The Chrysalis: A Summary-to-Date

There are a number of new subscribers to The Chrysalis. I thought it advisable to summarise the road thus traveled to date, as I do on occasion. That theme is the present breakdown, and metamorphosis, of the present structure of consciousness we call “the Modern Mind”, or otherwise as “point-of-view-line-of-thought” consciousness, or what Jean Gebser calls “the perspectival” or “the mental-rational” structure of consciousness. We will simply refer to this as the breakdown of the point-of-view.

I have noticed, in my conversations with others, that there is an assumption that pre-modern people were pretty much like us except that they thought wrongly. This is an illicit retrojection of our own contemporary attitudes (or “mindset” if you will, or sense of identity) upon the past where that just didn’t exist. What we call a “point-of-view” consciousness structure is a relatively recent innovation that did not really exist before 500 years ago with the Renaissance invention of perspective and the disclosure of the third dimension of space. The new three-dimensional consciousness structure with its “point-of-view” was nothing like the older consciousness structures which Gebser refers to as “pre-perspectival” or “unperspectival”. These only recognised one or two dimensions of reality as valid. In those terms there could be no such thing as a “point-of-view” as we understand that. This is sometimes referred to as a state of “participation mystique“. There really wasn’t any hard disctinction drawn between subjective and objective, and thus between dream and reality, or imagination of rationality. The sharp division between the seer and the seen, or the subjective and objective, was one of the innovations of perspectivism.

Again, let’s examine some of the illustrations from the early modern period demonstrating this shift in consciousness structure, perception, and identity, one being an illustration of Rene Descartes’ method which, we see, is a development from Renaissance perspectivism and triangulation, and thus adapted to a reality conceived as a space of three-dimensions.

Cartesian method illustrated

The new rage for perspectivism

The “point-of-view” is a term derived from Renaissance art. It is the point where the eye views a perspective painting without distortion, and the history of the struggles of Renaissance artists to disclose the third dimension in art makes pretty interesting reading. It took multiple generations of artists before the full reality of the third dimension was understood, and could be rendered accurately, and we refer to those who did in the mature phase as the Renaissance “masters”. As we see from the illustrations, though, the concomitant effect was to intensify the sense of self or the ego (and also what today is meant by “siloing”). Each individual here is isolated within their own conic sector of reality, and we see also the new emphasis on the primacy of the eye rather than the ear as the organ of identity, consciousness, knowledge and perception. This is exactly what we see also in the principle symbol of the European Enlightenment as illustrated on the Great Seal of the United States

In these symbolic forms, we see exactly what is meant by the “mental-rational” or “perspectival” structure of consciousness, and that it is one attuned to a reality conceived only in terms of three-dimensions of space. The science historian Thomas Kuhn noted this in his biography of Copernicus, that Copernicus must have had some knowledge of perspective in order to revisualise the cosmos the way he did, from the sun’s point-of-view. So just as consciousness structure and sense of identity shifted from the empahsis on the ear to the eye, to the emphasis shifted from the geocentric to the heliocentric cosmos.

This shift — an essential transformation of consciousness and identity — was attended also by terrible turbulence and chaos, and manias of all kinds, that we recall as the Late Middle Ages. It was a long and often violent and bloody period of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Revolution and Counter-Revolution as old and new, future and past, contended with each other.

This period we call “Modern Age” with its characteristic “Modern Mind” is now coming to a close itself. The irruption of time into consciousness beginning around the late 19th century, then finally formalised in Einstein’s four-dimensional cosmos, marked the fate of the “point-of-view” or three-dimensional, perspectival consciousness structure. Picasso and the Cubists are correspondingly becoming time conscious. Picasso even thought of perspective as “unnatural” and he attempts to render time visible in his art and as consequence breaks away from the mere “point-of-view”. Subsequently, also, with the breakdown of the point of view comes the paradox of the observer and the observed, the seer and the seen, consciousness and reality, as an inseparable unity, especially now with the strange and paradoxical realm of quantum reality.

