Radiant Organizations: on AWAKE Collectives (and the Path of Becoming One)

By Jeff Vander Clute originally published in Shifting the Grid

Introduction

What would it take for organizations to be radically more effective, while thriving in perfect alignment with the principles of life? What if leading-edge organizations could be as awake as the most awakened beings in history? Could such organizations become AWAKE “superorganisms” that realize greater potentials far beyond what we thought was possible… and with these radical new capacities be able to address Humanity’s intractable or “wicked” problems?

At Sourcing The Way, we believe that organizations consisting of conscious and committed individuals can become awakened beings in their own right, as Thich Nhat Hanh predicted when he wrote in 1994 that “[t]he next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation.” Moreover, we sense intuitively that such communities – and organizations in particular – hold the keys to Humanity’s evolution from conflict to compassion. So, together with many colleagues, friends, and organizational clients, we have dedicated our lives to the exploration and actualization of AWAKE organizations.

Along the way, we have worked with hundreds of individuals and dozens of nonprofit and for-profit organizations that are in service to the betterment of society and the well-being of Nature and the planet. What we have observed is consistent with psychological models that describe a sequence of stages through which the consciousness (¹⁾ of individuals and collectives develops or evolves, similar to the natural process of growing up from childhood to adolescence, early adulthood, mature adulthood, and so on. Since the clients we work with are by and large committed to cultivating their consciousness – radically, in some cases – we have had the joy and privilege of discovering that the sequence of stages can be meaningfully and usefully extended all the way to organizational enlightenment.

A Beautiful Model: “Reinventing Organizations”

The elegant book Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness, by Frederic Laloux, presents a model of stages of development in which organizations are seen to evolve through a series of key breakthroughs from leadership by fear amidst high levels of chaos and conflict to more harmonious, holistic, and empowered living organisms with a compassionate higher purpose for being. This model builds upon foundations laid by Spiral Dynamics, Susanne Cook-Greuter, Ken Wilber, Jenny Wade, and many other researchers and organizational practitioners.

In keeping with the conventions of Spiral Dynamics, the stages of development in Reinventing Organizations are color coded. On one end of the developmental spectrum we have “Red” organizations, which are held together by fear and are exemplified by gangs and the mafia. Red organizations have been around for tens of thousands of years. On the other end of the spectrum are “Teal” organizations, which are recognized as being the newest stage and the leading edge of organizational consciousness. Laloux focuses primarily on the benefits and opportunities of this new form of organization in Reinventing Organizations.

Teal Organizations have a strong sense of “evolutionary purpose” that enables the people of these organizations to stay aligned with one another and with the organization, which they regard as a living system, or organism, rather than a lifeless construct. Thus, at the Teal stage, there is no need for leaders to use fear to impose order; command-and-control structures are not required to maintain harmony. Instead, these organizations have replaced the structures of hierarchical leadership with an empowered culture of self-management in which individuals use their sense of “inner rightness” as a compass when making decisions.

Another key breakthrough of Teal Organizations is that they encourage wholeness in their people and in their operations. These organizations bring together and celebrate masculine and feminine qualities; mind, body, and soul; and relationships between human communities and Nature. With wholeness comes a diversity of inner capacities (e.g. emotional, intuitive, and spiritual) and a wealth of perspectives, including, especially, the views and experiences of indigenous and underrepresented communities. Wholeness renders these organisms wiser, more intelligent, and more capable of engaging with complexity.

Teal Organizations are a giant leap forward in terms of Humanity’s ability to work together; and these new forms offer much hope that humans will be able to rise to the challenges posed by multiple, interconnected systems crises, including water and food shortages, ocean acidification, plastic pollution, extreme weather events, and more. To learn more about Teal and the previous stages of development, read “The New Big Deal Is Teal,” this detailed summary of Reinventing Organizations, or, better still if you have the time, the whole book.

Explorations Beyond Teal: “Radiant Organizations”

At Sourcing The Way, we can help organizations transition to Teal if they have not already done so. However, our passion, purpose, and primary focus are connected with enabling organizations that are ready, and even compelled, to surpass the current leading edge of mainstream development in order to discover new frontiers of awakeness and opportunity. We refer to organizations that are leaping beyond the known, with consciousness and awareness, as “Radiant Organizations” – on account of a subtle quality of “light” or “lightness” that we perceive intuitively around them.

