The Bridge

Long ago I read Franz Winkler’s Man: The Bridge Between Two Worlds. That was during my student days when I began to sense that something was amiss with what I was learning at university and wanted to understand why I felt that way. I don’t recall anything about Winkler’s book today, but now I know there are not “two worlds” nor “separate realities” — one of the sacred and another the secular, one of time and one of timelessness. It only appears divided like this because of the increasingly schizoid state of human consciousness that thinks only in dualistic extremities.

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Science, Philosophy, and Schizoid Man

Before there was something called “Science” (with a capital “S”, and which is only of relatively recent coinage) it was called “natural philosophy”. That name itself is significant because it indicates that science and philosophy were not considered separate specialist activities and departments, but a unity — the unity of the quest for knowledge with the pursuit of wisdom.

A Note on Jean Gebser’s “Diaphainon”

Those familiar now with Jean Gebser’s great book The Ever-Present Origin and his anticipation of a new age of “integral consciousness” may be puzzled by what he means by “the diaphainon” as the vital centre or core of this integral consciousness structure, and is that which enables “diaphaneity” or “the transparency of the world”. We will take a few moments to (possibly) gain some insight into this “diaphainon“.