Origin & Presence: the Life & Work of Jean Gebser
WE ALL KNOW that we — humanity as a whole — are in the midst of the most daunting challenges, but seeing clearly to their root causes is not easy. Einstein, however, was sure of one thing: our problems cannot be solved with the same kind of consciousness that created them¹.
This may leave us wondering, what is the consciousness that we currently have that has caused our problems?
And what kind of consciousness must we find within ourselves if we are to resolve them?
One little known thinker (to the English-speaking world at least) has an important, perhaps even a central, contribution to make.
Universitas, a German state-funded academic review of the sciences and humanities², once made its assessment of the three most important and influential German-speaking thinkers of the twentieth century.
Everyone has heard of the first two: Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. But too few of us know of the third: Jean Gebser.
Perhaps Gebser was simply too far ahead of his time. His ideas are still barely acceptable to many, but they are prescient, significant, and more relevant now than ever.
He cannot easily be pigeonholed: he was an academic, a poet and writer, a philosopher, a linguist, a translator and a traveller. His friends included Gabriel García Lorca and Pablo Picasso, Carl Jung and Werner Heisenberg.
He was born in 1905 in Germany, and the first half of his life was characterised by extraordinary turmoil and disruption.
He lived through the First World War, and then the total collapse of the German economy in the early 1920s. He had been born into a privileged family with high political connections, but in 1922 his family was bankrupted and his father committed suicide.
After this tragedy, still only 17 years old, he apprenticed himself to a bank, attending lectures when he could at the University of Berlin.
But after running into Hitler’s Brown Shirts in 1929, he left Germany immediately; he was not prepared to live with or under Nazism.
He travelled in France and Italy, changed his name from Hans to Jean, and then settled in Spain, where he found work with the democratic republic’s government, until in 1936 he fled Madrid just before Franco’s forces began shelling the city. He was nearly executed by Franco’s soldiers as he crossed the border to safety in France.
He found refuge in Paris, until he was forced to flee once again as the Second World War loomed. In late August 1939, Gebser crossed into Switzerland, hours before the Swiss sealed their borders.
Here at last he found real refuge, and he began his life’s work in earnest. Switzerland became his home, though he travelled very widely, and he died there in May 1973.
But why is his life story important?
Because, throughout all those decades of turmoil, he carried within himself what he called Urvertrauen — intrinsic or basic trust, fundamental trust — which he had first experienced when diving into a swimming pool as a schoolboy.
Years later, he wrote to a friend about how this boyhood experience had begun to free him from “fear in the face of uncertainty” and had left him with “a confidence in the sources of our strength of being, a confidence in their immediate accessibility.”³
It seems likely that it was this intrinsic trust that allowed him to be sufficiently open, in the winter of 1931–2, soon after his arrival in Spain, to receive what he later called a “lightning-like inspiration”.
Gebser spent the rest of his life developing this inspired insight, and once settled in Switzerland, he devoted himself to his task. He was a brilliant scholar, and his interest was in the human mind, our consciousness or soul, and in our long journey through the ages.
Most importantly, he was concerned with our immediate future; his lightning-like inspiration was that humanity is at a pivotal juncture and is now in the process of undergoing a “mutation” in our consciousness, as we move from what he called the “Mental” into the “Integral” structure of consciousness.
This is a transition of critical importance for us all, but it is fraught with uncertainty, and success is not assured. In 1949, he wrote these extraordinary and prophetic words in the preface to his masterwork, The Ever-Present Origin⁴:
“The crisis we are experiencing … is a crisis of the world and mankind such as has occurred only during pivotal junctures — junctures of decisive finality for life on Earth and for the humanity subjected to them … The crisis of our times and our world is in a process … of complete transformation, and appears headed towards an event which, in our view, can only be described as a ‘global catastrophe’ … We must soberly face the fact that only a few decades separate us from that event … Stated differently, if we do not overcome the crisis, it will overcome us; and only someone who has overcome himself⁵ is truly able to overcome.”
Geber’s concern therefore was for the whole of humanity and for our well-being and our immediate future. And here we are, “only a few decades” after he wrote these words.
He began to explore how the Integral consciousness is already revealing itself in the arts, the sciences, law and the humanities, and he saw that our minds have been on a long journey, slowly developing ever greater capacity and wakefulness. His is a very different view of the human journey than the more common Golden-to-Iron-Age lament.
He examines the ways our minds have flowered on this long journey from so many perspectives and angles that it isn’t possible to summarise the extraordinary breadth of his enquiry in a meaningful way in this brief article.
But to give a single example, he notes the way our minds have been able to apprehend a new dimension with each successive evolutionary leap or mutation in our consciousness.
He writes that from our earliest roots in a zero-dimensional “Archaic” consciousness, when our minds were completely but unconsciously embedded in “Origin” (his term for the source or ground of consciousness and being), we emerged at some point into what he calls the “Magic” consciousness structure, a one-dimensional consciousness within which humanity lived in a state of “point-like unity” and “timelessness”.
