Monograph - Remembering the Future

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Table of Contents

Introduction

I. The Universe Story (Metastory)

II The Structures of Consciousness

III Integral Consciousness

IV Eternity Medicine

Appendixes

Resources

"I think that the reasons for the crisis in which the world now finds itself are lodged in something deeper than a particular way of organizing the economy or a particular political system. The West and the East, though different in so many ways, are going through a single common crisis. Reflecting on that crisis would be the starting point for every attempt to think through a better alternative. Where does the cause of this crisis lie?
I…feel that somewhere here there is a basic tension out of which the present global crisis has grown. At the same time, I'm persuaded that this conflict…..is directly related to the spiritual condition of modern civilization. This condition is characterized by loss; the loss of metaphysical certainties, of an experience of the transcendental…. and of any kind of higher horizon. It is strange but ultimately quite logical; as soon as man began consider-ing himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.
We are going through a great departure from God, which has no parallel in history. As far as I know, we are living in the middle of the first atheistic civilization…. It seems to me that if the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man."

Vaclav Havel, Disturbing The Peace

INTRODUCTION

This book could change your life. You may at first doubt what you read but we challenge you to take a few moments to remember and reflect while examining the evidence that is all around you.

The central idea is that consciousness, for us humans, has unfolded in five distinct stages or structures over time. Simply pick up any art-history book and page through it - the five structures are self-evident once you recognize the basic schema outlined herein.

Why is an understanding of these structures of consciousness important? These same structures are also present in each of us and here is the simple but important fact - by remembering and integrating these co-present structures we awaken to a new sense of wholeness. This is the Integral Human whose chief manifestations are wisdom, well-being, wonder and joy - very different from the loneliness and alienation felt by the modern person of today.

As medical doctors We have come to recognize that this "ordering of consciousness" or worldview is as important as all the nutrition, exercise, vitamins, minerals and life-style choices people make. Worldview maybe the most essential ingredient for a person's well-being and longevity. Integral Health is the process through which we humans achieve well-being by the "ordering of consciousness". Remembering is central to this process and includes the integration of our species and our own psycho-historical development.

If worldview is essential to a persons well-being then we need to better understand how our knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and shared meaning (culture) come to be.

One of the primary ways we humans provide meaning is by telling stories. The Universe Story (MetaStory) outlined in chapter one is the new story that needs telling. This story includes our entire history and transcends biblical genesis and Darwinism. This new story is best told by Brian Swimme. (See Resources). I have given the reader a very condensed version of his work.

The second chapter outlines the unfolding of our structures of consciousness. Jean Gebser's work is perhaps the clearest expression of this. With an understanding of this schema a person is able to understand "the pattern that connects"- this pattern underlies every field of human endeavour.

The third chapter introduces the emerging integral structure of consciousness that is now pressing into our modern world. Some simple strategies are given that can help transform today's mental structure of consciousness toward the emerging integral structure of consciousness.

The final chapter illustrates how an understanding of the psycho-historical development of humans is key to an understanding of health. This understanding can also be applied to law, economics, art education or any other institution in our modern world.

I. THE UNIVERSE STORY (METASTORY)

"We suffer from evolutionary amnesia, forgetting the sources, forgetting our natural spiritual lineages. Our amnesia, deep and serious, flings us into destruction. Lacking reverence for the earth and her creatures, we war with her, and bring ourselves to the wasteland. -Rowena Pattee Knyder."

As we enter the 21st century it is clear that humankind has reached a crossroad. Our journey, especially over the last 500 years has been an exciting one full of adventure. We are now poised on the eve of perhaps our greatest adventure - an exploration of mind and an insight into how we see the world at this particular moment and why we see it the way we do.

What does it mean to become transparent to the transcendent? How do we contact and live the divine life that is within each of us? Why does Eternity Medicine recognize that the nature of our own mind is infinite, indestructible and immortal?

To answer these questions we have, for the first time in history, vast amounts of knowledge from many different fields of inquiry - science, philosophy, anthropology, cosmology, archeology, religion, art - and all this knowledge, thanks to tele-computer technology, is available at our fingertips.

In order for knowledge to have meaning however we must provide a context. As we can see from the following diagrams:

Without a context there is no meaning beyond a collection of seemingly unrelated parts (DIAG 1). However in DIAG 2 a face (meaning) is immediately recognizable because its parts are presented in a deliberate context.

One of the primary ways humans provide meaning is by telling stories. Joseph Campbell spent his life uncovering the essential stories (myths) that humankind have used to inform their worldview and their actions. Campbell often asked what will be the 'new story' that people of the 21st century can embrace, that will provide meaning and a sense of wholeness. We believe the new story is really a MetaStory.

The Metastory - from the old Greek 'meta' means to transcend what was before - thus the new story eclipses previous stories such as Genesis (creationism) and Darwinism (evolution) and provides a new context for what has been, what is and what can be. The Meta-story contains three major interrelated stories - The Cosmic Story and the mystery of the fireball, the Earth Story and the wonder of life and the Human Story and the structures of consciousness.

This Meta-Story provides a new context that properly understood can bring about a new worldview with a profound sense of meaning and well-being.

The Universe Story (MetaStory)

1.1 THE STORY OF THE COSMOS

Following the publication of general relativity in 1905, Willem deSitter, an astronomer, and Alexander Friedman, a mathematician, independently demonstrated that the universe had a history. Since that time, four scientific methods for investigating the age of the universe have been devised. All agree the cosmos was born about 15 billion years ago. Although, the exact nature of that beginning is somewhat disputed.

In 1948, George Gamov proposed that the universe itself was the result of a primordial expansion of matter that he called the Big Bang. Amazingly, the earth did not explode into an empty space. Instead, it "grew" more space within its own midst. As a result of this expanding and cooling process, Gamov theorized a faint afterglow of radiation had likely been dispersed throughout the universe. Penzias and Wilson, using a huge microscope receiver, verified this prediction in 1965 when they discovered these faint radiations.

In that "time freedom," before The Big Bang, all matter in the universe was packed into space much smaller than a proton, the density of which is unimaginable. The Big Bang marks the beginning of matter, space, and time. Consequently, The Big Bang should not be portrayed as the expansion of matter within an existing space as mentioned.

Within three minutes of its birth, the young universe was as cold as the center of the sun, allowing about one-fourth of the hydrogen to be converted to helium. At that time, the universe was essentially composed of these two gaseous elements. It took about one billion years before stars and galaxies began forming. About five billion years ago, our own sun was born. Known to produce energy by the transmutation of elements, the sun, in its core, produces energy and light by converting hydrogen into helium. During millions of years, such nuclear reactions within each star created even heavier elements like carbon, oxygen, silicon, iron, etc. The elements that make up the earth, the sun and all living beings have an age of ten billion years. Each one of us is made up of this "star stuff".

Astrophysicist Steven Hawkins marvels at the fact that life is only possible because the universe is expanding at just the rate needed to avoid recollapse. The vastness of the universe and the creation of our solar system 5 billion years ago all seem to have been necessary to make life possible.

1.2 THE STORY OF THE EARTH

A byproduct of the interstellar gas cloud that collapsed to birth the sun was a swarm of rocky debris. From this debris orbiting the infant sun, the earth began. The inner solar system, which includes Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, was cold enough for materials like rock and ice to survive as solids, but the lighter gases such as hydrogen, helium, and methane found residence in Jupiter and the outer planets.

Earth's initial atmosphere was composed of mostly carbon dioxide and water vapor. As the surface of the earth cooled, water vapor condensed into clouds and rain contributing to the gradual formation of seas. Life began somewhere in the seas about four billion years ago and soon evolved into single bacteria. Within 100 million years or so, some of these bacteria learned to live off sunlight and carbon dioxide just as modern plants depend on photosynthesis.

During the next three billion years came the slow evolution of single cells and organisms. The most notable event regarding photosynthesis was the production of oxygen which, being very chemically active, was first absorbed by various minerals on the earth's surface. About 1.8 billion years ago those oxygen absorbers became saturated causing oxygen to accumulate in the atmosphere.

Sex developed about one billion years ago. Evolution could now accelerate through more varied genetic combinations, however it still required another 600 million years for life to move onto land. This occurred first with plants, then insects and, finally, amphibians.

The oldest rocks on earth are just over four billion years old. The age of dinosaurs represent only the last 10 percent of the earth's history. Human origins are traceable to just over 5 million years ago.

1.3 THE HUMAN STORY

Life is possible only because the universe is developing in the precise fashion it is. Life demands awareness and it is life that gives rise to consciousness.

