architects - Jean Gebser Society

A R C H I T E C TS
of the
Integral World
jean gebser society 2015
c a lif o rnia ins t it ut e of
int e g r a l s t udie s
Architects of the
Integral World
Forty-Fifth Annual International
Jean Gebser Society
Conference
In conjunction with the Philosophy, Consciousness &
Cosmology Program; Philosophy and Religion Department
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF INTEGRAL STUDIES
16–18 October 2015
SAN FRANCISCO, California
day one
10:00
Arrival and Registration
10.30
Das integrale Bewusstsein—Chicago 1969, John Dotson
11:15
The Integral Skeptic: Gebser and Metaphysics,
Michael Purdy, PhD
12:00
Lunchbreak (90 minutes)
1:30
Holotropic Breathwork and Jean Gebser’s Analysis of Miracles at Lourdes, Peter Weston, ms
2:15
Can the West be Integralized without Christianity?
Daniel Kealey, PhD
3.00
Break (30 mins)
3:30
We are Eternally Chinese: Mythic Identity in Outbound
Chinese Exchange Students, S. David Zuckerman, PhD
4.15
The Wisdom of the Whole: Integral Coaching Model,
Linda Bark, PhD
5:00
Close.
friday 16 October
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day two
9:30
Arrival and Registration
saturday 17 October
10:00 Technosophia: The Emerging Integral-Technological Wisdom Tradition, Theo Badashi
10:45
Ecophilosophy and the Feminine Divine: Creating the Climate for Aperspective Consciousness, Barbara Karlsen, ma
11:30
Meta Matrixes, Planetary Lattices and Integral A-Waring:
A Comparative Look at William Irwin Thompson and Ken Wilber in Light of Jean Gebser, Jeremy Johnson, MA
12:15
Lunchbreak (1 hour 45 minutes)
(Gebser Society Annual Meeting)
2:00
The Interrupted Irruption of Time: Towards an Integral
Cosmology, with Help from Bergson and Whitehead,
Matthew David Segall, abd
2:45
Henryk Skolimowski on the Participatory Mind,
Leslie Allan Combs, PhD
3:30
Break (30 minutes)
4:00
Towards a Geometry of the Aperspectival World,
Jeremy Strawn, ma
4:45
Hearing the Metron,
Sabrina Dalla Valle, MFA, and corey Grandmaison
5:30
Close.
7:00
Conference Dinner
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day three
10:30
Arrival and Registration
11:00
Rilke in Spain and Beyond: Gebser’s Origin,
Daniel Joseph Polikoff, PhD
11:45
Rendering Darkness and Light Present: Jean Gebser and the Principle of Diaphany, Aaron Cheak, PhD
12:30
Assaying the World Statement in, as, and through Language: Revealing the Poetics of Praxis in Gebser’s Eteology,
Heather Fester, PhD
1:15
Lunchbreak (one hour 15 minutes)
2:30
Nishida and the Place of Absolute Nothingness,
Lisa daus Neville, PhD
3:15
Approaching the Origin: the Diaphonous Body and Classical Chinese Medicine, Brandt Stickley, ma, lac
4:00
Close.
sunday 18 October
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Conference Information
Location
The forty-fifth International Jean Gebser Society Conference is being
held over three full days at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Friday 16 October 2015
Saturday 17 October 2015
Sunday 18 October 2015
Room 304 (Third Floor)
California Institute of Integral Studies
1453 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
The campus is located in the SOMA district of San Francisco, between 10th
Street and 11th Street. The closest BART station is a few blocks away at Civic
Center. A public parking garage is located across the street at the NEMA
building off 11th Street.
Arrival and Registration
Doors will open half an hour before the first lecture each day.
Tickets must be purchased online before the conference commences, or
at registration (in which case they must be finalised by Saturday morning
at the latest):
www.gebser.org/2015-program
Conference pass* (Friday – Sunday)
Single day pass*
CIIS Students* Conference dinner
* Does not include conference dinner
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$35.00
$20.00
Free of charge
tba
Accommodation
While there is no official conference hotel, there are a variety of convenient options listen on the CIIS website:
Good HotelHotel Tomo
Holiday Inn Civic Center
Hotel Whitcomb
Hotel Nikko
Phoenix Hotel
Hotel Monaco
SF Airport Marriot Waterfront
Conference Dinner
The conference dinner will be held on Saturday evening from 7.00–9.00
p.m. at the Basil Canteen Thai Restaurant. Please note that the dinner
is not included in the standard conference fee, and must be paid for
separately.
