The Valuation of the Concretion of the Spiritual

John Kadela, Ph.D. (2005)
Institute for Multi-Millennial Education

The first thing to be said is that the spiritual is irreducible to anything we say about it. Maybe that keeps us honest in our approach, because Gebser was clear that the “how,” the manner of our approach to opening to the new consciousness, itself and opening in us, is a key to the outcome. If we say that the degree of our choosing to accept can impact on not only what we value in the process, but how and who it affects, it may also impact on our very perception of the reality we are experiencing. Additionally, since there is no semantic differential we can deploy to mediate the experience; it might come as no surprise that Gebser says any attempt to force time into a system will simply lead to its bursting apart by the intensities attempting to manifest themselves. If this is true of a system, and we are daily reminded of it on the evening news, then what of its impact on a human being?

The intensities, the spiritual energies seeking manifestation through us, if we may say that, are not something “out there” which threaten us, but are already within us as constellation of predisposed spiritual energies. They are predisposed to us not merely as latencies or structures not-yet-realized – this is to keep things in a language of mediation – but as a living multi-dimensional presence. Here we are safe in saying that the concretion of the spiritual is not a mental experience, and conversely, not an intellectual accomplishment. In this sense, the realization of a new perception of reality is a process of discovery, a process of self-discovery and self-practice which each human will have to undergo each in his or her own way.

Does this in any way suggest that a kind of relativism, an ambivalence about a subjectivity somewhere being transformed? That would be high-altitude thinking that Gebser, I believe, would not accept as appropriate to our discussions. In fact, this manifestation of the spiritual in its most imaginable qualitative intensities, the bursting of system and personal rigidities, have, and will continue to lead, I believe, to a kind of personal earthquake which for individuals awakening to this reality may feel Biblical in proportion (hence the danger of misinterpreting what is occurring in intellectual terms has its own set of dangers). “Our new situation requires new means of description and statement. The new components that have irrupted into our reality demand new ‘concepts.’ But when we begin to sense the truly new, it is no longer new; it has already occurred. We do not render its design; rather our consciousness must recover it. It is pointless to ‘master’ this situation, at least intellectually, in a world of disintegrating patriarchy. But we can face our situation in a humane way and supersede it by becoming conscious of our entire humanity as well as by clearing away all our self-constructed obstructions and conceptions which run counter to the new before they – and this also means us – are done away with by the new.” (Gebser, 1986)

The temptation will be to rush out and begin to identify the new statements and descriptions, and there is nothing wrong with such an endeavor. But temptation always leads us a little further down the road, a little deeper into the crossfire of the uncertain. Uncertainty is not, as Gebser might say, something one masters, but something that one accedes to in perceiving the new reality – and in this case, the uncertain may well simply be translated into the temptation to codify the new reality when, as Gebser says, it will resist every attempt to do so.

For some this may mean a kind of chaos theory of life, something a Nietzschean might see as an opportunity for the whip to be brought out, and as a way of showing off one’s mastery of chaos and the creative shaping of a new life expression. On the other hand, it may also mean a trans-valuation of values that require a greater intuition of the divine wellspring that feeds one’s individual unfolding and concretion of the spiritual in daily life. There is a teasing statement in Gebser’s commentary, particularly where he asserts, “when we begin to sense the truly new, it is no longer truly new; it has already occurred.” There is, of course, the time tease in there, but I sense that there is something there that is transparently present that is simultaneously relevant for the individual as well as n-dimensional. Indeed, I am tempted to say that the new reality, as Gebser teases us, is not something out there, but something precious to the core of our humanity, and may well be, as he, Aurobindo, and so many others tell us, a key to the spiritual transformation of the human.

In this sense, then, the question of subjectivity is truly transcendental, as Husserl and Landgrebe so magnificently realized for us, because its origin is always already present, it is always already then not-any-longer “human” as its primordial being as divine always already lies ahead of us as the new reality to be discovered as the pivot of the human-becoming-divinely awakened. What implications this has for psychology, sociology, economics, politics and the like remains to be seen. What isn’t disputable is that this realization is taking place in all of us. The genius of Gebser, and those of his stature, is they traced out for us a remarkable process that is both individual and integral, is not reducible to system, or mental rational equivocation, but a process in which the evolution of consciousness itself as traced by Gebser is itself, as Gebser repeatedly said, a supplement to the primacy of the concretion of the spiritual.