Humanity has evolved from simple consciousness to self-consciousness and is now ready for its next major transition; from self-consciousness to integral consciousness.

As physicist Erwin Schrodinger has noted without humans, the universe would be a drama played before empty stalls.

About 5 million years ago the hominid line split from a common ancestor. The approximate timeline and milestones can be found in table 1.

Our thoughts result not only from the brains adaption and evolution over the last few million years but also from the meaning we attach to our sensory impressions of the world.

Everything we have ever known, or felt or will feel is mental. Our entire perceived and imagined world is personal, self-created within our head. The moment we recognize that this reality is self-created we grasp the power we have to change reality.

The ability to think enables each of us to create an infinite variety of content. Our personal thinking system is a complex network of thought patterns that include judgments, intuitions, experiences, concepts, beliefs, opinions and expectations.

This thinking system acts as a filter through which we view the outside world. In fact, we actually invent our moment-to- moment awareness or personal worldview. This "mind in place" becomes a dream of our own making.
Psychologist Raymond Casarni recently listed more than 240 different psychotherapies used to help people to deal with psychological problems including the sense of alienation felt by many modern persons.

Rick Suarez, in the company of a few other enlightened psychologists, undertook the task of sorting through this vast number of apparent different therapies and ultimately produced four basic principals of psychological thought central to all persons.

(i) Thinking: The capacity of each human being to formulate thought and the thought system that each human being has created.

(ii) Separate Reality: The individual differences that every unique thought system creates.

(iii) Understanding: The capacity of human beings to understand the nature of their own psychological functioning.

(iv) Perception: Feelings and emotions as indicators of the quality and direction of human psychological functioning.

Although knowledge shifts perception, there is converging evidence that there is a reality deeper than what a human being creates through personal thought.

As further noted by Suarez, until this larger reality-the wisdom-self-is discovered, a person's life experience will continue to be derived from and limited to the personal, conditional thought system, or the ego-self.

This larger reality or intensification of consciousness is recognized by positive feelings and emotions, happiness, well-being, meaning, creativity, wonder, reverence for all life, and a sense of humor and joy.

What unfortunately was missing from Suarez insightful book was how exactly does one discover this 'wisdom-self'. (Integral structure)

As we shall see in the next chapter the development of even the 'ego-self' is a very recent phenomenon in our development. The recognition of our 'wisdom-self' (integral consciousness) is an even more recent discovery and is the subject of the monograph.

It is important to understand that the development and recognition of both the ego and wisdom-self are inevitable and are a natural expression of the unfolding of consciousness. No book, doctrine or teacher is needed for this process; they simply help facilitate the journey.

Let us at this point include our opinion on the brain/mind dilemma. We believe that the brain is that fleshy three-pound structure of tissue residing within our cranial bones and that the nerves, hormones and chemicals found in these tissues are largely responsible for the ego self's thinking system. Mind, on the other hand, is not confined to the cranial cavity or limited just to the present moment, but rather mind is non-local and can transcend both space and time. This, as we will demonstrate in the next chapter, is what integral consciousness (or the wisdom-self) is about - This consciousness is infinite, indestructible and immortal.

Eternity Medicine because it recognizes this infinite nature of consciousness regards immortality as a given. (An "Eternist" as Larry Dossey M.D. likes to say is a physician who recognizes our timeless nature and helps a client understand this reality).

Table 1: The Human Story

II. THE STRUCTURES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

"By returning to the very sources of human development as we observe all of the structures of consciousness, and moving from there toward our present day and our contemporary situation and consciousness, we can not only discover the past and present moment of our existence but also gain a view into the future which reveals the traits of a new reality amidst the decline of our age."

Jean Gebser

We can trace the evolution of our species consciousness through five distinct periods as described by scholar and historian Jean Gebser in his 1943 work, "The Ever Present Origin". (See Table 2)

We awaken to the fifth structure (integral consciousness) by remembering the previous four copresent structures contained within each of us.

Different individuals, different segments of society and different cultures emphasize different structures.

It is worthwhile to spend a little time and really get a feel for the different structures. We will use art-history and some commentary to assist this process, as knowledge of Gebser's Basic Schema is essential to the understanding of how and why we see the world as we do.

See the streaming video which helps explain this.

Table 2:The Structures of Consciousness

Archaic Human (5 Million - 200,000 B.C.)

Homo habilis (handy man) appeared about 2 million years ago and had about one-half our modern brain. Although language was not yet well developed, they did make stone tools. This archaic human, although advanced beyond all prior evolutionary stages, matter, plant, and animal, is still undifferentiated from the surrounding world and has no sense of self. Neither space nor time exist. Early humans were at peace; innocent without mental reflection and thus presumably without any existential fears.

The originating structure of archaic consciousness is best described by the terms pleroma or uroboros, the latter being the primordial mythic symbol of the serpent eating its own tail; self-possessed, all-enclosing, paradisiacal but reptilian. In the Garden of Eden, the human is, as it were, in a deep sleep. Early man, like animals, has a simple awareness or consciousness. (This stage and the integral state are the only periods in which there is a complete lack of separation or distinction between the individual and the whole.)

E. Neumann, a scholar, concurs with Gebser, stating, the original situation which is represented mythologically as the uroboros corresponds to the psychological stage in man's prehistory when the individual and the group, ego and unconscious, man and the world, were so indissolubly bound up with one another that the law of 'participation mystique', of unconscious identity, prevailed between them.

This archaic state, although angelic in many ways, is the bliss of ignorance, not of transcendence. The sense organ that predominates is the body-kinesthetic sense. The psychology is one of instinct; a visceral psychology primarily geared around the alimentary tract and nose.

The tactile-kinesthetic body is the sentiently felt body that knows the world through touch and movement. Maxine Sheets-Johnston believes the roots of thinking are modeled on the body, thereby linking thinking to spatial and sentient-kinetic life. This sensing body is the cognitive source of the fundamental and pre-eminently human concepts that shape human evolution and thinking.

Sensory modalities of any given cultural period are not equal but have privileged positions of importance relative to one another. The addiction to visualism which marks our current technological culture is actually a Western culture-wide bias. Both language and vision are impregnated with archaic tactile values.

The control of body movement such as the upright posture of these early humans coupled with the capacity to skillfully handle objects such as thumb use in tool making accounts for the core of this structure of consciousness. In fact, the evolution of the archaic human can be described in terms of the increasingly sophisticated use of tools. For 4 million years humans lived in groups of 25-40. Proto-language may have had its beginning around the fire at night. As the only species to control fire approximately 1.4 million years ago, humans likely used this new-found force as an opportunity to begin exploring their environment and the recurring problems of food and shelter.

Magical Human (200,000 - 10,000 B.C.)

By 45,000 years ago, humans had spread themselves over most of Africa, Europe and Asia, and numbered about one million. Humans were in Australia 40,000 years ago, Siberia and Europe 30,000 years ago, and North America 27,000 years ago. During this period these hunter-gatherers increased in population and sophistication. More advanced tools, primitive art, and ritual were added. The magical period still lacks the concepts of space and time, and an advanced language. Mimetic cognition developed through the use of mime. This ability to produce conscious, self-initiated representational acts was intentional but not linguistic. Note the absence of the mouth (language) in the early drawings from Australia and Ireland.

According to Merlin Donald, the voluntary expressive use of the face and voice to transmit emotion began in the mimetic-magical period, but advanced significantly in the mythical period with the development of the larynx and the modern vocal apparatus. Donald further explains, "To reiterate: mime, play, games, skilled rehearsal, non-linguistic gesticulation, tool making, other creative instrumental skills, many nonsymbolic expressive devices used in social control, and reproductive memory in general are all by-products of the mimetic system, as it continuously models the episodic world. In effect, this means that the mimetic mind models, in action, the outputs of the episodic mind. The mimetic system is thus a seminal hominid cognitive innovation, a mode of cognition that remains dissociable from language even in modern humans, and is the logical basis of the first truly human culture."

The magical human begins to awaken to personal finiteness and vulnerability. A prehistoric etching of the magical human was found in a paleolithic cave site in France. Called "The Sorcerer of Trois Freres", it may well be the oldest self-portrait of a human. Humanity's original fusion with the world has its best anthropological expression in totemism, which regards a certain animal as an ancestor, a friend, or some kind of powerful and providential being.

Frazer, an anthropologist, writes: "Belief in the sympathetic influence exerted on each other by persons or things at a distance is the essence of magic. Whatever doubt science may entertain as to the possibility of action at a distance, magic has none; faith in telepathy is one of its first principals. A modern advocate of the influence of mind upon mind at a distance would have no difficulty in convincing a savage, the savage believed in it long ago, and what's more, he acted on his belief with a logical consistency such as his civilized brother in the faith has not yet, so far as I am aware, exhibited in his conduct."

