Albion’s Awakening

For William Blake, the seminal event of the emerging New Age he foresaw was the awakening of Albion, his name for what he also calls “the Universal Humanity”. Reciprocally, it is also the decline and fall, and the madness, of Urizen, hence what Jean Gebser similarly refers to as the “double-movement” of our times — one of a new integration emerging concident with a process of fragmentation and disintegration. This “Universal Humanity” is also now what we refer to as “the Global Soul”, and one of Blake’s other names for this is “the Poetic Genius” who is “the true Man”.

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Integral Spirituality

In The Christian Future, or the modern mind outrun (1946) Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy made his argument for what we might call “integral spirituality”, and as part of his overall project for “universal history” appropriate for, and foundational to, any emerging planetary civilisation. In it, Rosenstock-Huessy showed the place of the “liberators” — Abraham, Lao-Tse, Buddha, and Jesus — within the quadrilateral and his “cross of reality” framework. The work might then be considered a reference work for what we mean by “integral spirituality”.

Wholeness and Fragmentation

I mentioned in an earlier comment that I was presently reading Jose A. Yaryura-Tobias’s book The Integral Being. It is a very simple book, which might be considered a very basic primer for an integral philosophy, the central theme of which is encapsulated in his statement that “An integral being will not develop within a diseased system”.

It is this concern with the “diseased system” and the manner in which it continuously reproduces itself that underlies many of the integralist approaches we’ve examined in The Chrysalis. Something of interest, too, in The Integral Being are the elements of a fourfold logic and a premonition, too, of what Rosenstock-Huessy refers to as “the Twelve Tones of the Spirit”, although this is not as clearly enunciated by Yaryura-Tobias as effectively as by Rosenstock-Huessy.