Taking such things into consideration, then, a delightful play in the integral fields is to ask how Nietzsche and Aurobindo might be seen integrally through one another. Is the Overman an expression similar to Aurobindo’s claim that inconscient nature becoming conscious through a higher Absolute which transmutes human consciousness into a higher expression of the divine? For me, the answer is an obvious yes, but is that because I am willing to allow that in the absence of a programmatic yoga mantra that induces a higher vibratory range of consciousness experience, experiences that leads to out of body experiences, that Nietzsche could have been tracing the implications of such an awareness as key to the Overman. Somehow, at some opening in ourselves to this consciousness, such questions become meaningless, perhaps even silly, for it is not, as we may come to realize, in the words or philosophical concepts that the answer lies, but in our willingness to dissolve contention and dualisms born of culture or personal predilections, for a higher vibration of wonder to expand our vision enough to realize that we didn’t get here without help. The world without opposite, the integral insight is not something we did out of an act of will. If that isn’t obvious at this point, it is pointless to discuss Gebser or anyone else.

The new reality is not a production of universal philosophical objectivity or subjectivity. It is, as Gebser says, “already there.” Our job is to discover it in and through our own recovery, if you will, of having been unaware of it. Divine, spiritual, or integral consciousness (however you want it in words, you can have it), it would seem, is not unlike when we lose our car keys and wander around the house looking for them, only to discover they are in our hands. It is not a function of memory that helps us discover the keys, but an expansion of our awareness that reveals them to have been there all along.Saying such things doesn’t always help the situation. We are still creatures conditioned to the herd energy of the marketplace, media and technology, a paradox of integration that will not, in the final analysis, allow us to merely sit back in some kind of effete judgment and declare technology evil and being a Breath-Arian a true liberation of the human spirit. Overcoming such conditioning is the temptation, for we think that it can be done by will, but Gebser, and so many others, are so clear about this that they beat the drum around it ceaselessly warning us against believing that the new reality is something we somehow artistically, philosophically, linguistically, psychically, magically or scientifically cajole into yielding its riches to us.

The values of the new reality will not be perceivable to us until we let go of the beliefs born of the values of the previous structures. This does not mean their dissolution or denial, but an openness to stop willing and let be. For where thinking was the valuation process of the mental-rational, as we know, being is the manifestation of the aperspectival realization. It is not any longer that things have limitations, but that things are realized how they have become a de-limitation, an opening to a new freedom and horizon of perception in which the Origin, God, the Absolute, or whatever you want to call it this week, is in all beings. Clearly the values of the new reality are not based in thought and emotion, for thought and emotion merely reduce experiences into partialized attachments, concepts and ego viewpoints that lead to contention and debate. It is when we recognize that the integral phenomenon, the concretion of the spiritual is not merely something already there, but is the prophecy in every phenomenon, or what Picasso called the “secret structures of the world,” by which, we already know, he meant the aperspectival and atemporal perception of the world and nature. As I am sure many in this room can attest, when you risk expressing the new reality and how it is impacting on your consciousness, you have been no less an avant-garde presence in your world than Picasso was to his, for you sound like a totally chaotic, indifferent, self-indulgent egotist to those who refuse to participate in their own unique process of sharing the concretion of the spiritual. And since it is obvious that it is not a uniform process, any more than karma or dharma is for eastern thought,

I believe Gebser and Wilbur are correct in saying that only the coming decades will tell the tale whether humanity embraced the whole with love and primal trust (as outlined in Verfall und Teilhabe), or whether dissolution and self-rendering will be the outcome.In some sense we may intuit this primal trust as overarching all values, for whatever we fix our gaze in a valuation process, no matter how it stands or streams, Gebser is clear in stating that primal trust is neither a circumstance nor an existential condition. In fact, he says such a trust defies any psychological or ontological explanation because it is already a-temporally bewared as being at home in the invisible. In everyday terms we speak of trust as an action or an agreement struck between two parties. But in that sense trust is already an issue of anxiety and dread, a juridical situation that calls for two parties to take an action to place closure on a rift, a tear in the seam of life. Hence trust in its usual meaning isn’t really about trust at all – it’s about trying to fill in a gap where trust is gone and what has replaced it usually leads to some kind of conflict and opposition; again, the anxiety driven world of opposition and against-ness. Since this is not an epistemological condition, but one that in some sense is born along with epistemology and all its doxologies of meaning and sense, we are, in fact, miles from what Gebser means by primal trust.