Sourcing The Way specializes in working with organizational systems that are living and learning into more advanced stages of consciousness development, in which ever-greater capacities for collective wisdom, intelligence, and empowerment are manifested. Typically, we work concurrently with individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole around specific leverage points that we are able to identify and “alchemize.” In our experience so far, as organizations move into the radiance beyond Teal, through a natural unfolding they become beacons for transforming their industries and, ultimately, society as a Whole.

Continuing with the model of color coding, we are referring to these advanced stages of development as “Turquoise,” “Coral,” and “Clear Light.” (However, as we will see later on, “Clear Light” is not actually a stage.) Whereas the terms “Turquoise” and “Coral” are borrowed from Spiral Dynamics, “Clear Light” is Sourcing The Way’s contribution.

To the best of our knowledge, the stages of development beyond Teal have yet to be described and agreed upon for organizations. As such, it has been necessary for us to explore and discover the principles and essential breakthroughs through direct experience. The following sections offer a summary of our experiential learnings, which are still evolving and are therefore provisional, and we humbly submit all of these findings to the larger field of conversations regarding the evolution of Consciousness.

Deeper-Teal Organizations

Reinventing Organizations does a brilliant job of laying out three key breakthroughs (and much more) for each stage of development. In the case of Teal, these are:

Self-management: “Teal Organizations have found the key to operate effectively, even at a large scale, with a system based on peer relationships, without the need for either hierarchy or consensus.”

Wholeness: “Teal Organizations have developed a consistent set of practices that invite us to reclaim our inner wholeness and bring all of who we are [including our emotional, intuitive, and spiritual aspects] to work.”

Evolutionary Purpose: “Instead of trying to predict and control the future, members of the organization are invited to listen in and understand what the organization wants to become, what purpose it wants to serve.”(²⁾

Through working with organizations that embody these three qualities, meditation, and extended inquiry into the roots of these organisms within Consciousness, we have been able to look deeply at the key breakthroughs of Teal. On this basis, we can propose the following articulations of what might be called a “Deeper Teal”:

Self-actualizing: Teams become capable of self-management as the individuals step into their own talents and power. Self-actualized people have sufficiently met their basic and emotional needs, and are sufficiently “comfortable in their own skin” to operate autonomously while advancing to new levels of mastery in their work.(³⁾ Teal Organizations both attract people who are fairly far along on their developmental journeys and intentionally create conditions that support self-actualization.

Essential Purpose & Contribution: The deepest and most essential purpose of an organization is to serve life through its unique mix of capabilities. Teal Organizations are reflective and practice “collective self-inquiry” in order to understand their Noble Contribution to society and the planet, which are ever-evolving living systems, and then align their activities around this purpose.

Opening to SOURCE Through Wholeness: When we dive into Wholeness individually and collectively, we tap into currents of being, intelligence, and wisdom that are much deeper than ourselves, which we may come to know as the SOURCE (^4,5 ) of ourselves. When we cultivate a relationship with these deep currents, they carry us into realms of awakening and capacity that are inaccessible to the ego.

The purpose of proposing this deeper view of Teal is to bridge to the subsequent stages of development, which are characterized by the extent to which the organization-as-organism and the people within the organization are awake and operating beyond ego.

Turquoise Organizations

Reinventing Organizations focuses on the enormous opportunities of Teal Organizations and does not venture into the stages beyond Teal. However, Laloux alludes to the transcendent possibilities in an appendix (bold emphasis added):

From the perspective of one particular stage, in hindsight all previous stages of consciousness appear limiting. Sometimes I am asked, “What are the limitations of the Evolutionary-Teal worldview?” The corollary question is, “In what aspects might Teal Organizations one day feel as limiting as the current organizational models do today?” I believe it is fair to assume that to people who have moved on to the stage of transcendent consciousness, the practices of Teal Organizations … will seem very much grounded only in one level of reality―the level of tangible experience in waking consciousness. They could seek to break through this limitation and create organizational practices that work directly with the world of energy and spirit to help manifest an organization’s evolutionary purpose with less effort and more grace. (⁶⁾

