Printed in the Spring 2022 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Hoepfl-Wellenhofer, Susanne, "From Duality to Polarity in the Works of Jean Gebser" Quest 110:2, pg 32-34
By Susanne Hoepfl-Wellenhofer
The words duality and polarity are often used interchangeably, but discerning between these two concepts is extremely important in the metaphysical sense. Knowing the difference enables us to avoid misunderstandings and half-truths and clearly align our consciousness. This became clear to me when I discovered the writings of Jean Gebser (1905–73), a German-Swiss poet, cultural philosopher, historian, and intellectual mystic. Reading Gebser’s work is no easy task, and it took me many years to study all his books and lectures. But I was so intrigued by his concept of integral consciousness that I stuck with it.
Gebser concluded that human consciousness has transitioned through four levels: the “archaic,” the “magical,” the “mythical,” and the “mental-rational,” and is now transitioning towards the “integral” level of consciousness (Gebser, Ursprung, 83–164; Fuhr and Hellbusch, 22–35). He pointed out that this level must go past the rationalistic unambiguity and the dualistic either-or dichotomy of the mental-rational consciousness and into a both-and way of thinking (Gebser, Verfall, 39).
Gebser calls these transitions “mutations” and believed that they involve structural changes in both the mind and the body. He explained his thesis in his work, Ursprung und Gegenwart, which was published in various editions from 1949 to 1953 and translated into English as The Ever-Present Origin.
The archaic structure is almost completely instinctual, zero-dimensional, nonperspectival, and there is a total absence of differentiation or sense of separation. Humans and the world are identical.
The magical structure marks the first step toward a waking human consciousness. It is one-dimensional and egoless, a preperspectival state of timelessness and spacelessness. The magical man was part of his environment and felt secure only within his group. Its deficient form results in serfdom and collective trance (Gebser, Ursprung, 87–106; Fuhr and Hellbusch, 22–35).
In the mythical structure the soul experiences something as an other and lives in a two-dimensional polarity. It unfolds in symbols rather than in calculation. Its deficient form inflates symbolism and uses tales in an addictive way (Gebser, Ursprung, 106–25; Fuhr and Hellbusch, 22–35).
The domain of the mental-rational phase of consciousness is the thinking mind. The world is seen as an object. It is three-dimensional, and cognition operates on the principle of duality. The deficient form of this structure is a dissociation from the unity of experiencing and thinking and an overemphasis on logic. (Gebser, Ursrpung, 125–64; Fuhr and Hellbusch, 22–35).
The characteristic of the integral structure, which Gebser also called the aperspectival structure of consciousness, is a transparent lucidity capable of seeing through all dimensionalities and time forms (Gebser, Ursrpung, 165–72). In Jeremy Johnson’s words, “space is no longer empty of value or opaque as it is in the perspectival world but full and transparent. Integrality, then, is the fully expressed and innate wholeness of all the mutations” and “sees through to the spiritual reality that substantiates all worlds and all time forms: the ever-present reality of origin” (Johnson, 130). For the integral level of consciousness to arrive, we must discover what it means to be space-free and time-free, which, for Gebser, is learning to be ego-free.
For Theosophists who have read about the stages of human evolution in H.P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine and the timelines for the different root-races, it might be interesting to know that Gebser is deliberately vague about those time periods. Ken Wilber, an integral theorist who acknowledged Gebser as an important source for his model, estimates that the archaic level of consciousness began 3 to 6 million years ago and lasted to around 200,000 years ago (Feuerstein, 58). The mutation of the magical consciousness coincided with the appearance of Homo erectus. This human species was the first to use fire (Feuerstein, 75). Feuerstein argues that the early, mythical structure could be placed around 20,000 to 12,000 BC (Feuerstein, 76). The entire period from around 10,000 BC to 500 BC, which may be the time of transition from the mythical to the mental-rational consciousness, was marked by tremendous upheavals (Feuerstein, 95).
In his book Verfall und Teilhabe (“Decline and Participation,” which has not been published in English), Gebser emphasized that reaching the integral structure of consciousness required understanding the difference between duality and polarity. He criticized the belief that these terms are interchangeable and supported his opinion with quantum theory and discoveries by Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and others. He said that we must overcome Aristotelian determinism and its dualistic thinking—the belief that a given entity must be one thing or another (Alternativdenken)—the three-dimensional geometry of Euclid, the atomic theory of Democritus, and the heliocentric view of the universe, pioneered by Aristarchus of Samos in the third century BC. We must also overcome the belief that duality entails a negative and a positive that conflict with each other. Seeing polarity as complementary forces, in which the negative and positive attract each other and work together to create balance, will help us make our transition into the integral structure of consciousness (Gebser, Verfall, 39).
Gebser supplies specific examples for the transition from the mental-rational structure of consciousness to the integral one, such as: “Haste is replaced by silence and the capacity for silence”; “goal-oriented, purposive thoughts are replaced by unintentionalness” (Absichtslosigkeit); the pursuit of power is replaced by the genuine capacity for love; quantitative idle motion (Leerlauf) is replaced by the qualitative spiritual process. Prejudice is replaced by the renunciation of value judgments, manipulation is replaced by the patient acceptance of providential powers, action is replaced by poise/attitude (Haltung), and Homo faber, the human being as artificer, is replaced by Homo integer, the integrated human (Gebser, Verfall, 62; Feuerstein, 170).