For Gebser, primal trust is the prior condition of our being, perhaps the unreflected density of the archaic which is brought to consciousness slowly and cautiously in all the world’s great mystical traditions, for if the new reality is to be recovered, it cannot be done so in the fashion of healing a wound. I believe this is a misreading of the archaic. It has to be in the sense of that which is unconscious in nature and humanity being gradually brought to integration (and how all the previous structures are always co-present to our humanity) and awareness. Whichever way we choose to see it, Gebser is clear it is a “acting without acting,” a repose of stillness and movement, an allowing of the diaphaneity of all things. Primal trust isn’t merely given with the archaic, in some sense, it is recovered as renewed and enlivened, for as Gebser says, “this acting without acting” is the very embodiment of that which is signified here as an ‘inner attitude.’ This ‘innerness,’ -- to incorporate Holderlin’s use of the term – domiciles itself in the invisible. The veritable invisible is Spirit. Therefore, one can dare say: primal trust is participation, a conscious participation with Spirit and a conscious participation with that which is indestructibly and intractably held in Spirit. This way of speaking belongs to what Gebser identifies as the new form of expression, for in it he has succinctly stated the unique relationship primal trust bridges. It is, if you will, participation with Spirit as well as a participation with that which is held indestructibly and intractably in Spirit. This is one of those famous constructions in Gebser where he makes the transparent inner connection between Spirit as such, Itself, and as an inner constellation held by the invisible in Spirit. Perhaps this sounds like non-sense, because we are speaking of Spirit we are not speaking objectively or subjectively, but of something that is free of both, even indifferent to both.

For Gebser the bridge is always to the cosmic and universal consciousness of Spirit as an active field of awareness and evolution, while still being unmoved and unmediated. While we may be tempted to create a dialectical relationship at the heart of Spirit, what Gebser seems to be saying, at least to me, is that it would be an error to read it that way. If anything, primal trust expresses an attitude that is free of any such concern. When brought to conscious awareness and play, primal trust seems to be an inner ray of awareness that is ever silently poised (reposed) and transparently acting without doing anything. Hence, there is nothing for us to master, as Gebser says, because it has already occurred, so to speak, and our “leap,” if you will, is into a full awareness of that and its impact on our whole humanity. In a stunningly simple way, Gebser puts his finger on the pulsating life of the universal that is in the individual and the individual that is the universal itself. They are indeed one and the same, but with myriad rays of manifestation, for if human life is anything, it is an expression of this evolution of the apocryphal as already seeded within us. For some, Gebser realized, this may result in an experience of the Chicken Little sort: the sky is always falling down on those who do not realize the truth within themselves and who have not attained a realization of their own primal trust in a process that resists all attempts to be reduced to system or concept, yet remains a key to personal liberation and spiritual aliveness.

Primal trust is a conscious participation with something that is held in trust in Spirit. It is intractable and indestructible. It’s guaranteed. This is another way of saying that it’s already done, it’s already occurred, but not as a temporal event, but as inner constellation. In this sense, primal trust is not something I do, but a key to who I am and how I participate in Spirit. That it may also contain a key to dissolving the question of values as psychological (and developmental) end points (always in contention) and the ascension of divinity as a primary expression of our humanity. In this sense, primal trust might be seen as an ego-free phenomenon. But is primal trust not merely what we mean when we say “faith?” Yes and no. Yes insofar as primal trust outlasts our doubts and anxieties, and no because that would still be a trust that is based on the notion that I do something. Gebser is, I believe, pointing to something so essentially at the core of our humanity, that it may also well be a key to our transformation.

