Evolution of (human) consciousness

Jean Gebser and Sri Aurobindo

Towards the end of a recent post/email I brought up Jean Gebser’s monumental inquiry into the evolution of human consciousness.¹ According to Gebser, this evolution proceeds by discrete transitions from one consciousness structure to the next. It is not easy for us to grasp how radically these structures differ, for whichever way we try to imagine a structure of consciousness different from ours, we are hamstrung by our dependence on modes of perception and ways of making sense that are distinctive of our present consciousness structure.

We must not forget that in our era, which is now coming to a close, we are accustomed to considering the validity and necessity of everything from a mental standpoint. But the mental is not even adequate to “comprehend” the mythical, not to mention the magic. [Gebser, p. 359]

Among the many distinctive features of a consciousness structure listed by Gebser, one stands out: dimensionality. Our present “mental” structure has three dimensions: at any point in time, we experience ourselves as being situated in a three-dimensional world. A distinctive feature of our perspectival outlook is the dimension of viewer-centered depth (distance from the perceiver). The immediately preceding “mythical” structure lacks this feature. There the experiencing self/soul/subject finds itself at the center of a sphere, which has the fixed stars attached (literally fixed) to its boundary, the firmament. Since we are capable of imagining a sphere embedded in a three-dimensional space, we cannot but ask: what is on the outside that sphere?

The mythically conscious self could not visualize its spherically bounded world as situated in an unbounded three-dimensional space. Outside that sphere, there was no there, inasmuch as for it the dimension of viewer-centered depth did not have the reality it has for us. This is why it could not handle perspective in drawing and painting, nor was able to arrive at the subject-free “view from nowhere” which is a prerequisite of modern science. All this became possible with the consolidation, during the Renaissance, of the mental consciousness structure.

Each structure of consciousness comes with its own ways of experiencing the world, making sense of it, and being effective in it. Which comes to saying that to each consciousness structure there corresponds a different world. It is the height of mental hubris to think that we, confined to our present mental consciousness, are experiencing the world as it is in itself, or even that there is a world that exists, more or less as we experience it, and yet without being experienced at all.

The ability of the mental structure of consciousness to transcend the unperspectival outlook of the mythical structure—to situate the center of each individual’s outlook in a seemingly subject-free three-dimensional expanse, to integrate all individual outlooks into a seemingly uncentered world invariant under rotations and translations—is what paved the way for the mental structure’s distinctive ways of knowing and of acting: philosophy and science (the offspring of “natural philosophy”) and science-based technology.

According to Gebser, each structure of consciousness up to and including the mental passes through two phases, the first efficient, the second deficient. The emergence of a novel, dimensionally enriched structure of consciousness does not take place all at once. Since the so-called axial period, there have been inklings, forebodings of the mental structure. Plato’s famous allegory, describing men in the process of leaving the cave, may be one of them. Once a structure is fully consolidated, or sometime thereafter, a novel structure begins to irrupt. When this happens, the efficient phase of the consolidated structure comes to an end; its deficient phase begins. The previously efficient modes of cognition and action become inadequate for dealing with phenomena that require the modes of cognition and action distinctive of the novel structure.

As discussed in a previous post, there have been periods when a people or civilization that has emerged into a novel structure collided with a people or civilization that remained rooted in a previous structure. It seems eminently plausible to us that what enabled the sixteenth-century conquistadors to clobber the Central American Aztecs was technology made possible by the Spaniards’ superior consciousness structure. What seems anything but plausible to us is that the mythical structure had its own ways of being effective in its unperspectival world. Perhaps Gebser overstated his case when he attributed the Spaniards’ victory to their superior perspectival consciousness rather than to their superior weaponry, yet it was their superior perspectival consciousness that made room for ways of being effective that were superior to the Aztecs’ authentic spellcasting.

