. INTRODUCTION .

INTRODUCTION

Fig.1 Cosmic Marriage. Painting. M.A. Purcell (M.Ghaffurian), 1967. Adolescent fantasy, or seeking something more
integral than the dominant consciousness of provincial Victoria?

Contextual Madness
Approaching the subject of mind and consciousness academically from a perspective
that seeks clarification of nightmare and awakening is not an easy task, although how
difficult perhaps I had no idea of at the start. (Or perhaps I did and that is why post-
graduate research questions were postponed, once began, for more than a decade.)

The academy demands a rational approach, a sequential ordering of data, yet there is a
postmodern, poststructural ambience which surrounds us and demands multi-per-
spectivity, while studies in structures and modes of consciousness simultaneously open
up a postconventional environment where theory is taking leaps and bounds beyond
the formal mental enframement that has dominated meaning for centuries. This is
exciting, but from the angle of thesis preparation, sometimes frustrating, if not down-
right difficult, because the academic world still runs by the dominant rational (and
structural) mode.

Neville (1999:1) argues it is possible to deal with the postmodern cultural atmosphere by
a range of different perspectives because that is part of the postmodern condition,

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 . INTRODUCTION .
expressive of a multi-perspectival mode of consciousness which Gebser (1991) referred
to as axiomatic of a new ‘integral’ age. Current research students of the humanities and
human sciences may find themselves considering contexts that include cultural studies,
anthropology, psychobiology, neurology, religion and history, plus a postmodern disso-
lution and chaos of heterogeneity that a multiplicity of voices, almost simultaneously,
and often confusingly, offers together. We are assailed by the multiperspectival, which,
in the consuming atmosphere of the postmodern, may feel anything but integral.

What is referred to as the ‘integral’, in fact, may be nuanced along a spectrum of cul-
ture and consciousness in which existential awakening is an essential part of the proc-
ess, as individuals and communities become alert to prior frames of mental restriction,
graduating along a spectrum to ‘aperspectival madness’ (Wilber 1996:192), as well as a
new clarity of mind that suggests there are greater potentials awaiting.

‘All-at-onceness’
As a child of the postmodern world, I seemed to live in a kind of ‘all-at-onceness’ of
experience, which I could neither understand nor unpack in the dominant cultural
matrix of Christian religion, colonial nation (Australia), white, middle-class conserva-
tive values, and belief in rational progress (the world of my parents) of the second half
of the twentieth century, underlaid by mythic and magico-marvellous accompaniments
of affluence and technologies.1 Kegan (1994) and Neville (1999) write of different con-
sciousness states in general; humans shift in orders of thinking, depending on situa-
tions, and environment, which relate to Maslow’s (1971) basic premise of the order of
needs, from survival to self-actualization. On the other hand, ‘all-at-onceness’ as a
state-of-mind condition, of a sense of all stages, perhaps ‘at-once’, had been with me
since primary school.

It was an edgy experience when the cultural environment did not have a structure that
made room for what is now called ‘integral consciousness’. In Pinker’s (1997) terms, I
was in the philosophic ambit of the ‘core’ or of the ‘psyche’, yet that does not explain
anything, nor necessarily give direction from the outside, where externalities prevail
and are dominant, and nor were there accessible ways of dealing with the inner world
adequately. Theoretical models now available to understand consciousness, for
instance, were not available to educators, the Eastern systems not clearly understood,
and integral ideas, scant.

It is possible now to talk about what were once called the ‘irrational’, as the ‘arational’,
or individual interior experiences in terms of not only psychology but in terms of

1. Art and design was a way, however, whereby ‘all-at-onceness’ could be contained in image frames which
gave immense satisfaction and relief, a space of freedom. (See Fig. 1.) A colour or a line, or a dot could be
a whole world; one was not pressured by mental demands, even though one could rationally explain the
moves of a work, after it was done.