It is one thing to say that primal trust is a participation in Spirit. Given we are multidimensional geniuses for intuiting with skilled bodies of proprioception able to expand and contract with worlds, our evolution itself both displays and exemplifies itself through those avatars and exemplars themselves who are the Wayshowers, if you will, of the new reality. Such men and women are preceptors, if you will, of the new consciousness structure, and Gebser’s work is replete with examples of them. Even in discussing the Agraphons of Christ, Gebser is clear that such statements as can be identified as having been said, point clearly to a fusion of Origin and Presence in Christ that He both identifies and expands. Among these are: “You shall do these things, and greater,” in reference to his miraculous works, and “I and the Father are One, when you have seen me, you have seen the Father,” as well as “I chose you before the world was created.” This latter obviously referring to the dimensions of time and history reveals a direct connection between Christ and His followers that exemplifies Gebser’s assertion that primal trust is not a psychic or psychological condition, but a way in which we are held in Spirit. That we may have been heretofore unconscious to such awareness is no less forgivable or understandable in the same way that he refers to his “sleeping years” in the 1930’s.

Because we don’t know something in time does not exclude us from the possibility of being awakened to our core dreams and divine imprints in what can only be called “small miracles of perfect timing.” Such “synchronicities,” if you will, tense themselves within us in such ways that we may begin to sense, along with Gebser, that we are held in Spirit by Spirit in some way that we come to discover as a trust, a divine connection between ourselves and our divine consciousness in such a way that it’s unfolding is not something that happens to us, but is, in fact, who we are. If it can be said, read from the side of Spirit, then, we are not dealing with archetypes of the unconscious, but a purpose that has never left the confines of our initial creation: for if Christ chose us before time, we are co-creators and consenters to it. Perhaps in this Spirit we may grasp Gebser’s frequent referrals to our consciousness evolution being itself an expression of this original constellation of our being. This does not mitigate against depth psychology, or the archetypes of the Earth. Indeed, in the unfolding of our awareness of how we are held, and who and how it is we are held, such structures are perhaps necessary that our participation in Spirit is a continuous intensification to a point of individuation in which we are better able to handle the gnosis at the core of our being. The apparent ambivalence of reading primal trust as a being held in Spirit as well as a “how” of participation in Spirit is a tempting interpretation. It would, however, be a tragic reduction to mythic polarity and a de-vitalization of the integral exemplified as an expression of our way of being with Spirit.

“Man,” Gebser says, “is not just a creature of earth; he is also a creature of heaven, if only because he breathes this heaven with every breath (if one will permit the somewhat loose physical description). In every breath the ‘substance’ of even the most remote heavens are present, if only to an infinitesimal degree.” (Gebser,1986) Man is become the bearer, or agent, of the originary consciousness. Even more than this, because it sounds sterile and antiseptic to call it “originary,” man is a participant with the heavens. Interestingly enough, such a reference to breathing heaven is not attributable to Gebser alone, but has precedents in Kriya Yoga, Shabda Yoga and Yoga Manta, as well in mystical alchemical traditions that identify breathing as a key to higher vibrational consciousness and divine awareness. Hence when Christ says: "you too shall do as I", His statement is not one of patriarchal dominance, but one in which He holds in Spirit what is common to all men on earth at all times, which is that all men breathe heaven and earth. A short journey around the alternative health care and healing markets will bring you smack dab into this tradition, for whether one is a Christian, Sufi, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist, the central role of breathing in perceiving the new reality is ongoing. This is not something that one trusts is the case, as the skeptical scientist might challenge with pristine laboratories and calculators to see if breathing heaven actually can be proved, for such an approach is already one that has lost touch with its own foundations in consciousness, but clearly what Gebser means by saying that we are.

