The Paradoxes of the Evolution of Consciousness

The complex process of the evolution of human consciousness is replete with paradox. For instance, as the economist Jeremy Rikfin submitted, it is the materially advantaged societies that have evolved the farthest psycho-spiritually.[i] The economically developed and historically most exploitive countries tend to be inhabited by a small but significant portion of citizens whose worldviews are the most advanced (a little more about that later.).[ii] The less economically advanced a country, the less it has negatively impacted the Earth, and, paradoxically, the less evolved it tends to be. In the Arab Spring of 2010-2012, the leading edge of society—represented by the mainly young demonstrators in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East (MENA)—was primarily interested in jobs and participation in the political process, issues that were first articulated in England’s 1688 Glorious Revolution and in the 1789 French Revolution and that have been mainstream among industrial and post-industrial nations for the past century, at least.[iii] The Egyptian demonstrators’ call for “bread, freedom and social justice,” although essential, did not come even close to addressing the crises of population, water resources, food security, and carrying capacity that will soon crush Egypt and indeed all the MENA (Middle Eastern and North African) countries.[iv] And of course even this list is being framed here by the author through a human-centric lens; that is, a level of awareness far too limited to be of value in truly resolving the issues. Whereas the (mostly) Arab countries were just a few short years ago requesting a society built on rational discourse and individual freedoms, moving away from theocratic law and government autocracy, the West is moving on to a new paradigm where reason and individual rights need to be brought into an even larger perspective, into at least a biospheric worldview.[v] And throughout both the Middle East and Western “democracies,” there has a backslide in recent years to authoritarian, strong man, and otherwise antidemocratic policies.

Despite this geriatric-driven politics, it is in the First World countries, according to Rifkin, where a “biospheric” consciousness is evolving, especially among the youth.[vi] Where, for some, the circle of who is “us” has been enlarged beyond family, community, nation, and humanity to all sentient beings, to all life. Where a high school student wholly comprehends this leading-edge consciousness with a statement like, “Weeds are people too once you get to know them.”[vii] It is as if we have come full circle. 

            Although it is not a circle.  When viewed from a larger three-dimensional perspective, evolution appears more as a spiral.[viii] For those with a biospheric consciousness, we are back to considering our relationship with nature as being sacred, but one level up on the spiral.[ix] Cognitively we have evolved to understand that, rather than the rock and tree and animal merely possessing their own spirits, we are related to these in a far deeper way, materially, historically, and spiritually. We are both of nature, and it of us. We are both a holistic part of the global ecosystem and simultaneously internally more complex, enfolding within our consciousness all of nature before us. In the evolutionary process, the animistic monism of forager societies and the transcendent dualism of patriarchal religions become integrated into a newly emergent awareness, one that cannot be fully fathomed from the simpler, more limited perspectives. But it can be imagined. We can appreciate that, “all beings, in their mutual relations, form our extended body,”[x] and there is simultaneously “a tendency away from the concept of a God outside or above the universe, towards a divinity inherent in everything. Away from transcendentalism, toward immanence and pantheism.”[xi] So, it is neither by powering through the historical spiral with the “business as usual” model nor by going back down the spiral in some primitivist attempt of “returning to nature” that we will evolve into a sustainable species composed of billions of individuals. A biospheric consciousness implies an integration of what has come before into what will likely be some novel way of thinking, feeling, and behaving.  

For further irony, Rifkin also noted that just as we are getting a sense of this more mature perspective—one which could help us live in harmony with the rest of nature—we are facing the dire consequences of our historical immaturity.[xii] His analysis goes something like this: By appropriating much of the planet’s resources, the beneficiaries have become materially comfortable. In that comfort comes a sense of security, and from that we derive a sense of trust for our fellow humans and a caring for the rest of the earth.[xiii] “Now the bad news,” Rifkin writes. “The new global sensibility has been made possible by the creation of more complex, dense, and interdependent social structures, which, in turn, rely on more intensive use of fossil fuels and other resources to maintain their scaffolding, supply chains, logistics and services.”[xiv] It is another example of the human predicament—we have become materially comfortable and spiritually evolved by harnessing the abundant fossil photosynthetic energy of the past eons and by the trashing of our planetary home. So, as Rifkin continues, “[I]f advancing empathic consciousness and global cosmopolitanism are dependent on ever more intensive energy flow-through, doesn’t each cancel the other, leaving us with a bittersweet worldly wisdom as we descend into the dust heap of history?”[xv]

(Samuel Corum / Anadolu Agency / Getty)

            However, even when Rifkin is pessimistic he is actually far more optimistic than the situation warrants. When he speaks of a biospheric consciousness, he is considering only the leading edge of Civilization, not its less mature body. Not its 99.9 % majority.  The biospheric consciousness hailed as the salvation of humanity is represented by the very few, by far less—by anyone’s measure—than one percent of our human family![xvi]  The rest of us are still grounded in more traditional human-centered—usually self-centered—worldviews, where our principle concerns are jobs for our sustenance and our material betterment and perhaps a voice in the prevailing system. Where a vision of the future expands only the size of the economic pie. And where political, business, and religious ideologies remain rigid and hostile to every other worldview. Even the environmentalists and ecologists speak of other species from a human-centered instrumental perspective. Life is a resource that must be maintained for the good of all humans, present and future, or as part of a planetary bionetwork that serves as our life support system. Rarely is Life described as the Deep Ecologists might: as a sacred phenomenon within which all its species have the intrinsic right to exist. We have yet to awaken to even James Joyce’s nightmare of history, where human suffering is human-inflicted. How much deeper are we asleep to the true extent of the planetary damage.

Pilot whale meat and blubber are a food source that will help feed the 50,000 Faroese through winter.

ENDNOTES

[i] Rifin, J. (2009) The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. Jermey P. Tarcher/Penguin, New York.