Not surprisingly, the ear is the predominant sense organ for the magical human, while for the mythic human, it is the mouth. Words, modifiers and complex sentences, not just grunts, vastly enhance creativity by allowing thought to be shared within a group and from generation to generation. This language capacity signals the beginning of the interior mental life. The primitives harmonious and precise knowledge of their habitat came, in the process of the "Europeanization" of the globe, to be the very mark of the primitive itself based on the feelings and expressions of kinship with animals and even trees, stones, and water.

As the secret language of the body, dance was the expressive language of life for the magical human. Patterned after, for instance, buffalo, birds, and bees, dancing kept these preliterate people in nurturing contact with their trusted world.

Mythical Human (10,000 - 2,000 B.C.)
The Neolithic age (New Stone age) began about 10,000 years ago. Neolithic people differentiated themselves from all previous humans by settling in permanent villages. This was the result of two important developments: the taming of several kinds of animals and the growth of agriculture. On a nutritional note; we now know that our Paleolithic ancestors ate from 2 food groups only. Meat and fish ,vegetables, fruits and nuts. Grains (agriculture) and dairy products (animal husbandry) only began with the mythical structure of consciousness. Our genes as modern research is showing, are not geared to the excessive carbohydrate diets eaten today.

By 8,000 B.C., the major life institutions of mankind were established: family, language, education, religion, government, economics, science, technology, art, and war. This basic living pattern has not changed appreciably in nearly 10,000 years. Of all the institutions, language is the hallmark of the mythical human. While no one knows for certain how rapidly speech spread, its presence in the past 20,000 years appears uncontestable. Evidence from cranial bones indicates that rudimentary speech centers may have developed much earlier.

The most elevated use of language in tribal societies is that of mythic invention, the myth being the prototypal, integrative mind tool. This narrative-myth did not replace the mimetic-magical ritual, song, dance, or games, but rather, added to them. Most language of western and eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and India suggest a common ancestor about 8,000 years ago. French took its modern form in the twelfth century, Spanish in the fourteenth, Portuguese in the sixteenth. English took its modern form in the thirteenth century. In his reflections on the fate of storytelling in the modern world, the writer Walter Benjamin claims that experience is fast becoming incommunicable and that the wisdom that comes from one individual communicating to another a personal experience is being replaced by simple information in the form of what is purveyed by the mass media. This has enormous consequences for modern humanity.

Mythic culture tends toward the rapid integration of knowledge. Myth governs the collective mind. A "we" membership prevails. The mythic human is still egoless, lives in a dream state, and uses speech to tell stories that explains personal reality; enhancing song, dance, and games with narrative language. The move from hunter-gatherer bands into village life must have happened under extreme pressure and is probably attributable to population growth, climatic stress, and the dwindling herds of game.

Historians have yet to agree on the number of civilizations formed by humankind, but it is generally agreed that the first four were:

o Egyptian, Nile River (3,500 B.C.)
o Sumerian, Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (3,500 B.C.)
o Indian, Indus River (2,700 B.C.)
o Chinese, Yellow River (2,000 B.C.)

As we move from the Neolithic period into these classical civilizations, people discovered a great advantage in growing crops. A characteristic of this mythical human is temporal time, conspicuous in the natural tempos of day and night, and the cyclical changes of the seasons. Four major civilizations with different religions and different histories characterize this period. According to cosmologist Brian Swimme, they had the following in common:

o A King as ruler
o Dominance by an economic elite
o Domination of women by men
o Dominance of the human over the natural world.

Frederick Turner, American historian, writes about this period in the near East: "The hard won evolution from encampments to villages to the towns that eventually grew into cities - achieved over thousands of years in a difficult environment - nurtured the belief that "civilization" meant the walled, blocked, and grain stocked city and that civilization could only be achieved and perilously maintained by unremitting hand to hand combat with a nature that would of itself grant little. Whereas the mythologies of the earlier settlements seem to have been based at least partly on the earth (Great Mother), with the development of towns and cities, the locus of divinity shifted to the sky and the irrational violent gods who dwelt there."

This subtle shift marked the change from matriarchy to patriarchy. The illusion of human independence from nature is expressed in the Biblical statement: "Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it; and have domination over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."

About 5,000 B.C., the disruption of the old Neolithic civilizations began in earnest with several waves of Kurgan people sweeping across prehistoric Europe. These were nomadic people ruled by powerful priests and warriors. Beside these invaders, a second group, the most famous of which were the Hebrews, came from the deserts of the South and invaded Canaan (Palestine). In contrast to the horticultural societies, both groups had a masculine domination model.

Inevitably, the two societies clashed. Living a harsh, nomadic life, the herders, upon encountering villages where there was abundance, were compelled to plunder. For the first time in history it became biologically intelligent to wage warfare. The result was a hybrid society where, unlike any time before, villages built fences and fortifications to protect their abundance. Why would individuals, even whole communities, voluntarily agree to surrender their magical and impulsive gratifications for future mental goals? Why is it a case of jam tomorrow and not jam today?

The full-fledged emergence of language precipitated this change. Language, according to writer Robert Hall, is the means of dealing with the non-present world.

As the hallmark of the mythical human, language allowed for the integration of knowledge, symbols, imagination, ideals, morality, and belief systems. With this expanded consciousness and the ability to more clearly picture the future, humankind needed to visualize this unfolding future as promise that death was in the distance. A subtle change occurred in our worldview as we moved from the early magical-mythical, cyclical time to our modern linear time. A new and heightened death seizure followed as a direct result of farming and language. Fear exists only in linear time and stubbornly sits at the center of our modern worldview.

Mental Human - Early Mental Human (2,000 B.C. - 1,500 A.D.)
History, in the form of recorded events, began with the development of writing about 5,000 years ago, prehistory, relied upon storytelling. The Old Testament was written well over 1,000 years after the described events are said to have taken place. The Israelites were the first people to create and inscribe a consecutive sacred historical record: God created the world at a certain time; later He created man; still later He selected Israel as His nation of priests; led them out of Egypt, gave them their law; commanded them to observe that law for their inner sanctification - and all this in the interest of an ideal goal in the messianic future. In that age, history will finally vanquish nature.

From this time forward, religion was to be historically rather than mythologically oriented; human existence was to move relentlessly toward the achievement of a special destiny. This was a definite change from the old view of cyclical time and the setting apart of this monotheistic covenant from all the nature-based polytheisms of other people. Indeed, as Turner observes, "…..not only apart but against them in a war to the death." The people of the New Testament were even more divorced from myth and nature, and, lacking even the vital concept of a promised land, went farther in seeking to suppress the world of nature. On the other hand the Greeks worshipped gods in many shapes and by many names. They did not think along the same lines as the Jews, Christians, and Moslems. The Olympian gods brought justice, order and beauty and it is through these gods that the Greeks approached the secret of existence.

Western civilization however reflects the traditions of both Greece and Israel. The Jews discover religion; the Greeks "invent" the human mind and develop philosophy. Around 900 B.C., at the same time the Hebrew Bible was being composed, early Greek works reveal humans gradually coming to understand themselves. Homer's counsel in the Iliad shows "courage through endurance," and in the Odyssey hints at man becoming self-sufficient to investigate the universe.

As detailed by the Greek scholar Bruno Snell in The Discovery of Mind, Homer's characters use their eyes to see, or literally speaking, to receive optical impressions. However, they apparently took no interest in the objective essence of sight. There was no word for perspective; as far as they were concerned, it did not exist. Other contemporary authors note the reference to the "wine-color of Homer's sea" and agree that the color blue and the origin of perspective, is likely a very recent development in human awareness and was not appreciated by Homer and the early Greeks.

Homeric speech does not know words like "deep." Quantity but not intensity is known. As a result, there is no genuine reflection. This coincides with Gebser's findings, although dating the dawning of perspective for the Jewish tribes to 1225 B.C., he places this at only 500 B.C. for the Greeks. Beginning with the poet Sappho about 580 B.C. in her "The Fairest Thing is One I Love," this flowering of Greek lyric poetry first heralded the rise of the individual in the Western World.

Sappho was the first to put a sense of "I" into words and was joined by other early lyricists in presenting moments where the individual "is all of a sudden snatched out of the broad stream of life, when he senses that he is cut off from the ever green tree of universal growth." With Sappho, the human mind was first able to develop continuity of thought and feeling. Thus, the Greeks became the first in our European heritage to deprive the gods of their power over the natural world and claim consciousness for themselves.

