The Integral Message
Along with Gebser, Ken Wilber leads a group of scholars who have traced the history of the evolving consciousness of the mind. Each historical era is identified as shaped by a different capacity of the mind which is dominant at that time. The successive eras are as follows, the archaic or primitive, the magic, the mythic, the mental rational, and now what is spoken of as the integral era. Gebser describes the signs of the integral consciousness in a dozen domains of life, covering the broad world of science, the dual sciences, to the social sciences, literature and the arts. With each transition from one era to the next, the new incorporates the passing former capacity which becomes less significant. In current times the new integral capacity is emerging as the dominant which is necessary to meet the new challenges of the globalising world. In the context of the dramatic changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the dominant reality is the inter-related, inter-dependence of all reality.
Never has there been such a dramatic change in life throughout the course of history. The extraordinary population explosion from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 8 billion in 2020, the emergence of the information explosion with a totally different approach to science described as Quantum theory, the technological and cyber revolution from the invention of the telephone, television, computer, internet and world wide web, the new modes of transportation with the car, aeroplane and space ship, the discovery of nuclear capacity with uses ranging from medicine to weaponry, the microscopic and telescopic capacity to peer into the outer reaches of space or the minute internal machinations of life, all across the last one hundred years, have dramatically reshaped life and our understanding on planet earth. Philosophers Heidegger and Jaspers have pondered the significance of this change.
Speaking of the current era of history Karl Jaspers speaks of it as the Second Axial Period
The history of mankind visible to us took, so to speak, two breaths. The first led from the Promethean Age via the ancient civilizations to the (First) Axial Period and its consequences. The second started with the scientific-technological, the new Promethean Age and may lead, through constructions that will be analogous to the organizations and planning of the ancient civilizations, into a new, Second Axial Period, to the final process of becoming human, which is still remote and invisible to us.
Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (Oxon: Routledge, 2010), 25.
Martin Heidegger likewise speculates upon the significance of our times.
Are we on the brink of the most enormous transformation of the entire earth and of the time of historical space wherein it is suspended? Are we on the eve of a night leading toward a new dawn? Are we about to depart on the trek into the historical landscape of earth’s evening? ... Is this land of evening just now coming into being? Are we today “occidental” in the sense that the night of the world comes on only via our transition? … Are we the late-comers? Or are we at the same time the early arrivals of the dawn of an entirely new age which has already left behind our present conceptions of history? Martin Heidegger[1]
Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, (Athens: Ohio University Press 1985) 402
Integral consciousness is becoming increasingly apparent to increasing numbers of people. It is the vital consciousness of our time that is necessary to lead us positively into the future. Relational Spirituality speaks of the integral way of life.