In his monumental and heavily documented work Ursprung und Gegenwart, Jean Gebser shows how the modern ‘perspectival’ mental stage in the evolution of mental consciousness appears to be giving way to a new ‘aperspectival’, arational and integral mode of experience, amounting to a mutation of consciousness, in which the earlier phases are not left behind but transmuted into a diaphanous present. Gebser remarks in one of his last essays:
My concept of the emergence of a new consciousness, which came to me like a lightning-flash of inspiration…is very similar to the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, with whose writings I was then not familiar. My attempt, however, was concerned only with the western world and lacks the depth and pregnancy belonging to a rich tradition.
From the massive corpus of Sri Aurobindo’s writings there comes to us a voice charged with a sense of impending breakthrough to a new dimension of consciousness…of a step being taken beyond the edge of history and the Orient-Occident dichotomy. [J.L.Mehta: 1978~43]
My concept of the emergence of a new consciousness, which came to me like a lightning-flash of inspiration…is very similar to the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo, with whose writings I was then not familiar. My attempt, however, was concerned only with the western world and lacks the depth and pregnancy belonging to a rich tradition.
From the massive corpus of Sri Aurobindo’s writings there comes to us a voice charged with a sense of impending breakthrough to a new dimension of consciousness…of a step being taken beyond the edge of history and the Orient-Occident dichotomy. [J.L.Mehta: 1978~43]
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