Basil Canteen (Thai Restaurant)
1489 Folsom Street at 11th Street
San Francisco
Contact
Please contact the conference convenors if you have any further queries:
Aaron Cheak Society President
Conference convener
[email protected]
Jeremy Johnson
Society Treasurer, Webmaster
Conference coordinator
[email protected]
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About Jean Gebser
Jean Gebser (1905-1973) was a German poet, philosopher, and phenomenologist of consciousness. He is best known for his magisterial opus, The
Ever-Present Origin (Ursprung und Gegenwart, 1949/1953), in which he articulates the structures and mutations of consciousness underpinning the
pivotal shifts in human civilization. Gebser’s key insight was that as consciousness mutates toward its innate integrality, it drastically restructures
human ontology and with it civilization as a whole.
Five hundred years before Christ, the fundamental mode of reality-perception mutated from mythos to logos through the agency of figures
such as Socrates, Siddhartha, and Lao Tzu. For Gebser, we are on the cusp
of a new mutation, presaged by figures such as Rainer Maria Rilke, who
in Gebser’s view passed through “things” into the integral, transparent
lucidity “behind” things, thus breaking through to a new, aperspectival
perception of reality. Not only do we stand amidst the final death-throes of
the deficient, declining mental-rational ontology, which atomises culture
and consciousness day by day, we also stand on the threshold of a new
consciousness that is capable of revolutionising the spiritual foundations
of human civilization. The task of crystallizing the integral world out of
the prevailing cultural dissolution stands before us. Indeed, it is perhaps
more pertinent now than it was when Gebser first articulated it.
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The Gebser Society
Members of the Jean Gebser Society support the preservation and furtherance of the work of Jean Gebser through academic symposia, publications,
discussion list, website, social media, and other means.
As part of a forthcoming initiative, we are hoping to grant Society
members contributor access to the Jean Gebser Society website to increase
dialogue, interaction, and creative expression. Among other things, this
will enable members to contribute to the Gebser blog in order to generate
and sustain a richer and wider Gebserian presence on the internet. Members are also encouraged to inform the Society of any projects of Gebserian
interest—whether academic or artistic—that they are engaged in. We are
currently pooling resources among Gebserians in order to showcase existing and upcoming publications, courses, artwork, and other explorations
of integral consciousness. These will be available on the Gebser website
in due course. If you would like to assist in helping this come into being,
please let us know.
Regular membership $35 per annum
Student membership $15 per annum
Lifetime membership $350
Officers of the Society
Aaron Cheak, PhD
President
Sabrina Dalla Valle, MFA
Vice President
Jeremy Johnson, MA
Webmaster and Treasurer
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Architects of the Integral World
In the winter of 1932, from a
grammatical detail in the poetry of Rilke, Jean Gebser intuited
an entire shift in the structure of
western consciousness. Diaphanous, liberated from time, and
free from the constraints of perspective, Gebser’s integral vision
came to him in a “lightning-like
flash of inspiration”. As he unfolded this seed, he later remarked
that it bore “extensive similarities to the world-design of Sri
Aurobindo”, whose work he was
originally unaware of. Alongside
Gebser and Aurobindo, thinkers
such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (theology and palaeontology), Alfred North Whitehead (philosophy), and David Bohm (cosmology) would independently confirm the significance of Gebser’s integral
vision. Such instances speak to the relevance of an integral reality beyond
mere intellectual theory.
Spanning the sciences and humanities, this conference seeks to
explore the work of leading and neglected figures in the emergence of
integral philosophy, past and present. By charting the “morphic resonances” that appear to exist among the works of diverse evolutionary
and holarchical theorists, we aim to further Gebser’s commitment to a
genuinely interdisciplinary methodology, and the rendering transparent
of the integral world.
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Orienting Questions
• How has Gebser’s intimation of an emerging integral structure
of consciousness directly influenced or been independently
confirmed by the work of congenial thinkers?
• How has Gebser’s intimation of an emerging integral structure
of consciousness directly influenced or been independently
confirmed by the work of congenial thinkers?
