CONCERNING NIGHTMARE AND AWAKENING …

It is a crisis of the world ... of complete transformation ... This span of time is determined by an
increase in technological feasibility inversely proportional to man’s sense of responsibility—that is,
unless a new factor were to emerge which would effectively overcome this menacing correlation
(Gebser 1991:xxvii).

there is a ... universally recognized need in our time for a general transformation of consciousness.
The message here is of an actual age of harmony and peace in accord with the creative energies
of nature which … anteceded ... the ‘nightmare’... from which it is certainly time for this planet to
awake (Campbell 1989:xii-xiii).

They are all asleep ... They must be made to feel the urgency of the need to wake up (Wilson
1956:295).

One has to go beyond the mind .... When the Kundalini rises, these thoughts elongate. There is a
space, very small, between the thoughts (vilamba) which spreads out and a state of complete si-
lence is created. Then we are in the present … This inner silence opens our heart. All the ego and
conditioning starts dissolving in the ocean of rippleless silence ... (Shrivastava 1995:248-9)

The ever-present state is the natural state of sahaja (Maharshi 1989:13).

Let us not forestall the conclusion. Keep an open mind, dive within and find out … (ibid., p. 69).
‘But what is the method?’ asked a man [‘D’] seeking ‘liberation’ … Maharshi answered: ‘To re-
trace your way back’ (ibid., p. 457).

This thesis, then, attempts to meet the challenge, and do so.

6
 SEARCH FOR ORIGIN

A SYNOPSIS

Jean Gebser (1991) claims consciousness needs to be liberated from present time, that is, ratio-
nal time to achieve a state of the ‘supra-personal innate in everyone’ (p. 361). But ‘he declares
that to work against this time, our time, may appear a daring presumption. [Our] epoch is
one of transition and reshaping. It is our task to extricate time from its rational distortion …
yet the task is one of almost inconceivable difficulty. The solution to this problem has been
‘unconsciously’ sought for generations’ (p. 357).

This quote reflects the ambit of this thesis’ chosen task.

Asking the question ‘If there is a nightmare that mind and consciousness can awaken from, as
various philosophical and psychological theorists suggest, ‘What is one awakening from, and
what to?’ To uncover the possibilities the thesis sets up the inquiry in terms of the search for
‘Origin’.
Research on the subject moves back through historical time and metaphoric space to define
what is designated as the ‘mind-space container’. By exploring theories and models from con-
temporary psychology, analysis is made of the historical and technological processes which
led to the present dominant mode of consciousness. The progressive sweep of instrumental
rationality through careful historical reconstruction is shown reaching out to dominate nature
and the world, so shaping the mental container since the medieval era up to the present time.
The mental-rational enframement is subsequently utilized as a starting-point to indicate
something beyond, taking recourse to submerged knowledge-systems from Western tradi-
tions, ancient knowledges of connection. and several spiritual traditions of the East.
This, Dr. Ghaffurian suggests, opens the mind to what new transdisciplinary moves in psy-
chology and the humanities are beginning to put forward — that an integral consciousness, or
knowledge of the whole, is emerging now, from outside the rational frame as well as from
deep inside it.

With elucidating illustrations, this thesis demonstrate the availability and feasibility of a wider
nondualistic and integrative mode of being that identifies with the great and ancient feminine
principle of ‘Kundalini’ as a fundamental force, formerly linked to notions of the unconscious
spirit and the soul in exile.

The thesis concludes there is a mental apparatus that obstructs moves towards whole con-
sciousness, while there is also coming into potential a whole and integrated consciousness —
that with responsibility, can confidently overcome fragmented limitation and be opened up.

7
CONTENTS

Statement of Authorship ii
Summary iii
Acknowledgements iv
Contents vi
List of Figures xviii
Concerning Nightmare and Awakening … xix

Introduction 20
Contextual Madness 20
‘All-at-onceness’ 21
Structures of Wholeness 24

CHAPTER ONE
Inquiry into a Metaphoric Mind–Space Container of Nightmare & Awakening 27
Introduction 27
A Suitable Subject 27
The Problem Ambit 28
The Problem Question 29
The ‘Nightmare’ Problem
Introduction 31
The Reduction of Consciousness 33
Forms of Intensity 34
Leaping to Origin Amid a Sense of Powerlessness 35
Mutation 37
The Search 41
Literature 42
Research Procedures 44
Qualitative Research 44
Anchoring Being 45
Organization of Data 46
Methodology 47
Hypertextual Knowledge 47
Patterns of Consciousness 48
Systasis and Synairesis 49
Structural Samples 50
1. Polarity, Opposition, Dualism 50
2. Three, Middle, Third Force 50
3. Structure 51
4. Quaternity 51
5. ‘Four Quadrants’ 52
Conclusion 54
Chapters: Summary 54

9
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 clarifi-
cation 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 postgraduate 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-perspectivity, while studies in struc-
tures and modes of consciousness simultaneously open up a postconventional environment where the-
ory 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
downright 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 dif-
ferent perspectives because that is part of the postmodern condition, expressive of a multi-perspectival

17
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 postmod-
ern dissolution 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 atmos-
phere of the postmodern, may feel anything but integral.

