The Aperspectival

The Key Traits of Integral Awareness

This wonderful “Aperspectival” meme has been going around, please help me find whoever made it!

Back on January 31st, I wrote a high level overview of the work of German philosopher Jean Gebser, arguably my favorite philosopher in his-story. There we learned that Gebser proposed a model of five stages of consciousness evolution, with each stage growing more inclusive, complex and transparent than the stage prior, with the final stage being what he called “Integral”. These five stages have three main “perspectival” arcs:

The Unperspectival World embraces the archaic, magic, and mythic structures.

The Perspectival World hosts the mental structure.

The Aperspectival World is the still-emerging integral structure.

Today I want to look a bit deeper into Gebser’s invented word to describe the characteristics of Integral awareness: Aperspectival.

Not to be confused with the Greek “a” or “not”, Gebser uses the Latin “a”, or “multi” to describe an awareness system that can perceive many perspectives simultaneously. Rather than fighting for “one true perspective” as the only “right” one, the Aperspectival has the capacity to witness the unfolding and synthesis for the unperspectival archaic, magic, and mythic, as well as the rational perspectival worldview.

Picasso’s Aperspectival Cubism

He draws comparison to art throughout the ages to illustrate his points, including looking at Picasso’s cubism period to highlight the simultaneity of the Aperspectival consciousness. Picasso uses a two-dimensional canvas to look at many different sides of a figure at the same time, and often with sculptural works as well. If you look at the general arc of art history, you see the five stages and three main perspectives play out perfectly in both individual and artistic cultural pursuits.

It could be said the the Unperspectival worldview is currently at war, literally, with the Perspectival worldview, as the Aperspectival worldview slowly but surely emerges into the zeitgeist. The biggest conundrum in advancing more individuals and cultures into the Aperspectival is the total refutation of this Integral stage by the Perspectival, whom often confuses the Aperspectival with the Unperspectival, as it may appear to be pre-rational due to its embracing of both the Unperspectival and Perspectival. To the rationalist mind, any embrace of the pre-rational seems irrational.

Despite Picasso exploring these ideas early in linear time, on a whole, the world is still mostly dominated by Perspectival thinking. Using Truth, Beauty, and Goodness to highlight the Aperspectival is key to allowing the evolution of each stage into the more inclusive and deeper stages. This is “The Work” the Integral put into practice each day, tickling hearts and minds with more holistic and inclusive modalities.

The 19 Characteristics of Aperspectival Awareness

As compiled by Peter Pogany:

1. The whole: Origin-ness (as in the Ever-Present) gives spiritually awareness.
2. Integrity: Harmonious coexistence among all structures in the lived experience of integral consciousness.
3. Transparency: Based on the thermodynamic worldview, the individual sees, senses, and feels the unity of past, present, and future. Such a synergistic way of “understanding” becomes the permanent backdrop in dealing with all problems of human life.
4. The spiritual: Excessively ambitious calculative deficiency withdraws in the face of Original Presence. The intellect is no longer dominated by a compulsion to squeeze the world into categories; quantifying, tabulating, and formalizing every aspect of it. Primal trust overcomes primal fear.
5. Supersession of the ego: Reduction of egocentricity — Ichhaftigkeit. (Feuerstein describes the outward manifestations of integral consciousness. See, Feuerstein, 1987, p. 170).
6. Realization of timelessness: Connection between archaic-magic pre-conceptual and integral post-conceptual “being-without-time.”
7. Realization of “temporicity”: Recognition of mythical elements (e.g., cyclicality and destiny) in the structure of consciousness.
8. Realization of the concept of time: While becoming the integrating factor of all dimensions, time itself disappears (becomes amension) both as an absolute scientific/philosophical concept and as the Molach of daily life.
9. Realization of time-freedom: The integrative vantage point renders individual, community, and cosmic existence transparent.
10. Disruption of the merely systematic: Freedom from mental-rationally perceived causality, liberation of creativity.
11. Incursion of dynamics: Conscious appreciation that ceaseless animation is a fundamental aspect of all forms of existence, including human thought.
12. Recognition of energy: The science of thermodynamics absorbs and reinterprets conceptualizations and characterizations of time.
13. Mastery of movement: Transformation of consciousness begins to take an outward shape.
14. Fourth dimension: Conscious absorption that Being is temporally dimensionless.
15. Supersession of patriarchy: Movement toward Integral is catalyzed by the elimination of man/woman duality in the socioeconomic sphere; decline in the relevance of masculine symbolism in theological meta-narratives.
16. Renunciation of dominance and power: Discovery that imbalances in personal and social relations are ultimately futile, collectively harmful, and consequently, untenable in the long run.
17. Acquisition of intensity: The presentation of “Itself” (Sich) as internal transcendence in opposition to the mere expansion of consciousness. (This theme is too abstractly related to economic theory to make a plausible connection.)
18. Clarity (instead of mere wakefulness): Recognition through a “systemic act” that the outer-related (exhaling) mental-rational world of wakefulness, buffeted by previously dominant structures, is insufficient to achieve true freedom.
19. Transformation of the creative inceptive basis: History is no longer viewed as a path of some linearly imaged progress; the future as an unlimited design of human volition.”