“His Face Set like Flint Toward Jerusalem…”

When I look at our current political scene through the Gebserian lens, I am impelled to consider that the best use of my spiritual skillset might actually be to take a large step back from the cultural and political battlefield and not squander too much of my remaining heartfire on triage for a system that may be legitimately aging out. While it breaks my heart to see beloved cultural institutions under attack and hallowed instruments of governance and world order being aggressively sabotaged, Gebser reminds me to slow down, take a deep breath and not lose sight of the larger picture. Sometimes things have to die in order for new things to be born.

Humility, I remind myself. What makes me so sure that I KNOW what is needed in this moment, that I know which one of Gurdjieff’s three lines of action (affirming, denying, reconciling) is truly mine to occupy? I am naturally attracted to the denying line, of course, the groundswell of “RESIST” rising spontaneously from the hearts and minds of American citizens, galvanizing conscience and rekindling resolve. I do not want to break the momentum; I want to join it. But what if the place where I might serve more usefully is on one of those other lines?

I do have some continuing sense that my primary responsibility is to help tend the ground from which the paradigm shift will gradually acquire critical velocity. Gebser himself had his eye on the cultural creatives of his era (the artists, intellectuals, and “out of the box” thinkers) as the true bellwethers of the new Integral emergence. But Gebser died before the spiritual reawakening of the 1980s was fully out the gate, and even before the massive transfusion into the Western cosmovision of mindfulness and integrative modalities of the East, so he may well be underestimating the force that the spiritual quarter is now contributing to the new arising. I myself am more than convinced that the displacement of Tibetan Buddhism westward following the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1961, the launch of the Centering Prayer and Christian Meditation movements within the Christian mainstream, and now the growing public recognition of the Gurdjieff teaching with its powerful evolutionary toolkit are all unmistakable signs of the Integral structure of consciousness already seeding itself well among the shards of the decaying Mental structure; it might be a matter of simply waiting it out while continuing to do the inner work.

While Gebser did not gravitate to esoteric paradigms, it’s a fairly easy translation for me to infer that the new structure of consciousness will arise out of World 24 and not World 48. These two stations on Gurdjieff’s Ray of Creation closely dovetail, respectively, with Gebser’s “Integral” and “Mental”; the qualities of perception and the range and mode of agency correspond almost one-for-one. And this hits home for me emotionally, because it is also the area where my own spiritual interest and expertise most closely match the implied job description. Some of my Teilhardian colleagues like Ilia Delio and John Haught interpret this to mean that the new arising will come from the future—i.e. from what hasn’t yet manifested in flesh and blood here on this earth. Gebser would say it arises out of Origin—the primordial source of divine creativity and inspiration that is, as he says, “ever-present.” It lies neither in the past nor in the future, but in the activation of a human consciousness subtle enough to be able to perceive it.

If this is true, then the way I can most help is to keep tending this growing consciousness as best I can as it seeds itself in the human species and to keep my eye on the Origin, letting the present social perturbations recede into the backdrop. I do know that the quality and agency of imaginal action (i.e., action originating in World 24) far exceeds the capacities of the Mental structure of consciousness, still running the older mechanical and linear/causal energy that Teilhard called “tangential” energy. When the new structure fully kicks in, it is capable of non-localized action, spontaneous transmission of powerful spiritual substances (like faith, hope, and love), the formation of imaginal webs and ley lines that span the planet and beyond the grave, and the direct invocation of logically impossible synchronicities. I have seen all this happen before my eyes, and I know what it means when Jesus says, “Destroy this East Wing, and in three days I will rebuild it.” He is not kidding around. Why not bet on the faster racehorse?

But such a decision—to follow what I know more than what I want—is a gamble, and it comes at a certain risk and the willingness to bear white knuckle loss. For an even more disquieting realization that emerges out of this Gebserian line of inquiry is that democracy itself may be aging out; the problem is not simply the increasingly corrupted two-party system on which it now rests, but the fact that democracy itself might be inextricably tied to a dying structure of consciousness. I do not say this lightly, but intellectual honesty compels me at least to entertain the idea. Founded at the height of the Enlightenment, at the highwater mark of what Gebser calls the “hypertrophied ego,” it is possible that this cherished American dinosaur simply cannot make the leap into Integral perception. Nobly as it has served the American people over these two and a half centuries, it may nonetheless be incapable of exceeding its own hull speed: still incapable of thinking from the whole to the part, still ontologically an assemblage of “states” rather than an autopoietic unity capable of self-stabilization and self-regeneration. And if so, the hard path of tough love might be not to rush in and try to save it, but to step aside and let it die, trusting that the new structure of consciousness will in due course birth a new structure of governance fully synchronous with its more inclusive mode of perception.

At any rate, no matter how hard the “ouch” it inflicts upon my impetuous will, the Gebserian analysis seems to suggest that the qualities needed right now might have to do with impartiality and stoic forbearance. It asks me to acknowledge the limitedness of my own perspectival cone. To acknowledge that I do not know how much further things need to go down before healing can truly begin. I do not even know for certain what in me is the voice of conscience and not simply nostalgia and kneejerk reactivity. I do know that my impartiality is as of yet only of a provisional nature; I can wriggle out of the narrowness of my own perspectival seeing, but not yet through a direct seeing from the eye of the heart, only by overlaying multiple perspectival cones to try to create a composite view. What may be most called for at this moment is indeed just that stoic forbearance: to look on as things you have known and loved being shattered before your eyes and not flinch or turn away, but simply to breathe it all in in a kind of pebble-thrown-into-the-ocean tonglen, and somehow to stay the course. Through a broken heart, to bear witness.