Spiral Dynamics defines a subsequent “turquoise” stage of development for individuals, characterized by synergy, holism, and harmonious cooperation. However, we have yet to see a consensus emerge around the key breakthroughs or “evolutionary adaptations” (our preferred term) for Turquoise organizations. So, in humility, and perhaps to stimulate a larger, collective conversation, we propose the following three adaptations of Turquoise Organizations, based on organizational clients that we have worked with:

JOY: We have grown fond of saying that “AWAKE (⁷⁾ Leadership is the disciplined practice of JOY,” and Turquoise Organizations are filled with such leaders. Turquoise Organizations cultivate profound joy, which in our work and meditations has been revealed to be an aspect of TRUTH, (⁸⁾ along with BEAUTY and COMPASSION. (⁹⁾ Leading from JOY accesses what is most deeply true in every situation, activates LOVING responses, aligns with the Whole of LIFE, and gives rise to a comprehensive vitality or thriving, both within the organization and in everything it touches.

Generative Space for Arising: What is truly new tends to emerge in spaces of betweenness. Turquoise Organizations cultivate the space between things and listen closely for the signals that hint at what may be arising in the field. These can be subtle, like tiny shoots in springtime, or they can be quite dramatic, as in the recent examples of Brexit and the U.S. Presidential Election of 2016. However small or large these signals may be, for Turquoise Organizations such events are clues to deeper patterns of transformation that – because they are often  unprecedented – can be challenging to discern or even unthinkable at earlier stages of development (which rely much more on the past to make sense of present circumstances and then hope to predict the future).

When asked, “Which part of the future is real and which is not?” Nisargadatta Maharaj answered, “The unexpected and unpredictable is real.”

Frequently, what arises in generative space is conflict between or among relatively unconscious, ego-based systems. Such conflict is a natural part of growth: It is how the places where growth needs to occur announce themselves. Because Turquoise Organizations are spacious, they have the capacity to “hold” conflict (without losing JOY) and see the larger patterns beyond the limited perspectives of ego. Moreover, this space is big enough and stable enough to hold the disturbance until solutions arise from a higher level of consciousness that transcends the egos involved. By consciously stewarding such spaces, Turquoise Organizations can facilitate the compassionate resolution of problems created in prior developmental stages.

Transpersonal View: That which radically promotes synergy and harmonious cooperation is an awareness of the layers of Being beyond the personal, human self coupled with a consciousness that is sophisticated enough to give voice and shape to this deeper beingness. These layers of Being are shared and “transpersonal” – a root system of spirit and energy that is common to all humans and ultimately all beings. This is the realm of archetypes (living patterns within collective consciousness that play out through individuals and groups, often pitting them against one another), of gods and goddesses, and of the creative and destructive forces of the natural world.

We find that the problems and conflicts that arise in generative spaces tend to have transpersonal origins, and that the solutions are almost always connected with transpersonal insights. Turquoise Organizations are able to uncover whether problematic behaviors are originating at the level of an individual or group of individuals, or whether the individual or group is unconsciously expressing one or more patterns of collective being. With practice and over time, these organizations come to operate transpersonally by default.

Turquoise Organizations emphasize JOY in leadership and decision making. These organisms open spaces for emergence and maintain spaciousness in their structures; acknowledge and co-create with the deeper layers of transpersonal being; notice, learn from, and compassionately heal disturbances at the root; and actively cultivate shared beingness. The combination of these practices leads to experiences of synergy and “collective flow,” i.e. manifesting purposefully with less effort and more grace, as described in Appendix 2 of Reinventing Organizations.

Coral Organizations

Within the community of transformation practitioners, it is widely held that the next stage or level of Consciousness beyond Turquoise is now emerging in response to novel and pressing challenges facing Humanity. For one, the hypercomplexity of a planetary species in pervasive communication (and communion) via Internet-enabled mobile devices is such a new condition. There is even an acronym, VUCA, that refers to the perfect storm of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity that has been growing in energy and force thus far in the 21st century. The new stage of Consciousness that is emerging as an evolutionary response to these and related challenges has been given the name “Coral.”

