Seeing Through the World

Jeremy D Johnson, host of Mutations Podcast and author of Seeing Through the World, offers a five-week exploration of Jean Gebser’s “structures of consciousness." Interpreting Gebser’s magisterial text, The Ever-Present Origin (1949) as both a prophetic work and a spiritual treatise for an age of climate crisis and intelligent machines, this course sifts through the troubled present. It is in our present, as Gebser intimated, that we find the seed crystal of a new worldview.

Jean Gebser (1905-1973) was a philosopher, poet, and phenomenologist of integral consciousness best known for his magisterial The Ever-Present Origin (Ursprung und Gegenwart, 1949). Writing in the mid-century during a period of intense cultural transformation and crisis in Europe, Gebser intuited a series of mutational leaps spanning the history of human consciousness, the latest of which he called the “integral” structure.

The integral mutation, Gebser observed, had begun to emerge in the early twentieth century. From the curved space of Albert Einstein’s relativity, to the chaos mathematics of Henri Poincaré, to the impossible gestures of cubism: each of these, Gebser observed, indicated a dramatic leap from the classical linear conceptions of “space” to a strange new “time.”

This new consciousness of time was not the clock-time of modernity but a time of a “most complex” nature. It described a world that was entangled, relational, and yet characteristically open. It was a world “without opposite,” Gebser emphasized, one that had overcome the subject-object duality of the Enlightenment.

The new mutation did not center modern thought, nor a progression forward to a more advanced consciousness. What it seemed to call for was integration. Earlier structures of consciousness were to be recognized as co-present and even co-valid with modern consciousness. Human beings were not exclusively ‘modern,’ nor were they ‘archaic.’ They were the integrity, the wholeness of their mutations. It was the whole which was shining through, pressing towards new awareness in the ‘transparent’ present.

From the discovery of the unconscious to artistic movements like Dada and Surrealism, the past had begun to break into the present. So too had the future. Cubists were aspiring to depict time itself in their paintings, their figures appearing to move simultaneously backwards and forwards, left and right, in ways that mirrored the strange behaviors of quantum physics.

Meanwhile, French philosopher Henri Bergson had declared “time is not space,” replacing clock-time with durée (duration).

Time seemed to be coming to consciousness everywhere.

“I sense space abolishing itself,” wrote the poet Paul Eluard, “and time increasing in all directions.”

With the dangerous rise of fascism in Europe and the runaway technological forces of ‘progress’ hurling civilization into crisis, Gebser understood that the ‘spatial’ consciousness of modernity had exhausted itself. The modern world had initiated a period of dramatic upheaval and revolutionary change. It had harnessed the forces of time and nature in the name of progress, but it was not capable of mastering these same forces. The machines of progress continued to ‘emancipate’ themselves from human hands, becoming runaway forces. Only an integral consciousness of the world, one which had overcome the “bifurcation” between human beings and nature, and overturned classical linear notions of space and time, could match the intensity of these new realities.

The imperative, then, was to bring this new consciousness to the forefront of awareness, to indicate where the seed crystals of a new reality were already present.

There, as the Romantic poet Hufeland described, we would find a “new strength of spirit.”

Gebser’s magnum opus, The Ever-Present Origin (Ursprung und Gegenwart) provides a sweeping history of consciousness. It is both rich with detail and expansive in vision.

The host of this course, Jeremy Johnson, invites participants to see this text as wayfinding companion in a time of intelligent machines and ecological catastrophe. It offers a re-enlivenment of the past “structures” of consciousness, but also a deep attunement to the presence of the future. Alongside the past, the future also shapes the present. The radical breakthroughs of art and physics in the last century are, in a sense, events which are still happening.

We are entangled, like one of the strange superpositions of the quantum world, in a cultural transformation still in the making.

More than ever, then, we must come to see how the future coalsces in the present, and “ripens” in us, as the poet Rainier Maria Rilke ha described. The new mutation perceives a time and space in open relation.

Our class distills Gebser’s insights into a series of five lectures, and additional in-depth office hours sessions.

These lectures are catered for both newcomers to Gebser’s philosophy as well as seasoned alumni. In either case, participants are invited to see this class as a deepening into shared inquiries, and a practice of “living the questions” in a time of unthinkable worldview shift.

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Gebser’s insights into the phenomenology of human consciousness has offered profound intellectual depth—and spiritual transmission—to the field of integral philosophy and consciousness studies, influencing the works of American historians such as William Irwin Thompson and the philosopher Ken Wilber. Further syncretic corroboration links Gebser’s integral epoch to those of the Indian revolutionary and yogi Sri Aurobindo’s “integral yoga” (The  Life Divine) and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary mysticism (The Human Phenomenon).

​As William Irwin Thompson writes, “Gebser was a brilliantly intuitive mystic with a profound understanding of poetry and art,” and that Ever-Present Origin  is, “the kind of book that changed one’s life.” Georg Feuerstein, Gebser's colleague and friend, wrote that, “Socratic spirits like Gebser typically live before their time… perhaps the present climate is more receptive to Gebser’s arguments.” 

The future lives in us. In this era of meta-crisis, Gebser’s time has come yet again to help us navigate a liminal epoch between worldviews and realities.

Class Outline

• The course will begin on Wednesday, January 28 and runs for five consecutive weeks.

• Lectures will be held on Wednesdays at 5:00 pm PT / 8 pm ET.

• Office Hours will be held on Sundays at 9:30 am PT / 12:30 pm ET.

• All sessions are held for approximately 90 minutes.

Lessons

• Lesson I - Introduction - Time Increases in all Directions

• Lesson II - Our History is Mutational: The Structures of Consciousness Model

• Lesson III - Myth, Magic, and Machines: Past Becomes Present

• Lesson IV - Breaking Forth of Time: Upturning the Progress Narrative

• Lesson V - In the Danger, the Saving: Integral Consciousness and the Presence of the Future

Student Learning Outcomes

Students will:

• participate in a reading of Ever-Present Origin, in an attempt to make new connections with our modern world

• explore a host of other, related works (poetry, film, fiction, philosophy, etc.) to deepen their understanding of key themes and ideas

• cultivate embodied and experiential insight on the structures of consciousness — the archaic, magic, mythic, mental and integral — in their daily lives

• familiarize themselves with Gebser’s core insights into integral consciousness, such as ‘time concretion,’ ‘systasis’ and ‘diaphaneity’(transparency)

• acquire tools for participatory knowing that help them to navigate a culture of extreme fragmentation and worldview transition

• have opportunities to converse with the instructor and their peers in an environment of open inquiry and mutual learning

• join a community of seekers who believe in the transformational potential of consciousness and culture, and the power of art, imagination, and contemplative wonder to help realize a more beautiful world

Registration: $175

Mutations alumni (those who have taken any previous course with us) receive a $25 discount. Register here.

Student rates:
Send us a note to receive a pay-what-you-can registration link: jeremy (at) mutations (dot) blog

Thank you, and see you in class!

Returning Students:

Register here if you’re already a ‘mutant’ on the Mutations network.