Greek is the only language that allows us to trace the true relationship between language and the rise of science. Regarding the articulation of logic, Snell writes: "Even before so-called logical thinking came upon the scene, men were able to speak in connected sentences, just as they did not wait for the arrival of rational thought before they began to feel the need for seeking out causes, and for interpreting a series of two events as a necessary sequence of cause and effect.

"The problem is comparable to that of the soul which did, in a certain sense, exist even for Homer, but of which he was not cognizant, whence it did not really exist. Logic, in that same sense, has been in existence ever since men have talked and thought; the reason why it did not, at first, find expression in speech was not that logic did not exist but that it was implicit and understood. As soon, however, as it is discovered, and intrudes into consciousness, human thinking undergoes a radical change, and this mutation is particularly apparent in the comparisons, the images which make up the language."

The date 146 B.C. is considered to be the end of the Hellenistic Age. By then the Romans had extended their influence over a large portion of the eastern Mediterranean. In contrast to the genius of the Greeks, epitomized by their development of philosophy, the genius of the Romans was in politics and law. For over 200 years, Rome flourished. However, during most of the third century, the empire experienced dreadful confusion, civil war, and barbarian invasions. From the ruins of the Roman Empire, two key cultural elements survived: the Roman heritage of law and Christianity.

By the middle of the third century, as part of the decadence of Roman religion, there was a welter of conflicting and competing cults. Dozens of "mystery cults" were imported from the East. Christianity fervently competed for the devotions of an increasingly despairing people. Christianity was the first to correctly assess the true nature and extent of the Roman crisis. Jesus and his ministry were historical events that could happen only once in historical time. Consider the impressions of historian Eric Kahler: "The advent of Christianity was the spiritual complement to the political expansion of the Roman Empire. The triumph of Christianity would not have been possible without this world empire which provided the stage for its development. And the Roman Empire, on its part, would have remained fragmentary and futile without this additional force. What is the essential element and achievement of Christianity? We may well say that in Christianity man reaches the stage of humanity. For the first time, mankind is identified with humanity."

The period in Western civilization following the collapse of the Roman Empire from about 500 to 1500 A.D. is called the Middle or Dark Ages. Historian William Manchester notes that, "Although they called themselves Christians, medieval Europeans were ignorant of the gospel's. The Bible existed in a language they could not read. The mumbled incantations at Mass were meaningless to them. They believed in sorcery, witchcraft, hobgoblins, werewolves, amulets, and black magic, and were thus indistinguishable from pagans."

Even well into the fifteenth century, most peasants and laborers remained illiterate. One of the most baffling conditions of the early medieval mind was the total absence of self or an ego. Fewer than one percent of European nobleman had surnames. Most people were known, as Hans, Will or Will's son, or Will's wife. Later when identities became necessary, they would often take the name of an honest occupation like Taylor, Smith, or Miller. One of the results of this lack of self was an almost total indifference to privacy.

Turner makes an important observation when he writes, "More specifically, it seems to me that aggression against the body, against the natural world, against primitives, heretics, all unbelievers; and the vain, tragic, pathetically maintained hope of thus winning a lost belief or paradise: this is the terrific burden Christian history has to bear. It is the classic reaction of those who have lost true belief (or have been robbed of it) that they must insist with mounting strenuousness that they do believe---and that all others must as well. For as social psychologists have shown, if the bereft can thus succeed in harmonizing the world with themselves, then the inward gnawing doubt might be stopped and the intolerable condition of spiritual inanition alleviated."

For a time, this violence turned inward and Paul showed the way; however, by the end of the eleventh century, the violence had turned outward. This may have occurred because the teachings of St. Augustine were now the dominant influence of the church. His militant we/they attitude and uncompromising hostility toward non-believers, formed the basis of a literal victory over the enemies of Christ.

The Crusades truly commenced the large scale, intentional violence against all unbelievers. Prior to the Western world reaching beyond itself into the wilderness, the clearest illustration of this spiritual plight was the Inquisition. Beginning with Innocent III in the last years of the 12th century and continuing for the next four centuries, the church hunted the enemies of Christ. Turner continues with, "For Christianity was civilization, and its theology, symbols, clergy, and churches underpinned, towered over, and authorized the daily order in Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, and England. Still there was this death at the center of the civilization's life - and though all was retained human energies began to turn elsewhere. Like those Desert Fathers expressing their bodily desires in mortification, the West turned to exploration as both a 'palliative remedy' and a way of humanizing the rest of the world with itself."

Thus, it was neither accident nor native genius that impelled Western civilization to embark on the conquest of the globe. Darcy Ribeiro writes, "The history of man in these last centuries is principally the history of the expansion of Western Europe which, constituting the nucleus of a new civilization process, launched itself on all people in successive waves of violence, cupidity, and oppression. In this movement the whole world was shaken up and rearranged according to European design and in conformity with European interests. Each people, even each human being, was affected and caught up in the European economic system or in the ideals of wealth, power, justice or politics inspired by it."

Mental Human - Late Mental Human (1500 A.D. to the present)

The beginning of the modern mental structure around 1,500 A.D. was the result of four major actions that changed the course of mankind:

o World explorations that began in the late 1400s
o The development of perspective and the scientific inquiries
o The flow of inventions such as Gutenberg's movable type
o Industrial production which began in earnest in the 1600s.

This phase of history focused on reviving interest in classic Greek and Roman teachings. This "renaissance" was the beginning of our modern era.

During this time period the "perspectival" European world finally evolves from the unperspectival view of the Middle Ages; with its apparent lack of self-identity where people still belonged to tribe or communal group, where the emphasis was not yet on the "I" but on the impersonality of the group. The psychic inner space of "I" breaks forth at the same time the Troubadours are writing the first love poems. This personal poetry suddenly opens an abyss between humans as poets and the world of nature and is analogous to the unfolding of Sappho's inner "I" in 500 B.C. Greece.

Whereas the primary sensory feature for interpreting the world for the magical human was the ear and for the mythical human that of the mouth, the mental human relies on the eye. This visual world is brilliantly represented by Gebser's concept of perspectivity. This seeing and conceptualizing are commensurate with our mental reflective structure. How we see becomes an expression of our understanding.

Giotto was the first artist of record to understand intuitively the benefits of painting a scene as if viewed from a single, stationary point. The flat picture presentation which was prevalent for a thousand years acquired a third dimension of depth when Giotto's proto-perspective placed the viewer in front of the canvas.
In a letter written about the same time, Petrarch offers the first literal account by a European emerging from a place dormant in time and space into "real" space with his discovery of landscape. Upon Petrarch's ascent of Mount Ventoux in France, he was able to isolate and describe a part of nature separate from the whole for the first time.

As significant as was Petrarch's contribution, Filipo Brunelleschi, an Italian architect, who developed his ideas from the romanesque Pisa cathedral, is credited with the true discovery of Western linear perspective. Gebser uses Leonardo da Vinci to illustrate the new perspectival view as a forerunner to technical drafting and three-dimensional painting. During the mid 1300s, intelligent Renaissance Italians, captivated by perspective, failed to make a significant contribution to literature because the most profound thinking of the time was not expressed in words but with visual imagery.

As a scientist, engineer, and artist, da Vinci was the first to fully develop drafting techniques and perspectival painting. Note the openness of the Mona Lisa compared to the compactness of Ghirlandaio's painting.
Besides incorporating the notion of linear, abstract time, the mental human also faces this great paradox: not only is perspective developed and space conquered, but this human experiences all the angst resulting from the separation of the subjective ego ("I") and the surrounding objective world. This egocentricity is the hallmark of the modern mental human. Paralleling this increasing sense of individualism is the declining influence of the church and the growing strength of science.

The Black Death that swept Europe around 1350 killed at least one third of the population. Survivors emerged with a deep belief in individual self-reliance. This new egocentric individualistic activity appeared in many areas. Merchants proclaimed the potential for personal success, and artists poured personal expression and creativity into their work. Artists began to sign their name for the first time on their artwork. Martin Luther broke the claim of medieval discipline by reasoning each man could be his own priest. The Protestant Reformation now claimed personal salvation through individual behavior and a direct relationship with God. Science declared the supremacy of firsthand experiment and observation over the authorities of the past. In 1455, Johann Gutenberg's invention of movable type reinforced the primacy and literacy of the written word. The subsequent diffusion of books helped split the land mass of the church into an archipelago of individual thinkers.