At this point it is essential to acknowledge with great respect that we have yet to find anything in writing that is remotely definitive regarding the qualities and characteristics of Coral individuals, let alone Coral Organizations. Nonetheless, we have a strong intuitive knowing that some of Sourcing The Way’s clients are expressing aspects of Coral Consciousness, and so we have reason to suppose that this information is available in our web of professional relationships, provided that we can discern the patterns.

Additionally, on our own individual and organizational journeys of awakening, we have developed the capacity to “source” and receive information from the profound currents of wisdom, intelligence, and being. Thus we have been able to engage in an iterative process of sourcing various concepts and qualities and cross-referencing these meditatively-derived “hypotheses” with actual client experiences. Out of this ongoing discipline of deep listening and experiential refinement, the following (provisional) list of evolutionary adaptations for Coral Organizations has blossomed:

SOURCING: Coral Organizations have established “sourcing” practices that connect with much vaster intelligence and wisdom than the human mind. Doing so lifts the individuals and the organization increasingly beyond reliance on ordinary thinking into what Sri Aurobindo called the “supramental,” which is a higher knowing of pure being and consciousness.

SOURCING is a primary way in which such organizations work directly with the realms of energy and spirit, and the people within Coral Organizations source consistently to access what is most deeply true. Teams practice “co-sourcing” to listen more holistically into the mosaic of CREATION, to validate one another’s information, and to refine the collective picture of how TRUTH is showing up in actual experience. (See this earlier blog post on “group gnosis.”) Moreover, as it is recognized that Nature expresses utterly profound currents of beingness, these organizations actively partner with natural systems to “eco-source” further into the taproots of BEING.

One the greatest benefits of these SOURCING practices – beyond making creative, wise, and TRUTH-based decisions – is the illumination of relationships between people, between people and Nature, and between individuals and the SOURCE of their being (the primary relationship). Ultimately, all value is grounded in profound relationship, and Coral Organizations are built on this bedrock realization.

SELF-Discovery & SELF-Realization: The Coral Organization as a whole organism and the individuals within it are on a co-evolutionary journey of ultimate discovery and realization. As an increasingly self-aware being with agency and consciousness in its own right, and with transpersonal as well as transfinite¹⁰ qualities beyond what the humans contribute to the overall system, a significant activity and purpose of the Coral Organization is to explore itself. And as with individual humans beings, eventually the organizational being traces its own roots back to their SOURCE, at which point it discovers that its SELF is inextricably one with ALL.

At the same time, perhaps 40-50% of the people of the organization have realized – a direct knowing without the need for repeated experiential confirmation – this profound SELF to such an extent that they know themselves to be “in the World, but not of the World.” The center of beingness of such individuals has moved from strongly identifying with the vibrational forms of Manifestation to knowing, as themselves, the pure CONSCIOUSNESS delighting in existence.

As an aside, the processes of exploration, discovery, and realization can be greatly accelerated using a SOURCING technology called “Resonance Mapping” and a set of maps called “Architecture of CREATION.” These offerings have emerged more or less spontaneously in working with clients. They make visible the hidden or subtle dimensions of Being and Consciousness and then illuminate the pathways of profound realization that are most suitable for the individual or organization.

Accomplishing via Nondoing: Since Coral Organizations are starting to tap into the profound SELF that is one with all of Manifestation, shifts in their consciousness can show up anywhere and everywhere, and usually do so in unexpected ways. The simple “act” of perceiving with crystal clarity and some awakeness, especially of perceiving a luminous possibility that is aligned with the Whole of LIFE, sets in motion an unfolding process and activates all manner of forces that will do the heavy lifting. From the point of view of the individual, it is as if an inconceivably large number of dominoes have been arranged by Consciousness and one has only to push the right one to set the entire system in motion. To achieve this level of effortlessness, however, requires two pieces of “doing”: seeing the luminous possibility that is aligned with LIFE and then knowing the optimal intervention point. Resonance Mapping facilitates both.

As advanced as Coral Organizations are in their evolution, they are still awakening. While they may have more or less mastered the capacities that emerged in earlier stages of development, the individuals and the organism as a whole at the Coral stage may need a few years to master, as a collective, the practices of SOURCING and accomplishing via nondoing; and they will find that there is infinite SELF-Discovery and SELF-Realization yet to come. However, in due course, these organizations will be able to work “miracles” of nondoing, transforming themselves and their environments in the process.

