Integral Consciousness
= concept by Swiss cultural historian Jean Gebser
Description
Peter Pogany:
"According to him, each consciousness structure coincided with distinctive socioeconomic conditions: The archaic, with primitive hunting, fishing, and gathering; the magical, with more advanced versions of the same activities within increasingly complex social schemes centering on the horde; the mythical, which was characterized by agriculture; the mental by industry coming to dominance.
The collision between our civilization and its ecological constraints, along with a likely historic crisis of epic proportions, may be regarded as the struggle of integral-arational consciousness (Gebser’s “fifth structure”) to deprive overblown rationality (the deficient phase of mental consciousness) from its current preeminence.
What will the parameters of the new global system be? Regardless of how correctly or incorrectly one may characterize it, any consistent attempt to find an answer must conclude that a radically new social, economic, and political organization will be needed. The precondition of saving the world from itself is a mutation of the average individual consciousness. It will favor cooperation over competition; acquiescence over indifference; responsible sociability over isolation; integrative open-mindedness over stubborn, perspectival dogmatism, altruism over extrasomatic hedonism. "
Commentary
1. Jean Gebser:
"It is precisely because Asia and the Occident are not mutually exclusive opposites, but are mutually complementary poles (which may very well one day rediscover their common roots), that it is important for this consciousness to be coherently and fully explored. This now becomes even more necessary in view of the fact that my earlier publications have been mainly concerned with providing evidence of the dawning of the Integral consciousness and of the forms it has taken in the Occident in recent decades, and have not addressed themselves sufficiently to the unique character of this new constellation of consciousness.
It is difficult to find the right name—the most fitting and appropriate designation—for something new. Sri Aurobindo and Deisetz Teitaro Suzuki, for example, have each given a different name to what is essentially the same phenomenon: this new consciousness. We have called it “integral” and “a-rational,” and have, moreover, emphasized that it is above all “time-free,” a designation which is in keeping with Western terminology.
Let us then consider what is to be understood by such a description as an “a-rational, integral consciousness, free of time.” Many people will say that these are difficult, even incomprehensible notions, and that whether we understand their meaning will, in the end, not matter at all. But anyone who believes that it is sometimes good as well as constructive to come to grips with a problem which touches the very foundations of our everyday life (to say nothing of the future which is helping to shape our present) will agree that a problem concerning our consciousness is worth thinking about.
Our conception of what we call reality depends upon our mode of consciousness. For example, reality, as it is understood by many Asiatics, Africans, American Indians and other non-European peoples, is not the same as it is for Westerners, because they do not see the world as the correlate of their own ego. We, on the other hand, regard everything from the point of view of our ego-consciousness. For us, the world is a tangible reality which confronts us: Here am I, there is the world. We believe ourselves capable of managing this world by means of external techniques because we are strongly conscious of our position in space and time—we must be conscious of our stance, for without this conscious knowledge we should be egoless, indeed timeless, as are the representatives of those non-European cultures just mentioned. Their consciousness is to a certain extent dreamlike; it knows little of ego or of time. The same could also have been said of Europeans several thousand years ago, before we awoke to an awareness of the ego in the world, and thereby learned to regard time and space as tangible values. Thanks to this mental and ego-centered waking awareness we were able to shape our reality anew: We saw reality as objective to ourselves as subject, and thereby created science and made technology possible.
Yet. in spite of all the so-called progress we have made, in spite of all our achievements, we are threatened by a danger which becomes greater and more apparent day by day and which cannot be over-stressed: the danger that our identification with the ego may become too strong—that it may harden and degenerate into egocentricity, until we lose the ability to fructify conscious human relations and may even, eventually, become inhuman. Many people today feel that ego-development is leading to a fatal imbalance, even to the point of threatening our whole Western culture. The threat arises from the fact that excessive ego-centricity, which is associated with unbridled possessiveness and lust for power, results in a corrosive materialism and a ruthless disregard for the essential quality of human life. It leads finally to loss of the ability to apprehend those transcendent values which Asia still knows better than we do.