Rifkin (2009).  Rifkin writes, “The surveys show that 83 percent of the high-income countries have transitioned into a postmaterialist culture, but 74 percent of the poorest countries have sunk back into a survival-values culture. So, while a minority of the world’s countries and populations are becoming increasingly cosmopolitan in their values, a majority is going the other way.” (Rifkin, 2009:452). Harrison (1997) and McIntosh (2007) come to similar conclusions.

Harrison, P. (1997) The Third Revolution: Environment, Population and a Sustainable World, Chapter 29 in Nelissen, N., van der Straaten, J. and Klinkers, L. (Editors) Classics in Environmental Studies: An Overview of Classic Texts in Environmental Studies, pp. 364-370.

McIntosh, S. (2007) Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution. Paragon House, St. Paul, MN.

[ii] McIntosh (2007), Rifkin (2009:414, 452).  This idea is theoretically supported by Maslow’s developmental model of the hierarchy of needs (Maslow, 1943; and for a critique, Heylighen, 1992), wherein a person’s more fundamental needs (physiological, security, sex) must be met before she can focus on less fundamental but important psycho-spiritually needs (tolerance, fairness, compassion, etc.).  These also fit well with the developmental stages of yoga philosophy (for example, Gowan, 1974; Rama et al. 1976, Ajaya, 1983).

Heylighen, F. (1992) A Cognitive-Systematic Reconstruction of Maslow’s Theory of  Self-Actualization. Behavioral Science, v. 37(1), pp. 39-58.

Maslow, A.H. (1943) A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review, v. 50, pp. 370-396.

Gowan , J.C. (1974) Development of the Psychedelic Individual, Privately printed.

Rama, Ballentine, R., and Ajaya (1976) Yoga and Psychotherapy: the Evolution of Consciousness. Himalayan Institute Press, Honesdale, PA.

Ajaya (1983) Psychotherapy East and West: A Unifying Paradigm. The Himalayan International Insitute of Yoga Science and Philosophy of the USA, Honesdale, PA.

[iii] Acemoglu and Robinson (2012:1-5), Ajami (2012), Freidman, (2012, June 16), Johnstone and Mazzo (2013). Although mainstream issues, it hasn’t been until the last 60-100 years that universal suffrage has been part of the political landscape in industrial countries Bowles (2012).

Acemoglu, D., and Robinson, J.A. (2012a) Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Crown Business, New York.

Ajami, F. (2012, March/April) The Arab Spring at One: A Year of Living Dangerously. Foreign Affairs, v. 91(2), pp. 56-65.

Friedman, T.L. (2012, April 7) The Other Arab Spring, New York Times. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/opinion/sunday/friedman-the-other-arab-spring.html.  Accessed January 30, 2013.

Friedman, T. (2012, June 16) First Tahrir Square, Then the Classroom, New York Times.  Available http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/opinion/sunday/friedman-first-tahrir-square-then-the-classroom.html?_r=1&emc=eta1.  Accessed June 18, 2012.

Johnstone, S., and Mazzo, J. (2013) Global Warming and the Arab Spring, pp. 15-22, in C. E. Werrell and F. Femia (Editors), The Arab Spring and Climate Change, Center for American Progress.

Bowles, S. (2012) Warriors, Levelers, and the Role of Conflict in Human Social Evolution, Science, v. 336, pp. 876-879.

Friedman, T.L. (2013, May 18) Without Water, Revolution. New York Times. 

[iv] Friedman (2012, April 7; 2012, June 16; 2013, May 18), Zurayk (2012). These overpopulated desertic countries are the world’s largest importers of food, suffer the highest population growth and have the greatest economic inequity (as measured by GINI coefficients) in the world.  The demonstrators might rightly argue that only by addressing the problems of inequality will the problems of food security and environmental damage be solved. Michel and Yacoubian (2011) contend that actually ““access to clean water” figured among the handful of issues that Arab youth labeled as their greatest concerns, even topping unemployment and the cost of living in several countries.”

Michel, D., and Yacoubian, M. (2011) Sustaining the Spring: Economic Challenges, Environmental Risks, and Green Growth, pp. 41-50, in C. E. Werrell and F. Femia (Editors), The Arab Spring and Climate Change, Center for American Progress.

Zurayk, R. (2012) Bread, Freedom, and Social Justice, Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community  Development, v. 2(2), p. 7–1. 

[v] On the other hand, Thomas Friedman (2012, June 16) stands out as a reasonable voice on the Arab Spring when he contends that “there is no differences across the board—not the slightest-between liberals and conservatives on priorities for the next government. They are jobs—No. 1—then economic development, security and stability and education, in that order. Take out security and stability, and they look just like American voters.”

[vi] For example, Rifkin (2009:171-172).  Others have noted the shifting consciousness of young Americans, “who are less inclined to feel a sense of duty to participate politically in the conventional ways such as voting or following issues in the news, while displaying a greater inclination to embrace issues that connect to lifestyle values, ranging from moral concerns to environmental quality” Bennett, Wells and Rank (2008).

Bennett, W.L., Wells, C., and Rank, A. (2008) Young Citizens and Civic Learning: Two Paradigms of Citizenship in the Digital Age, A Report from the Civic Learning Online Project, Center for Communication & Civic Engagement. 

[vii] Sylvia Channing (2010) senior quote in the Ross School yearbook, East Hampton.

[viii] I borrow this metaphor from many, including my dear friends Neal Goldsmith and William Irwin Thompson. See, for example, Thompson (1981:188) and Goldsmith (2012).

Thompson, W.I. (1981) The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, St. Martin’s Press, New York.

Goldsmith, N.M. (2011) Psychedelic Healing: The Promise of Entheogens for Psychotherapy and Spiritual Development. Healing Arts Press, Rochester, VT. 

[ix] Thompson’s deeply-studied concept has been thoroughly developed for some twenty years by faculty and staff and has become the metaphorical structure for the curriculum at the Ross School, a private school in East Hampton, New York,

[x] Bender (2003:21). Bender, F.L. (2003) The Culture of Extinction: Toward a Philosophy of Deep Ecology, Humanity Books, Amherst, New York.

[xi] Harrison (1997).

[xii] Rifkin (2009:17).