Clear Light Organizations

If Turquoise reaches past the recognized leading edge of organizational consciousness (Teal), and Coral is a bigger stretch (e.g. knowing and relating to organizations as awakening beings with their own consciousness and agency), then Clear Light Organizations are a further leap in development – indeed, a quantum leap beyond all that we have known as individual and organizational development.

In a May 2016 article titled “Discover Your Innermost Awareness,” His Holiness the Dalai Lama summarizes the essence of his lifetime of wisdom teachings, referring repeatedly to the “clear light of innermost awareness.” For instance, he writes:

“Clear light pervades all consciousness. … [A]s the clear light becomes more and more profound, the types of coarse thoughts diminish more and more. This … practice is called ‘the essential path through knowledge of which all states are released.’ Coming to know this single innermost awareness in our own experience, we are liberated from all sorts of tense situations.”

In the clear light of innermost awareness, all states and stages are released. Clear Light Organizations are thus liberated from the negative feedback of “tense situations” that accompany development through unawareness and unconsciousness, however subtle.

Of course, Clear Light Organizations are not limited to Tibetan Buddhism or any belief system. In fact, this point serves to illustrate why they are called “clear light”: They are not partial to any color or combination of colors (both literally and figuratively). While in any given moment, Clear Light Organizations may exhibit “colors” that are appropriate for the situation, such organizations transcend color and all other category systems, including stages of development and even states of consciousness. They are the ultimate chameleons or shapeshifters, taking whatever form is needed to support the compassionate unfolding of Manifestation.

Clear Light Organizations have relaxed and surrendered into the flow of “Isness” to such an extent that they no longer have any sense of exerting control. Nor is there a sense of being out of control; nor is there any sense that the appearances of being in control and out of control are problematic. In the flow of Isness, concepts like personal, collective, leadership, and organizational development in the conventional meaning of planning, striving, and arriving at a hoped-for destination (including the desire to be more awake) all cease to be meaningful. Instead, phrases like “absolute oneness-fluidity” and “surrendered evolutionary unfolding” may be more accurate, if less convenient.

The practice of Clear Light Organizations is to maintain clarity and stay centered in the flow, experiencing themselves as each situation that arises, abides, and yields into the next form of here and now. Clear Light is one with Nature, and so, in a very real sense, these organizations are Nature. Thus the distinction between natural and constructed systems, along with all other dualistic formulations, completely dissolves in the colorless, transparent LIGHT of profound AWAKENESS. What remains is the freedom to use distinctions appropriately and compassionately, for the good of ALL, without being actually contained, defined, or otherwise limited by them.

We appreciate that Clear Light Organizations may be somewhat or even completely unintelligible from a conventional perspective. It may, therefore, be helpful to recall Arthur C. Clark’s statement that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Organizations are a form of technology; Clear Light Organizations are the most advanced form of this technology, both in Sourcing The Way’s experience and in the model that we are proposing. In as much as we have sourced and lived them, the three essential adaptations of Clear Light are as follows:

Knowing THE LIGHT: In our deepest explorations, it has been shown to us that LIGHT is even more fundamental than TRUTH. Although LIGHT completely pervades Manifestation (a.k.a the World) and Manifestation is made of LIGHT, LIGHT is somehow independent of Manifestation whereas TRUTH is not. TRUTH is what gives “shape” to LIGHT’s radiance. In Clear Light Organizations, the majority of individuals maintain an awareness of the LIGHT within all people, beings, things, and situations, literally seeing the divine in all. Thus, Clear Light Organizations are constituted by individuals of considerable mastery who know themselves to be “the light of the World.” This knowledge both liberates (per H.H. the Dalai Lama’s quote above) and empowers.

Consciously SELF-Realized Superorganism/Superorganization: In previous stages of development, the Clear Light Organization was seen to be a living organism with its own evolutionary impulse as well as a transpersonal beingness with will and consciousness. Now, the Clear Light Organization is known to be a “superorganism” that is both one and many, consisting of individuals that have gelled as a collective and become one as a higher-order unity. Since a majority of the individuals are SELF-Realized, realization spreads and is shared throughout the superorganism. The whole and the parts thus cross the threshold of SELF-Realization into a kind of free-fall, free-flow as infinite, woven streams of life-energy – the INFINITE-LOVING expressing as the totality of Manifestation. The people of the Clear Light organization are like strings of livingness resonating together, with each sounding its own notes in the Symphony.