Today, many are endeavoring to escape these consequences by trying to return to a state of timelessness and egolessness without, however, being aware that they are doing so. They turn for help to (misunderstood) yoga training, or join Eastern communities whose purposes are little understood in Europe. In these, however, only the teachers (who are regarded as holy) and the community itself have any significance, and therefore those who seek refuge in such traditions of necessity lose their ego. Again, if Aldous Huxley’s intercession on behalf of mescaline was a first falsification of the experience of felicity, the “psychedelic experiment” has been a crime against our young people, whose true longings to avoid the taints of materialism were misled by false promises and fatal means. It has been suggested that LSD and other drugs can provoke the same sensations of self-release, bliss and escape from the world as, for example, those described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. To equate the hallucinations artificially engendered by chemicals with the experiences won only after decades of spiritual training is to submit to a delusion based upon the grossest kind of materialistic thinking. That which is to be achieved only by mental application and spiritual discipline leads, as a result of psychic non-discipline, to ruin instead of enlightenment; the result is regression, a weakening or lowering of awareness instead of its necessary and integrating intensification. These negative attempts to master our situation are not an overcoming, but rather a falling back, because those who act thus fall below the possibilities of the waking consciousness, which we have acquired through thousands of years of effort.
There is another way, however, which overcomes egoism and leads to the freedom of the ego. That is to say, it leads to a newly-unfolding, truly awake consciousness, free both from attachment to “egoness” and “egolessness”—a consciousness that deliberately integrates the two states. When this is achieved by the individual, something very significant—indeed, saving—happens. His consciousness, and thereby his reality, take on a richness and abundancy of life heretofore not believed possible. A person who has such an Integral consciousness is no longer dependent on his ego: His ego, with all its passions, no longer dominates him; rather, he governs his ego. Then the world as a correlate of ego—a world which confronts us with all its conditions of time and space—becomes a shared world, a world of participation in that which, like the divine or the spiritual, is not linked to time and space because it is, by its very nature, timeless and spaceless. If we succeed in overcoming both egolessness and egoness by consciously integrating them, our mental, ego-centered waking consciousness is transformed into an Integral, fully awake consciousness, free from time and ego. By this means we overcome the fatal danger that threatens our culture today—the danger that we may perish of ego-hardening and the fall into complete materialism.
This concept of an Integral, time-free consciousness is neither Utopian nor illusory; neither is it a form of wishful thinking. On the contrary, it represents and shapes a richer reality. The dawning of this new consciousness, with its new conception of reality, is today becoming visible in many different fields, in the West as well as in the East. Like everything new, it strikes one at first as extremely strange, although it is simply an intensification of the possibilities of our consciousness. It is a spiritual process which, though painful, brings with it the assurance that if it can be consciously achieved, we ourselves, the world, and indeed all humanity will move towards a new and positive reality.
To think of this achievement, even as a possibility, will not be an easy matter for everyone. In order to be able to see it clearly––us the present age, so full of imminent catastrophe, demands one must cast off all prejudice and break old and outmoded habits of thinking. One condition for this is that we become so well-acquainted with ourselves that we become “self-transparent”—that we accept the active roles of the Archaic, Magical and Mythical Structures which help to constitute us, and do not attribute exclusive validity to the Mental-Rational Structure.* In order to achieve the clear-sightedness whereby we can recognize the efficacy of all these structures without either falling back into magical superstition or enchantment, or sinking into mythical dreaming or irrationality, what is required of us is just that which no one is particularly willing to undertake—work on oneself. The world and its humanity will under no circumstances be changed by preaching a better world; would-be “reformers,” in their efforts to achieve a better world, often demand of others what they have not required of themselves.
Of course, such a transformation will not be easy for those who still try to shape and master their lives entirely on the basis of the Mental-rational attitude. It will be much easier for the younger generation to realize the dimensions of the new consciousness which we have called “aperspectival,” as well as “a-rational” and “integral.” These different terms, although pointing to one and the same thing, derive from the different spheres of experience in which the new form of consciousness is already revealing itself. For this generation has been born into a climate of change, wherein the new consciousness is breaking through into the light.