One of the great triumphs of the Renaissance was the establishment of new ties with the genius of antiquity. First, came the rediscovery of Latin classics in the early fourteenth century. With the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, several Byzantine scholars traveled to Rome with genuine Hellenic manuscripts. For more than a thousand years, Italian professors fluent in Greek had assumed the original classic texts had perished. Thus began the transfer of priceless documents from east to west and the redefinition of knowledge itself which further helped overshadow the Bible and traditional Christian teachings.

The "scientific revolution" of the 1500s and 1600s raised profound questions about nature and humanity. Nature was now investigated free from reference to previous beliefs. Nothing was to be believed without experiment or mathematical proof. By 1725 science was thought to have replaced religion as the predominant force in western culture.

While da Vinci showed us how to "see the world", Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica in 1687 showed us how to "think the world." Classical mechanics addressed this objective realtiy and reigned supreme until 1900.
Whereas God and religious dogma were the spirit of the early mental human, science and technology together with the concept of unending progress and materialism, became the God of the later mental human. Economics became the prime objective symbolizing a shift within this Mental Era from religion to science to economics. Elaborating on this development, Norman Brown in his book, Life Against Death, observes, "Already Luther had seen in money the essence of the secular, and therefore of the demonic. The money complex is the demonic, and the demonic is God's ape: the money complex is therefore the substitute for the religious complex, an attempt to find God in things." Gold becomes the new immortality symbol.

The scientific revolution was helped by Christianity's conception of subduing and dominating the earth allowing an increasingly "objective" scientific analysis. The prolific American writer, Lewis Mumford contended the greatly increased fund of scientific knowledge was accompanied alas by a deformation of experience as a whole, stating, "The instruments of science were helpless in the realm of qualities. The qualitative was reduced to the subjective, the subjective was dismissed as unreal, and the unseen and the immeasurable as non-existent." Such an attitude toward the life of religion is fatal. Not until the close of the twentieth century will science be able to make amends.

"The divorce between soul and body," according to Brown, "takes the life out of the body, mechanizes it." For the modern human the body is a machine. This mechanized body coupled with the modern rational ego serves to dehumanize humanity whose only currency appears as abstractions divorced from real life-narrow, industrious, rational and economically goal oriented. Summarizing the situation, again from Brown, "The basis of history is man's repression of his instinctual nature-the body, its needs and drives, its rhythms, its desire to achieve atonement (at-one-ment) with the world about it. This turn away from nature, in other words, is what makes man the only history-making animal. Seen this way, history is the steadily lengthening chronicle of mass neurosis, maybe even a kind of suicide note, with mankind seeking restlessly, unconsciously, for a way to end it all and be finally at rest. For repression can never be wholly or finally successful, and the drive of the animal to seek the proper conditions of its existence can never be overcome. Only a reconciliation of life (which Brown identifies as sexuality and the desire to feel at one with the world) with death (as the natural end of things) can bring about a state of rest. And this state is not stasis, the cessation of all activity, but the harmonious functioning of activity in which pleasure of repetition replaces the restlessness of novelty. Then history would have a stop, for the desire to become would be absorbed by the ability simply to be."

We call the desire to feel at one with the world Eros, and the natural end of things the experience of the transcendent. With a new appreciation of time which is the essence of the Integral structure. as elaborated by Gebser in the next section, the result is the same: history comes to an end.

The mental structure however has resulted in the increasing fragmentation of the individual together with technological progress, the rational conquest of nature that has assumed irrational proportions, has resulted in a life severely out of balance. This was well recognized by several enlightened writers:-

John Donne, in the late mental period (1611), was one of the first to notice how "community ties" were loosening around him.

This in peeces, all cohaerence gone;
All just supply, and all relation;
Prince, subject, father, sonne, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinkes he hath got
To be a Phoenix, and that then can bee
None of that kinde, of which is he, but hee.

As scientific materialism became our mode of operation, our increasing sense of individualism, self-interest and alienation increased so that Henry David Thoreau could observe in his fellow citizens six years before the Civil War:

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country…. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind."

In 1838, the advanced decline of religion prompted Ralph Waldo Emerson to comment to Harvard's School of Divinity:

"I think no man can go with his thoughts about him into one of our churches, without feeling that what hold the public worship had on men is gone, or going. It has lost its grasp on the affection of the good and the fear of the bad… And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation than the loss of worship? Then all things go to decay. Genius leaves the temple to haunt the senate or the market. Literature becomes frivolous. The eye of youth is not lighted by the hope of other worlds, and age is without honor. Society lives to trifles, and when men die we do not mention them."

Mark Twain, in 1871, writes about what he believes to have replaced religion in modern society:

"What is the chief end of man? To get rich? In what way? Dishonestly if he can; honestly if he must. Who is God, the one and only true? Money is god."

Finally, John Gardener Writing in American Heralds of the Spirit, describes the prophetic warning in Moby Dick if civilization continues its current course:

"Through the voyage of the Pequod, Melville shows what happens when we set out, under the command of a ruthless intelligence and an arrogant will, to dominate and exploit the earth that was given to us for quite another purpose. The Pequod set itself to hunt down the creature who, as we have suggested, of all beings on earth best symbolizes the innocence and abundance of nature's spiritual energy. The hunting, killing, stripping, and boiling down with its own fire of the ever-diminishing wale population is as exact a picture as one could find for the main task so-called productive actually consuming -modern civilizations set before themselves."

Thus, most of the crises afflicting us today are rooted in the addictive lifestyles we have adopted to assuage our feelings of insecurity, fear, alienation and loss of meaning. The nature of a symptom or crisis is that it calls us to re-examine our worldview and value systems, and then reassign our priorities.

The Integral Human

Near the close of the 19th century a new appreciation of space and time finally occurred with artists like Muybridge, Cezanne, and Manet. In this painting by Manet the mirror shows the whole interior of the night club, but deprives it of three dimensionality by showing the barmaids reflection off to one side which is an impossibility. However, it remained for Picasso and Braque to invent a revolutionary new art form called cubism at the turn of the century. Cubism embodied the first new way to perceive space since Euclid 2,300 years before.

Shortly after this time, Albert Einstein overturned the foundations of the old physics leading physicists to abandon forever the notion of absolute space and time.

Einstein showed that the laws of motion can only be defined by reference to an observer; the conscious observer becomes an essential participant.

Gebser is very clear in defining the necessity for a new "aperspectival" view for us if we are to look at the world and see it whole. Whereas the understanding of the mental structure depended on the concretion of space, our emerging epoch depends on the concretion of time. Only where time emerges as pure present and is no longer divided into it's three phases of past, present and future will it be concrete.

For the first time in our history by integrating the copresent structures of the archaic, magical, mythical and mental, the human personality becomes transparent to itself enabling the originary presence, the spiritual, to be directly awared.

III. INTEGRAL CONSCIOUSNESS

With each mutation of consciousness, origin acquires an intensified conscious character of presentness, origin, which bears the imprint of the whole and of the spiritual and is before time and space, becomes time free-present. It is the aperspectival world that acquires this ever present origin and thereby supersedes the perspectival worlds.
-Jean Gebser

It is just over five hundred years ago, during the Renaissance, that the unmistakable reorganization in our consciousness occurred: the discovery of perspective which opened up 3-D space. Besides illuminating space, perspective brings it to man's awareness and lends man his own visibility of himself. Perspective provides a distance between man and objects.

The conception of man as subject is based on a conception of the world and the environment as object.
Man's lack of spatial awareness is attended by a lack of ego, since in order to objectify and qualify space, a self-conscious 'I' is required that is able to stand opposite or confront space.

Thus from about 1250 AD onwards (the mental structure) man can be considered to have a self-consciousness rather than the simple-consciousness of an earlier period.

It is interesting to note that words expressing awareness and self-awareness first appeared in the Anglo-Saxon language during the 17th century. Conscious, meaning "inwardly sensible or aware" has its origins traced to 1620-consciousness or the state of being conscious to 1628; and self-consciousness or conscious of one's own thought to 1690.

Today, we need a new understanding not only of space but of time to help facilitate integral consciousness. At different stages of humanity time has held different meanings. It is not a single concept. Early humans were satisfied with imitating and repeating the gestures of another. There was a suspension and abolition of time through ritual. Archaic cultures had little tolerance for history since these cultures accorded no importance to personal memories. There was an a-historical character of mind in early humanity. As Mircea Eliade notes, "Archaic man's refusal to accept himself as a historical being, his refusal to grant value to memory and hence to the usual events that in fact constitute concrete duration. What we discover in all these rites and all these attitudes is the will to devaluate time…. Like the mystic, the primitive lives in a continual present."

Even the later structure of the magical-mythical human, by conferring a cyclical duration upon time, annuls its irreversibility.

