are nice to everybody but often lack a serious spiritual worldview. It’s a social experience, all relational, a time to chat amiably with neighbors. They have little or no interest in learning Divine or spiritual truths. They are good almost by default. Their intentions, thinking, and actions are not rooted in spiritual or Divine reality — or only vaguely.
There are several problems in this mode:
First, feelings are ephemeral. Feelings come and go. They cannot be consistently relied upon through all of our interactions with people.
Second, when we are relativistic about our values and, while we are always willing to talk – and listen – we’re willing to talk and listen endlessly, without ever reaching a conclusion, making a decision, or taking action.
Third, this mode leaves our self too relational, too permeable. Things become too subjective; it is all about feelings and little else. Our value system becomes too relativistic. At times, it seems that tolerance is the only value.
What can go wrong with our self as we discover that there are multiple perspectives in the world? While it is a beneficial thing to see whole persons operating in the difficult ambiguities and contradictions of real life, it is problematic to descend into chaos and confusion.
Fourth, without genuine spiritual development, we may remain just egos running around with concepts of harmony and a vague sense of niceness.
Fifth, we are depending on society to discover our self — to discover who we are. But if our society is rejecting standards and excellence, the Nice Feelings viewpoint leaves us adrift.
Sixth, in ignoring, denying, or even rejecting the reality in human life of both moral goodness and moral evil, the Nice Feelings worldview is somewhat amoral.
And, seventh, in being against all hierarchy, this mode of thinking and behavior tends to render organizations dysfunctional.
Those of us who believe that we have a soul tend to conclude that nice feelings are insufficient to sustain our soul and that “truth-is-all-subjective” relativism leaves our soul in danger.
There is a deeper dimension to genuine spirituality than only connecting with people as we find them — and thinking that it is only society that matters, not individual merit and development. When in Nice Feelings mode, we usually have a fairly harmonious personality – at least on the surface – and more good intentions than evil intentions. But if we are theists, at some point we realize that our relationship with Deity should be rooted in more than tolerance, unity in diversity, harmony, and inclusion – rooted in more than just being nice.
At its worst, the shallow spirituality of the Nice Feelings Self fractures, splinters, and falls apart, leaving only millions of individual egos to rule. The bright promise of spiritual intelligence fragments, runs into blind alleys, and often regresses.
It’s worth our time to look at the major intellectual traditions with which these two modes of the Rising-Adult Self are associate with. Our Worldly Achiever Self (Orange) is associated with Modernism and our Nice Feelings Self (Green) is associated with Romanticism and Postmodernism.
With Modernism, our rational mind usually becomes reductive. Pure Scientism is reductive. When we think only objectively, life loses its quality and depth. We can calculate everything but we ascertain the true value of nothing. Interior depth is gutted. Inner life is repressed. Life becomes mechanistic. Life loses its enchantment and its worth.
Modernism is associated with the empiricism of John Locke, the positivism of Auguste Comte, and the matter-based “grid” and worldview that is often called Newtonian-Cartesian (despite the fact that Isaac Newton and Rene Descartes were both deeply spiritual men).
Opening up a war between religion and science, pure Modernists assume science is superior to spirituality and they lead a hyper-rational crusade against spirituality. Proud that it has a map for and has mastered the external environment, pure Modernism represses consciousness, spirituality, enchantment, inner life, and everything that is sublime. Lashing out blindly at their own higher spiritual impulses, pure Modernists live in a state of spiritual atrophy and dysfunction.
With a mechanistic worldview, we think of the world as a machine. We see the world as nothing but objects, governed by mathematical rules. Matter and natural energy are all that exist; they are the totality of reality. And so everything in our life becomes a number or an object. We reduce life to its surfaces. And life ceases to be satisfying and becomes spiritually empty.
With a purely mechanistic worldview or Scientism, we ignore everything in human experience that is subjective and intersubjective. We neglect the inner self and we ignore meaningful culture. We dismiss, reject, or marginalize everything Divine, spiritual, or even transpersonal. And so we live in Flatland.
Today the Nice Feelings Self (Green) is often aligned with Postmodernism.
Postmodernism demolishes all qualitative distinctions — insisting that nothing is better than anything else. What is senseless, vulgar, or nihilistic is just as valid as what is ennobling, virtuous, and wise.
In the Postmodern view, there is no eternal or even enduring truth. We can never hear more than one voice arising out of one culture and one historical era.
Postmodernism proposes that we not only take all personal perspectives and views into account — and never privilege nor favor one perspective over another — but that we see all views as subjective and, therefore, limited in meaning.
In the Postmodern view, everyone’s reality is nothing but a personally or culturally constructed meaning. Context is everything. There is no depth, there is no transcendence, and there are no moral or aesthetic values.
In the Postmodern worldview, everything is reduced to cultural influences and personal interpretation, objectivity is impossible, nothing is objectively true, and no truth is foundational. There is no final place to rest your head and say, “I get it”. No grand narrative, no big picture, is allowed.
Postmodernism abdicates all spiritual meaning and leaves our soul (or consciousness, or both) in a wasteland, disoriented and lost. There are only surfaces, with nothing under the surfaces.
Postmodernism is both aperspectival and omni-perspectival. Indeed, it’s aperspectival and omni-perspectival madness.
It is madness because it is empty of meaning – void of all values except tolerance, which is absolute. Postmodern culture is full of this kind of “all-truth-is-relative” values-free meaninglessness.
It is a problem to turn omni-perspectival. We try to honor and celebrate all subjective mental perspectives as equally valid. We favor no viewpoint and accept no viewpoint as foundational or absolute. The result is that we do not believe in anything but a tolerant and pluralistic relativism — in which no values or stance are better than any other and no judgments are allowed — and so we end up confused and mentally paralyzed.
Whether in Worldly Achiever / Orange mode or in Nice Feelings / Green mode, if we are going to grow beyond one or the other it is often in our thirties that we begin to find how limited our main mode is. By the time we arrive at midlife, hopefully, we know that it’s time to move on.
In the Graves / Beck model, the next stage is Yellow. In the Wilber model, the next stage is Teal. I regard the next stage as the ideal for midlife, so in my ideal symbolic community of New Florence, I simply call it Midlife.
This is good, "There is a deeper dimension to genuine spirituality than only connecting with people as we find them — and thinking that it is only society that matters, not individual merit and development. When in Nice Feelings mode, we usually have a fairly harmonious personality – at least on the surface – and more good intentions than evil intentions. But if we are theists, at some point we realize that our relationship with Deity should be rooted in more than tolerance, unity in diversity, harmony, and inclusion – rooted in more than just being nice.
At its worst, the shallow spirituality of the Nice Feelings Self fractures, splinters, and falls apart, leaving only millions of individual egos to rule. The bright promise of spiritual intelligence fragments, runs into blind alleys, and often regresses."
You could do a whole piece on this alone.