• In what ways can his account of integral consciousness be
further fleshed out by the work of those who follow in his
wake?
• In what ways does Gebser’s overarching account of the evolution of consciousness illumine and enhance the contributions of
these thinkers?
• How have Gebser’s ideas been anticipated by currents within
eastern and western philosophy of mind?
• How do precepts and practices from the world’s esoteric
lineages, ancient or modern, contribute to the realisation of
integral consciousness?
• In what ways might Gebser’s work be legitimately criticised,
refined, or revised?
• To what extent has Gebser’s work been appropriated or
misread, constructively or otherwise, by integral theorists?
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Abstracts & Biographies
Technosophia
The Emerging Integral-Technological
Wisdom Tradition
Creating an integral orientation towards technology is one of the most important tasks of our time. It is becoming clear that neither the materialist
scientists nor the anti-technology Naturalists are capable of addressing our
current and future planetary issues from within their own perspectives.
What is needed now is a new holistic technological worldview, one founded upon a deep reverence for Nature and Life, and empowered by the
innovative creativity of modern science.
In this presentation we will explore some of the core propositions
and insights of Technosophia, the technological wisdom tradition that is
emerging from within integral consciousness. We will discuss how integral
culture is participating in bringing forth a new mode of technological being on Earth, and how the ideas of Gebser, Berry, Swimme and others are
informing this new techno-cosmological vision.
At the heart of our discussion we will explore what a new Technosophic orientation can look like as we move into the future, and some of
the opportunities we face in bringing forth a new technological culture in
harmony with the evolutionary dynamics of the universe.
Theo Badashi is a filmmaker and doctoral student in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS, and a student
of Brian Swimme and Sean Kelly. His research focuses on developing
cosmo-ecological orientations towards technology and the creation of
a new technological wisdom culture. He lives in Berkeley.
The Wisdom of the Whole
Integral Coaching Model
If accepted, this presentation will have three components. First, Dr. Bark
will briefly present The Wisdom of the Whole® coaching model that she
developed, which helps coaches and clients understand, move into, and
operate from an integral structure of consciousness based on Jean Gebser’s
work as described in his book, The Ever-present Origin. Second, Dr. Bark
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will share the strategies that she has found, after working with Gebser’s
framework for over 15 years, which help people understand and operate
from these concepts. She will utilize a PowerPoint presentation which
demonstrates the philosophical grounding for the coach training program.
Finally, she will lead interactive experiences to demonstrate techniques
and teaching methods that draw on different structures of consciousness (depending on time allotted), including an integral decision-making
process that explores multiple options, a simple but powerful method to
build new behavior patterns, a technique to see how story can predict and
change outcome (emphasizing the Mythical structure), and/or a dialog
method for exploring integral possibilities.
Dr. Linda Bark has used her interest and passion in Gebser’s work
to bring his ideas into a practical form by developing coaching tools
that have and will help people see, value, and function from multiple
perspectives. The fact that using her methods is faster, more effective,
and more authentic demonstrates the benefits of an integral approach.
Coming from a multidimensional framework supports her belief that
when we have a world where everyone feels unique and is strongly
connected to all parts of themselves, others, and all things and where
people operate from this place of wholeness, ultimately a different
and better world will be created. www.wisdomofthewhole.com
Rendering Darkness and Light Present:
Gebser, Rilke, and the Principle of Diaphany
The emphasis on diaphany (transparency) arises in Gebser’s work from
the perception that the nature of origin (Ursprung) is neither a primordial light nor a primordial darkness but a Diaphainon—that which ‘renders darkness as well as brightness transparent or diaphanous’. Whereas phenomenology is the study of pure appearances as they manifest to
consciousness, diaphany is concerned with that which appears or shines
through phenomena (dia, ‘through’, + phainomai, ‘to appear, shine’).
Rather than delineating a ‘world-view’ (Weltanschauung) diaphany is,
more specifically, a ‘view through the world’ (Welt-durch-anschauung).
According to Paul Klee, ‘Nature is not at the surface but in the depths.
