No need to reinvent the wheel - Gebser, Myers, Kelly, Aurobindo, James, Mohrhoff, Wallace, and more
Don Salmon
8 Evolution of human consciousness according to Jean Gebser
According modern evolutionary theory, our sensory systems are shaped by natural selection to allow homo sapiens to survive within its niche, not to present it with a faithful depiction of its niche. We don’t expect the sensory system of a cockroach, a gecko, or a chipmunk to reveal the true nature of reality. We expect it to give simple signals suited for survival in a particular niche. The neo-Darwinian synthesis leads us to look upon the phenomenal world as a species-specific user interface. A user interface, like a computer desktop with its icons, is useful precisely because it does not resemble what it represents. A file icon hides the complexity of the hardware and software that makes it so useful as a representation of a file (Hoffman, 2000, in press, forthcoming).
What the scientific theory of evolution rarely takes into account is that the paradigms of modern science stand or fall by the particular user interface that brought them into play. Nobody has brought this point more clearly into focus than evolutionary philosopher and cultural historian Jean Gebser (1985), in his magnum opus The Ever- Present Origin. As the subtitles of its two parts indicate, The Every-Present Origin is “A Contribution to the History of the Awakening of Consciousness” and “An Attempt at the Concretion of the Spiritual.” According to Gebser, the awakening of consciousness passes through four “user interfaces”: the archaic structure, the magic structure, the mythical structure, and the mental structure. As its name suggests, the mythical structure deals with the world through the medium of myth, whereas the mental structure deals with it with the help of philosophy and science.
Each of these structures of consciousness has an efficient and a deficient phase. A once efficient structure becomes deficient when it is confronted with the irruptions of the next structure. The diminishing returns of modern science documented by John Horgan (1996) in The End of Science, by Lee Smolin (2006) in The Trouble with Physics, and by Peter Woit (2006) in Not Even Wrong are signs that we are once again on the threshold of a new structure of consciousness — this time a structure that neither philosophy nor science is able to cope with, as little as the mythical medium is able to cope with the manifestations of the mental structure. We therefore need to distance ourselves from the claim that science can make us understand things as they are in themselves. While the mythical world is a world of images, the mental structure is able to integrate two-dimensional images into a system of three-dimensional objects — the so-called “material world.” But as this three-dimensional “coagulation” of images came into being with the mental structure, so it will fade into irrelevance with the consolidation of the integral structure, along with its representational mediums, philosophy and science.
The mutations from one consciousness structure to another are analogous to Kuhn’s (1962) paradigm shifts, but they happen on a grander scale. We are not merely presented with a theory that is capable of dealing with the anomalies of a previous theory. By gaining a new user interface, we enter a new world.
Gebser (1985, p. xxix) himself equated the consciousness he called “integral” with that Sri Aurobindo has called “supramental,” and he described it in similar terms. For Gebser, the origin — the source from which all springs — is spiritual; evolution is essentially a series of transformations by which the world becomes ever more diaphanous — transparent and revelatory of its spiritual origin. The diapheneity or “shining through” of the origin leads to concrete awareness of the whole in each part. Released from its perspectival fixation both in space and in time, the individual comes to perceive the manifestation from the aperspectival viewpoint particular to the origin — i.e., from everywhere and everywhen at once. This corresponds to the supermind’s
primary poise. Seen from the supermind’s secondary poise, both the past and the future are present in the present.
It is interesting to note that Gebser became familiar with the works of Sri Aurobindo a long time after the completion of The Ever-Present Origin. In a lecture published towards the end of his life, he observes:
“my conception of the emerging of a new consciousness, which I realized in winter 1932/33 in a flashlike intuition and started describing since 1939, resembles to a large extent the world conception of Sri Aurobindo, that was at that time unknown to me. Mine is different from his insofar, as it is directed only to the Western world and does not have the depth and the gravidity of origin of the genially represented conception of Sri Aurobindo. An explanation for this apparent phenomenon may be seen in the suggestion, that I was included in some manner within the strong field of force as radiated by Sri Aurobindo.“(Gebser, 2005)
When dealing with individuals that are integrally conscious, the metaphor of the user interface breaks down. The supermind is truth consciousness. It knows things as they are in themselves, for it is by its own creative imagination that they exist. And since the integral structure will not only supersede but also fully integrate the mental and all preceding structures, as was emphasized by both Gebser and Sri Aurobindo, its emergence will justify the interpretation of the consciousness mutations discussed by Gebser as progressive thinnings of the veil of avidya.