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 . INTRODUCTION .
modes of consciousness, as the general area of seeking integral consciousness opens to
consideration and introspection.2 An elucidation of ‘all-at-onceness’ is the famous
description of the eating of the madeleine cake, baked by Proust’s aunt, and how taste
mingled with memory and intense states of consciousness blending childhood past
and grown-up present into blazingly exquisite moments that extended time and space
into infinite reverberations, an auditorium of the senses.3 Kegan (1994) explores the
multidimensional aspect of time in relation to a child throwing a ball against a garage
wall, in another example of theory that suggests there are new ways of considering
time, which refer back to the relativity theory of Einstein, where time and space bend
(see Shlain 1991).

In the context of this thesis, working through various theoretical ideas, I became
assailed with the ‘all-at-onceness’ feeling, of multidimensional and multiperspectival
viewpoints and subject-material, an intellectual madeleine. ‘All-at-onceness’ brings
with it a particular problem for a thesis writer, for outside of the sequential ordering of
reasoning, other spheres may intensely open up, interpenetrations and conceptions,
reverberations along wires of mind and consciousness, that keep on resonating. This
movement is in the ambit of chaos theory as well as ‘aperspectival madness’.

Sheldrake’s (1981) theory of morphogenetic fields in biology derives from moves

toward nonmechanistic causal theory. Sheldrake began to associate the mind and
body problem of interaction, physics and genetics with Jung’s archetypal theory. He
stated there was no reason that psychological theory should be confined to a mechanis-
tic theory nor its framework.
… certain types of memory need not necessarily be confined to individual minds; Jung’s
notion of inherited collective unconscious containing archetypal forms could be inter-
preted as a kind of collective memory. Such speculations, defensible in the context of
interactionism, seem nonsensical from a mechanistic point of view. But the mechanistic
theory cannot be taken for granted (Sheldrake, ibid., p. 28).

From the ambit of science, theory is being urged to go beyond reductionist dualism.

Although a creative agency capable of giving rise to new forms and new patterns of be-
haviour in the course of evolution would necessarily transcend individual organisms, it
need not transcend all nature. It could, for instance, be immanent within life as a whole
… the élan vital. (Sheldrake, 1981:203).

Theories of vital currents, energetic streams, a pattern that connects all things together

2. The web journal Integral Age, Integralis, the Integral Association, and Integral Institute are examples; our
collegial research group is another. A glance through any university, further education, or even community
center syllabus, reveals that people from all education levels and backgrounds are searching for alternative
ways to think and be, exploring options unavailable a decade or two ago from these educative channels.
3. Marcel Proust, ‘Remembrance of Things Past,’ or A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. 1987. Robert Laf-
font, Editions Bouquins, Paris. Gebser (1991:497-8) describes this work as ‘almost oceanic style, floating
the utterances on waves until the breathless wave of the sentence breaks, its foamy crests, air spray, and
ground swell taken over by the next unfolding wave. This style reflects the psychic dimension … traverses
the sea of the soul … and comprehends time without perishing.’ Alchemically, and psychologically, the oce-
anic deep is the watery realm of the ancient mother: immersion, after a time of drying heat of the solar
intellect. Soul, psychic dimension and sea join together to suggest an auditorium of the senses in body-
space, a recollection not just in extracted mind, and a lost realm.

22
 . INTRODUCTION .
in an overall web of life had been thrown out of science centuries earlier by the ‘Age of
Reason’ which consigned such notions to the oblivion of old oriental ideas, and those
heretically dispensed with since the Inquisition, ideas of ‘natural philosophy’ and inner
meditation. Now they were returning.

An important point of ideas like Sheldrake’s (1981) is that humans are beginning to
conceive of immanence and transcendence within the span of their own minds. That
is, there is a holding-power in them beyond the framing of time and space contain-
ment of the mental and rational mind and its mythic elements. Donald (1997), for
example, refers to the mind able to reflect on its own consciousness. But beyond this is
also a potential for intensifying acts of consciousness which lead out of the maze of the
mental mind and all its conceptual apparati to yogic states like nirvikalpa samadhi or
sahaja samadhi.4 ‘Spontaneous samadhi’ is ‘liberation while being alive’ (Combs,
1995:283, Feuerstein, 1997:248).

