The Itself, the Diaphainon, and the Vital Centre

When any movement tends to the extremes it leads away from the center or nucleus toward eventual destruction at the outer limits where the connections to the life-giving center finally are severed. It would seem that today the connections are already broken, for it is increasingly evident that the individual is being driven into isolation while the collective degenerates into mere aggregation. These two conditions, isolation and aggregation, are in fact clear indications that individualism and collectivism have now become deficient.

Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, p. 3 (Opening chapter on “Fundamental Considerations”)

This is one of the key passages in Jean Gebser’s magnum opus entitled The Ever-Present Origin. It’s a concise and precise diagnosis of our present spiritual malaise, if not mass psychosis. In other places, Gebser describes this condition as “distantiation from the vital center”, a condition of maximum estrangement from life that is described also in terms like alienation or anomie, or what Max Weber also referred to as the “disenchantment of the world”. A Buddhist would call this state “samsara“, which Blake calls, in his terms, “Ulro”. Simply, for Gebser, if this “distantiation” is the essential problem, the corrective for this is what he calls “presentiation”, which, for those of a Christian bent, would correspond to that state called “the presence of the kingdom” where the connection to the vital centre is restored. This is the essential meaning of the word “religion”, in fact — re-ligio means to “re-connect” or “return to the Source”.

Those unfamiliar with Gebser’s work may be perplexed by what these words mean: “the Itself”, “the diaphainon” or even what Gebser means by “the vital center”. Gebser actually experienced these as immediate spiritual realities in his own life, and not as speculative or a mere intellectual metaphysics of being. These are important terms, though, for appreciating what Gebser means by “presentiation” as a corrective to our present civilisational malaise and alienation from life. The present situation as described by Gebser was, of course, the theme likewise of W.B. Yeats’ ominous poem “The Second Coming“, with it’s opening verse

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

This is our present situation, sometimes referred to as the Kaliyuga. Much that, today, is described as “New Age Spirituality” belongs to the sickness of the Kaliyuga, and not to its rectification, an aberration sometimes described as “spiritual materialism”.

To appreciate what Gebser means, fully, by “presentiation” as the corrective for this aberrant state, we need to understand what he means by “the Itself”, “the diaphainon” and “the vital centre” or actually “vitality” itself, which is energy — the energy which, in psychological terms — is sometimes referred to as “libido”. Vitality is the sense of being fully alive, the essence of the energetic being.

We know, today, that everything is ultimately energy — a singular field of energy that through some mysterious process becomes differentiated. This is the necessary implication of what is called “collapse of the wave function”. What energy is, in itself, we don’t really know. We only know it through its effects, its works. Energy is defined as “the capacity to perform work”, or to act. The New Science (Quantum Field Theory) now recognises the energetic field, and not matter itself, as the ultimate reality. Matter is secondary effect or phenomena. Physical reality ultimately is rooted in this singular energetic reality. The physicist David Bohm called this “the Infinite Potential” or “undivided wholeness in flowing movement” or “the holomovement” in which every “thing”, as such, is connected with everything else through this underlying unitary field, as described in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order).

This is what Gebser refers to as “the Itself”. Other traditions may call it the “Universal One” or “Oneness” or the “Tao” or even “Non-Being”, for as Bohm’s “Infinite Potential” it is, in itself, non-differentiated. Buddhism calls it the “unoriginated origin”, and is the meaning of “Ultimate Truth” as compared to the “Relative Truth”. It may also be called “Nothingness”, and was the original meaning of Greek “Kaos“, from which all things were born. Gebser associates this condition with what he calls the “archaic consciousness” — a state of maximum latency similar to a deep dreamless sleep. For William Blake, it was a state where “the Soul slept in Beams of Light”.

For Gebser, then, “the Itself” is this singular energetic field, infinite in scope and potential, identical with what he calls “the ever-present origin”. Being itself both timelessness and spacelessness (for it is the source of time and space) it corresponds to the eternal and the infinite, and is therefore called “the unoriginated origin”.

The “diaphainon” is the individuated aspect of the Itself, and is, for Gebser, the “vital centre” of that structure of consciousness that he calls “the integral”. The metaphor to describe this is the hologramme. This is the paradox of what we call “Self”. What Gebser calls “the diaphainon” is sometimes referred to as “the You of you“. Although you might call it “soul”, I don’t recall that Gebser actually uses that term for the diaphainon. A corresponding term for the diaphainon might be “Atman” or William Blake’s “Albion”.

This diaphainon is the “living centre” — the inner vitality. It is the core of Gebser’s “integral consciousness” and thus would be coincident with the centre of a mandala like structure, or with the radiant centre of Rosenstock-Huessy’s “cross of reality”, as discussed earlier. Its effective realisation or manifestation is what makes “diaphaneity” or “the transparency of the world” possible to the integral consciousness. Sometimes this is referred to as the scales falling from our eyes or what Blake calls opening “the doors of perception”. “Purify your eyes and see the pure world”, as Rumi put it. Buddhism would describe it as dispelling “the veil of Maya“.

“Presentiation” is, then, the self-realisation or manifestation of the diaphainon, which participates in the reality of “the Itself”. It is the energetic entity that is synonymous with the vitality or the vital centre. When some speak of the experience of “the Eternal Now”, this is a reference to the diaphainon. Gebser is convinced that the various crises of the contemporary world as an overture and prelude to the emergence of the diaphainon. And because the diaphainon is attuned to the Whole rather than the part or partial, it is the basis for “aperspectival” consciousness. An early indication of this is also Dr. McGilchrist’s book The Master and His Emissary, but also in others we have discussed in The Chrysalis such as David Bohm, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, William Blake, Aurobindo, Carl Jung as well as many others who appear to be the early forerunners and pioneers of the new aperspectival – integral consciousness, and the self-realisation of the “diaphainon“.

(I believe that, in Castaneda’s books, this same diaphainon is referred to as “the totality of oneself” and also as the condition for “total freedom”).

While “the Itself” is all-encompassing, often described as “the All-in-all”, the diaphainon is its particular manifestation within the individual. In those terms, the authentic individuation process is also a divination process which, in Hermetic terms, is the transmutation of lead into gold.

Of course, the old adage and cautionary principle that “all that glitters is not gold” applies here, especially these days.

Gebser speaks of an “intensification” of consciousness and awareness rather than an “expansion”. This intensification is the activation of the core vitality. Jung often addresses this himself, as the reclamation of vital energy locked up in the Shadow, so it seems inevitable that one has to deal with the Shadow on the way to the diaphainon.

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