Our linear notion of time, as mentioned previously, probably developed more than 10,000 years ago with the advent of farming. A sense of urgency arose from history creating the sensation of flowing time and the importance of preparation for planting, harvesting and storing for the future. No doubt this held survival value for humans. With the development of sensitive measurement devices we became less and less observant of the natural cyclical processes. The prophets, as previously shown, were credited with having first placed a value on time, and succeeded in transcending the traditional vision of cyclical time and inventing a one-way time. Eliade further explains, "It may, then, be said with truth that the Hebrews were the first to discover the meaning of history as the epiphany of God, and this conception, as we should expect, was taken up and amplified by Christianity."

Instead of this linear time we can now "experience" time freedom in a flowing presence as both artist and scientist have recently discovered. Currently, most of us still have a sense of past, present and future. Time is seen as an arrow just as space is perceived as static. This notion of time and space is very limiting. Gebser writes about the artists new appreciation of time-space freedom when he states:

"The presentation or making present evident in Picasso's drawing (Fig. 1) was possible only after he was able to actualize, that is, bring to consciousness, all of the temporal structures of the past latent in himself (and in each of us) during the course of his preceding thirty years of painting in a variety of earlier styles".

"This process was unique and original with Picasso. By drawing on his primitive, magic inheritance (his Negroid period), his mythical heritage (his Hellenistic period), and his classicistic, rationally-accentuated formalist phase (his Ingress period), Picasso was able to achieve the concretion of time (or as we would like to designate this new style which he and his contemporaries introduced in painting), 'temporic concretion.' As I have said only where time emerges as pure present and is no longer divided into its three phases of past, present and the future, is it concrete. In this drawing (fig 1) time itself is incorporated into the picture rendering space and body transparent. We see at one glance a whole person - the simultaneous presence of that person's front, side and back. In addition to art the new understanding of time is now being incorporated into literature, music, poetry, sculpture and architecture.

During the early part of the twentieth century, due to physicists like Einstein and Planck, and the development of relativity and quantum mechanics, science at last turned away from its materialistic/mechanistic focus.

In 1905, Albert Einstien overturned the idea that space and time were absolute. In 1911, Ernest Rutherford dealt the final blow by showing the atom consisted of an extremely small nucleus surrounded by a swarm of electrons. Quantum mechanics was born in the early 1920s by men like Max Born, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. The role of the observer became integrated with the system.

Jean Gebser was captivated by the work of these physicists since they validated his recognition of a new sense of time. The coming to awareness of time in its full complexity is a precondition for the awakening consciousness of time freedom. In turn, freedom from time is a precondition for the realization of the integral structure that enables us to perceive the aperspectival world. When we view things in a perspectival way we see only segments. The whole can be perceived only aperspectivally. Of course, for this to occur, we need the inner attitude of going beyond oneself and becoming capable of unconditional trust and self-opening. The whole can only be perceived by an apersonal, ego free individual. This wisdom, incidentally, is not only typical of India or Eastern Asia, but also of Christianity.

Jean Gebser has identified this profound and unique event in our history; this eruption of time into our consciousness which is not the quantitative time measurement of our modern age but time as an intensity or quality. He writes, "The courage to accept along with the (modern) mental time concept the efficacy of pre-rational, magic timelessness and irrational mythic temporocity makes possible the leap into an a-rational time-freedom. This is not freedom from previous time forms, since they are co-constituents of every one of us, it is to begin with a freedom for all time forms."

Gebser is not the only one to recognize the importance of space and time for our wellbeing. Two well-known modern day physicians have a similar view.

Larry Dossey, M.D. writes in Space, Time and Medicine, "The spacetime view of health and disease tells us that a vital part of the goal of every therapist is to help the sick person toward a reordering of his world view. We must help the sick realize that he is a process in spacetime, not an isolated entity who is adrift in linear time, moving slowly toward extermination. To the extent that we accomplish this task we are healers..."

Deepak Chopra, M.D. further acknowledges the importance of space and time for health. Contrasting the time-bound (mental) versus the timeless (integral) awareness of persons in Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, Chopra offers the following:

Time-bound awareness is defined by:

o External goals (approval from others, material possessions, climbing the ladder)
o Deadlines and time pressure
o Self-image built up from past experiences
o Lessons learned from past hurts and failures
o Fear of change, fear of death
o Distraction by past and future (worries, regrets, anticipations, fantasies)
o Longing for security (never permanently achieved)
o Selfishness, limited point of view (typical motivation: What's in it for me?")

Timeless awareness is defined by:

o Internal goals (happiness; self-acceptance; creativity; satisfaction that one is doing one's best at all times)
o Freedom from time pressure; sense that time is abundant and open-ended
o Little thought of self-image; action focused on the present moment
o Reliance on intuition and leaps of imagination
o Detachment from change and turmoil; no fear of death
o Positive experiences of Being
o Selflessness; altruism; sense of shared humanity (typical motivation: "Can I help?")
o Sense of personal immortality

(See AppendixA for more extended comparison of the Mental (Time bound) and
Integral (Timeless) Structure of Consciousness.)

Artists like Picasso and scientists like Einstein point the way for us moderns. At this point in our development we should remember Vaclav Havels words at the beginning of this monograph . "It seems to me that if the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man". What else can we each do to awaken to the whole healthy integral human?

(1) Lifelong Learning:

Learning is really about the expansion of consciousness. It is a process that must include knowledge about our species and our own psycho-historical development.

Educator Page Smith addressed this challenge when he wrote about there being an "uneasy awareness" regarding the average student's dim knowledge of the human race's fascinating past. Smith further states, "without some knowledge of that past, a man or woman cannot be fully human; he or she cannot be truly a person at home in the world."

The central perception of the Natural Design Curriculum (figure 1) presented here considers mind to be an evolving guidance system for each person and for humanity as a whole. Education should parallel the structures of consciousness as they develop within the individual.

The Internet can draw on the best of the worlds scientific, artistic, and spiritual works. This technology is even more significant than Gutenberg's Printing press and is the natural mind - tool for integral consciousness. Vast amounts of knowledge can be moved around at lightening speed and delivered in a multi-media format consistent with our multi-structured consciousness.

The Meta-Story gives a context for this knowledge, and as stated earlier, context gives meaning. This then is the ultimate goal of education - to help order consciousness and provide meaning to each individual. Systems thinking is the natural outcome of an integral consciousness.

The Eight Natural Design Curriculum Principles are:-

1. Provide a coherent, functional context for education with a unifying sense of purpose.
2. Develop mind as an evolving guidance system for each person and for humanity as a whole.
3. Education is a collaborative endeavor built in partnership with family and business.
4. Understand that learning is nothing more nor less than the expansion of consciousness.
5. Teachers are coaches and co-learners facilitating the development of integral humans.
6. Assessment methodologies should evaluate student performance in a comprehensive manner.
7. Recognition that humankind is moving to a post-industrial age which is knowledge driven and global in scope.
8. The ultimate goal of education is to produce "integral humans" who feel at home in the world.

(2) Psycho-Analysis

"Sensation establishes what is actually present, intuition points to possibilities as to whence it came and whither it is going in a given situation, feeling tells us its value and thinking enables us to recognize its meaning. These four functions together form a totality. In this way we orient ourselves with respect to the world."
CARL JUNG M.D.

In The Psychology of Individuation Carl Jung, in 1921, provides what is considered one of the first serious empirical examinations in our history of the phenomena of consciousness which represents a relatively foolproof technology of mind, for making communication intelligible between all humans no matter their differences. Jung determined that people were either extroverted or introverted and within those two divisions were four functions: sensation and intuition were non-rational functions while feeling and thinking was rational.

Carl Jung devoted his life to try and understand what makes a whole healthy human being. He came very close to discovering this with the concept of individuation. Individuated people have developed an integral consciousness. They do this by integrating the four functions sensing, intuition, thinking and feeling. (These four 'functions' can actually be seen to have evolved as part of each structure of consciousness).

Jung also read the work of the fourteenth century poet Petrarch, accepted by Gebser and others as the first person to provide a literal account of perspective. Both Jung and Gebser regard this exact point in time to be the beginning of the renaissance and subsequently, the birth of modern humanity. Jung elaborates with, "Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself." This mass may be the state religion of the church, or the industrialists or the state religion of the Marxists or Capitalists.

One becomes whole by integrating all the functions into consciousness. In most people, one or two functions are consciously in command while the other two are pushed toward the unconscious. The integration of all four functions into full consciousness contributes to individuation. By becoming an "individual" or one's own self, we embrace our innermost and incomparable uniqueness. This individuation is a coming to "selfhood" or "self-realization. "Egotists are called "selfish" but this has nothing to do with the concept of "self-realization". There is an important distinction between the selfish individualism of the 1980s and individuation, Jung's term for the integration of the structures of consciousness.

