Where are we now?
Part 2 — Gebser
“..Integration is not a gentle slide into the next mutation but rather a leap into the ‘pristine state of origin’ — a leap back to Eden..”
Part 2 looks at Gebser’s structures of consciousness and ultimately his Integral perspective. Integral thinking captures the impulse of the future through which mankind may bring new depth, clarity and compassion to every level of human endeavor, to unlock individual potential or to find new approaches to global-scale problems: In the words of Dr Richard Slaughter — “to see with fresh eyes”.
Gebser’s structures of consciousness
By looking back through time, historians search data sources, read ancient literature and consult with archaeologists to bring us the narrative of “the life and times of man on earth”. Macrohistorians search the social rhythms of civilizations to understand the reality of life in space and time in history — including this present time and the future — beyond time. Thus the macrohistorical foundation remains the deep primal influence on our view of reality: metaphors “stick” because they resonate with our deepest selves at our point of origin. In the Wisdom of Solomon, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).
Gebser’s work stemmed from the German Idealists around the time of the two World Wars. Forced to flee Germany in 1929 he lived and worked throughout Europe, India, the Far East and the Americas, finally settling to write in Switzerland. Gebser was a senior official in the Spanish Ministry of Education during his years in Spain. He was also a poet and passionate observer of the arts where he first recognized the emergence of transformational consciousness — the stress and chaos as the old structure becomes “deficient” and the new light dawning as a new “efficient” structure emerges. Because of his deep understanding of both Eastern and Western discourses, his work is considered to be the first true bridge of East and West (Feuerstein, 1987). His macrohistorical theory is expressed as human consciousness in transition: these transitions are seen as “mutations” into an altogether new state, and not a continuous or progressive process. Unlike evolutionary notions that close species off into a limited environment, Gebser saw transformational consciousness as an unfolding of awareness, an opening up. Gebser’s work, Ursprung und Gegenwart was published in German in two parts in 1949 and 1953. It was translated in 1985 as The Ever-Present Origin. In this work Gebser gives a macrohistorical account of social life since our origins, and also highlights evidence of a new emergence in our present time. Gebser evidenced the emergence of five structures of consciousness with the fifth structure, Integral, seeking emergence:
1. The archaic structure
2. The magic structure
3. The mythical structure
4. The mental structure
5. The integral structure
A brief outline of each of the structures follows:
The Archaic structure — “Dreamlessly the true men of earlier times slept” Chuang-tzu (ca 350BC) When it comes to describing the social life of the archaic period, Gebser warns that:
Our present mode of thinking would insist that everything be regarded from the vantage point of the present and would proceed to trace in reverse the path of events. Yet if we did this, we would draw conclusions and results from fragmented manifestations and would never reach the nearly inaccessible origin.
Gebser held that enquiry into past times through the “rational mind” — an attribute of the Modern structure — must be acknowledged as potentially distorting. Rather than viewing past times “from without”, he advocated viewing “from within” — through sensing what was actually present (Hayward, 2005). Among other examples, he quoted the post-archaic thinker, Chuang-tzu, “Dreamlessly the true men of earlier times slept” to explain that “sleep” equated with lack of individual consciousness and “dreamless” demonstrated an absence of any dualistic or constructive notions of “reality”. Gebser’s Archaic structure is instinctual and primitive. He saw old structures become “deficient” and the altogether new “efficient” structures emerge through “mutation”: he also demonstrated the ever-present origin being drawn up through the structures to be retained in a subordinate fashion. Therefore modern man retains the “sense of splendour” of ever-present origin throughout the structures of time — abiding but latent.
The Magic structure — tribal, egoless man, the ‘magical’ something gives power to the group. Hayward (2005) describes this next structure of consciousness as release from sleep to a waking-state awareness of an external world. The world is seen as a ‘point-like’ consciousness of details, but still without subject/object consciousness, without detail of pattern, causality and relationship. Nature is manifested in emotion and instinct. Gebser describes existence for man in such a structure:
Impulse and instinct thus unfold and develop a consciousness which bears their stamp — a natural and vital consciousness which enables man, despite his egolessness, to cope with the earth and the world as a group-ego, sustained by his clan. Here, in these attempts to free himself from the grip and spell of nature, with which in the beginning he was still fused in unity, magic man begins the struggle for power which has not ceased since; here man becomes the maker. Here too, lie the roots of that tragic entanglement of fighter and fought: to ward off the animal that threatens him — to give but one example — man disguises himself as that animal; or he makes the animal by drawing its picture, and to that extent gains power over it. (Gebser, 1985 pp.46–47).