The new reality is a “we” that extends to the stars and beyond, that consciousness is divine in Origin, is our inheritance, not a claim to be proved or disproved, and something we all share in, whether we are ready, willing or able to admit. In that sense, we could say that the Origin, originary consciousness, or whatever you want to call it, is as common as dirt. In Gebser’s sense, and in Wilbur’s expanded sense of the “communal experience” of the validity of the integral, being held is not a passive experience, nor is it a blind instinct that differentiates us from animals. It is a consciously held connection that seems to go both ways: a holding by Spirit that lends itself to our conscious participation. Words like adhering, hearkening, listening and alignment all come to the fore as traditional descriptors of this inner discovery, if you will, which, if seen as Spirit’s interpretation of us (a being to be held) coming to us in the process of our awakening to Spirit’s efficacy in our consciousness. This is how the neither-nor works because we cannot reduce Spirit to our participation with it, i.e., our will to power and life confidence through it (more on this later), nor to just what is held and how it is held for us. In Buddhist traditions there is a statement that says, “The universe is confident in you,” which I believe expresses this connection rather well. Translated into Gebser’s scheme it may sound like “In you I have faith.” While some may read this as a relativization of the expressions, they would seem to belong to the new consciousness, at least in the sense that they express a top-down kind of connection. The bottom-up experience requires some effort on our part, those “pains” of growth Gebser refers to in EPO and elsewhere, suggesting that we have to somehow “position” ourselves and our awareness to give ourselves over to the primal trust that shines within us. This goes along with his statement that “it is pointless to master” it as it is already the surpassing of all self-constructed obstructions and conceptions.

Another way of saying this is that it is we who block the new with our clinging to old associations, concepts, ideations, ideologies, constructions and structures, whose one time master meant success in the world, but now may be experienced as impediments to “breathing heaven.” Shifting it around, “wishes are memories coming from the future” is the transformation of ideologies into responsibilities and capacities in discovery the inner prophecy at the heart of all things: man and heaven are One. This is not an assertion, but a reality to be integrated as the fabric of one’s being. These “truths,” these apparently simple statements, can be earth shattering to one who relies on the outer world for validation and self-image. For it is not merely that we trace the tracings of things, events, expressions, worlds, but the connection is reciprocal, in the same way you cannot separate a person from their walk, by tracing the tracings we are tracing ourselves as well. Instead of thinking truth into being, we are become beings-in-truth, where verition is more than truth telling (mythic) or truth valuing (mental), but is the conscious manifestation of that very valuation of the spiritual that our existence becomes. In this sense authenticity is the expression of primal trust as verition, verition here being the very way the valuation of the concretion of the spiritual is made transparent. As Christ said, “when you have seen me, you have seen the Father,” this was an exemplification of the transparency of truth-in-being that both expresses absolute differentiation as a key to realization without ever once losing sight of the infinite and eternal possibilities born of such a perception.

The visible and invisible are met and individuation as an expression of primal trust, a confidence in the conscious connection with Spirit is discovered as a core element of our humanity. The seeds of transformation are not something we plant, but are buried deep within our evolution and are discovered in their full blossoming power when we bring our focus to bear on it. Naturally, one need not do this – one may choose otherwise, and that is allowed, but as Gebser said, it is better to consciously choose transformation than to have it chosen for one, if for no other reason that one has abrogated their trust in the process and relinquished their freedom, for then all that may occur to an individual may seem like a “cruel fate” or “the strength of destiny,” which more often than not, we realize, ends in tragedy. A self born out of the psychic reaction to the irruption of the new may experience inner earthquakes and self-renderings the likes of which could be seen as the self-fulfilling of apocalyptic writings detailing the end-times. Such “reactions,” or “abreactions,” are not born of a healthy marriage of the visible and invisible in an individual, but a psyche made of concepts and positions, dogmas and cognitive maps and “the devil being in the details.” I believe we have already seen the effects of these inner earthquakes in global events leading to cultural implosions and spiritual holocausts (a continuation of the same holocaust which blighted the20th century from Russia to Auschwitz) in Rwanda, Botswana, Uganda, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Chechnya and Georgia, among others, that expresses the loss of the inner courage that is the primal trust Gebser speaks of. We may refer to past great cultures that have manifested and shown this courage, but it makes little sense in a current climate that rejects the past, particularly the cultural past, as part of a cultural hegemony which is believed in many quarters intent on extinguishing wholesale populations and cultures based on its cultural and technological superiority. The mass murder and torture of millions of people is a reflection of the potential existential abyss of such a choice, a bathing in such an abyss of despair and disconnectedness that Gebser said was unfit for any human.

