Seeing Through the World

Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness

Jeremy D Johnson

• Publisher: Revelore Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781947544253
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Seeing Through the World introduces the reader to the work of German-Swiss philosopher, poet, and intellectual mystic Jean Gebser (1905-1973). Writing in the midcentury during a period of intense cultural transformation and crisis in Europe, Gebser intuited a series of mutational leaps in the history of human consciousness, the latest of which emerging was the “integral” structure, marked by the presence of time-freedom. Gebser’s insights on the phenomenology of human consciousness has brought profound intellectual depth and spiritual transmission to the field of integral philosophy and consciousness studies, influencing the works of American historians such as William Irwin Thompson and the philosopher Ken Wilber. Further syncretic corroboration links Gebser’s integral age to those of the Indian revolutionary and yogi Sri Aurobindo’s “integral yoga” and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary mysticism.

Arguably, Gebser’s structures of consciousness are as significant an ontological insight as C. G. Jung’s “reality of the psyche.” Yet, until now, very little secondary literature has been available in the English-speaking world. Jeremy Johnson, the current president of the International Jean Gebser Society who has spent the last decade as an integral scholar and researcher, produces this introductory volume on the life and writings of Jean Gebser. Part companion piece to Gebser’s magnum opus, The Ever-Present Origin, part inspired treatise on an integral futurism, Jeremy guides the reader through the structures of consciousness and incepts integral scholarship as a divination that scries the age of ecological collapse and the ontological recodings of the Anthropocene.

It is the first volume in the NuraLogicals series, produced in partnership with Nura Learning.

1

Towards an Integral Philosophy of the Present

Time is being and being time, it is all one thing, the shining, the seeing, the dark abounding.

— Ursula K. Le Guin¹

JEAN GEBSER (1905–1973) was a German-Swiss cultural philosopher, intellectual mystic, poet, and scholar of the evolution of consciousness. Many know him in the English-speaking world for his magisterial text The Ever-Present Origin (1949–1952), a massive tome spanning art, language, and human history with great detail. Though perhaps lesser known than C. G. Jung, Erich Von Neumann (Origins and History of Consciousness), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Human Phenomenon), or Sri Aurobindo Ghose (The Life Divine), Gebser nevertheless offers immense insights for scholars and students of the evolution of consciousness alike. Spanning through the mid-twentieth century, Gebser saw his time, which is arguably also ours, as one of tremendous potentiation catalyzed by crisis. A solution within dissolution, and a latent spiritual mutation in humanity working towards realization. This incipient integral age—the “integral aperspectival” as a term I will attempt to introduce and convey to the reader in this volume—is nothing short of a leap from civilization as we know it (to what, we know not yet). It is an age unfathomable to us, however necessary, one in which Gebser suggests to us that, “the divided human being is replaced by the whole human being.”² Key to understanding this leap is not mere intellectual comprehension alone but a form of spiritual clarity, a recognition of wholeness, a waring of past, present, and future. At the outset, the integral is an intensification of originary presence in the human person.

In the rolling thunder of the immanent present, all that we are, all that we have been, and all that we could be is radically with us.

Time is whole and therefore you are whole.

Although coming to him in a “lightning-like” flash of inspiration in the early 1930s, Gebser’s integral insight would need to be carefully articulated through many years of maturation and personal growth.³ What began as a description of the current mutation, following the breakdown of Europe with the eruption of fascism and two World Wars and the simultaneous promise of a new form of consciousness expressed in the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke or the post-Newtonian science of quantum physics, it expanded to include a study of other epochal shifts in human history. For instance: the leap from the mythical to the mental structure through the example of Socrates in Ancient Greece (Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist famous for “the medium is the message,” has been compared with Gebser, and would draw similar conclusions about a leap in “sense ratios” through the advent of the Greek alphabetic script and systems of writing).⁴ Gebser would come to describe these qualitatively different world spaces that are no less real than our own, with phenomenologically unique relationships to time and space, as the structures of consciousness. These, briefly, are the archaic, magic, mythic, mental, and integral—each one a fundamental reworking of what it means to be in the world, and what the world is for us ontologically (meaning, in philosophy, a study of the nature of being). The structures, for the sensitive reader, are not merely categorical (i.e., the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the social sciences⁵), they are living realities immediately apprehensible within oneself. Indeed, one of the prerequisites for Gebser’s integral consciousness is the lived experience of concretization, that is, an awareness that the previous structures are very much alive, though latent, in the present. As William Faulkner remarked in Requiem for a Nun, “the past is never dead, it’s not even past.”