Colours are an expression of this depth at the surface. They surge up from
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the roots of the world’. In a similar vein, this study seeks to explore the
idea of diaphany not by examining Gebser’s philosophical articulation
of it—its surface—but by looking at the vital experiences that underpinned it—its depths. Rather than a purely conceptual approach, which
risks mere abstraction, I have chosen to explore the principle of diaphany
through Gebser’s life experiences, through his poetic perceptions, and in
particular, through his relationship to the work of Rainer Maria Rilke. In
doing this I seek to illuminate the ‘lightning-like flash of inspiration’ that,
according to Gebser himself, seeded his entire life’s work.
Aaron Cheak, PhD, is a scholar of comparative religion, philosophy, and esotericism. He is author and editor of Alchemical Traditions: From Antiquity to the Avant-Garde (2013), editor (with Sabrina Dalla Valle and Jennifer Zahrt) of Diaphany: A Journal and
Noctu¬rne (2015), and current president of the International Jean
Gebser Society. Broadly speaking, Cheak’s research encompasses eastern and western philosophy of mind, the history and phenomenology
of alchemy, and nondualistic modes of reality perception. Dr Cheak
is presently trying to break the bad habit of residing in Australia,
where he avoids the sun, maintaining his youth on an exclusive diet
of red wine, dark chocolate, and aromatic tobacco.
Henryk Skolimowski on the Participatory Mind
Astrophysicist John Archibald Wheeler may have been the first to announce, in the early 1970s, the idea of the Participatory Universe. He observed, “The universe does not exist ‘out there’ independent of us. We
are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening. We are participators. In some strange sense this is a Participatory
Universe.”
The notion of an integral cosmos, one in which consciousness is infused into the fabric of the cosmos and in which the idea of reality in the
absence of consciousness is unthinkable, has continued to grow in both
philosophy and science since that time. Contemporary representatives include Robert Lanza’s principle of “biocentrism” and Thomas Nagel’s deconstruction of “objective” reality (The View from Nowhere). As far back
as the early 1980s, drawing on the insights of Wheeler, and building on the
ideas of Teilhard de Chardin (“We are evolution[ary] conscious of itself ”),
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Skolimowski developed a theory of the Participatory Mind. This theory,
on the one hand, attempted to vindicate the claims of the new physics
about the participatory nature of the cosmos, and on the other to fill the
missing dimension in Teilhard’s opus — which wonderfully describes the
unfolding of evolution but misses the essential role of the mind.
In line with this, I propose that Skolimowski, like Gebser for whom
he had great respect, is also an architect of the emerging integral world,
and also like Gebser, has often been overlooked by even the philosophical
public. Skolimowski considers himself in line with Bergson and Teilhard
de Chardin. In common with these predecessors he shares Gebser’s view
that mind and consciousness are far from completed; that the evolutionary
journey is ongoing. “What new structures of consciousness or new forms
of Mind the future will bring as evolution unfolds, not even God may
know at present.”
Allan Combs, PhD, is a consciousness researcher, neuropsychologist, and systems theorist at The California Institute of Integral Studies where he is the Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies.
In 2012 he was named the Navin and Pratibha Doshi Professor of
Consciousness Studies at CIIS and elected to the Board of Directors of
Nalanda International. He also holds appointments at the Saybrook
University and is Co-Director of the MA in Consciousness Studies at
the Graduate Institute of Connecticut. He is Professor Emeritus at
the University of North Carolina-Asheville. Professor Combs is the
author of over 200 articles, chapters, and books on consciousness and
the brain, and is the founder and President of the Society for Consciousness Studies and co-founder of The Society for Chaos Theory
in Psychology and the Life Sciences, a member of The General Evolution Research Group, the Integral Institute, and the one-hundred
member Club of Budapest. He is Executive Editor of CONSCIOUSNESS: Ideas and Research for the Twenty First Century; Co-Editor of
the Journal of Conscious Evolution; and serves on a variety of Editorial Boards including World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm
Research. For his CV and some of his publications please visit his page
at Academia.edu.