In dismissing the effectivity of ways of acting that are specific to the magical or the mythical consciousness structure, we ignore that at their origin, knowing and being are one. The original creative consciousness termed “supramental” by Sri Aurobindo and “integral” by Gebser knows the world as it really is because by so knowing it, it constitutes it. Just as our separative and indirect consciousness is supported and made possible by a direct consciousness, and every direct consciousness is supported and made possible by the ultimate identity of the knower and the known, so the effective ways of acting specific to any particular consciousness structure—magic, mythical, or mental—are ultimately rooted in the power of the supramental consciousness to directly affect or change the world. Here is how this power was described thousands of years ago in the Rig Veda, as paraphrased by Sri Aurobindo:

[This] conscious-force turned towards works and creation is possessed and guided by a perfect and direct knowledge of the thing to be done and its essence and its law,—a knowledge which determines a wholly effective will-power that does not deviate or falter in its process or in its result, but expresses and fulfils spontaneously and inevitably in the act that which has been seen in the vision. Light is here one with Force, the vibrations of knowledge with the rhythm of the will and both are one, perfectly and without seeking, groping or effort, with the assured result. [LD132–33]

To us mentally conscious creatures it appears that the only way to be physically efficacious is by physical means, ranging from fists and swords to rockets and computers, notwithstanding the cognitive labor that goes into discovering the underlying physical laws and correlations, in making creative use of them, in designing equipment, and in developing the software that runs the hardware.

By Gebser’s reckoning, we are witnessing the first throes of the emergence of the integral consciousness structure, and to Sri Aurobindo the descent or manifestation of the supramental consciousness was “an inevitable necessity in the logic of things” and “therefore sure.” Even if the terminologies differ in some respects, “integral” would be a suitable substitute for “supramental,” inasmuch as Gebser used the term to denote a consciousness structure that can and will integrate the efficient aspects of all structures that preceded it.

The “aperspectival world” is a “world” whose structure is not only jointly based in the pre-perspectival, unperspectival, and perspectival worlds, but also mutates out of them in its essential properties and possibilities while integrating these worlds and liberating itself from their exclusive validity. [Gebser, p. 294]

We must achieve the new integral structure without forfeiting the efficient forms of the previous structures. If we are able to fully effect this integration, if our consciousness is successful in achieving the incrementation of dimensions in mutation—which in this instance “opens up” everything in its entirety—the second of our guiding principles will become evident: Transparency (diaphaneity) is the form of manifestation (epiphany) of the spiritual. [p. 299]

(More on the diaphanous and the spiritual below.) By the same token, in the view of Sri Aurobindo, each emergent principle of being can only achieve a partial integration of the principle from which it emerged, except for the supramental, which can and will achieve the complete integration of all principles that preceded it.

Mind and Life are evolved in Matter, but they are limited and modified in their action by the obligation to use its substance for their instrumentation and by their subjection to the law of material Nature even while they modify what they undergo and use. For they do transform its substance, first into living substance and then into conscious substance; they succeed in changing its inertia, immobility and inconscience into a movement of consciousness, feeling and life. But they do not succeed in transforming it altogether; they cannot make it altogether alive or altogether conscious: life-nature evolving is bound to death; mind evolving is materialised as well as vitalised; it finds itself rooted in inconscience, limited by ignorance; it is moved by uncontrolled life-forces which drive and use it, it is mechanised by the physical forces on which it has to depend for its own self-expression. [LD 732–33]

In the physical world, neither life nor mind are capable of attaining the power of self-expression and self-enjoyment which they command in their respective supraphysical worlds, where they are the dominant determining principles.

Mind and Life do indeed modify the material substance they inhabit and its energies and are not merely determined by them, but the extent and way of this mutual modification and determination are fixed.... If there is to be an entire transformation, it can only be by the full emergence of the law of the spirit; its power of supermind or gnosis must have entered into Matter and it must evolve in Matter. It must change the mental into the supramental being, make the inconscient in us conscious, spiritualise our material substance, erect its law of gnostic consciousness in our whole evolutionary being and nature. [LD 733–34]

Hilma Af Klint — from the Evolutions cycle

But if the emergence of a consciousness structure is accompanied by a certain increase in the dimensionality of the experienced world, how should we imagine the dimensionally enriched integral/aperspectival world? As previously mentioned, in this effort we are hamstrung by our dependence on modes of perception and ways of making sense that are distinctive of our mental/perspectival consciousness.