Most people, Jung recognized, confuse self-knowledge with knowledge of their conscious ego or personality. People who have an ego usually know only its own limited contents, not the unconscious and its contents.
With this in mind, Jung writes: "It is a fact, which is constantly and overwhelming apparent in my practical work, that people are virtually incapable of understanding and accepting any point of view other than their own."
By 'remembering' the contents of the unconscious (anima, animus, the shadow) and by integrating the functions (structures) we become whole.

In order to effect this organization within humans an ever present archetype for wholeness (Eros) must guide us. We must there for recognize Eros for what it is, but more on this later.

With this integration the transcendent function (integral consciousness) comes into being with a recognition of the wisdom-self-a "flowing presence" that brings with it a sense of connectedness, meaning and reverance for all life.
A good psycho-analyst can assist you in integrating the structures of consciousness. But as Jung warned an analyst can only take you as for as he/she has developed their own consciousness.

(3) Enhance Each Structure Of Consciousness

It is important to nourish all our structures. I am often reminded that Jung really came into his own after his African (archaic-magical) experience. Somehow this trip was an anti-dote to his overcivilised (mental) Swiss upbringing.

In a similar fashion Picasso and Braque developed cubism following a visit to an exhibit in Paris on African art- again it was the missing piece they had been waiting for.

Figure 2 contains some practical examples to help enhance each structure. By enhancing each structure we intensify consciousness.

Each of the structures needs to be separated, remembered and integrated.

Plato's impact on western civilization was due to him being one of the first self-reflective humans to break from the more simple consciousness of earlier humans. Plato also described phases in the evolution of humanity. Central to his philosophy was also the idea of "remembering" or "anamnesis." Political historian and mystic, Eric Voeglin, underscored this significance when he wrote, "Remembering is the activity of consciousness by which the forgotten, i.e., the latent knowledge in the consciousness, is raised from the unconscious into the presence of consciousness."

Many healing modalities have this "remembering" property. As physician Rowland Fischer writes, "The reality of Bertschinger's rebirth or recovery process has been re-structured according to personal and preferred models. Freud's 'regression' was transfigured to Jungian 'archetypes,' Campbell's 'heros journey,'Perry's 'death and rebirth, 'and Grof's Freudian-Rankian-Jungian 'agony to ecstasy' the latter to account for the death-rebirth experience of the hallucinogenic drug-induced hyperphrenic journey."

Eternity Medicine provides the context and content, the knowledge, experience, and skills for us to integrate the different structures of consciousness in our search for health and wholeness.

(4) Understanding EROS

Our single most important task today is to reinstate the feminine on an equal footing with the masculine. Why have we males projected our spiritual selves onto women? Why has not only the male species but the West done this to a far greater degree than the East? It is clear that women and those in the East never become as fractured as the western man. What is this hole in the males' psyche? Is Eros really the desire for wholeness or something else?

For women, many bodily processes such as menstruation, childbirth, and lactation are reminders of their intimate association with the earth, the primacy of that relationship and their sense of wholeness. They have, as psychologist Robert Johnson points out, always been closer to the earth, to beauty, to home, and have an abiding sense of who they are. Johnson further notes to the extent that a relationship is founded on projection, the element of human love is lacking. It is the re-integration of these projections by the awakening consciousness that helps make us whole and makes quality relationships possible.

George Bataille maintains that each individual feels himself in the modern world as discontinuous, and the erotic---the attempt to know another through breaching the lonely confines of ones own body---makes an effort to know, if only momentarily, a kind of continuity with others. For Klein, Freud, and Bataille, the desire to know is ultimately linked to sexuality. As Peter Brooks indicates, "If intellectual curiosity is based upon sexual curiosity, the moment at which the genitals are exposed represents the emergence of sight as the intellectual faculty par excellence, the very figure of perception and discrimination (in western culture) the relation to another body is repeatedly presented in visual terms, and the visual as applied to the body is often highly eroticized, a gaze subtended by desire. The desire can be to possess, and also a desire to know, most often the two are intermingled."

Charles Pinot Duclos, in the eighteenth century observed, "It is no doubt from a secret love for Truth that we pursue women with such ardor; we seek to strip them of everything that we think hides Truth; and when we have satisfied curiosity on one, we lose our illusions, and we run after another, to be happier. Love, pleasure, and inconstancy are perhaps only a consequence of the desire to know truth." We have only to think of representations in painting and sculpture to acknowledge that Truth, in our culture, is indeed a woman. Uncovering the woman's body is a gesture of revealing what stands for ultimate mystery.

Brooks shows that the history of narrative, like art, offers its own unveiling of the body. Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and Proust represent an increasing discourse of desire and its objects, for there is a connection between the way Eros acts in the mind of a lover and the way knowing acts in the mind of a thinker.

Why is it that falling in love and coming to know makes us feel genuinely alive? The acts of desiring and knowing share the same core delight gained from reaching and entail the same pain by falling short, on being deficient. Eros thus also deals with space and boundary.

A space must be maintained, or the desire ends. That which is known and possessed cannot be an object of desire. The presence of wanting awakens in us a nostalgia for wholeness. Simply put, desire is a longing for some missing part of oneself or so it feels to the person in love. "A hole is being gnawed in my vitals," wrote Sappho. Desire changes the lover. Suddenly, an unknown, truer self is discovered and the process of individuation begins.

This moment of emotional ambivalence splits the soul. Sappho's "glukupikron" or sense of "bittersweet" signals a revolution, what Bruno Snell earlier called the discovery of mind by the ancient Greeks and the rise of individualism.

Just as the adolescent is unsure of this emerging "self," so did the Greek poets of old feel uncomfortable about their own new found, bounded selves. In Greek lyric poetry, Eros is an experience of "melting," and is viewed as a threat or assault from outside upon a very tenuous sense of self.

"Is it a matter of coincidence," asks Anne Carson, "that the poets who invented Eros, making him a divinity and a literary obsession, were also the first authors in our tradition to leave us their poems in written form?" Selves are crucial to writers. Oral cultures do not think, perceive, or fall in love the same way as do literate cultures. Carson elaborates, "The phenomenon of alphabetization and the beginning of the spread of literary thought throughout Greek society was perhaps the most dramatic of the innovations with which seventh and sixth century Greeks had to cope."

In the audio-tactile world of the oral cultures, people relate differently to their environment. Bodies and selves are transformed by putting words on paper. Vision becomes the primary conveyor of information. As individuals learn to read and write, they gradually close off or inhibit their senses, and become aware of the interior self, separate from their environment and controlled by mental action.

A listener hearing an oral poetry recitation is an "open force field," onto whom sounds are being breathed in a continuous stream from the deliverer. Carson notes, "Written words, on the other hand, do not present such an all-persuasive sensual phenomenon. Literacy desensorializes words and reader. A reader must disconnect himself from the influx of sense impressions transmitted by nose, ear, tongue and skin if he is to concentrate upon his reading. A written text separates words from one another, separates words from the environment, separates words from the reader or writer and separates the reader or writer from his environment. The mental structure, because of linear time and the separation of self from the world, gave birth to the existential angst that afflicts modern humanity together with this longing for wholeness.

As we have mentioned just like the romantics many of us males try and assuage our desire for wholeness with the flesh and blood body of a woman. This will not satisfy Eros, nor infact will any of the objects of desire we continue to scramble for in our modern consumer driven lives.

When Socrates asks Diotima what is Eros, he receives the following reply, "First, he is always poor, and far from being soft and beautiful as the many suppose, is hard and dry and shoeless and homeless, lying on the ground without bedding in the open air, sleeping in doorways and on highways, having his mother's nature, always cohabiting with want. But, like his father, he plots for the beautiful and the good things, is manly, impetuous, and high strung, a clever hunter, always weaving some stratagem, a desirer of and resourceful concerning produce, philosophizing throughout his whole life, a clever juggler, purveyor of drugs, and sophist. His nature is such that he is neither immortal nor mortal, but at one time on the same day he flourishes and lives, when he has plentiful resources, and at another time, he dies, but he comes back to life again because of his father's adventure. He is always getting resources but they are always flowing out."

Eros is neither human nor god. Rather, lacking awareness or knowledge, it is linked with ignorance. Diotima thus associates Eros with the love of wisdom and philosophy. Given the powerful attraction and longing for the beautiful, Eros yearns for truth and wisdom; for integral consciousness.