Gebser’s structures offer us a broad picture of humanity: from the event horizon of hominization in the archaic, to the vitalist dreaming and interweaving of Paleolithic cave paintings of Chauvet and Lascaux in the magic, to Chartres Cathedral and the celestial, ensouled cosmology of the mythic, still more to the emerging spatial and measurable waking world of the mental. Notice, however, how the dreaming mind and the waking mind are neither inferior nor superior to each other; rather, they are co-constituents of a larger reality. The integral, for Gebser, is likened to clarity. Diaphaneity. It belongs neither to the daylight nor twilight mind but instead achieves a lucid seeing through of these worlds as they reflect inexhaustible aspects of the Real,⁶ the spiritual Origin.

What is origin for Gebser? The German word Ursprung, as the late scholar of yoga and Gebserian biographer Georg Feuerstein notes, literally means “primal leap.”⁷ Gebser is at times elusive here, attempting to avoid both symbolically mythical or precise, rational language (it is neither the mythic-tied image of a “primordial spark,” nor the mental, Hegelian “being”⁸). Origin is not time-bound, nor space-bound, but is the originator or source of all that is time and space bound. “We might say it is sheer presence,” Feuerstein writes.⁹ Gebser has also described origin as “the itself,” or “that which pervades or ‘shines through’ everything.”¹⁰ Feuerstein finds its correspondence in the “super-consciousness” of Hinduism. “For the enlightened beings of Hinduism, the atman, which can correctly be rendered as ‘itself,’ is flawless consciousness or the ‘witness’… according to their testimony this witness is utterly unqualified, transpersonal, absolute.”¹¹ The integral, then, is an actualization of this originary presence in human consciousness—a coming to awareness, an awaring—and the integration of all previous structures. We might also note that consciousness, for Gebser, is the capacity in human beings to integrate these structures, which ultimately falls not upon the synthesizing capacities of the mental to do so, but the originary spiritual presence—hence the need for an intensification of presence as precursor to their integration and realization.

The Integral Milieu

Readers of Ever-Present Origin will immediately sense great care given for the aesthetic particulars in specific works of art: a Paleolithic mask without a mouth and what we can glean from it about the auditory surround of the magical structure, for instance, or how a Minoan fresco speaks volumes about the emergence of the soul, or even how the dimension of time becomes realized in a Picasso painting. This attention to detail is at least partly credited to Gebser’s own biographical context. The latter of which was not merely incidental: he was, in fact, friends with Pablo Picasso, and many other luminaries of the time. These included Federico Garcia Lorca, and Werner Heisenberg as well as religious scholars and psychologists such as C. G. Jung, Lama Anagarika Govinda, and Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki (the latter of whom would confirm Gebser’s satori experience at Sarnath, India, which we will mention at greater length later on in this volume) and frequented the famous Eranos lectures in Switzerland. It is through this correspondence and these scholarly acquaintances that Gebser first proposed the “three European worlds” of the unperspectival, perspectival, and aperspectival in his writing prior to Ever-Present Origin, in The Grammatical Mirror. These three worlds offer a broader overview of the coming to awareness of space and time, and to which the structures can offer us more concrete detail. Think, for instance, about the transformation from unperspectival medieval iconography to perspectival realism in Renaissance painting (to be detailed further in the following chapters). Additionally, Gebser would later come to discover and describe the “pre-eminent” works of Teilhard and Aurobindo, noting their independent corroboration of the new consciousness. Both Aurobindo’s work and his own¹² would use the term “integral,” though Aurobindo would describe this new consciousness particularly as the supramental. So, we have what might be described as an emergent integral milieu coming out of the mid-twentieth century.¹³

In 1985 and twelve years after Gebser’s death, Ever-Present Origin received an English translation through communications professors Algis Mickunas and Noel Barstad and reached the extended consciousness culture of the United States. Ken Wilber, a Colorado-based philosopher has helped to re-energize—and tremendously popularize—the philosophy of integral and has even adopted Gebser’s terminology (magic, mythic, mental, etc.) for his own Integral Theory in texts such as Up from Eden, The Atman Project, and Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality. Yet, what is arguably unique to Gebser in all of this is his singularly phenomenological approach to integral consciousness and the structures—it is not developmental. Nor is it a work of sophisticated meta-theoretical abstraction.¹⁴ In fact, throughout most of Ever-Present Origin, Gebser will repeatedly attempt to get out from under the natural machinations of the categorical mind. Much of contemporary integral studies has, like the larger human potential movement and fields such as transpersonal psychology, relied p...