California Institute of Integral Studies
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Integral Aesthetics – The Evolutionary Function of the Sublime
Get PDFThis paper explores an evolutionary integral aesthetics arising at the end of a two hundred year arc beginning with Immanuel Kant\u27s establishment of modern aesthetic theory, and culminating with Jean Gebser\u27s integral mutation of consciousness described in The Ever Present Origin. I examine Kant\u27s aesthetics of the sublime as an early opening into Gebser\u27s integral mutation of consciousness, and describe how an encounter with the sublime can boost the mind into wider bandwidths of consciousness with the activation of an integral perception. Beginning with the concept of the sublime in art, I describe how supersensible perception might be evoked and developed through encounter with the sublime. I then examine how experiences of the sublime through encounters with natural phenomena and works of art have the ability to suspend rational and verbal modes of cognition, clearing the way for the rise of supersensible states and the opening into a wider awakening of integral awareness. Along the way I shall discuss theories of postmodern aesthetics, recent conceptual mappings of consciousness, and how discoveries in electrophysiology and anatomy call for a new model of human consciousness to account for the psychodynamics of encountering the sublime. My thesis is that an integral aesthetics will catalyze the transformation of consciousness from exclusively mental into the integral by activating a supersensible state that is at the same time a reactivation and a retrofitting of that mode of consciousness operating prior to human language. A supersensible aesthetics will induce the emergent integral consciousness foreseen by Gebser without loss of previous evolutionary structures. In so doing it will open up to us truly new perspectives, previously unimaginable new visions of the universe
The Russian Bride’s Attire: A Journey Through Art and Consciousness
Get PDFThis paper addresses the triad of, creativity, consciousness and culture. How the viewer “sees” the painting is influenced by consciousness and the surrounding culture – creativity is the creative process of the artist. Art is fluid in the sense that viewers see it differently at different times in their lives. The creative process experienced by the artist is the genesis of the painting. However, the art takes on a life of it’s own for every viewer. The definition of consciousness in this paper is based on the awareness and environment of the viewer
Poly-Perspectival Wisdom and Aperspectival Awareness: How Attunement to the Umwelten of Nonhumans Cultivates Integral Awareness
Get PDFThis paper explores the idea that humans are biologically, mentally, and spiritually connected to nonhumans throughout the natural world. As science and philosophy expand to include the participation of the observer, new integral methodologies emerge and understanding shifts. Without deeper awareness of our place and purpose within the planetary ecosystem, we cannot begin to understand who we are as a species, and what we mean to the cosmos. We need to re-awaken to our relationship with the whole. Theologian and Earth scholar Thomas Berry referred to this connected whole “the Great Conversation,” (1991). He warned that only our re-entry into this primordial conversation, and re-enchantment and communion with the whole, can facilitate conscious evolution. Biologist and early cyberneticist Jacob von Uexküll’s concept umwelt (“environment”) will be a focal point in this paper. This “conversation,” occurring at a level of consciousness hidden to most beings, forms the fundamental connection underlying the full complexity of life
Re-imagining Embodiment and the Self in People with Traumatic Spinal Cord Injuries: A Narrative Approach
Get PDFTraumatic spinal cord injuries from accidents cause physical and social suffering, pain and loss. After an initial period of physical and psychological trauma, the individual begins to cope and successfully crosses over. Crossing over as a term used in the spinal cord injury register refers to positive adaptation—physical, psychological and social. This paper is based on a qualitative narrative study of the lived experiences of individuals negotiating spinal cord injuries in the Indian context wherein the disability is no longer the location of inability, tragedy, pain, and loss, but one of creative possibilities. As individuals re-imagine embodiment and self, a space of infinite possibilities opens, thereby creatively re-engaging the embodied self and taking on new role identities
The End of Death? Conscious Life in Global Cyberspace
Get PDFIn The Ever-Present Origin, Jean Gebser, in talking about the magical structure of consciousness[1], states: All directing implies a consciousness process (EPO 49). And so to die is to become not consciousness, to lose the power to direct, ultimately to lose control over our own destiny. Being only human, and realizing that death is often more real than an afterlife that we cannot experience while alive[2], we actively fight any loss of control-we fight the passage to death. In that directedness, the glimmerings of which began with magical consciousness, and that came to full awareness with the mental-rational consciousness, we exert control at every turn to put off the limitations of death and hold it in abeyance.
Perhaps putting consciousness on a chip is the last hurrah of the mental (rational) consciousness, the ultimate extension of instrumental rationality-the ultimate attempt to direct and be in control of life.
Do not go gentle into that good night. ... Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Dylan Thomas
Consider the uproar over the shooting of high school students by other high school students in Littleton, CO, as well as other scenes of violence and death in the last couple of years. Despite that fact that these are rare events, and generally getting rarer (statistically, though no less stark for their horror) there was and is a compulsive desire to eliminate every threat to life, at any cost. We want a death-free life, we want to eliminate all risk of death-we want only life with no scary interruptions. Some schools have gone as far as to remove all student lockers from school; some have put in transparent lockers; some require that all students wear transparent book bags, and some have eliminated all book bags and backpacks so nothing foreign or hurtful can be brought into the school. Is there anything we could ever do to insure that death will not catch us? If there is we are probably already trying to do it-we want only life without death-total control.
Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it. William Somerset Maugham
Generally, we are compulsive about putting off death-death the disease of old age (Victoria Sharpe in Wade 1999). Who could imagine that any of us wouldn\u27t want to extend his or her life. That any one of us wouldn\u27t want to avoid death seems absurd to most people. Only a saint or a fool thinks otherwise, and even saints are sorrowful about the actual event of death for they have lived and know the enlightenment of living