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Hearing the Metron
Hearing the metron is a proposal for a multi-media presentation that
tests Jean Gebser’s notion of natural cosmic periodicity as it relates to
the mythical structure of consciousness. Accordingly, there exists a primordial temporality, something beyond human, that makes itself known
through tempos and rhythms of the imagination, what is embedded in
our theta brain-wave state of consciousness. To test this, Gebser states (The
Ever-present Origin, p. 173), “We must attempt to render audible certain
specific and highly differentiated primordial sounds … How do we find
these values?” He suggests we look at the precision of etymology. However,
this proposal attempts to show that we can also create inner imaginative
spaces simulating the physical movement of the natural world to access
these same periodic values. Furthermore, leaning on Goethe’s botanical
theories we will explore the possibility that the way we imagine not only
echoes the tempos and processes of the universe, and more directly, of our
natural world on earth, but that reciprocally, a rhythmic observation of the
natural botanical world can act as a catalyst for the imagination to move
more dynamically in the purity of universal tempos at large in a way that
consciously concretizes time.
This presentation will be created by Sabrina Dalla Valle, MFA,
experimental writer, and Corey Grandmaison, singer/songwriter/
bass-player for numerous bands including The Blue Notes, The Hot
Heads, and Deloris Telescope.
Das Integrale Bewusstsein—Chicago 1969
Forty-five Years After First Reading Gebser
As an undergraduate at Northwestern University, co-majoring in communications theory and philosophy, I frequented Great Expectations, the
legendary north shore bookstore specializing in philosophy and the humanities. There, on a bright spring day, the title of a newly released book,
Eastern Wisdom and Western Thought: A Comparative Study in the Modern
Philosophy of Religion, by P. J. Saher, caught my eye. Opening it, I saw the
name Jean Gebser, author of the foreword, for the first time. I bought the
book on sight.
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In the foreword, Gebser states “Today a new consciousness is rising…
in the dawn of which mankind is now living.” Later, in the chapter “The
Revitalization of Metaphysical Thought,” Saher writes “Today integrale
Bewusstsein (integral consciousness) is the most hotly discussed topic in
Continental circles…[and] the grand doyen of the Integral movement
is the Swiss poet philosopher Jean Gebser, who is an ardent admirer of
Radhakrishnan and Aurobindo.” In following paragraphs, Saher sketches
the “different dimensions of consciousness…magical…myth-derived…
[and]… mental.” He adds the terms Bewusstseins-Mutationen, integrale
Einsicht, Systase, and Synairese. Then he presents Diaphanierung—“the
perception of the presence of anything simultaneously in all its aspects
both past and present.” I immediately grokked that these expressions integrated my studies of phenomenology and communications with the intensities of my psychedelic adventures and the happenings in Chicago, New
York, Los Angeles and elsewhere in America and the world. Since that day,
Gebser’s thought has been quintessential for me.
In the temporics of this presentiation, I will summon some details of
my 20th-century experiences in synairesis with the ambiance of the 2015
International Jean Gebser Society Conference, CIIS, San Francisco.
John Dotson: My ancestral roots run very deep in Kingsport, on
the Holston River in the Appalachian mountains of east Tennessee,
my birthplace. I graduated from Northwestern (communication
studies/philosophy). Various involvements in Chicago, New York,
Los Angeles, and Seattle have always been important. After living in
Iowa and Colorado, some forty years ago, I moved to California. For
twenty years, I was a teacher and dean of faculty at Santa Catalina
School and also an instructor at the University of California, Santa
Cruz, Extension. With journeys to Europe and India and on-going
links in Wales, I want to participate as fully as possible in the world
in which the lives of my two young grandchildren are unfolding. I
am devoted to poetry, playwriting, multi-media and performance art.
My forthcoming book is Singing in My Chains: Dylan Thomas at
the Birth of an Age. I am a director of the Monterey Friends of C. G.
Jung and have been a Gebser Society member since 1999.
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Assaying the World Statement
in, as, and through Language
Revealing the Poetics of Praxis in Gebser’s Eteology
“Every eteologeme is a ‘verition,’ and as such is valid only when it allows origin to become transparent in the present. To do this it must be
formulated in such a way as to be free of ego, and this means not just
free of subject but also free of object; only then does it sustain the verity
of the whole. This has nothing to do with representation; only in philosophical thought can the world be represented; for the integral perception of truth, the world is pure statement, and thus ‘verition.’” (Gebser,
Ever-Present Origin, 309).
Can writing be understood as an act of integral eteology, as a pliable
tool revealing origin as “transparent in the present” to “sustain the verity
of the whole”? This presenter will explore traditions of sacred writing that
would say yes. These spiritual, magical, and wisdom writing traditions
point to the prophetic levels of poetic texts and the transformative transmissions the texts give as acts of verition. This may seem strange in a world
of philosophies that treat language as purely symbolic, and arbitrarily so,
but against these conceptual treatments of the written word, various traditions have cultivated states of awareness in which the written symbol is
transfigured into a deep feeling-based tuning device for consciousness and
transformative process that relies on embodied awareness and working
with the felt sense (Gendlin).