One difficulty which to some will seem insurmountable is the difficulty of “representing” the aperspectival world. This world goes beyond our conceptualization. By the same token, the mental world once went beyond the experiential capability of mythical man, and yet this world of the mind became reality. Anyone who objects that the aperspectival world is, in spatial terms, unimaginable, incomprehensible, impalpable, inconclusive, and unthinkable ... falls victim to his own limitations of comprehension and to the visual representation imposed by his world. (Gebser, p. 267)

Let’s return to the fundamental fact that all consciousness and all knowledge is founded on the identity between subject and object, between the knower and the known. Ultimately there is but one all-containing consciousness and one all-constituting substance, and they are one. Saying that all is contained in this consciousness is the same as saying that all is constituted by this substance. To requote Sri Aurobindo:

[U]niversal force and universal consciousness are one—cosmic force is the operation of cosmic consciousness. So also divine Knowledge and divine Will are one; they are the same fundamental movement or act of existence. This indivisibility of the comprehensive Supermind which contains all multiplicity without derogating from its own unity, is a truth upon which we have always to insist, if we are to understand the cosmos and get rid of the initial error of our analytic mentality....

In this comprehensive knowledge there is no independent centre of existence, no individual separated ego such as we see in ourselves; the whole of existence is to its self-awareness an equable extension, one in oneness, one in multiplicity, one in all conditions and everywhere. Here the All and the One are the same existence; the individual being does not and cannot lose the consciousness of its identity with all beings and with the One Being; for that identity is inherent in supramental cognition, a part of the supramental self-evidence. In that spacious equality of oneness the Being is not divided and distributed; equably self-extended, pervading its extension as One, inhabiting as One the multiplicity of forms, it is everywhere at once the single and equal Brahman. [LD 147–48]

Even in this comprehensive poise of Brahman, individual beings exist, notwithstanding the fact that their aperspectival consciousness transcends the distantiating viewpoint of our perspectival consciousness. As a self, the individual is coextensive with the content of its consciousness; as a substance; it is coextensive with the world. How can such individuals have relations? What would be the nature of their relations? This is precisely the sort of thing we cannot (and should not expect to) comprehend.

I used to simplify matters by conflating individuation with the process by which Brahman adopts a multitude of spatially localized standpoints. According to Sri Aurobindo, spatial localization actually requires two further steps, in addition to individuation. The first consists in a differentiation by which the self (the knower) steps back from the content of its consciousness (the known), or else projects it in front of itself:

First of all, the Knower holds himself concentrated in knowledge as subject and regards his Force of consciousness as if continually proceeding from him into the form of himself, continually working in it, continually drawing back into himself, continually issuing forth again. From this single act of self-modification proceed all the practical distinctions upon which the relative view and the relative action of the universe is based. A practical distinction has been created between the Knower, Knowledge and the Known. [LD 149]

This makes possible the second step—localization:

Secondly, this conscious Soul concentrated in knowledge, this Purusha observing and governing the Force that has gone forth from him, his Shakti or Prakriti, repeats himself in every form of himself. He accompanies, as it were, his Force of consciousness into its works and reproduces there the act of self-division from which this apprehending consciousness is born. In each form this Soul dwells with his Nature and observes himself in other forms from that artificial and practical centre of consciousness. [LD 150]

To the comprehensive (aperspectival) consciousness, by which the many know each other by identity—integrally and completely—there is added the apprehending (perspectival) consciousness we mentally consciousness beings are familiar with.

We can see that pursued a little farther [this new status of the Supermind] may become truly Avidya, the great Ignorance which starts from multiplicity as the fundamental reality and in order to travel back to real unity has to commence with the false unity of the ego. We can see also that once the individual centre is accepted as the determining standpoint, as the knower, mental sensation, mental intelligence, mental action of will and all their consequences cannot fail to come into being. But also we have to see that so long as the soul acts in the Supermind, Ignorance has not yet begun; the field of knowledge and action is still the truth-consciousness, the basis is still the unity. [LD 150]

The great (sevenfold) Ignorance becomes a reality when the multiple concentration of consciousness supporting the multiplicity of beings becomes exclusive. Now each being is isolated in a separative and purely perspectival consciousness. It sees the others solely from a distance, and it presents itself to the others solely as the surface of a three-dimensional object. Direct awareness of what the others are within—their svabhāva, their unique nature, their specific ways of experiencing and manifesting the Quality/Delight at the heart of Reality—is lost.