[xiii] As evidence Rifkin notes that “surveys show that 83 percent of high-income countries have transitioned into a postmaterialist culture, but 74 percent of the poorest countries have sunk back into survival-values culture.” Rifkin (2009:452).

[xiv] Rifkin (2009:493).

[xv] Rifkin (2009:494).

[xvi] McIntosh (2007:56) estimates that less than five percent of the humanity possess a “Postmodern” consciousness, which, given the traits associated with this evolutionary stage, most resemble what is being referred to here as a biospheric consciousness.  However, actual behavior measured by some minimum criteria for a sustainable existence on our planet (Lianos, 2013), suggest that there are even fewer in the world who voluntarily live in a manner that reflects a biospheric consciousness.

Lianos, T.P. (2013) The World Budget Constraint. Environment, Development and Sustainability, v. 15, pp. 1543-1553.

Religion, Science, and Capitalism Against Nature

The Encomienda System. American Indian slaves in Peru silver mines.

Like its Classical and Hebrew predecessors, Christianity placed humans somewhere between nature and God. We were certainly not of nature. We were above it, made in God’s image. We had transcended nature. On the one hand this was a developmental step into comprehending the magnificence of the human potential. On the other hand, by desacralizing nature and placing ourselves outside and above it, we could blithely exploit nature without empathy or common sense. As Gregory Bateson reasoned, “If you put God outside and set him vis-à-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit.”[i] Now when we stepped outside our towns and cities, we did so as if we might in traveling to another planet that was inhabited by aliens, to mine its minerals, eat its meat, and observe it from a distance in awed fascination.

The Great Chain of Being from the Rhetorica Christiana by Fray Diego de Valades (1579). Wikimedia Commons

We find a similar trend in all the world’s religions. The Great Chain of Being, with its evolution from matter to spirit, is a perennial notion. In Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Taosim, the aim is transcendence.[ii] Earth and nature are imperfect, less spiritually evolved way stations to nirvana, to heaven, to the transcendent. In fancying a godlier role for humans, we lost our sense of Earth as sacred and we sundered what had been—since the awakening of human consciousness—an ever deepening, integrated relationship.

Illustration from "One Thousand and One Nights" (http://commons.wikimedia.org) by by Sani ol-Molk (1814-1866), licensed as Public Domain.

Starting with the early agricultural, patriarchal empires, this new paradigm became dominant during what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age. It was then, roughly two to three thousand years ago, that the world’s great transcendent religions developed.[iii] They have since dominated the human narrative about our relationship with the universe, the Earth, human society, and our individual being. These religions still dominate the human narrative. Almost eight in ten people in the world identify with one of these religions, and most institutions are philosophically and historically rooted in the dominant religion of that region.[iv] Of these, the Christians perhaps went furthest in their separation from Nature, actually making Earth evil and a “carnal prison” to be exploited by humans as they saw fit.[v] 

Relics from the Womb of Some Age by Arella Tomlinson

This master-slave relationship between humans and the rest of life was made explicit in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, both of which served to further legitimize the destruction of nature.[1] Rene Descartes (1592-1650) wrote that we could “render ourselves… masters and possessors of nature.”[vi] And Francis Bacon (1561-1626), often regarded as the “father of modern science,” believed that the scientific method would be a powerful new tool that would allow us to “conquer and subdue” nature and to “establish and extend the power of dominion of the human race itself over the universe.”[vii] Nature must be “bound into service” and made a “slave,” put “in constraint” and “molded” by the mechanical arts.[viii] According to the philosopher Carol Merchant, “The removal of animistic, organic assumptions about the cosmos constituted the death of nature—the most far reaching effect of the Scientific Revolution. Because nature was now viewed as a system of dead, inert particles moved by external, rather than inherent forces, the mechanical framework itself could legitimate the manipulation of nature.”[ix] This was still a dominant viewpoint in 1929 when Freud noted, “… that countries have attained a high level of civilization if we find that in them everything which can assist in the exploitation of the earth by man and in his protection against the forces of nature…”[x] And to this day this utilitarian and estranged relationship to nature has remained as what has been referred to as the Dominant Social Paradigm.[xi]

An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) by Joseph Wright of Derby.

This mechanistic ideology of science meshed nicely with the emergence of capitalism. Both were viewed as being objective and value-free; neutral instruments that we could employ to manipulate nature in the service of humanity. The notion of ourselves as transcendent, different from nature, and living in a linear progressive universe, served as the psycho-spiritual catalysts and the ultimate philosophical legitimacy for capitalism, technological innovation, and the whole evolutionary force of industrialization, colonialism, imperialism, globalism, and all their blowback of suffering.[xii] 

It was the great Enlightenment philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) who performed the philosophical justification for capitalism and its consequential rape of nature and grievous inequality among people.[xiii] Since nature has no worth in itself, he argued, value comes only from the productivity gained through human labor. And since God gifted nature to “the industrious and rational,” we are obligated to make the most of it, by cultivating the land and producing commodities.[xiv] To justify the owning of private property, he wrote, “Persons who worked on natural products in any way to alter them for use also gained possession of them through their industry.”[xv] In these ways, we turn a natural wasteland into a human cornucopia. And by hoarding the surplus of our efforts—capital—we produce inequality among people, sure, but we also create the excess wealth necessary to fund the ventures that create even more wealth.[xvi] And so capitalism, fueled by coal and oil and human cleverness, has produced unimagined wealth for the few, suffering for the many, and the biospheric crisis.

FOOTNOTE

[1] Paradox seems to exist at every level.  The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment were also a punctuated leap in consciousness for the West, moving away from slavery, superstition, and obedience to authority, towards the values of reason, empiricism, and the inherent value of the individual.

ENDNOTES

[i] Bateson, G. (1972:468) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Random House, New York.

[ii] Parrinder (1971), Wilber (1981, 1995), Cope (2000), Murphy (1992:144-147), Shah-Kazemi (2006).  Parrinder (1971) doesn’t use the word transcendence in describing the goals of the world’s religions, but terms such liberation, salvation and enlightenment serve the same purpose, namely of liberating one of her illusory material bonds in order to become fully aware of one’s true immaterial nature.

Parrinder, G. (1971) World Religions: From Ancient History to the Present. Facts on File Publications, New York.

Wilber, K.  (1981) Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution. Shambhala, Boulder, CO.

Wilber, K. (1995) Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution. Shambhala, Boston.

Cope, S. (2000) Yoga and the Quest for the True Self. Bantam Books, New York.

Murphy, M. (1992) The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution of Human Nature. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, New York.

Shah-Kazemi, R. (2006) Paths to Transcendence: According to Shankara, Ibn Arabi & Meister Eckhart. World Wisdom, Inc., Bloomington, IN.

[iv] Pew Research Center (2012, December 18) The Global Religious Landscape. Accessed March 19, 2019 at http://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-exec/.

[v] Bender, F.L. (2003:187-208) The Culture of Extinction: Toward a Philosophy of Deep Ecology. Humanity Books, Amherst, New York.

[vi] Descartes, R. (1637/1998:32). A Discourse on Method, Translated by Donald A. Cress. Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, IN.

[vii] Bacon cited by Rifin, J. (2009:154) The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. Jermey P. Tarcher/Penguin, New York.

[viii] Taken from Merchant, C. (2001) The Death of Nature, pp. 273-286 in Michael E. Zimmerman et al. (editors) Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, 3rd edition, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.

[ix] Merchant (2001).

[x] Freud, S. (1929/1961:145) Civilization and its Discontents, translated and edited by James Strachey. W.W. Norton and Company, New York.

[xi] McCright, A.M., and Dunlap, R.E. (2003) Defeating Kyoto: The Conservative Movement’s Impact on U.S. Climate Change Policy, Social Problems, v. 50(3), pp. 348-373.

[xii] Bender (2003).

[xiii] Bender (2003:221-228).

[xiv] Locke (1690/2010) Second Treatise, Chapter 5:34.

[xv] Locke (1690/2010).

[xvi] Locke (1690/2010).

The End of Earth as Sacred

To disabuse us of the notion that the evolution of human consciousness is smooth, simple, and continuous as the chart and metaphors (of amoebas, budding roses, and overlapping bells curves) may suggest, Gebser proposed that “A true process always occurs in quanta, that is, in leaps; or, in mutations.  It occurs spontaneously, indeterminately, and consequently, discontinuously.”[i] The “mutational process we are speaking of is spiritual and not biological or historical,” he clarified. “Moreover, we become aware of such presumably invisible processes only when they have reached sufficient strength to manifest themselves on the basis of their cumulative momentum… The apparent continuity is no more than a sequence subsequently superimposed onto overlapping events to lend them the reassuring appearance of a logically determinate progression.”  

Image: https://selfishactivist.com/what-quantum-physics-can-tell-us-about-the-future-of-activism-that-change-is-messy/

            There exist numerous other significant intricacies to the models being considered here. Given our multiple “intelligences,” a person may be highly developed cognitively and yet be emotionally and ecologically immature.[ii] In a lifetime, few people make it through all the developmental stages at all the various intelligences. Most “get stuck” along the way, content to worship their powerful god, for example, or to analyze the world through a rational, scientific lens only. However, any one individual and each society may sit anywhere along the vast (many-dimensional) spectrum of possibilities. This would be their center of psychic gravity. But we do not consistently inhabit this statistical center. We may, for instance, as a thirty-year old American worker bee generally reside at the scientific-rational level. We are reasonable and honest, neither unduly selfish nor altruistic. But on Monday we behaved like a child, throwing a tantrum because we had to wait at the Walmart checkout line longer than we figured was fair, and then on Tuesday we helped a stranger jump his car battery although we knew this might make us miss an appointment with an important client.

Image: https://sma.sou.edu/exhibitions/from-ignorance-to-wisdom/

            No less complicated has been civilization’s path to our present predicament. For along with a rise in cognitive maturity, technological sophistication, and material comfort have come horrific ways to kill, maim, and torture, and increasing inequality and environmental destruction. When humans developed the power to domesticate animals and to enslave each other, to exploit others’ somatic energy to fulfill their own material desires, the psycho-spiritual relationship changed. No longer could a person have the Animist’s sense of the sacred for other creatures. Nor for the rest of nature when we harnessed wind and water power for travel and to replace muscle power, or when—with iron—we cut down forests and plowed deep furrows into the Earth to fulfill our desires.  Of this agricultural development, the anthropologist Lynn White suggested in the journal Science in 1967, “Man’s relationship to the soil was profoundly changed. Formerly, man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of nature.” [iii] Our spiritual/ecological maturity was arrested and our cognitive maturity went into overdrive.

Photograph: Broken Clouds And Chopped Cotton Georgia Agriculture Farming Art, by Reid Callaway

According to White, the cycles of nature were replaced by the linear (more advanced) Christian model of progress. And, through the generations, as they moved from the forests to the fields, people’s worldviews changed. From experiencing (mostly unconsciously) an intimate relationship with nature, perhaps not even really differentiating themselves from nature, unaware of nature as “other,” to viewing nature as wild, dangerous, and very much other.[iv] In the Bible’s first chapter of Genesis, “God said onto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion… over the fish of the sea… fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” A few short pages later in the seventh chapter of Genesis, God kills nearly every creature of the Earth in a great flood: “And every living substance was destroyed.” Then, as the philosopher Frederic Bender puts it, “Evidently acting from remorse, God… gives the biosphere to humans as an outright gift.”[v] Or as the King James version has it: And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. Nature becomes man’s (by this point, it had become man’s world) to do with as he wishes.

Image: The Flood, by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel

Although nature was made by God and then pronounced good, it is not sacred.  Only God is sacred and only God can be worshiped. He is a jealous God after all. Humans, made in the image of God, become God’s main concern, and the biosphere is left for humans to subdue and terrorize.[vi] Fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution—including the three-and-half billion years of Life—becomes null and void.

The Rape of Europa, by Titian (1560-1562)

The Classical Civilization of the ancient Greeks and Romans had independently come to similar conclusions about nature’s lowly place.[vii] The death of the goddess religions had, by 600 BCE, become near complete, with Zeus and his extended family of rapist males at the top of Mount Olympus. The nature cults of Dionysus were replaced by the Orphic cults, where union with nature was supplanted by transcendence away from nature to some separate higher godly realm. Divinity was separate and outside of nature. According to Frederic Bender, “The [Greek] mystery religions’ focus on the soul’s destiny after death both denigrated and desacralized nature, making Earthly existence seem merely temporary and almost painfully imperfect. Thus, according to Orphism, the body is the soul’s temporary prison or tomb.”[viii]  Socrates and Plato, too, accepted and expounded on this dualistic split between matter and mind, between the base and the transcendent, between the ever-changing earthly world and the eternal, universal, spiritual realm of Forms. For them, truth, beauty, and the good exist in a perfected ideal realm. Not on Earth, not in ourselves, but in an afterlife.[ix] Urban dwellers with little time for nature outside their city’s walls, these two most influential philosophers contributed greatly to the West’s unremitting devaluation of nature.[x]

The School of Athens, by Raphael (1509-1511), in the Vatican. Socrates is missing, and so —except for slivers of sky and clouds— so is any hint of non-human Nature.

ENDNOTES

[i] This and the rest of the quotes in paragraph from Gebser, J. (1953:37) The Ever-Present Origin (Translation by Noel Bardstad with Algis Mickunas). Ohio University Press, Athens, OH.

[ii] Wilber, K. (2007) Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World. Integral Books, Boston.

[iii] White, L. (1967) The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, Science, v. 155, pp. 1203-1207. 

[iv] This idea is taken from Wilber (1983), Hughes (2001), Bender (2003), Harper (2004).

Wilber, K.  (1981) Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution. Shambhala, Boulder, CO.

Hughes, J.D., (2001) An Environmental History of the World: Humankind’s Changing Role in the Community of Life. Routledge, London.

Bender, F.L. (2003) The Culture of Extinction: Toward a Philosophy of Deep Ecology, Humanity Books, Amherst, New York.

Harper, C.L. (2004) Environment and Society: Human Perspectives on Environmental Issues. Pearson Prentice Hall, New Jersey.

[v] Bender (2003:183).

[vi] Bender (2003:171-185).

[vii] Though Greek and Hebrew notions of dualism were different, they both traveled down the same patriarchal split between man and nature (Bender, 2003).

[viii] Bender (2003:199).

[ix] Sagan (1980:186), Bender (2003:160).

[x] Bender (2003).

Modeling the Evolution of Consciousness: The Evolution of Consciousness, Part 11

By observing his own children as they developed, the psychologist Jean Piaget discovered that a child matures cognitively in a series of distinct stages.[i] The psychologist Erik Erikson suggested that a person matures throughout her life in a series of psychosocial stages.[ii] And Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan – also psychologists – found a similar unfolding for one’s moral development.[iii] Each stage, according to the professor of psychology Clare Graves, “is a unified system that encompasses the development of values, worldviews, self-sense, belief systems, neurological activation, and a person’s overall center of psychic gravity.”[iv] From infancy through old age, we each become less self-centered, more cognitively, emotionally, and morally sophisticated, less troubled by ambiguity, more modest, more “wise.”[v] 

And with some variation and with perhaps less linearity—the idea goes—human culture has evolved along a similar trajectory. That is, Civilization has developed through a series of stages that are analogous in some very important respects to the bio-psycho-social stages through which a person matures.[vi] Indeed, as Graves suggested, the development of our individual stages tends to recapitulate the stages of human history.[vii]  Infants and early forager societies, for example, both share a way of viewing the world that is magical and capricious. Later, young children and the inhabitants of feudal empires are easily led to believe in powerful gods (or God) from which all action manifest and which communicate and negotiate the terms of our very existence with us.  As an adolescent, one may sense that the universe behaves in a more ordered, less personal, way. Not by whim, but by “laws” that are internally consistent and potentially apprehensible through both reason and observation. At the scale of a society, this attempt to shed dogmatism in favor of empirical knowledge took hold in the West during the 17th century Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. The Eastern philosophical traditions had reached similar conclusions millennia earlier, calling these impersonal laws of the universe variously dharma, dhamma, and the Tao. Later in life, an adult may come to understand the universe in an even more integrated and wondrous way, perceiving it as a complex, dynamic evolutionary process in which every event is related—however inexplicably—to every other. According to William Irwin Thompson, since the late 19th century, some of Civilization’s leading-edge denizens have begun shifting into this latest stage.[viii] For Civilization, as with the sage adult, this newest consciousness tends to emerge from an integration of all our “intelligences,” including the scientist, the artist, and the mystic.

Nataraja - Shiva dancing

Implicit in these models is that not everyone within a society perceives reality with the same general worldview. Rather, a map of the worldviews of a society would perhaps more resemble the shape of a bell curve, where most people fall within the society’s “center of psychic gravity.” Extend this metaphor of a normal distribution curve, drawing one after the next through history like the top halves of a sine curve, and you have historian Fernand Braudel’s long wave of history.[ix] Within each wave reside most of the “ordinary” people who “looked out at the world in the common mentality of their time.”[x]  And, at any one moment, in either direction lie the other bell curves, smaller, populated with less people, and overlapping each other. Today, over half of humanity still resides in the worldview of children, a mythic stage where belief in right and wrong is rigidly held, and—to maintain law and order in an otherwise evil world—one pledges allegiance to state and to a God that reigns supreme.[xi] Progressively fewer people inhabit the worldviews in each developmental direction, backward and forward in time. There is another metaphor that perhaps better captures the dynamics of the process: that is, Civilization as an amoeba. Its body sits where it has been most nourished by reality. Its pseudopods represent other worldviews. The leading pseudopod reaches forward, and when it finds greater sustenance, the whole of Civilization morphs slowly, fluidly, into the pseudopod, inhabiting its new terrain.  

The Great Wave of Kanagawa, by Kasutshika Hokusai

According this model, those people who have advanced farther and faster along the evolutionary path tend to be the most admired in history. They become Civilization’s heroes, the ones to whom we aspire to emulate: Siddhartha Gautama, Jesus Christ, Mirabai, Teresa of Avila, Confucius, Socrates, Joan of Arc, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela. Some societies, too, have sparkled particularly bright and serve as our guideposts—contemporary Ladakh, Kerala, and Vermont, the 18th century American colonies, Holland during its Nazi resistance, Catalonia Spain during the Spanish civil war, 3rd century BCE India during the Maurya dynasty, the Golden Age of Athens during the 5th century BCE, and the Bronze Age Minoan society. Each served as exemplars of human possibility, at least in comparison to the dominant worldviews in which they were situated.

In the mid-twentieth century, two figures—the Christian Jesuit and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Hindu mystic Sri Aurobindo—traced out the evolutionary end point of humanity within this evolutionary context. They took the notions of perfectibility through self-effort to their extremes. Both saw the evolution of consciousness as a progressive dynamical process that was the logical flowering of material evolution toward an ultimate wholeness with the universe. Teilhard “proposed that the increasing complexity and consciousness of humans is directly related to the evolution of the universe. This complexity-consciousness… is an emergent property of matter itself.”[xii] According to Tielhard, “The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself.”[xiii] Sri Aurobindo similarly envisioned that “It is indeed as a result of evolution that we arrive at the possibility of… transformation. As Nature has evolved beyond Matter and manifested Life, beyond Life and manifested Mind, so she must evolve beyond Mind and manifest a consciousness and power of our existence free from the imperfection and limitation of our mental existence.” [xiv] His central theme was the evolution of our ordinary human life into life divine. 

On the one hand, these two mystics’ evolutionary models served to philosophically re-integrate the dualistic split of materialism and idealism. On the other, the models were logical expressions of a universal spiritual worldview called the Great Chain of Being.[xv] According to this view, held by just everybody since the beginning of Civilization except for the post-Enlightenment materialists, “reality is a rich tapestry of interwoven levels, reaching from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit.”[xvi] Each succeeding level “transcends and includes” the previous level and is perceived by a person to be more subtle in reality. Tielhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo simply placed the worldview within an evolutionary framework. They borrowed from Western science and then went beyond. Western science begins its model of reality at the Big Bang and then views increasingly complex phenomena as “emerging” from simpler ones. For example, the interplay of subatomic particles and the various fundamental forces (the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism) lead to the emergence of atoms, which then lead to the emergence of molecules, then crystals, living organisms, and consciousness.  Whereas materialist science is presently at odds over how to even interpret consciousness, the two mystics saw ordinary human consciousness not as some inexplicable evolutionary end point but rather as an early stage in the long continuum of being.[xvii] 

Accordingly, as this model goes, the development of a person and the whole of Civilization follow similar patterns of unfolding. As if this pattern were written into the rules of the universe—the Dharma, the Dhamma, the Tao. To use another metaphor: as in a rose, the pattern of its full flower are already enfolded in its bud. Or as the ethnobotanist/mystic Terence McKenna provocatively put it, “The universe is not being pushed from behind. The universe is being pulled from the future toward a goal that is as inevitable as a marble reaching the bottom of a bowl when you release it up near the rim.”[xviii] However, even the eternal optimist Teilhard did not see this process as inevitably leading to a higher human consciousness.  Cosmic evolution will continue. But our perfection is not guaranteed. Our self-created extinction could arrest the process.[xix]

Table 1.  To condense the enormous complexity of stages, variously called mentalities, worldviews, and “consciousness structures”[xx] into a visually comprehensible map, simple charts have been often created by many of the contributors. The names given to represent a worldview are meant to capture the essence of the way in which reality is perceived or experienced by the people of the time. Since Ken Wilber has expressly focused on comparing and synthesizing the works of others in the field, I am using his maps as an example of how the dominant societal worldviews have changed (and with his last two stages, perhaps will change) through time.[xxi]

ENDNOTES

[i] Dworetzsky, J.P. (1985) Introduction to Child Development, West Publishing Company, St. Paul, MN..  Ignored here is Sigmund Freud’s highly controversial hypothesis of psychosexual development.  The ideas of Piaget, Erikson and Kolhberg have also faced great criticism.  

[ii] Erikson, E.H. (1966) Eight Stages of Man, International Journal of Psychiatry, v. 2(3), pp. 281-300.

[iii] Kohlberg (1977), Gilligan (1993). Kohlberg, L., and Hersh, R.H. (1977) Moral Development: A Review of the Theory, Theory into Practice, v. 16, pp. 53-59. Gilligan, C. (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

[iv] McIntosh, S. (2007:32) Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution. Paragon House, St. Paul, MN.         

[v] Hall, S. (2010) Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

[vi] Gebser, J. (1953) The Ever-Present Origin (Translation by Noel Bardstad with Algis Mickunas). Ohio University Press, Athens, OH. Thompson, W.I. (1998) Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, St. Martin’s Press, Griffin, New York. 

[vii] McIntosh (2007:32).

[viii] Thompson (1998, 2009). Thompson, W.I. (2009) Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Culture, Second Enlarged Edition, Imprint Academic, Exeter, UK.

[ix] Braudel’s ideas of long or great waves of economic history are explored in Braudel (1984) and Fischer (1996).  Braudel, F. (1984) The Perspective of the World, Volume III: Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, Translated by Reynolds, S., Collins, London. Fischer, D.H. (1996) The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. Oxford University Press, New York.

[x] Thompson (2009:36). 

[xi] Laszlo (2006), McIntosh (2007:44).  Laszlo, E. (2006) The Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads. Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc., Charlottesville, VA.

[xii] Grim, J., and Tucker, M.E. (2003) Introduction, pp. 1-12, in A. Fabel and D. St. John, Teilhard in the 21st Century: The Emerging Spirit of Earth, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY.

[xiii] de Chardin, P.T. (1955/1975:221) The Phenomenon of Man. Harper and Row Publishers, New York.

[xiv] Sri Aurobindo (1953:31-32)The Mind of Light, E.P. Dutton and Company, Inc., New York.

[xv] Wilber, K. (1998:6-7) The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion, Random House, New York.

[xvi] Wilber (1998:6-7), italics his.

[xvii] For the materialists’ various arguments see for example Hofstadter and Dennett (1981), Dennet (1991), Chalmers (1996), Carter (2002), Richards (2002), Ramachandran (2011). What materialists accept in common is that the physical universe is primary and all other phenomena are the result.  The whole of the universe can be adequately explained through an understanding of the interaction of matter and the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force) in the spacetime field.

Hofstadter, D.R. and Dennet, D.C., Editors (1981) The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, Bantam Books, Toronto. Dennet, D.C. (1991) Consciousness Explained, Little Brown and Company, Boston. Chalmers, D.J. (1996) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Oxford Univ. Press, New York. Carter, R. (2002) Exploring Consciousness, University of California Press. Richards, J.W., Editor (2002) Are We Spiritual Machines? Kurzweil , R. vs. the Critics of Strong A.I. Discovery Institute Press, Seattle, WA. Ramachandran, V.S. (2011) The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human. W.W. Norton & Company, New York.

[xviii] McKenna, T. (1994, November) Approaching Timewave Zero, Magical Blend Magazine, Issue 44. 

[xix] de Chardin (1955, 1964).

[xx] In a memoriam to Jean Gebser, Jean Keckeis defined “consciousness structures⁄as nothing other than the visibly emerging perception of reality throughout the various ages and civilizations.” Kekeis,  J. in Gebser (1953:xx).

[xxi] Wilber (2000:215, 2007:21). Wilber, K. (2000:215) Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy. Shambala, Boston. Wilber, K. (2007:21) Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World. Integral Books, Boston.

Individual Consciousness and Collective Culture: The Evolution of Consciousness Part 10

Like many other successful complex systems—the Internet, biological ecosystems, living organisms and Life, itself—culture exists as “a nested fractal network of independent beings” in continual change.[i] The human brain can be crudely imagined as a pulsing circuitry of a hundred billion cells or nodes within a network, making perhaps as many a quadrillion connections.[ii] One level up, each brain operates as a single node, connected to billions of others in a series of interconnected configurations, scales, and levels, of families, friends, organizations, communities, etc. All together they produce the global society. And just as a symphony is not composed simply of musicians fingering their instruments, but also of a shared and collaborative internal experience, the emergent symphony of humanity involves society and culture, the exterior and the interior experience of it, as Civilization. And the experiences of the symphony occur at all levels simultaneously. Civilization and the individual feedback upon each other (much like two facing mirrors), producing nearly infinite intercourse. And since their adaptive success is entwined, Civilization and the individual share a co-evolutionary existence.

The School of Athens, by Raphael

            Even within the seemingly infinite inner experiences of the human and of humanity as a whole, we do recognize major evolutionary patterns. Beliefs and whole worldviews come and go. Animism, communalism, equality, ancestor worship, blood sacrifice, and slavery were once significant elements of human society.[iii] By the beginning of axial age (around 800 BCE), reverence for nature and gender equality had been completely replaced by God worship and patriarchy. In much of the world, the ancient warrior ethics of ruthlessness and brute force has since been replaced by an acceptance of the rule of law and the shenanigans of business.[iv] In the First World countries, dogma has been largely replaced by individualism, and the religious ideal of absolute truth is being replaced by a Postmodern sense of relativity and cultural context.  In postmodern societies, an incongruous mix of devout atheism, religious faith, New Age mysticism, hyper-individualism and fierce patriotism, male dominance, and gender equality, “shopping until you drop,” and deep ecology all exist side-by-side.

Balloon Dog by Jeff Koons at the Versailles Palace

Through the millennia, the manner in which we perceive nearly everything imaginable has changed, including, of course, the nature of reality, itself. Time, for instance: the Hellenistic Greeks and the Vendanta philosophy of the Hindus regarded history as passing through great cycles, from times of perfection to chaos and back again.[v] The Medieval Christians viewed time as a linear devolutionary process from the initial Fall from grace, and our lives here on Earth as but a stopover to some form of everlasting life. All that has since been replaced in the industrializing world by a gathering sense that history is a linear flow not of woe, but rather of material progress.[vi] Simultaneously, and so consistent with a postmodern perspective, we understand that time, like everything else, is relative. The workday is recognized as being of absolute duration, from nine to five, let’s say, and yet each person’s phenomenological (actual internal) experience of those hours will be uniquely different. And, of course, the physicist and the cosmologist find the measurement of time completely dependent on one’s perspective, some mystics find “eternity in an hour,” and many mystics and scientists, alike, suggest that time is an illusion created by a species disconnected by thought from the whole.[vii]

Other Side of the Bridge, by Yves Tanguy

            Although some warn us against interpreting this evolutionary process in terms of development or progress,[viii] others do find great advancement through time. Steve Pinker, in his books The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) and Enlightenment Now (2018) finds that through the centuries, humanity has, as a whole, become less violent and more tolerant of others’ differences.[ix]  Even during the murderous 20th century, proportionally less people were killed in wars than in the previous centuries. The homicide rate has been steadily decreasing, as has brutality, child beating, and animal brutality. Children’s television programs are less violent than traditional nursery rhymes. Moreover, societies are becoming generally less racist, less sexist, more tolerant of gender differences and of people with disabilities, and the ideal of civil rights has become more established globally.[x] In resonance with Martin Luther King Jr.’s statement, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” people are increasingly vocal against injustices in faraway lands, whether it occurs in Tibet, Syria, or Myanmar. And when disaster strikes thousands of miles away, in Indonesia, Pakistan, New Orleans, Haiti, and Japan, millions of people rush to help.  So consistent has been this change in worldview that Steve Pinker notes, “the attitudes of conservatives have followed the trajectory of liberals, with the result that today’s conservatives are more liberal than yesterday’s liberals.”[xi] Jeremy Rifkin suggests, “Each new stage of consciousness represents an enlarged CNS [central nervous system] encompassing broader and deeper realms of reality.”[xii] 