The idea that the younger generation is born into the climate of a new structure of consciousness is difficult to accept unless we think of the concept of cultural evolution in somewhat different terms, for it requires acceptance of the fact that the new consciousness manifests itself of its own accord, that is, arises naturally and spontaneously in man, in the world and in time, by becoming “transparent” in them. So long as we are unable to free ourselves from the conventional routines of thought which have now become anachronistic and therefore erroneous, we will think of cultural evolution as a process that urges us toward a goal in a linear progression. So long as we attribute exclusive validity to a pragmatically narrow definition of progress by accretion, the assumption that a generation can be “born into” a new consciousness is impossible.
If we are not able to free ourselves from a narrow, one-sided view of evolution which does not include other perspectives of time and transformation. we shall remain fixed within the rationally postulated limits of events and thereby fail to break out of the rational cul-de-sac. It was for this reason that we called the first part of Ursprung und Gegenwart “A Contribution to the History of the Awakening of Consciousness.” There was no mention there of the evolution of consciousness, for while history is an active process, evolution is only a partial view of this process and its limitations a view that arises from perspective of the Mental-Rational Structure. The manifestation of the new consciousness is not a milestone on the path to a so-called higher development; it is rather, on the one hand, an enrichment and intensification of the human consciousness and, on the other, our conscious response to the Integral Structure of the world, which through us becomes transparent. This invisible process activates in us the new consciousness that has always been latent in us. Evolution, from this point of view, is the evolving (e = from, volvere = proceeding, forming) of man’s hitherto latent possibilities of consciousness, which are released by a corresponding supplementary “involution” of the Integral component of the world-consciousness: that involution (in = inward) in the terrestrial sphere is answered by its other pole, awakening—our readiness at a given time for the Integral and time-free consciousness; to evolve from within us.
Whoever has ennobled, intensified and prepared his consciousness, so that an enrichment of the Integral consciousness is achieved, lives in a state of participation in the world as a whole. This participation, which is conditioned by the Integral consciousness and which, even now, is to be found in individuals in every part of the world, holds the possibility for the healing of the world. It will depend on those few who are already consciously realizing this process and who are, thus, enabling the new forces to take effect in the individual, the world and humanity."
— (http://blog.gebser.net/2012/01/jean-gebser-integral-consciousness.html)
2. Cynthia Bourgeault:
" here’s what Gebser’s Integral is NOT:
It’s not about political or social inclusiveness. It does not equate to “tolerance,” “broadmindedness,” or affirmative action. (This is all still synthesis, solidly ensconced within the perspectival modus operandi)
It is not about “soul work,” self-awareness as we typically understand it, or “integrating the shadow.”
It is not “non-duality,” “a higher state of consciousness,” “self-realization,” or “enlightenment.” In that sense, it has nothing to do with spirituality whatsoever.
It is not the top tier of the evolutionary pyramid (what part of “perspectival” do you still not understand?)
It is not “living in the now.” It does not negate the past and future, but radically re-perceives them.
It does not require the suppression of the mental structure of consciousness, simply the release from its hegemony.
It is not an “it” at all—neither a “state” nor a “stage” of development—but rather, a new integrating capacity that allows all other structures of consciousness to come into a dynamic, harmonious balance. The integral wild goose chase that’s so muddled much of contemporary spirituality got underway in earnest in the early 1980s with Ken Wilber’s ambitious effort to “complete” Gebser’s roadmap. In Gebser, there are five structures of consciousness, five only. In his groundbreaking 1981 work Up from Eden, Wilber, at the time a fervent Buddhist, added a “third tier” to Gebser’s map consisting of attained states borrowed mostly from the Asian traditions and culminating in “Nondual.” His nomenclature has substantially morphed over the years, but his staunch identification of the top rung on this evolutionary ladder with “the ever-present Nondual awareness” (Integral Spirituality, 74) has held firm — this rung, in turn, accessed through a basically Buddhist transformational technology grounded in the Four Noble truths, the renunciation of suffering, the dissolution of the mirage of ego, and the attainment of a permanent “Nondual” enlightenment.