Epilogue
One is left to wonder what could bridge the enormous gulf between, on the one hand, current mainstream psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind and, on the other hand, such profound insights into the nature of reality, evolution, and consciousness as those we owe to Jean Gebser and Sri Aurobindo.
Here the recently published book Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century by Kelly et al. (2006) offers hope. The authors of this outstanding volume marshal evidence for a large variety of psychological phenomena that are extremely difficult, and in many cases clearly impossible, to account for in conventional physicalist terms. The relevant issues are framed in the context of the work of F. W. H. Myers. Myers’s model of human personality, which he began to formulate in the early 1880s, became the theoretical framework for psychical research and remained so for decades. Much of the later work of William James, including Varieties of Religious Experience, can be viewed as the systematic application of Myers’s central theoretical ideas to problems in religion, epistemology, and metaphysics.
Aldous Huxley (1961, pp. 7–8), comparing Myers’s (1903) posthumously published Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death to better-known writings on the “unconscious” by Freud and Jung, justly wondered:
How strange and how unfortunate it is that this amazingly rich, profound, and stimulating book should have been neglected in favor of descriptions of human nature less complete and of explanations less adequate to the given facts!
Myers’s huge body of published writings is essentially an elaboration of the view that certain phenomena of psychology, particularly of abnormal psychology and psychical research, demonstrate that human personality is far more extensive than we ordinarily realize. It was Myers who introduced the term “subliminal” into scientific psychology. He held that the biological organism, instead of producing consciousness, limits and shapes ordinary waking consciousness out of a vastly larger subliminal self, concealed from the former by what we have called the veil of avidya. Anticipating Gebser, Myers described the evolution of consciousness as a process in which we become “more and more awake.” A “general perceptive power” (Myers, 1903, Vol. 1, p. 118) informs the protoplasm, and
having shown itself so far modifiable as to acquire these highly specialised senses which I possess, it is doubtless still modifiable in directions as unthinkable to me as my eyesight would have been unthinkable to the oyster. (Myers, 1889, p. 190)
Myers conceived of evolution as tending toward “constantly widening and deepening perception of an environment infinite in infinite ways” (HP, vol. 1, p. 96). Psychological anomalies, therefore, come in two basic varieties — evolutive and dissolutive: “in studying each psychical phenomenon in turn we shall have to inquire whether it indicates a mere degeneration of powers already acquired, or, on the other hand, “the promise and potency” if not the actual possession, of powers as yet unrecognised or unknown.” (Myers, 1885, p. 31)
Contemporary mainstream psychology is in dire need of this insight. “Not only is the number of rediscoveries shamefully high,” Draaisma (2000, p. 5) writes, “but valuable empirical and conceptual work carried out in older traditions has disturbingly little impact on present-day research. The result is that certain defects in theory formulation diagnosed as long ago as the nineteenth century, are repeatedly reintroduced in psychology.” Anticipating Sri Aurobindo’s concept of involution, Myers (1903, Vol. 1, p. 118) stated that “All human powers . . . have somehow or other to be got into protoplasm and then got out again. You have to explain first how they became implicit in the earliest and lowest living thing, and then how they have become thus far explicit in the latest and highest.”
In his review of Human Personality, William James (1903) wrote: “Myers’s theory, so far, is simple enough. It only postulates an indefinite inward extension of our being, cut off from common consciousness by a screen or diaphragm not absolutely impervious but liable to leakage and to occasional rupture. The “scientific” critic can only say it is a pity that so vast and vaguely defined a hypothesis should be reared upon a set of facts so few and so imperfectly ascertained.”
A century later, the relevant facts are no longer “so few,” and a significant fraction of them is anything but “imperfectly ascertained.” Many of Myers’s observations have been powerfully confirmed, reinforcing the need for a theory of human personality which — like his — encompasses the full range of human experience. Irreducible Mind is an important pointer in the direction of such a theory.
