What does it mean to "Awaken"?

What Does It Mean to Awaken?
 
Patrick Paul Garlinger wrote a wonderful article, published on Medium.  The question he asked and answered is a clear explanation of what it means to “awaken.”  Here is his summary, followed by some comments.  Note, too, that I have separate posts on each of the other three stages Garlinger identifies. Here I address only the first.  His summary follows.
 
Boiled down to its most basic principle, awakening is a process that challenges and subverts your framework for understanding the nature of reality. During a stage of awakening, you shift your perspective on how you see the world. In doing so, you jettison an older, more limited framework for understanding the world and incorporate new concepts that you had previously ignored or rejected. A genuine awakening causes you to recognize that much of what you previously thought or understood was quite limited or partial.
 
Awakening to the Constructed Nature of Society
Awakening to the Conditioned Nature of Mind
Awakening to the Unseen Universe
Awakening to the Natural World
 
Now, for some commentary.

I've been helped enormously by the work done by Clare Graves, popularized by Don Beck and Christopher Cowen in their book Spiral Dynamics.  ​For a very helpful blog post on Spiral Dynamics, go here.

Spiral Dynamics is a framework for understanding and working with the evolution of values socially, and individually.  The chart below, taken from the blog noted above, is an excellent summary.

We begin at PURPLE and evolve stage by stage up to GREEN, and then there is a huge leap ahead to Second Tier where YELLOW and TURQUOISE emerge.  There is no mistake that I chose turquoise for the cover of my book. 

Societies evolve.  In 1491, before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, this land was occupied by the first peoples, and they were primarily PURPLE and RED.  Today we are spread something like this - 55% are BLUE and below, and 45% are primarily living in the modern and post-modern worlds of ORANGE and beyond.  We don't jump from one stage to the next, but we morph over time from one to the next, moving back and forth as a society.

I lived through 1968 when GREEN really emerged for the first time.  In 2020, GREEN is challenging everything below as the progressive movement pushes ahead, and PURPLE and RED and BLUE resist.

Awakening is the collective consciousness evolving up the spiral, occasionally regressing under pressure, but inevitably moving ahead.  Spiral Dynamics is a wonderfully easy model to grasp and we have taught the framework to our children as they grew up so they could understand the news, politics, religion, technology with greater awareness.

​Society is Constructed, and that construction evolves.

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