Barry's and Anna's discussions on addiction and freedom had me thinking.
As many are aware, I am diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome. Like most Aspies, I have a special topic of interest that I like to discuss.
My particular topic of interest is Jean Gebser's The Ever-Present Origin. More recently, it has shifted to climate change. I try to discuss it at every opportunity that I can, although I realize that Gebser's Integral model is considered inadequate and far too simplistic for use in an Integral Ecology today (the Green stage, for instance, had not yet matured as a stage to be recognized as a stage apart from orange). So I thought, let's take Gebser and incorporate his theory into a more contemporary and comprehensive integral framework such as AQAL.
Is this redundant? I realize that KW had already done this before. So we'll do it again. We can justify this because we're highlighting different aspects Gebser to show how his theory can be relevant today.
Gebser's basic message, written in the context of the atom bomb and the nuclear arms race in years following WWII, is that our fundamental predicament is one of confinement to the mental-rational structure (which includes both orange and green). This structure compartmentalizes truth into right-hand quadrants pertaining to material and space.
Source:
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Gebser argues that our current structure of consciousness began with the Greeks, reached its full flowering with the Renaissance and the discovery of perspective, and has since entered its “deficient” or decadent phase. During this period, mental-rational humanity became not only obsessed with space, but possessed by space—by the possibilities that developed from our increasing ability to transform matter and shape physical reality.
Obsession with purely right-hand quadrants, e.g., space, quantity, and material leads to gluttony and excess. And ultimately, to possession by these things at the exclusion of time, quality, and the spiritual on the left-hand quadrants (confining our understanding of "the spiritual" (for the moment) to left-hand quadrants so as to differentiate "the spiritual" (subjects) from "the material" (objects) on the right, but of course with the understanding that Spirit is still the Ground of all being (or quadrants)).
Gebser:
This actuality is of decisive importance because "the spiritual". . . .can only become successful in superceding the three-dimensional coordinate system in which only visible things are valid and relevant. We must attempt to perceive four-dimensional integrality which is space-and-time freedom: only this space-time freedom, only "in" in, is the transparency of the spiritual--diaphainon--perceptible, for it cannot be manifest in visible form.
We would caution here that this does not imply some attempt at spiritualizing the world apart from all reality. Every form of spiritualization is gained at the expense of renouncing or negating and suppressing the previous consciousness structures. But a truly integral perception cannot dispense with the foundation of the mental structure any more than the mental structure can dispense with the mythical, and the mythical with the magic, that is, if we are to be "whole" or integral human beings.
We need look no further than the current global economic recession and global climate change to see that Gebser's message of our basic predicament is as relevant today as it was nearly a half century ago. Nothing short of a tier-jump and an integration of all quadrants will do to.