Recall Feynman’s question about the inside of a brick. What we usually mean by the inside of an object is what we perceive when we take it apart. What we perceive is more objects, what we do not perceive is their insides. When we come to electrons and other fundamental particles, we have reached the end of the line: where there are no parts, there are no further (never to be discovered) insides.

This is not the kind of inside that a gnostic being perceives in another object or being. What it perceives is another dimension, in addition to our three spatial dimensions, which only contain the outsides of things. And this is the sense in which the integral/aperspectival world in richer in dimensions than our mental/perspectival world. In the words of Gebser, the world itself becomes diaphanous (translucent).

We will have no success with mastering the tasks given to our epoch unless we have the courage to supersede the merely three-dimensional, spatially conceived systems. This is not to say that we must reject them, only that they be reduced to their proper magnitudes and extensities. Intensities—hitherto spatialized and fixed—demand their own mode of arrangement, systasis.² Wherever we are able to perceive acategorical effectualities as such and not as categorical fixities, the world will become transparent. We are then no longer tied to the spatial structure of systems but will be able to see through them systatically (integratively). The transparently (diaphanously) emerging space will then no longer be a three-dimensional but already a four-dimensional reality. [p. 286, Gebser’s emphasis]

Hilma Af Klint — from the Evolution cycle

The phenomenon releasing origin is spiritual, and with each consciousness mutation it becomes more realizable by man. With respect to the presently emerging mutation we may speak of a concretion of the spiritual. The word “concretion” here is not to be considered as the antithesis of “abstraction”.... Concretion does not mean a transformation of the intangible into something tangible or substantial, but rather the completion of con-crescere [growing together, merging], that is, the coalescence of the spiritual with our consciousness....

Previously the spiritual was realizable only approximately in the emotional darkness of the magical, in the twilight of imagination in the mythical, and in the brightness of abstraction in the mental. The mode of realization now manifesting itself assures that in accordance with its particular nature, the spiritual is not only given emotionally, imaginatively, abstractly, or conceptually. It also ensures that in accordance with our new capacity it is also perceptible concretely as it begins to coalesce with our consciousness....

Once man sought truth; this was achieved over the millennia by philosophy; once man believed truth, and this bond was made possible over the millennia by relegio and later through religion.³ And wherever we think and believe, those attainments endure. But for those capable of “a-waring” the whole, the true, this “verition” is no longer a philosophical search nor a faith beset by doubts but a discovery without that search which throughout the ages was, as it were, merely the preparation.

The undivided, ego-free person who no longer sees parts but realizes the “Itself,” the spiritual form of being of man and the world, perceives the whole, the diaphaneity ... which suffuses everything. For him there is no longer heaven or hell, this world or the other, ego or world, immanence or transcendence; rather, beyond the magic unity, the mythical complementarity, the mental division and synthesis is the perceptible whole. To this he does not need the retrospective bond (religion).... Magic pro-ligio, mythical relegio, mental religion become co-supports for praeligio(n) which is the intensified and overdetermined expression of all the others.... [I]n transparency the spiritual comes to perception: origin is present. In truth we ware the whole, and the whole wares us. [Gebser, pp. 542–43]

1. Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, Ohio University Press, 1986. The original German edition (Ursprung und Gegenwart) was published in two parts in 1949 and 1953.

2. The Greek term systasis is used here to express a process whereby partials merge or are merged with the whole.

3. Within the mythical structure, “religion” was linked to the Latin verb relegere, which means “careful observance” and is the opposite of “negligence” (from neglegare). Later “religion” was given an arbitrarily mentalized etymology based on the verb religare, which means “to tie back” or “to constrain.”