The Gebserian Take

Viewed through the lens of cultural philosopher Jean Gebser (1905-1973), the source of our present social turmoil becomes immediately apparent: we are stuck on the cusp of a very hard and painful transition between two structures of consciousness. The old order, the Mental structure, is slowly waning, but the new, the Integral structure, is still far from established. In the meantime we are stuck in the birth canal.

The Mental structure of consciousness has been in the driver’s seat now for more than two thousand years. Its relatively swift and ubiquitous emergence into cultural ascendancy around 500 BCE has sometimes been characterized as “The Axial period,” and it’s not unfair to say that Western Society has risen on its back. Its early heralds were Pythagoras and Plato; its precepts were reason, strategic thinking, and a powerful sense of the individual. Its golden age was antiquity, its even more portentous second wind the European enlightenment.

The new rising star on the horizon of evolutionary consciousness is known as Integral. Jean Gebser named it “integral” because its most distinctive characteristic is that it does not merely add another high-powered new rung to the ladder of consciousness; instead it integrates and harmonizes all the preceding structures of consciousness (Archaic, Magic, Mythic, and Mental) in a deeper capaciousness that allows all the structures authentic room to be. That is why he insisted on calling them structures, not levels of consciousness. They do not transcend and include; they co-exist like the faces of a prism, each one reflecting the light of Origin through its own shape and individuality.

What I’ve just written above is probably the world’s shortest summary of Jean Gebser’s 508-page masterpiece, The Ever-Present Origin, published in the early 1950s and the fountainhead from which would pour Ken Wilber, Thomas Keating on the Human Condition, and most recently Spiral Dynamics. But for our purposes this brief synopsis will have to suffice; it’s enough to get us through the gate. I hope you can see that even in barebones form it puts in our hands a powerful analytical tool for getting to the root of what may be driving the seeming systemic collapse of our political and cultural institutions.

It also clears the way for some rather unsettling new takes on the direction in which the solution to our present impasse might lie. More on that in the next post.

While in some ways far more sweeping and pessimistic than the historical perspective; this view does bring with it (at least for me) a certain initial sense of relief. I spoke in my last post of a wrong turn having been made somewhere along the line, for which a course correction is now being painfully applied. But when approached through a Gebserian filter, the need for “blame” and “rectification” subsides; viewed at its proper scale, all is on track and unfolding normally. New structures of consciousness do not simply slip into place like tumbler locks; they grind against each other like tectonic plates until the transition is accomplished, which can take centuries. One has to expect a certain amount turmoil as of part of the process; in it we are witnessing both the slow disintegration of the waning structure of consciousness as it dashes itself against the rocks of its own endemic shortcomings and, simultaneously, a chaotic interregnum in which newness is clearly in the wind, but no one yet quite knows the direction from which the wind is blowing.

That pretty much matches what I am seeing out my bedroom window as I view the chaos swirling around me right now. It is clear and generally agreed upon by commentators on both sides of the political spectrum that the conflict playing out in our world is much more than a contest between two political parties; it is a clash between two cosmovisions, two sweepingly different ways of looking at the world, which in turn, according to Gebser, rest upon on two significantly different structures—two different operating systems, if you prefer—of conscious perception.

One structure still views the world through the older mental hardware, the hardware we have been using for two and a half millennia now, upon which Western Civilization is built: substance ontology (i.e., “things” have real existence and permanent essence qualities); perception through differentiation; the reification of the both the object perceived and the perceiver; perspectival thinking (seeing only within one’s own cone of perception), and the familiar direction of causality, thinking from the part to the whole (“WE is simply “I” writ large.)

The other structure is beginning—still only at its headwaters—to display its newfound integral capacities: the capacity to grasp relationship directly and to grasp it in motion. Integral is what allows you to see in terms of movement within a unified relational field rather than as transactions between individual entities. The older mental worldview sees a bicycle as an object with two wheels standing locked on a bike stand. The new worldview sees a bicycle as an event in time and space, flying down the hill, wind at your back, companions at your side. Integral is what allows you to understand—truly understand—that “no man is an island, entirely unto himself.” Integral is what allows you to think from the whole to the part, to see the whole as containing emergent properties not attributable or reducible to the part. It is a whole new way of being in the world

Viewed from this wider evolutionary perspective, most everything that looks so terrifying to us right now from that narrower (and Mental-structure-generated) historical perspective is right on track. Even the worst of the fragmentation we’re seeing—the polarization, the siloes, the cognitive dissonance, the breakdown of reason and lack of an agreed upon social truth, the re-emergence of ethnic supremacy and tribalism—all this is what happens, Gebser predicts, when the mental structure craters. It is intensely painful to watch, but it is not a sign that the process is off-track; more likely a sign that evolution is proceeding apace.

I will follow up on the implications in my next post. But as a final word: please, please, listen very carefully to what I am saying here and don’t make the associative leap that I am explicitly not making. I am explicitly not saying that this clash of structures of consciousness aligns with our present political divisions as captured in those popular caricatures, MAGA and “wokeness”—or in other words, don’t assume that the jousting playing out on the political scene is a joust between two different levels of consciousness with “wokeness” carrying the baton of the new structure of consciousness. I am manifestly saying exactly the opposite. As my wise monastic mentor Fr. Bruno Barnhart once ironically commented, the fundamentalism of the left and the fundamentalism of the right are still both fundamentalism; they are simply the two ends of the same stick, operating out of the same structure of consciousness. Despite what pop spirituality sometimes likes to think, “wokeness” is not the herald of the new consciousness; it is simply the last paroxysm of the mental structure trying to feign thinking from the whole while still perceiving from the part; no wonder it is so easily hoisted on its own moral petard! In the end, both ends of the stick will go down together, as the new wind enters from an entirely different compass point.

The real job is to be on the lookout for the windshift.

For further exploration: You might read Cynthia Bourgeault’s blog series on Gebser or Jeremy’s Johnson’s short guide to Gebser via his book Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness.