Fourfold Vision and The Global Soul

Before they trundle me off to hospital, we should perhaps discuss the implications of Gebser’s “aperspectival consciousness” (or integral consciousness) for the fate of capitalist society.

Capitalist society is rooted in the primacy of the self-interest principle, i.e, “the rational pursuit of self-interest”. This emphasis on the self and its interest as the keystone (which also gave birth to the ethos of utilitarianism) emerged from the invention of perspective and the perspectival “point-of-view” in the Renaissance. The self-interest principle has become so much the expected norm of thought and behaviour that anything not motivated by the self-interest and for gaining personal advantage has come to be suspect, and it has now decayed into “the culture of narcissism”.

What, then, are the implications for social relations that may arise from “aperspectival/arational” mode of consciousness and perception?

Advertisement

Emergence: Order, Measure and Structure

The implications of field theory is that energy and the energetic flux is the primary reality, and that what we call “matter” is an emergent property or aspect of the energetic flux. In effect, then, what we are essentially is a particular structure or Gestalt of energy that is aware, an energy which we call the “vitality”. In effect, all energy is vitality. Physicality is an emergent or secondary phenomenon.

David Bohm and Ecodynamic Civilisation

If the Newtonian-Cartesian worldview of the Clockwork Universe and its associated mode of perception (perspectivising) gave you one type of civilisation — the Industrial civilisation — a new mode of thought and perception will give you another, different type of civilisation. We are already seeing the emergent outlines of this new type of civilisation and it’s particular mode of perception and insight. We may call it “Ecodynamic Civilisation”. Physicist David Bohm’s “rheomode” of consciousness and thinking, which may also be described as “ecodynamic”, is an important contribution to this emergent new civilisation.