Illustrating the Spiral of Development in Consciousness and Culture

One of the most significant aspects of integral philosophy is its recognition of the living system of cultural evolution known as the spiral of development. Many of those who are teaching integral philosophy have produced graphical expressions of this internal universe structure, but none of these spirals have truly captured this structure’s essence in my opinion. Although it is more like an ocean current than a piece of architecture, the spiral of development in consciousness and culture is a real system that has a definite structure, albeit an internal one. And the attempt to model and illustrate this internal structure provides one of the important ways that we can employee beauty in the service of truth. So over the last few years I have been working on coming up with a spiral graphic that best describes the contours of this evolutionary system.

The spiral of development is technically a “helix;” it can best be modeled as a three-dimensional series of dialectical steps whereby each turn of the helix is formed through the process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. It is thus the developmental nature of this dialectical process of growth that suggests the helix structure, which is formed as each new synthetic level returns to the position of its original thesis, but at “a higher turn on the spiral”—a position that achieves its increased altitude through the inclusion of both the thesis and the antithesis of the previous two levels. Unlike the helix of a DNA spiral, which remains the same width throughout, the spiral of development grows wider as it ascends as human consciousness and culture becomes more complex and sophisticated as the result of evolution.

Another aspect of the spiral’s structure that lends itself to a 3d model is its inherent self-similarity. Self-similarity is a pattern of growth that is one of the hallmarks of natural evolutionary systems. Just as a seashell grows from within itself, always building each new level in harmonic proportion to its previously existing form, so too do consciousness and culture evolve in this fractal, self-similar way. The result is a structure whose proportions are logarithmic and self-similar, reminiscent of a seashell or a tornado.

Now all this theory is great, but actually producing a spiral graphic that reflects this relationship geometry has proved to be somewhat of a challenge. As illustrated in the “before and after” image above, my attempts to draw the spiral using Photoshop software resulted in an image that looked more like a zig-zagging snake than a logarithmic helix. So after vainly trying to improve this spiral image myself by adding more shading and blurring the edges, I finally gave up and hired a 3d model expert from silicon valley and worked closely with him to create a realistic looking structure. The results are shown in the “after” graphic, which made it into my book at the last minute.

Interestingly, even before I came to understand and appreciate the significance of the spiral of development in consciousness and culture, I had a strange fascination with spirals because of their ubiquitous appearance as a central motif of the universe. Like Richard Dreyfus’ character in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, who found himself carving the Devil’s Tower out of his mashed potatoes as he obsessed about this subconscious attractor, I have actually been making spiral art images since the early 90s. You can see some of these early spirals at this URL: www.stevemcintosh.com/spirals.

SM