View source for From Egoic Consciousness to Integral Person Consciousness



=Discussion=

Cynthia Bourgeault:

"The founding documents emerge from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, just at the highwater mark of the “rational” (a.k.a., “deficient mental”) structure of consciousness. Within this structure of consciousness, egoic consciousness is the principal vehicle of self-awareness, and the individual is the sacred expression of this self-awareness. Selves are individuals—and individuals are the building blocks of larger social units, and ultimately of nations. These larger units grow by simple aggregation: i.e., by an optimization of individual “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Reciprocally—as in Adam Smith’s classic economic formulation— “individual ambition serves the Common Good.”

The Gebserian analysis, however, suggests a radically different scenario playing out as we journey deeper into the emerging Integral structure of consciousness. In an evolutionary leap no less quantum than the leap from “super-molecules” (repeating domino chains of “individual” molecules) to the cell (featuring differentiated function within an overall unity) these domino chains of individuals are being pressured evolutionarily to reconfigure as “persons”—i.e., at a higher evolutionary stage—where the functional unit of consciousness is no longer the boundaried ego but the interpenetrating and diffusive Witnessing Self (remember Beatrice Bruteau’s classic quip, “What if true persons are circles whose centers are nowhere and whose circumferences are everywhere?”). Within this even-now-unfolding Integral structure of consciousness the direction-of-flow is from the whole to the part; the whole possesses “emergent properties” vested only in the whole, not attributable to the part(s) in isolation. Larger social units are based no longer on simple aggregation (i.e., domino chains of individuals individually self-optimizing) but on autopoesis: individual, holographic participation in a dynamic, intelligent, and purposive whole."

(https://cynthiabourgeault.org/2021/06/27/evolutionary-theory-and-the-common-good-a-wisdom-inquiry/)


=More information=

Cynthia recommends:

"for bibliographical starters: Teilhard’s The Human Phenomenon; Beatrice Bruteau: The Grand Option, The Maundy Thursday Revolution, God’s Ecstasy; Adrian Bejan, Design in Nature (“The Constructal Law” and flow systems), Ilia Delio, Making All Things New; Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin; and of course, continued meandering in Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales and associated commentaries."

(https://cynthiabourgeault.org/2021/06/27/evolutionary-theory-and-the-common-good-a-wisdom-inquiry/)

[[Category:Integral Theory]]