BEING GROUND: Clear Light Organizations are “doubly grounded” in form and primordial formlessness, in the World and in the ultimate REALITY within which universes arise and fall away, in the experiences of human beings (and perhaps other sentient beings) and in the GROUND OF BEING, INFORMATION, and LIGHT. Even as Clear Light Organizations know themselves to “be the GROUND” of being and light, they do not hold themselves apart from the World in which they appear to operate. Deeply present, the individuals in these organizations flow with radical effectiveness in activity and inactivity alike, seeming to establish plans and make preparations when optimally called for, and seeming to release or revise these without hesitation when the flow shifts. Similarly, the superorganism appears to operate skillfully in the physical realms of time-space while operating from the realms of spirit and energy.

A hallmark of Clear Light Organizations is that it is no longer possible to tell whether the organization is “doing the doing,” whether Nature/Spirit is operating through the organizational vessel, whether both are the case or, curiously, whether neither is the case. The “two” are now truly indivisible, apparently one from some perspectives, apparently two from other perspectives, and fundamentally neither. All questions of will and agency thus disappear, being groundless. There is Isness within Clear Light; and it is LOVE, and it is LIGHT; and the organization knows ITSELF as LIGHT expressing.

Summary Table

Concluding Remarks

What started with an intention to share a few characteristics of the more advanced manifestations of organizational consciousness, based on our experiences at Sourcing The Way, has unfolded into something much more than a blog post. To those who have read all the way to this point, thank you! We welcome your reflections, feedback, clarifications, and corrections, and we invite the conversations to continue in the comments, over email, and via Skype or Zoom.

It is our hope, and also our sense, that having given voice to these profound possibilities, we will begin to see more and more Radiant Organizations and “superconscious superorganisms” in service to all of the apparent levels of LIFE. Clear expression is a manifestation technology, and we hope that these many words have been clear enough to serve. Certainly, there is room for further improvements.

Up to this point, we have been explorers of Consciousness much more than scholars of organizational theory. What we have shared derives about 80% from actual client work coupled with thousands of hours of meditation and SOURCING. The other 20% is what we have picked up or borrowed along the way, about two-thirds consciously and one-third unconsciously. If you feel that we have strayed in any of our articulations or representations, especially of others’ contributions, know that we are happy to receive your clarifications and corrections, which we will not hesitate to incorporate.

And so this is a living document that will evolve. It is perhaps 23% complete. We know that there needs to be further unpacking of these ideas, as well as specific case studies and examples, suggestions for how to shift organizational culture and consciousness from one stage to the next, basic instructions for developing advanced capacities with pointers to where to learn more, additional perspectives that can make Clear Light more accessible, simpler articulations to reduce reliance on esoteric language, and professional offerings to support individuals and organizations on their journeys of relaxing progressively into the surrendered (yet empowered) flow of Clear Light.

There is more work to be done than Sourcing The Way can do and non-do on its own, more to write than we can write by ourselves, and more awakening to support than we can support alone. Thus we invite your collaboration and co-creation to help bring forth a global movement of AWAKE superorganizations. Here’s to what may be the grandest evolutionary opportunity of our times. Let’s play!

Appreciations

We are forever grateful to a radiant network of learning partners, both individuals and organizations. These relationships, built on trust, TRUTH, and mutual respect over many years, have enabled us to co-source “The Way” of awakeness, compassion, and thriving, and to apply all that we have been discovering to organizations. While the individuals are too many to name here, the following are foremost among our organizational learning partners:

• Sourcing The Way – First and foremost: the being of Sourcing The Way
• InClaritas
• Alliance for the Earth
• Avanoo
• Charter for Compassion International
• Compassionate Action Network
• DreamRider Productions
• EARTH’S CALL
• Fluency Foundation
• Gaiafield Project
• Healthy Buildings
• NewStories
• NextNow Collaboratory
• OPTYVA
• Process Experts
• The Source of Synergy Foundation
• Thrive Napa Valley
• Thriving Communities
• ThrivingCommunities.org
• And so many more…

Endnotes

¹ Consciousness. The word “consciousness,” as we use it, refers to the ability to act in harmony with one’s environment as well as the actor that performs, or seems to perform, the action. By “becoming more conscious,” we mean cultivating the ability to act in compassionate alignment with larger and larger wholes, all the way up to Earth as a fully integrated living system, and ultimately beyond notions of size and scale. Although the consciousnesses of individuals and collectives can be usefully conceptualized in terms of qualities, states, levels, personal and transpersonal entities, etc., Consciousness itself – the ultimate actor, so to speak – is transcendent of these, being their source, their maintainer, and their destroyer.

