CONVERSATIONS THAT MATTER – INTEGRAL AFRICAN DIALOGUES
My dream is to keep purple alive – with René de Beer
HEIDI WRITES
Humans are growing up through well noticeable stages. Growing up well means that we lean back and include the previous stages when we have fully arrived at the next one. “Transcend and include” is the famous wordings by Ken Wilber. Our western world is great in transcending, climbing one stage after the other. But instead of including the previous stages we leave them behind. We disidentify from them completely, we cut them away from our personal or collective history believing them to be somehow primitive and unworthy of the image we want to present ourselves with at the present moment.
What it is that we have lost, we can only discover when we meet other cultures who are -still – living it. I am talking here especially about our connection to our heart, our body, our intuition. We have lost all that, collectively, in the western world and people are beginning to feel a lack in their lives. They spend a lot of money to take courses which promise to give the lost treasure back to them. Or they follow gurus in the hope that the striving for enlightenment will bring them closer to what they vaguely feel missing. We have learned to live in our heads, to believe in thinking and rationality as the highest quality in humans, the only important capacity to develop. We have lost the deep connection with ourselves, with the other, with nature, with the all-present energy of existence. We have fed ourselves with some pieces of the cake and have allowed the rest of the cake to rot in the cellar. And we didn’t even consciously realise that we cut ourselves away from the life force which would allow us to become whole.
I knew all that in theory, but in practice I came to realise it on a deeper level when I visited South Africa and was guided along by people who embody those qualities and are very capable to see, understand and explain them. And furthermore, they aim to re-integrate them in our minds and take care that those who are still living them naturally, won’t lose them when going ahead in their development.
“It is my dream to preserve purple” Rene de Beer says. “Purple” stands for the second stage of development, often called “magical”. Our rationally trained mind laughs with a air of superiority, thinking about “magic” as the services of weird looking women in a fair reading your future from the tea leaves or a crystal bowl. That is just childish wishful thinking, we know it better. We need rational explanations before we believe in anything. What the magicians do is just a trick, or pure invention.
Really? Most of us still live in a materialist worldview and haven’t yet noticed that science has gone ahead. It started with EInstein who noticed that the world worked somehow differently than we, on the surface, chose to believe. Since then huge progress has been made in quantum physics. The phenomena who we used to believe to be impossible and therefore fake are now given a scientifically based justification. We begin to realise that the mechanistic worldview is just another belief which is limiting our playing fields. There is much more real than we have been taught for a long time. We needed to get rid of a God, sitting on the clouds and deciding for us – which was a good thing. But we threw out the baby with the bathwater by denying that something like “God” could exist, very much to our detriment. Now the God-energy, universal energy, or call it as you like, is coming back right by scientific research. Who would have thought that?
Now we can look on Purple again as a stage of development where the world is enchanted with sacredness and beauty, where people care for each other, in the family and in the tribe. The bonds are lasting, not conditioned by anything but the human connection itself. There is no calculus about: “who do I need to keep connection with? Who could be useful for me and my goals in the future?” and many of these “economic” considerations which are pervasive in our western world. There is the connection of the heart which is the most important thing at that stage – and we desperately would need to rediscover that again!
In Africa and other places of the earth this way of seeing the world and the own life still exist as a natural stage of personal and collective development. It is inevitable that these people and cultures will go through the spiral of development, too. But could there be a way that they do it differently than we have done it in Europe? Could there remain the appreciation of those values of human connection and heartfelt bonding instead of being sacrificed to the greed and power strives of the next stages? Rene believes that this would be possible by bringing consciousness to the process and learning from those who have already passed through it, especially learning from the errors they made.
It is a glimpse of hope and light in the dark of all the inhuman things which are happening all over the globe. It is a wake-up call for reaching back and love and appreciate, preserve the good and go ahead to open our minds to what is possible.
Video post for October 23th, 2019
About René de Beer
René has worked at Mandala Consulting since 2008 and has extensive experience in Management Consulting, Leadership Development and Human Resources. She is in the process of completing her MSc degree in Management of Technology and Innovation.
René has been trained in Spiral Dynamics and has a passion for preserving “Purple” in an African context. She focusses predominantly on first line management and the development of future leaders in organisations. She aligns team strategy with the overall organisation’s strategy and translate the strategy to all levels within the organisation.
She delivered leadership development programmes for Mandala Consulting in various countries. René worked as Group Human Capital Manager in Renlyn Group where she developed various Culture Change initiatives in the Mining Sector.
René has an avid interest in art and enjoy painting and spending time with her loved ones.
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