In the phrasing of axial artist George Quasha, in this way, prophetic
or transformative language becomes “axial” and takes on “performative
indicative” qualities. This presentation will explore how George Quasha’s
“axial poetics” and “preverbs” are two tools that disclose verition intentionally, revealing the world as “pure statement,” in Gebser’s terms (EPO 309).
Beyond Quasha’s methods, a sampling of prophetic and oracular writing
forms will be evaluated according to a rubric of poetic praxis. Writing
practices will be explored in the traditions of depth psychology, Unique
Self prophecy as described in the work of Kabbalistic lineage holder Marc
Gafni, and Sufi poetics as explored throughout the work of Henry Corbin.
Heather Fester, PhD, is currently attending Naropa University
in Boulder, CO as an MFA Poetics and Creative Writing student and
Allen Ginsburg Fellow in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied
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Poetics. Heather is returning to full-time study after nearly fifteen
years of teaching college writing in order to satisfy her long-time quest
to find the time to “actually write.” The preparatory steps she’s made
for this moment include her recent role as Director of the Center for
Writing and Scholarship at the California Institute of Integral Studies
and, prior to that, Associate Professor of English at Lincoln University of Missouri. She holds an MA and PhD in Rhetoric and Writing
from Bowling Green State University. Her work explores interfaces
between writing and spirit, including various ways that writing itself
can be used as a tool in personal and transpersonal development.
Heather is also a certified Unique Self Coach specializing in
unique voice, style, and creative process, and she currently serves as
an advisory board member of the Center for Integral Wisdom activist
think tank, where her current writing projects include co-editing the
forthcoming Integral Leadership Review issue on Unique Self in the
disciplines and completing a manuscript entitled Enlightenment of
Fullness: The Essential Collected Essays of Dr. Marc Gafni.
Meta Matrixes, Planetary Lattices,
and Integral A-Waring
A Comparative Look at William Irwin Thompson
and Ken Wilber in Light of Jean Gebser
Since the original publication of Ever-Present Origin in 1949/1953, there
has been a tremendous and diverse body of work surrounding the notion of a “new consciousness”, and the planetization of human cultures.
The constellation of these thinkers is too numerous to mention in a brief
introduction, but to note a few: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s Integral Yoga at Auroville, Teilhard de Chardin’s planetization of human kind
through his evolutionary theology, and William Irwin Thompson’s intentional community and fellowship at the Lindisfarne Association are all
examples following the shared daemon of planetary culture. Since the late
1970s, inspired in part by Jean Gebser’s structures of consciousness, the
Colorado-based philosopher Ken Wilber has popularized the “integral”
term in his Integral Theory denote a philosophical movement ingrained
with a “meta”—or big picture—theoretical impulse and a developmental and evolutionary worldview. Integral Theory has since inspired a me23
ta-theoretical turn starting with the 2013 Integral Theory Conference’s
“Kosmopolitan” theme. In the spirit of collaboration, Wilber’s Integral
Theoretical praxis was introduced to Edgar Morin’s complexity studies and
Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism. It is the intention of this essay to elucidate,
in a comparative light, both the works of Jean Gebser and William Irwin
Thompson as critically illuminative in their own light – not merely to be
subsumed into a larger theoretical body. On the contrary, it is Gebser’s
unique insights on time, the non-linearity of emergence in the evolution
of consciousness, and Thompson’s insights on notion of planetary culture
that provide unique and arguably missing insights to the emergent landscape of contemporary integral thought.
Jeremy D. Johnson, MA, is an editor for Reality Sandwich magazine. He also serves as Community Manager and IT specialist for
Evolver’s online webinar series, the Learning Lab. Jeremy received his
MA in Consciousness Studies from Goddard College, concentrating
in transpersonal psychology, new media and cultural studies. He currently serves as treasurer and webmaster for the International Jean
Gebser Society.