This is also true of the so-called “unconscious”. Freud’s and Jung’s “discovery of the unconscious” and the return of the repressed is essentially about time, for the “unconscious” is time itself, both personal and transpersonal in terms of our evolutionary legacy which abides still as “the unconscious”. The “unconscious” comes to light also coincident with the discovery of “deep time”, and the further we probe into deep time, the more we also reanimate those energies in ourselves that had become dormant over time which now appear in strange new, but often chaotic and aberrant, forms of magic and myth, paganism and neo-paganism, tribalism, and so on. And this is what now presents us with the problem Gebser and others have addressed, the need to effect the “integral consciousness” as the successor to “point-of-view” consciousness currently in disintegration and disarray owing to the new “dimension” of time and the problem this poses for “identity”.

The breakdown of this conventional “point-of-view” consciousness is everywhere apparent today, especially in anxieties about “identity” which, because of time, must now become more fluid and flexible, and we see this requirement in contemporary process philosophies or the contemporary revival of Heraclitus, just as Nietzsche thought consciousness should be like music or dance — a flowing movement. We see this same in Whitehead, in Gebser, in Blake, in David Bohm’s rheomode of thinking, or in Rosenstock-Huessy’s new quadrilateral logic and “cross of reality” method.

For Gebser, the breakdown of the point-of-view consciousness (and thus the “identity crisis” as it’s called today) is a necessary preparation for the metamorphosis of the consciousness structure itself. He describes this as a “leap” into a new consciousness, new mode of perception, and new reality he calls “the aperspectival” or “arational”, which is attuned to the whole rather than the part. The point-of-view cannot handle this adequately and thus it enters into its “deficient” mode of functioning with unhappy consequences for itself as it fumbles blindly, even violently, to make sense of the new emerging reality in its older terms. And we do see this with the contemporary understanding that the “field” — the “quantum energy field” — is primary rather than the particle, which now becomes secondary effect. The “field” is also what David Bohm describes as “undivided wholeness in flowing movement” as the pre-existent condition or foundation for all reality. This requires a different sensibility than can effectively be realised by the mere point-of-view, but this pressure is throwing identity and the point-of-view into conniptions of distress.

I’m of the opinion that the present epidemic of what we call “cognitive dissonance” is simply the result of trying to live in two very different realities at once, and which manifests as things like paradox and self-contradiction, or double-think or double-bind. One aspect of us already lives in the new emergent reality or what we call “future”, while another part of us clings to the familiar reality of the past and what it is pleased to call its “identity”.

For the time being, in any case, the simplest way to describe the current transition and its chaos is the pressure of time upon the old “point-of-view” consciousness structure, whether that pressure arises from “the unconscious” of depth psychology (or “return of the repressed”) or from the new sciences of deep time. They are, in any case, one movement, arising from what Gebser describes as Origin or “the ever-present origin”.

It is a very perilous leap or crossing-over. It always brings to mind Neo’s “leap” in the Matrix or Nietzsche’s metaphor of the tight-rope walker over an abyss. The extent of violence and destruction during the Late Middle Ages was constrained by the instruments of violence and destruction that existed at the time. Today’s madmen don’t have those same constraints, and the current global situation is quite volatile. But that also acts as a pressure on us to effect the “leap” into the new consciousness.

In closing, if the “point-of-view” identity is like the caterpillar in the chrysalis stage — disintegrating — the new identity is the emergent butterfly that Gebser calls “the diaphainon“. The diaphainon is the awareness of “the Itself” as the Itself and is what makes possible “diaphaneity” or “the transparency of the world” and thus, also, “time-freedom”. Zen would call that “Illuminated Mind”. Blake calls it “Albion”. Others call it “Atman” or “Christ Consciousness” and so on. This is what effects the integration and is the core of the integral consciousness. That’s a good way to think of the “diaphainon“, as the emergent butterfly from the disintegration of the point-of-view identity as caterpillar. The same, of course, is effected by the Hermetic symbol of the crucible, the site of the transmutation of the ignoble base element into the noble element.

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