Our minds then flowered again, into what he calls “Mythic” consciousness, where time was experienced as “natural temporicity”, and we developed a two-dimensional awareness of the rhythms of life flowing between its complementary poles (day and night, inner and outer, summer and winter, life and death, masculine and feminine, etc.), all held within the sheltering circle of life. The yin-yang symbol most clearly represents this Mythic structure of consciousness.
And then, in the eastern Mediterranean, the sheltering circle was first broken, and humanity began the painful transition into our current Mental consciousness structure. The myth of Athene’s birth speaks of this epoch-defining breakthrough, born as she was from an axe-blow to Zeus’s head.
For Gebser, it was the Athenians “whose sagacity gave our mental, perspectival world its shape and countenance.”
Only with this Mental structure of consciousness does a three-dimensional awareness of space and perspective become possible. Time becomes what we know so well — “measured time”, clock time.
And ego, the distinct sense of “I”, emerges from the “we”, the ego-less collective identity of the family, clan or tribe. Now ego can be seen for what it is, a remarkable achievement in consciousness.
Gebser wrote many articles and books, though too few have been translated into English. Fortunately, his masterpiece, The Ever-Present Origin, is available from Ohio University Press in a fine translation.
In this book, Gebser takes his readers on a thrilling intellectual journey, but one that is always fully informed by spiritual values and concerns.
I can certainly recommend it; it is beautifully written, and the range of its inquiry is truly extraordinary, but it is a demanding read, and a long one at over 600 pages. It is a work of the highest scholarship, with a deep love for humanity and for this world at its heart.
Only after its publication did Gebser discover that others were working the same seam.
Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo and the English philosopher and critic Owen Barfield⁶, amongst others, shared his concerns and were reaching the same insights.
For Barfield, it was the Greeks who first apprehended three-dimensional space but the Jews who first apprehended time as linear and progressive, our ‘clock time’, no longer cyclical.
For Gebser, our current “mental, perspectival consciousness”, first birthed in the eastern Mediterranean, is now deficient, exhausted, and is therefore at the root of our many crises.
In its now-deficient mode, it brings “excessive egocentricity”, “unbridled possessiveness and lust for power”, a “corrosive materialism”. and a “ruthless disregard for the essential quality of human life”.
It urgently needs to be superseded by the Integral structure, and he tells us that this requires us to develop what he calls “freedom from the ‘I’”, freedom from the ego.
For Gebser, the Integral structure, as it manifests within us, shines through as ego-free qualities such as clarity of mind, steadfast commitment to truth, openness of heart, and an innate trust in life.
Only with this new way of being, this new mindset and change of heart, can we become “someone able to place the whole ahead of his⁵ ego in our daily affairs”. He writes: “nothing that exists exists for its own sake; it exists for the sake of the whole”.
How then are we to find this necessary “freedom from the ‘I’”?
Gebser tells it to us straight — by undertaking “that which is most difficult and painful: the work on ourselves.” If we are to live “with worth and dignity”, we must “sooner or later pass through the agonies of emergent consciousness”.
But he offers a tantalising and inspiring vision of what awaits us if we do: “anyone who resides in origin and the present is protected and sustained by life and the spirit.”
So whatever our exterior contributions may be, for Gebser there is an exacting but necessary interior transformation to be undergone. This is “the genuine work which we must achieve”, the “decisive task of human life.”
Jean Gebser made his own profound journey to become a person of integrity and presence, and he writes from deeply lived experience of “the decisive task”.
Aged just 68 years old, he died in Switzerland in May 1973.
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Photographs of Jean Gebser at various stages of his life are available at the Swiss-based Jean Gebser Society’s website. All the photographs illustrating this article are taken from there, with gratitude.
FOOTNOTES
- “A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.” From “Atomic Education Urged by Einstein”, New York Times (25 May 1946).
- When originally researching an early version of this article, in 2011–12, I found this statement about the asessment by Universitas of Einstein, Freud and Gebser online, but I didn’t note the website source, and have not since been able to re-find it. Universitas is still published, though no longer as a state-funded entity.
- Gebser is quoted by Jean Keckeis in his article In Memoriam Jean Gebser published in 1973, shortly after Gebser’s death, which is included in the Ohio University Press translation of Gebser’s “Ursprung und Gegenwart”.
- Published in German in two parts (in 1949 and 1953) as “Ursprung und Gegenwart”, (literally “Origin & Presence”). Gebser himself chose the English title, The Ever-Present Origin, for his book.
- I have no doubt at all that if Gebser were writing his masterpiece today and not in the 1940s and early 1950s, he would add “or her” here. In The Ever-Present Origin, he writes beautifully about the transformation needed in male-female relations and what the emergent Integral structure will mean for these relations, particularly for the patriarchal structure and the “masculinised” world.
- For example, in his book Saving The Appearances: A Study In Idolatry (Wesleyan University Press).