The Inquisition, by Juaquin Pinto

There is much historical precedent for the notion that, along with our biological and societal evolution, there has been an evolution of culture and of human consciousness. The Eastern religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism—are centered intrinsically on the notion of the evolution of human consciousness, of its progress and perfectibility.[xiii] According to these philosophies, human consciousness evolves both during a life and between lives. Westerners, too, have tended to believe that human progress is possible during the life of a person. Islam, particularly, and Christianity and Kabbalist Judaism to a lesser extent, view us as possessing the free will to improve our nature, and Western philosophy and psychology beginning with Plato have generally accepted the notion of perfectibility (if not always complete human perfection).[xiv] In this tradition, Friedrich Nietzsche’s overman (Übermensch) was the pinnacle of human possibility, the self-perfected man, the one who has acquired self-mastery.[xv] After Nietzsche, however, most of western philosophy left speculations about the nature of consciousness to the neuroscientists, psychologists, poets, and mystics.

The Contemplative Landscapes of German Romantic Painter Caspar David Friedrich

            From this diversity of perspectives there has emerged a generally acknowledged evolutionary paradigm of human consciousness; one in which deliberation revolves mainly around the concepts by which the underlying structures can be mapped.

Table 1.  To condense the enormous complexity of stages, variously called mentalities, worldviews, and “consciousness structures”[xvi] into a visually comprehensible map, simple charts have been often created by many of the contributors. The names given to represent a worldview are meant to capture the essence of the way in which reality is perceived or experienced by the people of the time. Since Ken Wilber has expressly focused on comparing and synthesizing the works of others in the field, I am using his maps as an example of how the dominant societal worldviews have changed (and with his last two stages, perhaps will change) through time.[xvii]

ENDNOTES

[i] Margulis, L. and Sagan, D. (1995:90) What is Life? University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.

[ii] Pennisi, E. (2006) Brain Evolution of the Far Side, Science, v. 314, pp. 244-245.  A node, by definition, can be thought of as any element (cell, brain, person, organization, town, etc.) that can be connected to other nodes (at all the different levels) in a complex of networks.

[iii] For the pervasiveness of human sacrifice in early civilization, see Gibbons, A. (2012) The Ultimate Sacrifice, Science, v. 336, pp. 834-837..

[iv] McIntosh, S. (2007) Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution. Paragon House, St. Paul, MN.

[v] Rifkin, J. (1980:1-30) Entropy: A New World View, Viking Press, New York.

[vi] Wright, R. (2004) A Short History of Progress. Da Capo Press, Philadelphia, PA..

[vii] For example, Hawking (1988), Davies (2002), Barbour (2008), Callender (2010).

Hawking, S.W. (1988) A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. Bantam Books, Toronto.

Davies, P. (2002) That Mysterious Flow. Scientific American, September, pp. 40-47.

Barbour, J. (2008) The Nature of Time. FQXi Forum.

 Callender, C. (2010) Is Time an Illusion? Scientific American, June, pp. 41-47

[viii] For example, Geber (1953:37), Murphy (1992:31-32), Wright (2004) and Fukuyama (2011:51).

Gebser, J. (1953) The Ever-Present Origin (Translation by Noel Bardstad with Algis Mickunas). Ohio University Press, Athens, OH.

Murphy, M. (1992) The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution of Human Nature. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, New York.

Fukuyama, F. (2011) The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.

[ix] Pinker (2011). 

Pinker, S. (2011) The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. Viking, New York.

Pinker, S. (2018) Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Reason and Progress. Viking, New York.

[x] Rifkin (2009), Goldstein and Pinker (2011), Kristof (2011), Pinker (2011). 

Rifin, J. (2009) The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. Jermey P. Tarcher/Penguin, New York.

Goldstein, J.S., and Pinker, S. (2011, December 17) War Really is going Out of Style, New York Times.[xi] Pinker (2011:476).

Kristof, N.D. (2011, November 23) Are We Getting Nicer? New York Times

[xii] Rifkin (2009:37).

[xiii] Rama et al. (1976), Coward (2008). 

Rama, Ballentine, R., and Ajaya (1976) Yoga and Psychotherapy: the Evolution of Consciousness. Himalayan Institute Press, Honesdale, PA.

Coward, H. (2008) The Perfectibility of Human Nature in Eastern and Western Thought. State University Press, Albany.

[xiv] Rifkin (1980), Coward (2008:186-193).  Christianity and Judaism are far more pessimistic than Islam on the questions of human perfectibility and on the natural state of human perfection.  In the Judeo-Christian tradition, history itself is viewed as a Fall from God, as a devolution. In the past couple of centuries, however, history as an evolutionary process has taken root through the Western philosophers Johann Fichte, Friedrich Shelling, Georg Hegel, and Herbert Spencer, the economist Karl Marx, the scientist Charles Darwin, and the mystics Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin (Wilber, 1998:103-105; Coward (2008:17)).

Wilber, K. (1998) The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion, Random House, New York.

[xv] Kaufman, W. (1967, 1974:312).

Kaufman, W. (1967) Nietzsche, Friedrich, p. 504-514 in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillan Publishing Company, New York.  

Kaufman, W. (1974) Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Fourth Edition, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

[xvi] In a memoriam to Jean Gebser, Jean Keckeis defined “consciousness structures⁄as nothing other than the visibly emerging perception of reality throughout the various ages and civilizations.” Kekeis,  J. in Gebser (1953:xx).

[xvii] Wilber (2000:215, 2007:21).

Wilber, K. (2000) Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy. Shambala, Boston.

Wilber, K. (2007) Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World. Integral Books, Boston.