What is referred to as the ‘integral’, in fact, may be nuanced along a spectrum of culture and conscious-
ness in which existential awakening is an essential part of the process, as individuals and communities
become alert to prior frames of mental restriction, graduating along a spectrum to ‘aperspectival mad-
ness’ (Wilber 1996:192), as well as a new clarity of mind that suggests there are greater potentials await-
ing.

‘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 conservative 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
consciousness states in general; humans shift in orders of thinking, depending on situations, and envi-
ronment, 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 modes of consciousness, as the gen-
eral 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

1. Art and design was a way, however, whereby ‘all-at-onceness’ could be contained in image frames which gave immense satisfac-
tion 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 men-
tal demands, even though one could rationally explain the moves of a work, after it was done.

18
grown-up present into blazingly exquisite moments that extended time and space into infinite rever-
berations, an auditorium of the senses.1 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, interpenetra-
tions and conceptions, reverberations along wires of mind and consciousness, that keep on resonat-
ing. 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 nonmecha-
nistic 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 mechanistic theory nor its framework.
… certain types of memory need not necessarily be confined to individual minds; Jung’s notion of inher-
ited collective unconscious containing archetypal forms could be interpreted as a kind of collective mem-
ory. 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 behaviour 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 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 Inqui-
sition, 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 containment of the mental and rational mind and its

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.
1. Marcel Proust, ‘Remembrance of Things Past,’ or A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. 1987. Robert Laffont, 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 oceanic 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.

19
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. 1 ‘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 sus-
taining myths, without.

The predominant mode of Western civilization for most of the last millennium (supported by sustaining myths
and magical associations), assigns reality to a three-dimensional perspectival containment, but beyond the
dualism of positivist reductionism and disembodied rational thought lie other realities, possibilities. Even so,
the dominant 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 per-
ceived 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
metaphysical and epistemological box, a hermetically closed system … within which human awareness is encom-
passed 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
consciousness, apart from the ‘epistemological box’ or ‘solipsistic bubble’? The contraction of consciousness
these two terms suggest is precisely the restriction to impinge on 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 inarticulately, release from the labyrinth of confusion, through an opening.

1. Samadhi: ‘spiritual absorption’ (Combs, 1995:283). Absorption has many modes, levels and intensities, gradating from that within a preva-
lent 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).

20
Structures of Wholeness

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

Gebser (2000:13) refers to ‘at-once’ structures, beyond linguistic categories, ‘constellations alien or non-existent
to the visible realm’, at least to rational mentality, but coming 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 sci-
ence, perceived also as the basis of physical matter, resonant in the human being also.
the invisible origin becomes perceivable: its reflection presses, so to speak, into the visible and becomes transparent,
which makes it evident to the mental consciousness ... our three-membered consciousness structure is integrated with-
in or by the pristine universal consciousness. The insight into these contexts makes accessible to those, who are capable
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 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’. 1 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

1. ‘ … 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).

21
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 aware-
ness is still a great divide.

While I am interested in whole and entire consciousness and the state of sahaja samadhi (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-onceness’ 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 psyche.

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 disem-
bodied eyrie. So I searched for a ‘container’ in a subject committed as much to new opening as to the factors
mitigating against it.

Thompson (1996:42-3) recalls also Proust’s sensual memories of childhood, explaining them as a recovery of
the primordial non-perspectival mind, of archaic senses lost to the usual, distancing mind. Deeper brain cent-
ers, stirred by more instinctual responses than the outer rational cortex, engage senses other than merely sight.
The most powerful epiphanies of consciousness, Thompson explains, include the lost feminine. This issue then
surfaces as a major theme of not only feelings of existential loss, but of a childlikeness beginning to awaken in
consciousness to ‘all-at-onceness’, even as one simultaneously enters a sterile world-mind of present fore-fathers
in which the blossoming of the inner senses are reduced to visual abstraction, then having to save oneself from
dehydration or the asphyxiation of the tentatively searching spirit. Today one is looking for another kind of
‘madeleine’, of merging mind, heart and consciousness in an ocean of new perceptions, so recovering the lost
feminine, as well as a newly sensed illumined and different ‘mind-space’.

Although there is a personal story bound up with this inquiry, I found that the personal and collective con-
sciousness 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 personal 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 consciousness 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 con-
sciousness and the monologue 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 alive, 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, its
valencies ablaze in love and light.

22