What appears as catastrophic “out here” is so because it has already been constellated as an event “in there.”Paradoxically, one must accept the comprehensiveness of primal trust in Gebser’s sense. Primal trust is a way of participating in Spirit, conscious or unconscious; I believe that is the way it is. I suppose that is also how it is that primal trust is “held” in Spirit, for even where we see people want to break the world down into “good vs. evil,” “right vs. wrong,” “just vs. unjust,” we know that such dualisms are part of the transparent blindness of a mental-rational world living in anxiety and dread. Yet nowhere is it suggested that this trust, this bond with Spirit, is anywhere broken up in Spirit itself. Repose and movement are a paradox mental consciousness cannot comprehend, so it breaks them up into component parts, as if the mysteries of Spirit were an algebraic equation to be solved for “x.” Good and evil are no more reducible than repose and movement are. We say “is” and not “are” here to highlight the integrated poise of this essential expression of the new reality. We may suspect that Gebser’s emphasis on this has far ranging applications, not the least of which is the resolution of the paradox by virtue of the reality that for good and bad, so to speak, it is all held in Spirit. Held not as a pie-in-the-sky theology, but one that is in our every breathing (hence a clue to clearing those blocks and obstructions) and applies to all our humanity. That trust, it would appear, is elemental to Christ’s statement “I chose you before the world began,” inasmuch as it expresses what Gebser meant when he said it is “indestructibly and intractably held in Spirit.”

It would seem that no amount of intellectualizing would change it, doesn’t it? Spirit holds the trump card in the resolution of all paradoxes. It would also seem to hold the trump card as far as our individuation and will to create goes as well.Primal trust is the way we live, whether we are aware of it or not, whether we accept it or not. We can live in anxiety and dread, if we choose, if we continue to see life as a drama in which we are the victims of unseen forces of fate, destiny, evil and darkness. Either way, we come back to the primal connection. At such a junction it doesn’t seem to matter much if one is a believer in reincarnation or not, because the key is in the living and the creating of choices and outcomes which are not so much a learning curve (though we can to that too), but as our own personal pathway in intensification and awakening. Spirit, it would seem, could care less about our time creations and petty worries about our bodies and minds, but is more interested in our integration with its own nature, so to be speak. This is like saying there isn’t “one world.” There are seven billion potential way-showers on the planet at the present time, just as there are uncountable worlds of consciousness differentiating themselves in every way they are intending to be. Consider that carefully, for in it, I believe, is much to be gleaned, and much to be joyful in celebrating.

Real laughter comes encountering the differences in all their bright glory and a zest for living expresses itself in the peaceful smile that knows all is held as unfolding in a perfect expression that requires no second guessing. Nietzsche spent a lifetime trying to make clear the Will to Power and the Eternal Return of the Same, and in his vital expression, the Tradition was shaken to its foundations, and is still shaking, for what is irrupting is not chaos, not disaster and apocalypse, but the perfect unfurling of a once unconscious nature integrating into a self transforming self creating life. As all contradiction and oppositeness is dissolved and made transparent in its origins as this consciousness comes forward more and more into our lives, what becomes clearer is that the primal trust Gebser speaks of is the bridge from which we may see many events flow in their completeness as having already occurred. In this sense one is not seeing the past or the future, but living with a now that has no limits or boundaries and whose energies, which seen in the ordinariness of daily life, are bursting the seams of our self imposed illusions about self, consciousness, culture, society and world.

The core dream of humanity is a divine unfolding which, at various ©being held in Spirit as already completing and transforming itself because it has been held in Spirit for us to do so; two, however one sees it, repose and movement in all things is something none of us can deny for within ourselves lives the inner connection of primal trust as expression of the divine as the essence of the transformation of the human in the valuation of the concretion of the spiritual. In simpler terms, this is a very fancy way of saying: the blessings already are.

GEBSER, JEAN (1974a). Verfall und Teilhabe. Gesamtausgabe, bd. 5/2, Schaffhausen: Novalis Verlag AG, 1986

GEBSER, JEAN The Ever-Present Origin (Authorized translation by Noel Barstad with Algis Mikunas. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1986).

AUROBINDO, SRI The Life Divine Lotus Press, Twin Lakes, WI, 1981

NIETZSCHE, FREDERICK The Will to Power. Walter Kauffman & R.J. Hollingdale. Vintage Books 1968