So, into the ‘all-at-onceness’ of the chaos of the postmodern are introduced ideas,
where besides a seemingly out-of-control chaos and flux, there is defined also:
a) an apparatus of mind exerting order and control, and
b) there are other possibilities that may look chaotic, beyond enframement of mind
and mentality, but involve structural form, that emerges more from the innate within,
than from imposed mental mind-sets or their sustaining myths, without.

The predominant mode of Western civilization for most of the last millennium (sup-
ported by sustaining myths and magical associations), assigns reality to a three-dimen-
sional perspectival containment, but beyond the dualism of positivist reductionism
and disembodied rational thought lie other realities, possibilities. Even so, the domi-
nant reality remains sequestered by a narrowing perspectival frame:

[an] experiential template that selectively filters and shapes human awareness in such a
manner that reality is perceived to be opaque, literal, objective, and alien … and ratifies
a state of consciousness in which the experience of the unitive numinous depths of reality
has been systematically extinguished … Such a world view is, as it were, a kind of meta-
physical and epistemological box, a hermetically closed system … within which human
awareness is encompassed and confined as if it existed inside a solipsistic bubble (Tarnas,
1991:431).

If one did not have other ways of understanding newly opening situations to human
consciousness, could one run the risk of getting lost in new ‘space’, in the deficient and
negative sides that emerge with every new growth (or evolution) of consciousness?
What could be some other ways of conceiving structure in terms of mind and con-
sciousness, apart from the ‘epistemological box’ or ‘solipsistic bubble’? The contrac-
tion of consciousness these two terms suggest is precisely the restriction to impinge on

4. Samadhi: ‘spiritual absorption’ (Combs, 1995:283). Absorption has many modes, levels and intensities,
gradating from that within a prevalent dualism, to the nondual; the experience of the formless (nirvikalpa
samadhi), or absorption within form; being contentless or including content, or responsive to both (sahaja
samadhi).

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 . INTRODUCTION .
mind and mentality seeking a new emergence but having no idea what it is up against,
not only without, but within, because cultural frames and psychological templates are
also so deeply embedded. However unnatural, they may look as natural as can be, if
endorsed by the paramount frames on reality and the meaning context. The only clue
to there being something awry may be that the inner life may present as uncomfortably
restless, or unwhole, so an aspiration of consciousness seeks, however blindly or inar-
ticulately, release from the labyrinth of confusion, through an opening.

Structures of Wholeness

The images above offer clues to the enigma, one directly from nature, the other from Fig.2 Left. A refraction photo of the nature
of atomic substance, appearing as patterns
the artistic work of humans seeking to express the inexpressible, or at least that which of geometrised light-energy in mandala-like
form. (Source: Lawlor, 1982:109)
goes beyond linguistic sophistry. Both are saying similar things, that there is an innate
Fig.3 Right. Standing under an Islamic roof,
structure before humans overlay it with imposed frames of conceptual scaffolding. Spain, c. 13th C. (Source: Brett & Foreman,
1980)

Gebser (2000:13) refers to ‘at-once’ structures, beyond linguistic categories, ‘constella-

tions alien or non-existent to the visible realm’, at least to rational mentality, but com-
ing into consciousness from the invisible. He claims that nuclear physics ‘opened our
eyes’ (ibid.), but further, that invisible constellations, nuclear in nature, are coming into
consciousness from ‘Origin’. They represent the ground of being, coming to visibility
through science, perceived also as the basis of physical matter, resonant in the human
being also.
the invisible origin becomes perceivable:H its reflection presses, so to speak, into the vis-
ible and becomes transparent, which makes it evident to the mental consciousness ... our
three-membered consciousness structure is integrated within or by the pristine universal
consciousness. The insight into these contexts makes accessible to those, who are capa-
ble of opening themselves to them without reservation, immediately and for ever, the life
altering experience of sharing the unexplorable seclusion and the all-illuminating clarity

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 . INTRODUCTION .
of the World Foundation, the Origin, the Tao, the Divine, of God (Gebser 2000:13).