² Laloux, Frederic. “Three Breakthroughs and a Metaphor.” Reinventing Organizations, Nelson Parker, Brussels, p. 56.

³ The qualities of autonomy, mastery, and purpose correspond to the three elements of true motivation proposed by Daniel H. Pink in his book Drive (2009). We might therefore suppose that “Deeper Teal” organizations create the conditions for true motivation, thus conferring an evolutionary advantage upon the entire organism.

⁴ Capitalization conventions. (a) All capital letters: The use of all-caps indicates that the qualities being referred to are rooted in the ultimate ground of existence, which we have mapped extensively in Sourcing The Way’s Architecture of CREATION. (b) First letter capitalized: When the first letter of a word is capitalized when it would not normally be capitalized according to grammatical conventions, we may be referring to a universal wholeness or deeper expression of some entity or quality that, while deep, is still at the level of emanations of the ultimate GROUND rather than within their SOURCE.

⁵ SOURCE. The word “SOURCE” in all capital letters refers to the aspect of the generative GROUND that projects Vibrational Manifestation, which includes the complex patterns of vibration and energy that give rise to the multitude of forms experienced as sensory reality. A primary distinction in Sourcing The Way’s Architecture of CREATION is between Vibrational Manifestation and the GROUND OF INFORMATION AND LIGHT within which such Manifestation arises. This GROUND has various “interchanges,” and so, depending on context, we may refer to the GROUND OF BEING, the GROUND OF AWARENESS, the GROUND OF LIGHT, etc.

⁶ Laloux, Frederic. “Appendix 2: Beyond Evolutionary-Teal.” Reinventing Organizations, Nelson Parker, Brussels, p. 316.

⁷ AWAKE. Our definition of “AWAKE” has two components: (1) The center of awareness of a person, organization, or other being has moved from Vibrational Manifestation into GROUND AWARENESS and become established there. This is the state of being “in the World but not of the World.” (2) The consciousness of the person, organization, etc. has expanded to include the full spectrum of qualities, spaces, and states listed in the Map of CONSCIOUSNESS (part of the Architecture of CREATION). Thus the AWAKE person, organization, or other being has realized both the profound depths of AWARENESS and the exalted heights of CONSCIOUSNESS and expresses these in the World.

⁸ TRUTH. We use the word “TRUTH” with caution and an awareness that people’s notions of truth have been severely misused through the ages to justify harm. What we are referring to the deepest roots of truth, both beyond Universal and yet nourishing all forms and situations, which is not a limited point of view or something that can be possessed or fought over. The application of TRUTH is attended by BEAUTY, COMPASSION, and JOY. Therefore, be particularly vigilant for the presence of these qualities, before accepting anything offered as TRUTH.

⁹ COMPASSION. The profound COMPASSION is, roughly speaking, 43% kindness and 57% TRUTH-bringing fierceness. COMPASSION is a force that liberates sentient beings from their deluded ideas, which liberates them from the suffering caused by delusion. Much suffering has been alleviated through comfort; much less has been liberated through fierce compassion, which is the true nature of awakened activism. It would be reasonable to hypothesize that there will be more fierce compassion in the World as the impulse to awaken gains strength.

¹⁰ Transfinite. The etymology of “transfinite” traces back to Latin words meaning “beyond limits.” The word was introduced in the 19th century by Georg Cantor in relation to transfinite numbers and transfinite arithmetic. We use “transfinite” to refer to the profound depths of AWARENESS and the exalted heights of CONSCIOUSNESS that are beyond the limitations imposed by ideas and definitions of infinity. Transfinite realization sees that Infinity and the Infinite Expanse are simply ideas within MIND.

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