Where the Peril is Greatest

“Where the peril is greatest, there lies the saving power also” – Hölderlin

Hölderlin’s proverb is quite true, and the truth of it is the subject of today’s post on The Chrysalis. We will continue also with our attempt to gain deeper insight into what Jean Gebser means by the “deficient” and the “effective” modes of a consciousness structure as a “civilisational type” so that there is no confusion about this.

Another way of reflecting on Gebser’s terms “deficient” and “effective” is in terms of infidelity to the true and fidelity to the true, respectivey. The latter — fidelity to the true and the real — is what he calls “verition” or “being-in-truth”, whereas the deficient mode of functioning and realisation corresponds to what Stephen Colbert termed “truthiness” — an aberrant or perverse mode ofrealisation of the true and the real. The Devil is a mimic, and the mimicry of the true and the real is the aberrant realisation of it. But the “saving power” that might rescue us from total dissolution already resides within the dissolute or disintegrative condition.

Gebser’s view of the situation and the potential for a transmutation of consciousness is very Hermetic or alchemical in conception. The alchemist likewise acknowledges that the seed-germ of the noble element is already latent or implicate within the ignoble or base element and must be activated, usually by passage through the crucible. Likewise Hölderlin’s proverb is very Hermetic in conception in realising that the saving power already resides within the perilous condition and can act as a kind of leavening to condition and transform the perilous condition.

William Blake actually illustrates that beautifully in a passage in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell where he transmutes the horrific and violent vision of the monster Leviathan in Hell imposed upon him into a serene scene by an act of spiritual alchemy. That is something at which Nietzsche was also quite accomplished and which he credited to his “ability to switch perspectives”, as he put it.

So let’s examine a few instances of the “deficient” and “effective” modes of functioning in our time and see how they likewise correspond to infidelity and fidelity to the true, and thus to the opacity and transparency of our perception by extension.

Narcissism and the culture of narcissism is perhaps our present greatest obstacle to authentic self-realisation and certainly to the emergence of integral consciousness. But there is a paradoxical and ambiguous situation here. Narcissism is the aberrant or perverse mode of full self-realisation rather than its stark antithesis. It is the process of self-realisation gone awry, but in which still resides the drive towards self-realisation which only seizes upon aberrant and perverse means for that. In other words, it is a mimic of the real thing. Mimicry is how the Devil goes about his work, as it were. This is what Almaas describes with his own work on narcissistic personality disorders in his book The Point of Existence, pointedly subtitled “Transformations of Narcissism in Self-Realization“. Awakening is thus to awaken to the kernel of truth that is already within its fallen or aberrant state of realisation and its rescue from what Rosenstock-Huessy calls “amalgamate false natures”.

So narcissism can be a state or phase in the process of authentic self-realisation.

Likewise the issue of “unity”. Unity may be achieved through an authentic integrality or via uniformity. But uniformity is a false, deficient or aberrant mode of realisation of essential oneness or integrality. The fascist confuses unity with uniformity — an aberrant or deficient understanding of integrality, which confusion is, of course, related to the aberrancy of narcissistic mind.

The Lie works because of its resemblance to the truth, and that is what is described by the term “truthiness”. This is why so many can be, and are, misled into aberrancy.

Blake’s Zoa “Urizen” is likewise this — evil only to the extent he has become the aberrancy of the good and the true personified — the image of Gebser’s “deficient mode” of the current “mental-rational” or “perspectival” consciousness structure. But his redemption as an integral part of “Albion” is the recovery of his true and authentic nature — his membership in the integral fourfold, even though that redemption passes through the crucible of horror, darkness and Urizen’s madness before it is accomplished.

And that is very much how Gebser sees our own process of transition playing out on the way to integral consciousness and the “diaphainon” as described in The Ever-Present Origin.

We can, then, consider the “deficient mode” and the “effective mode” of functioning in terms of infidelity and fidelity to the true and the real, bearing in mind that the infidelity is a aberrant or perverse mode of truth realisation. “Verition” and “being-in-truth” is Gebser’s term for the fidelity or effective mode of the integral consciousness.

So, the transformative potential is already implicit or latent in the aberrant or deficient modality, hidden within or behind the camouflage and which, in Blake’s imagery, must be burned away to reveal the truth hid within it.

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