Ecophilosophy and the Feminine Divine
Creating the Climate for the
Next Human Evolution
As humans we have altered the Air, the Earth, and the Ocean. A rapidly changing world is demanding that we adapt in order to survive as a
species, much less flourish. It is precisely these changing conditions that
have signaled the next phase of our human evolution. A phase that that
is forcing us to wake up and participate consciously in our own evolution
in order to meet the challenges ahead. We now know it is not enough to
just be aware of the changes that are occurring on our planet, we must
participate with our biology in order to receive the transmutation of a
rapidly changing biosphere. Perhaps the greatest resource we have is our
own human Origins. An embodied evolutionary history of anatomic cellular transmutation that stretches back billions of years. A sophisticated
resource of bio-cosmic technology that makes cells from long chain amino
acids, organelles from bacteria, and brains from sensory neurons. A pro24
cess echoing the immensity of what it means to be human.
The nature of evolutionary consciousness that is urgently pressing toward us cannot be expressed in rational or categorical systems. And so long
as it remains inexpressible, it cannot effectively enter into our awareness.
We are compelled, therefore, to find a “new form of statement”(Gebser,
306). What is necessary to turn the tide of our situation are “eteologemes.”
Eteology must replace philosophy just as philosophy once replaced the
myths. Every eteologeme is a “verition” and as such, is valid only when it
allows origin to become transparent in the present (Gebser, 307–309.) The
human body with its primordial endowment and symbolic consciousness
is one such verition- an embedded and embodied context for integral being and becoming.
Barbara Karlsen, MA is a transformational movement teacher.
She holds a Master’s degree in Somatic Counseling Psychology from
Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado and a Bachelor of Nursing
degree from Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada. She has
been teaching movement-based work for the past 20 years, and is an
authorized Continuum movement teacher. Barbara has been exploring the formative dynamics of somatic organization alongside studies
in Pre and Perinatal Psychology. Integrating these with her life long
passion for deep ecology, she has developed an eco-somatic based
practice for birthing the new human. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Transformative Studies Program at California Institute of
Integral Studies where her area of research is Eco philosophy and the
Feminine Divine: Towards an Integral Futurology.
Can the West be Integralized
without Christianity?
The short answer is that with or without Christianity, Gebser found the
initial blossoming of the integral happening in various Western cultural
domains. Just as one can ask whether Christianity will nurture or resist
integralization, so we must ask whether increasing secularization will help
or retard it. There are good reasons to suspect secularization as a notable obstacle to the spread of the integral in many ways. If so, it would
seem that Christianity has a role to play in dealing with secularism, a role
that would complement other forces of integralism and may arguably be
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necessary for integralism to take hold in the West. However influential
the present sweep of secularism, the fact remains that Europe has been
deeply structured by Christianity and this past is not so easily forgotten
or dismissed. Moreover, integralists wouldn’t want to excise the Christian
past but to integrate it. It makes sense that many Christians would also be
keen to see that an integral Europe and America be Christian, as much as
possible. The most widely promoted Christian contribution to integralism
is the evolutionary theology of Teilhard de Chardin, until recently a seed
sown on infertile church land, but receiving a great upgrade with Pope
Francis’s encyclical on environment, Laudato Si’, On Care for Our Common Home. This proclamation needs to be analyzed for implications for
integralism. It is to be noted that chapter four of the encyclical is titled
Integral Ecology. As a pioneer in publishing a proposal for an integral
environmental ethic, I am delighted to see the ripening of this seed at the
highest level of the Church. There are bridges being built here between
Catholicism and the integral community, an invitation for crossings over.
I propose to analyze the encyclical for its relevance to Integral theory.
Daniel Kealey, PhD, had his worldview formed during the six
years he spent studying at the California Institute of Asian Studies,
since renamed as CIIS. He earned his doctorate in philosophy at
SUNY-Stony Brook and is professor emeritus from Towson University, MD. He wrote what may have been the first book on an integral
approach to environmental ethics. He resides at his homestead in Mt.
Shasta, CA, where he also teaches at the College of the Siskiyous.