In another lecture, Gebser mentions that he had received statements from young people who “distinguish themselves with a fundamentally new attitude. Compared to the previous deficient mental rationality, it expresses integral consciousness, although they do not harbor any resentment” toward the earlier mode (Gebser, Verfall, 59). He writes that these are “more self-critical; they know more about their weaknesses, which they openly admit and are working to overcome, and they make demands on themselves and not on the environment.” He states further that they are “open, in a completely unsentimental way, tolerant, capable of loving, not arrogant, silent, and shielded from the inside against the lure of money, property, power, fame, and no longer are exposed to the flight into the means [of escapism], the lie, the split, and mere sexuality” (Gebser, Verfall, 60).
The last book I read by Gebser was his first: Rilke and Spain, a short monograph on the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In this book, Gebser shows that he grasped that the troubled times he lived in contained the embryonic beginning of the integral consciousness. We encounter Gebser’s first tentative explorations of this theme in this book (Feuerstein, 128). In discussing Rilke, Gebser writes:
The notion of objects has lost its significance, together with perspectivity, achieved using adverbs by which objects were meant to be deepened or interpreted according to the viewpoint of the observer. What is gaining importance now is the spiritual light that prevails between objects—the tension and relation between them. (Gebser, Rilke, 41–42; Feuerstein, 128)
Gebser is pointing toward a mode of consciousness that is no longer based on perspective, as it is in the mental-rational structure. Gebser describes how Rilke’s great existential crisis eventually led him to come to terms with the phenomenon of death, leading him toward a nondualistic type of thought:
The Yes to life becomes at the same time a Yes to death. More than that, it is in two at the same time because it has erased the boundaries: It is a single space, a single world, which at every moment encompasses the two phases of development, because time, the organic component, has become the fourth dimension. (Gebser, Rilke, 46; Feuerstein, 128–29)
Gebser emphasizes that the integral level of consciousness, which in his opinion has been constellating since the turn of the twentieth century, depends on each individual person for its full emergence. All must do the work of self-transcendence, which, as he admits, is the most difficult of all human tasks.
All work, the genuine work which we must achieve, is that which is most difficult and painful: the work on ourselves. If we do not freely take upon ourselves this preacceptance of the pain and torment, they will otherwise be visited upon us in individual and universal collapse. (Gebser, Ursprung, 676)
Studying Gebser and trying to get a deeper understanding of his thought eventually led me to Theosophy and helped me understand the difference between duality and polarity on a spiritual level. In The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky explained that the manifested universe “is pervaded by duality, which is, as it were, the very essence of its existence as ‘manifestation.’” She added that the opposite poles of subject and object, and spirit and matter, are but aspects of the One Unity, in which they are synthesized. She went on to observe that “evil” merely denotes the polarity of matter and spirit, a struggle for life between the two manifested principles in space and time. But these principles are ultimately one, being rooted in the Absolute (Blavatsky, 1:15–16).
In simpler terms, duality implies separation, meaning that the two are separated. But polarity tells us that they are two poles of the same thing. Thus we are talking about polarity within unity. That is the secret: understanding that we are all one with the Absolute and thus with all else.
It is not enough to merely understand the difference between polarity and duality. We must live this polarity within unity, think it, breathe it. That takes tremendous effort, and the path to integrating it into everyday life is different for everyone. As Pablo Sender explains in Evolution of the Higher Consciousness, in order to “stabilize the perception of unity,” we must gradually integrate it into daily life (Sender, 171). The concrete suggestions in Sender’s book have helped me to work on this goal daily. They have helped me understand that polarity is the dyad of equal, mutually complementary poles, based on the natural balance of the divine order.
Sources
Blavatsky, H.P. The Secret Doctrine. Two volumes. Wheaton: Quest, 1993.
Feuerstein, Georg. Structures of Consciousness: The Genius of Jean Gebser. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Integral Publishing, 1987.
Fuhr, Reinhard, and Hellbusch, Kai. “Jean Gebser: Das integrale Bewusstsein: English Summary of Jean Gebser, ‘The Integral Consciousness.’” Integral Review 1 (June 2005): 22–34: https://integral-review.org/issues/issue_1_jun_2005_full_issue.pdf.
Gebser, Jean. Rilke und Spanien [“Rilke and Spain”]. In Abendländische Wandlung [“Western Change”]. In Gebser, Gesamtausgabe [“Complete Works”], volume 1. 3d ed. Schaffhausen, Germany: Novalis Verlag, 2003.
———. Ursprung und Gegenwart [“The Ever-Present Origin”]. In Gebser, Gesamtausgabe, 3d ed., volumes 2 and 3.
———. Verfall und Teilhabe [“Decline and Participation”]. In Vorlesungen und Reden zu “Ursprung und Gegenwart” [“Lectures and Discourses on ‘The Ever-Present Origin’”]. In Gebser, Gesamtausgabe, volume 5:2. 2d ed., 1999.
Johnson, Jeremy. Seeing through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness. Seattle, Wash.: Revelore, 2019.
Sender, Pablo. Evolution of the Higher Consciousness. Ojai, Calif.: Fohat, 2018.
Susanne Hoepfl-Wellenhofer was born in Austria and has been living and working in the U.S. since 1986. She is currently the president of the D.C. Lodge, contributes to the Theosophical Wiki and the Online School of Theosophy, and mentors prisoners. She retired from the German department of the George Washington University in 2019. She still translates from German to English and teaches yoga.