The true goal of most any religion is to lead followers to a sense of wholeness, to truth and wisdom, to a divine center. The day of the guru is gone. We must now assume as our personal task the need to experience and come to know through our own effort our divine center. The experience of this Self intensifies and is facilitated by the integration of the structures of consciousness. Integral consciousness is currently pressing into mankind's awareness and offering us the best possible opportunity to produce a more enlightened and caring society. Only through recovering this spirituality can we end our longing, our addictions, alienation, environmental degradation, terrorism and other social diseases.

The importance of Eternity Medicine to the individual is further realized when we consider that original thoughts, images, and creativity more readily occur when integral thinking cuts across the usual amnesic boundaries of the individual structures. Generally, most of us, only have access to that knowledge which pertains to our particular level of structural arousal.
As an integral human, you are open and always in the process of ordering consciousness. Your deep inner strength is manifest in your equanimity and joy; your sense of unfolding mystery manifest in wonder and self-discovery; and your harmonious interconnectedness manifest by your sense of belonging and your reverence for all life.

(5) Follow your Bliss

In our past, rituals that were performed widely and generally enough, became institutionalized. Although this book is about a New Medicine all our institutions are experiencing the trauma of the same impending transformation.
In figure (3) I have given a summary of the major institutions as given by a leading expert in that field of inquiry. Interestingly these enlightened pioneers have discovered the basic scheme and show a total correspondence in each of their work to that of Gebser even if they are unfamiliar with his work.

We believe strongly that to develop and maintain a passionate life one needs to discover what makes us excited about getting out of bed each morning. Obtaining wealth is secondary. As someone once said do what you love and the money will follow. Deciding how much is enough is also an important question to ask yourself. Fulfillment (meaning) versus money is shown in figure 4. As I have said no objects of desire (including money) will ever satisfy our longing for wholeness. Only a new understanding of space and time and the ordering of consciousness can set us free.

Up to now most institutions have been unaware that there is a similar schema at play .To really understand and master the field of knowledge in each institution one needs to understand how the structures of consciousness have shaped each of us. Those true leaders in each field have discovered this Gebsarian schema in one way or another themselves. The key then is to find what field of knowledge excites you and apply the Gebsarian schema to it- this will help you find ultimate joy in what you choose as your life work.

IV. ETERNITY MEDICINE

Eternity medicine is about our awareness of the non-local nature of our own mind that it is infinite, indestructible and immortal.

Larry Dossey M.D.

A Brief History of Medicine:

More than 50 years ago, faith in the conventional medical model (disease care) began to erode. In 1959, Rene Dubos suggested in Image to Health that the advances made in the development of antibiotics and other technology contributed far less to the improved health of the population of industrial nations than did a variety of economic, social, cultural and behavioral changes. It has become increasingly clear that the remedy for the diseases of civilization that now afflict our aging, overfed, sedentary and ecologically besieged populace, must come from an enlightened change in lifestyle and world view. By using the iceberg model as we address a problem we begin to peel away the layers much like an onion. We find we often need to go below the waterline into the depths and assist the client with their worldview and the meaning they find in their lives. For example we are the only species that die at a higher rate at 9 a.m. on Monday mornings. More people die at this time from heart attacks than at any other time. Job satisfaction turns out to be a bigger risk factor than cholesterol, smoking or high blood pressure.

As Norbert Wiener pointed out, what gives our species its evolutionary edge is our vastly superior ability to change our behavior in response to feedback. We can, if necessary, change our patterns of behavior (lifestyle) very fast, even instantly, by using our vastly superior minds, provided we perceive the crisis for what is.
With the use of Eternity Medicine.com and the emergence of telemedicine an opportunity exists to provide a new vision for optimum health and wellbeing.

FIGURE 1 TO COME

The Iceberg Metaphor:

One of our favorite teaching metaphors is the Iceberg. As you know, only a small part of the Iceberg is above water, the bulk of the Iceberg being below the water surface, hidden and less accessible; but imposing. We see the Iceberg divided into three levels (see figure 1).

I. The First Level (physical) is the area above the water line. Here we find most conventional medicine where symptoms and disease are being addressed. This is usually focused on the physical body and the methodology at this level emphasizes drugs, surgery, and those therapies more concerned with physical health. The science of this level focuses on Newtonian physics and quantitative methods. Simpson and Dossey describe this as ERA 1 medicine. ERA 1 includes physical techniques like acupuncture, homeopathy, exercise, nutrition, chiropractic and herbs.

II. The Second Level (mental) is below the water line and is described as ERA II medicine. Here, the mind-body connection and the disciplines of psychology, sociology, and psycho-neuro-immunology play a role. The science of this level focuses more on qualitative methods, often using methods involving dialogue and other cognitive methods inquires. Action research into human systems and organizations play a role here. We believe that some symptoms and diseases start at this level as precursors to future problems seen at Level I. In other words, a persons lifestyle, habits, and social support systems impact tremendously on physical health. More root causes to physical health can be addressed here. ERA II is about mind-body health and includes hypnosis, biofeedback and relaxation therapies.

III. The Third Level (Spiritual): The deepest and most impressive part of the iceberg is the third level or ERA III medicine, described as spiritual or meaning medicine or Eternity Medicine. Dossey describes this as non-local mind. This is the area that we feel is ultimately the most important. Within the human being, this level is our inner most wisdom and strength and is known by many names. The methodology for inquiry at this level is more reflective, involving such practices as meditation and prayer and the integration of the structures of consciousness. Quantum Physics may play a role here. It is this level that gives meaning to every human being: relationships, work, play, family, and friendships. ERA III medicine is about Integral Consciousness, time-free and space-free. It includes all forms of distant healing, diagnosis at a distance and probably plays some role in many of the so called 'Bio-Energetic' therapies (Appendix B).

Although we take pride in the Integral Health model and the Wellness and Longevity programs delivered by Eternity Medicine.com let us remind you that no one gets out alive ---- at least not in a physical body.
It is time for us to look at death in a different manner. Up until the beginning of the Middle Ages death was considered natural and was not feared. This is not surprising since, as we have pointed out, humans had not developed a strong sense of self. Only with a sense of "I" separate from the world and the notion of linear time do we develop fear about death.

Infact our denial of death led finally around 1930 to us sending our loved ones to hospitals and nursing homes to die rather than dying surrounded by friends and family at home. This fear has also resulted in us spending more than half our health care dollars in the last few weeks of a person's life as we desperately try and keep the grim reaper at bay, at any cost.

Now as humanity moves from self-consciousness to integral consciousness, we can each experience the timelessness of mind. Unlike ERA I and II medicine which rests in time, ERA III medicine rests in eternity - space free and time free.

Eternity medicine because it recognizes the unbounded nature of integral consciousness regards immortality as a given. This is a monumental event in the history of medicine.

For the first time you can experience this fact for yourself. The awareness of the non-local nature of our own mind can be experienced by integrating the various structures of consciousness as outlined. This "remembering" and integration results in a space free - time free (non local) aperspectival worldview where the originary flowing presence is deeply felt. In addition science, art and the great spiritual traditions now speak with a single voice to this fact - that each of us is infinite, immortal and indestructible.

In closing we would like to again state, that you should not take anything we have written at face value but rather we challenge you to look at the evidence that is all around you and verify integral consciousness for yourself.

Appendix A

See Also: ONE HUNDRED INTEGRAL HEALTH POSTULATES

Sources:

1. The Evolution of Consciousness, Robert Ornstein (1991, Prentice Hall Press)
2. The Creative Imperative, Charles Johnston, M.D. (1986, Celestial Arts)
3. Multi-Mind, Robert Ornstein, (1986, Houghton Mifflin Company)
4. The Ever Present Origin, Jean Gebser (1985, Ohio University Press)
5. Up from Eden, Ken Wilber (1986, Shambala)
6. Frames of Mind, Howard Gardner (1985, Basic Books Inc. New York)
7. Life-Force, Jean Houston (1980, Delacorte Press)
8. LSD Psychotherapy, Stanislaw Gram, M.D. (1980, Hunter House Inc.)
9. Art and Physics, Leonard Shlain (1991, William Morrow & Co. Inc.)
10. The Universe Story, Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry (1997)
11. The Five Ages of Man, Gerald Heard (1963, The Julian Press)
12. The Paleolithic Prescription, Boyd Eaton, M.D., Marjorie Shostok, and Melvin Konner, M.D., Ph.D.
13. Unfolding Meaning, David Bohm (1985, Foundation House Publications, England).
14. Carl Jung (Collected Works)
15. Eric Voeglin (Collected Works)

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