Integral Profiles with Jeff Salzman: Don Beck
Spiral Dynamics and the Palestine-Israel Conflict

Eleanor Roosevelt once said that "poor minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, and great minds discuss ideas."  Integral minds, we might add, discuss all three.  In the Integral Profiles series, host Jeff Salzman sits down with some of today's most notable thinkers, teachers, and leaders, discussing the many ways they are catalyzing the Integral vision in their lives, in their hearts, and in their work.  These men and women are collectively defining the leading edge of evolution in today's world, their thoughts and actions actively influencing the shape and scope of tomorrow's possibilities. 

Don Edward Beck, Ph.D., is Co-founder of The National Values Center in Denton, Texas, and President and CEO of The Spiral Dynamics Group, Inc.  Beck co-authored The Crucible: Forging South Africa's Future (with Graham Linscott, l991) and Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership & Change (with Christopher Cowan, l996). He also writes a "Sports Values" column for the Dallas Morning News and appears often in the media regarding issues related to values, sports, and racial divides.

Here Don offers an intimate glimpse into his own life and career.  He discusses the current phase of his work: traveling the world and applying Spiral Dynamics to various geo-political "hotspots" all over the planet.  He offers his own ideas about healthy models of society, the crucial distinction between stages of consciousness and the contents of those stages, and the importance of preserving many of the early stages of development that are so often seen as primitive and obsolete.  He then goes into considerable depth around the specifics of the Palestine-Israel conflict, describing the needs and problems on both sides of the divide, his hands-on involvement with both nations, and the remarkable receptivity with which his work has been met.  At a time when tensions in the Middle East can seem so hopelessly combustible, it is encouraging to see Integral seeds being planted in such surprisingly fertile soil, offering us all a much-needed exhale as we wait to see how evolution will continue playing itself out in this difficult region of the world.

"[Clare W.] Graves used to caution me, he said that "all you can do is help a country become what is next for it to become.  The belief that you can create this Utopian vision, and with a sleight of hand you can turn it into heaven on earth, is not in the cards.  What's in the cards is what is next for them—if you help them do that, nature will take care of you. But if you try to jam it in as we tried in Iraq—you see, too complex a system—it's going to blow back on you." -Don Beck

For a quick look at how Spiral Dynamics relates to several other developmental models, see the image below.  For a more in-depth look at Spiral Dynamics, be sure to listen to this 30-minute audio, which offers one of the best overviews of Don's work currently available, in his own words.

Be sure to stay tuned in coming weeks for the second, third, and fourth parts of this video series, as well as more Integral Profiles with Jeff Salzman.

Jeff Salzman is lead teacher at Boulder Center for Integral Living as well as part of the founding circle. He is co-founder of CareerTrack Training, and has worked in adult education/transformation for twenty years. For three years Jeff worked side by side with Ken Wilber building the Integral Institute, an International center for Integral theory and application. A Divinity School dropout, he expects to graduate from the Religious Studies Department of Naropa University with a Masters Degree in Indo-Tibetan Studies. Jeff is devoted to the Integral worldview and to helping it arise in people's minds, hearts, bodies, and lives.