These structures coming to awareness in certain intensified states of experience are ‘at-
once’ in awareness because they are not simply abstractly timeless, but are far richer,
originating from a before-time, or beyond (rational) time basis. To Gebser origin and
presence were separated by a rational ‘mistake’.5 Was it a mistake, the mad egoic rush
to dualistically divide man from nature, reason from ground? The tension such
thoughts inspire will be returned to in subsequent chapters, for example, in ideas of
dual-mindedness and the symbolic Western perspectival mind-space container that
expands even as it restricts. But if one accepts Gebser’s words above, in an apparent
‘Integral’ mode of consciousness, now emergent, ‘Origin’ might be conceived as
reached, already on us, with no more need for striving, simply a need to be open. But
between ‘Origin’ and usual awareness is still a great divide.

While I am interested in whole and entire consciousness and the state of sahaja sama-
dhi (Maharshi 1989) which suggests it, as well as what a nondualistic comprehension
may bring, it proved not possible to launch into a thesis on the basis of ‘all-at-once-
ness’ in this sense, not before providing a context for its emergence, and problems
associated with the arrestation of its coming to being in the Western mind and psy-
che.

Behind this inquiry has been a continual search for structure and depth, as well as an
inner axis anchored in embodiment, material existence, not merely in abstraction, or
ideas of imposed law and order from a disembodied eyrie. So I searched for a ‘con-
tainer’ in a subject committed as much to new opening as to the factors mitigating
against it.

Thompson (1996:42-3) recalls the evocative experience of Proust’s sensual memories

of childhood, explaining them as a recovery of the primordial non-perspectival mind,
of archaic senses lost to consciousness in the construction of a distancing mentality.
Deeper brain centers (like the limbic system), stirred by more instinctual responses
than the outer rational cortex, engage the senses, other than merely sight. The most
powerful epiphanies of consciousness, he explains, include the lost feminine.

This issue surfaces as a major theme explaining feelings of loss, of a childlikeness

beginning to awaken in consciousness to ‘all-at-onceness’ and finding one is simulta-
neously entering a sterile world-mind of fore-fathers in which the blossoming of the
inner senses are reduced to airs of visual abstraction, then having to save oneself from
dehydration or the asphyxiation of the tentatively searching spirit. One is looking for
another kind of ‘madeleine’, of merging mind, heart and consciousness in an ocean

5. ‘ … our contemporaries are still more impressed by so-called quantitative dimensions and neglect almost
totally the qualitative intensities. One should avoid this mistake’ (Gebser 2000:5).

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 . INTRODUCTION .
of new perceptions, so recovering the lost feminine, as well as a newly sensed illu-
mined different space.

Although there is a personal story bound up with this inquiry, I found that the per-
sonal and collective consciousness are intimately connected, and that problems I at
first conceived on the individual microscale were repeated or discoverable in social,
cultural and historical contexts in macroscale. This research project has been a per-
sonal journey into the archeology of consciousness as much as the manifestation of a
collective search for the roots of the Western mind disconnected from origin.

As such, the exploration takes up where Gebser’s (1991) complex of modes of con-
sciousness left off, as the inquiring mind and senses intensify towards integral being,
perceived sometimes dimly in daily awareness, if dulled by deficient cultural frames
of reference.

At the same time, palpable behind shrouded layers of consciousness and the mono-
logue of the environment, through its distracted frames, there are sometimes
moments of blazing awakeness where ‘Origin’ is tangibly connected with. In those
moments one knows what it is to be living, in this space of time, and to embody a
cogency where the universe suddenly finds a vessel in which to exercise its vital self
and know its fully dimensioned divinity in the structure of carbon matter.

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