Apart from the word “Nondual” word itself—which is foreign to Gebser’s vocabulary—Wilber’s original description of “the ever-present awareness” is but a hair’s breadth away from Gebser’s “ever present origin.” But as Wilber’s original teaching got reified in the hands of some of his influential popularizing followers, this hair’s breadth widened to a river, and the “nondual” piece found a comfortable new berth in the Christian contemplative reawakening now firmly entwined with quasi-Buddhist platitudes of “letting go of the mind,” “living in the now,” and “everything belongs.” It’s all part of that amiable “Nondual lite” mélange that grew up in the 1990s (been there, done that!) and has so profoundly set its stamp on an original and much more subtle understanding of the Christian contemplative vision.
In any case, this “nouveau-Integral” map” is radically incompatible with Gebser’s subtle and rigorously Western mode of thinking. What he envisions as “integral” is by his own testimony “not an expansion of consciousness, but an intensification of consciousness.” And the quintessential expression of this intensification does not lie in the “laying down” of ego, the cancellation of particularity, or the collapse of past and future into an amorphous present, but in the Originary Presence shining through the whole intricate artifice like light pouring through a stained glass window. To be sure, Gebser has little use for the “hypertrophied ego,” but the Integral selfhood he envisions is still very much a personal selfhood—only one operating at an immensely higher candlepower.
Gebser betrays his Western roots as well in his adamant insistence that the emergence of EVERY new structure of consciousness comes at the price of personal suffering. “Pain is the ground of motion,” Jacob Boehme once famously quipped, and Gebser proves himself to be a loyal son of this cardinal Western orientation point. True, there is “stupid suffering”— useless and unconscious— which does little more than add to the cosmic pain body. But suffering in and of itself is the precondition for all evolutionary emergence, and the enlightened spiritual stance is not to eliminate it, but to increase one’s capacity to bear it consciously. Gebser speaks to this with poignant brevity when he writes on page 71: “The demand of consciousness emergence [is] to be able to endure suffering.”
In one of his most revealing passages in The Ever Present Origin he further expands (90): “The identical deed that prompts Christ to accept suffering via his conscious ego leads, in Buddhism, to the negation of suffering and to the dissolution of the ego, which, when transformed, returns to the original state of immaterial Nirvana. In Buddhism the suspension of sorrow and the Ego is held in esteem; and this suspension of sorrow and suffering is realized by turning away from the world. In Christianity, the goal is to accept the ego, and the acceptance of sorrow and suffering is to be achieved by loving the world. Thus, the perilous and difficult path along which the West must proceed is here prefigured.” Without wanting to adjudicate in this perennial metaphysical dispute, I would say at very least that it defines and frames Gebser’s quintessentially Western approach to the question of conscious integration.
Whatever else Integral is for Gebser, it is far more closely mirrored in Teilhard’s “paroxysm of harmonized complexity” (The Human Phenomenon, p. 186) than in any attempt to corral it within a monadic Oneness, whether temporally (“the eternal present”), spatially (the top rung on the evolutionary ladder) or metaphysically (Nonduality). Neither the gestalt nor the complexity of Gebser’s thinking allow for its easy recapturing in popularized Westernized Asian models, and all contemporary approaches stepping off from this starting point will likely wind up marching around in circles."
— (https://cynthiabourgeault.org/2020/12/28/what-integral-is-not/?)
Source
- The article, published shortly after Gebser's death in 1973, appeared in the Jan.-Feb. 1974 edition of the now defunct magazine Main Currents in Modern Thought.
More information
- Axonometry: how the Chinese invented aperspectival consciousness, by Jan Krikke
- Consciousness