For man in the Magic structure, all phenomena are merged into something magical, something that gives power to the group. There is a form of group identity that includes participation in rituals of magic. Magic era man holds an emotional and instinctual interpretation of nature. It is from this structure that Gebser sees the Genesis account of the ‘Fall of Man’ arising. The symbol of the Magic structure is the point, representing the unity of person and nature.
The Mythical structure — focussed on inward contemplation — Imaginative. The characteristic attribute of magic was the emotional/instinctual interpretation of nature and the characteristic attribute of mythical was the imaginative interpretation of the soul/psyche. (Hayward, 2005).
Gebser likened man’s experience in this structure to that of awakening from a dream — not fully awake but with an awareness of a dreamtime. He cites a second quote from Chuang-tzu as an expression of the mythical structure: “Are you and I perchance caught up in a dream from which we have not awakened?” The symbol of the Mythical structure is the circle: this is the symbol of the soul, of the polarities of daylight and darkness, of the seasons, and of the sun and the orbits of the planets. The sun mythologies emerged in the East and West about 8th century BC and these are also considered emblematic of the brightening of consciousness (Hayward, 2005). Now that consciousness is awakening to the individual, the hero also arises as the one who gains his independence from magic enmeshment.
The Mental structure — abstraction and quantification of the material world — Abstract. Finally the structure of consciousness that operates today is reached. The symbol of the Mental structure is the triangle: two points on the base representing oppositional or antithetical positions held and the apex as the directionality inherent in the structure: where Mythical thinking was circular, Mental thinking is directional. The rich imaginative process of the Mythical is past and the new is “directed towards objects and duality, creating and directing this duality and drawing energy from the individual ego” (Gebser, 1985 p.72). Nature becomes increasingly invisible as man delves into abstraction.
Every act of abstraction results from the presence of measuring thought in the ostensible invisibility of what is being calculated, while every quantification results from the presence of measuring thought in the semblance of what is actually measured. This process is reflected in the reality of our world of thought; the symbol, always inherently polar and imagistic, is reduced to allegory, then to mere formula, as in the formulas of chemistry and physics and even the formulas of philosophy. In its extreme forms of exaggerated abstractness, it is ultimately void of any relation to life and becomes autonomous; empty of content and no longer a sign but only a mental denotation, its effect is predominantly destructive. (Gebser, 1985 p.88).
The Integral structure — the emerging future — Spiritual. The typical attribute of the Mental structure — abstraction and quantification inclines toward immoderate behaviour and ultimately existential disconnection. This disconnect is visible in the Western world as man in his ‘emancipated’ state, pursues Wants to fulfill Needs but finds himself inextricably in bondage. Gebser, in the middle years of the 20th century, brought evidence of the emergence of a new structure. However, by ‘integration’ Gebser did not mean seeking synthesis or balance in practice.
By integration we mean a fully completed and realised wholeness — the bringing about of an integrum, ie the re-establishment of the inviolate and pristine state of origin by incorporating the wealth of all subsequent achievement. The concretion of everything that has unfolded in time and coalesced in a special array is the integral attempt to reconstitute the ‘magnitude’ of man from his constituent aspects, so that he can consciously integrate himself with the whole. (Gebser, 1985 p.99).
Gebser was talking about an intensification of consciousness; “not because of any qualitative character which might be ascribed to it, but because it is by nature ‘outside’ of any purely qualitative valuation or quantitative devaluation” (pp.99–100). “This space-time freedom … is spiritual; and in this sense the fourth dimension in all its plenitude is the initial expression of a concretion of the spiritual” (p.387). Thus integration is not a gentle slide into the next mutation but rather a leap into the ‘pristine state of origin’ — a leap back to Eden, into an intensification of consciousness. This, then, is life in four dimensions — body, mind, soul and transcendent-Self (spirit).
With a glimpse back to the image that heads this article, we observe each mutation receiving light from outside of itself drawing the new structure up and out of the past which remains latent within. Imagine then taking a leap into the brilliant vortex created as the structures spiralled upwards, re-entering time and space fully whole, body, mind, soul and spirit.
Gebser said of Integral consciousness that it is: “encompassing all time and embracing both man’s distant past and his approaching future as a living present” (p.6).
Part 3 in this series will look at Scharmer’s fields and Theory U. I will also present a table showing a correlation of Gebser’s structures and Scharmer’s fields. This correlation demonstrates the vastness of the dimension of the emergent future that Scharmer also senses.