Integrality and the Place of
Absolute Nothingness
Nishida Kitaro (1870-1954) is a primary figure in the development of what
is now known as the Kyoto school of Philosophy. Born at the onset of the
Meiji period, when Japan opened itself to Western trade and experienced
an influx of Western culture, Nishida immersed himself deeply in the formal structures of Western philosophy. At the same time, he demonstrates
a rigorously creative engagement with and deep-rooted experiential understanding of Eastern and Zen Buddhist thought. As a result, he has
been called a philosopher “of world status.” Yet his integration of East and
West is no mere synthesis. Nishida determined himself to work out, as a
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philosopher, fundamental problems of human being, consciousness, moral action and knowing. Engagement with these philosophical problems
led him to formulate a non-dual standpoint, a “world of contradictory
self-identity” that demands its own, paradoxical, logic.
Gebser uses the term “paradoxical thinking” as a hinge. He locates it
first within the efficient rational, where it operates as a unifying function
of mutually opposing concepts, and rather grudgingly he admits paradox
as artistic expression that partially transcends conceptualization and invites
a-waring. While Gebser considers paradoxical logic to operate within a relative framework, and thus to be primarily synthetic, Nishida’s formulation
of paradoxical logic is entirely non-relative, informed by assertions of total
interpenetration and interdependence of individuals found in Mahayana
Buddhism. Ultimately, however, I believe we can understand the function
of Nishida’s philosophy as providing a formal structure in which thinkers
can take up the standpoint of integrality and the concretion of the spiritual as Gebser presents them. Nishida, in a letter to his friend D.T. Suzuki,
clarifies his aim to advance a new foundation for philosophizing that both
expresses and produces the process of concretion or lived spiritual reality.
“I want to make clear that religious reality cannot be grasped by conventional objective logic, but it reveals itself to the “logic of contradictory
identity…From the standpoint of prajna, I want to discuss what a ‘person’
is and want to connect that ‘person’ to the actual historical world.”
Lisa Daus Neville, PhD, is a writer of scholarly criticism, experimental fiction and poetry. Her work explores Buddhist theory and
practice, philosophy of language, contemporary poetics and literary
praxis and consciousness studies. She received her MFA in Fiction,
and MA in American Literature from Cornell University. She is a
Senior Lecturer at State University of New York at Cortland where
she teaches writing, literature, theory and film.
Rilke in Spain and Beyond
Gebser’s Origin
Rilke counts as a point of departure—even origin—for Gebser himself.
Gebser first articulates the kernel of his integral vision in Rilke in Spain. In
that book, Gebser suggests that Rilke’s linked experiences of the Spanish
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landscape and El Greco’s paintings proved vital to his eventual completion
of the Duino Elegies, and thus constituted a crucial turning point in the
poet’s life-work. Rilke in Spain offers Gebser’s interpretation of the gist of
that breakthrough, adumbrating Gebser’s own vision of an aperspectival
consciousness.
In this presentation, I aim both to rehearse the essence of Gebser’s
insightful reading of Rilke, and to amplify it by way of relevant commentary on the Duino Elegies and their companion work, Rilke’s Sonnets to
Orpheus. I endeavor to do so by employing Gebser’s mature formulations of the structures of consciousness to illuminate defining aspects of
Rilke’s late poetic masterpieces, and vice versa—for Rilke’s late poetry is
not only a springboard for Gebser’s vision of aperspectival consciousness,
but a powerful exemplification of it. More specifically, I suggest that Rilke’s Duino Elegies can be understood as a work one dimension of which
self-consciously represents the apogee of the deficient mode of Gebser’s
mental consciousness-structure, dramatically enacting its negative consequences with such intensity of force and insight that the poem simultaneously prepares (and to some degree performs) a leap to a whole different
mode of consciousness. Consequently, Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus—the
poet’s last great masterpiece—may be understood to flow from and fully
embody a new more integral mode of consciousness. I will draw upon my
own recently published translation of the Sonnets to aid the interpretive
enterprise, which will engage, too, the topic of the formative role of the
language of poetry in the emergence and cultivation of integral vision.
Daniel Joseph Polikoff, PhD: I am a poet, scholar, translator
and teacher whose scholarly work has revolved largely around Rilke
and the interpretation of this poet’s work in the light of depth-psychological and esoteric tradition. I received my Ph.D. in Comparative
Literature from Cornell University and my Diploma in Waldorf Education from Rudolf Steiner College. I have taught literature in three
Waldorf High Schools, and (more recently) courses in Rilke, alchemy
and depth psychology at Sonoma State University and CIIS. I have
lectured on Rilke scores of times over the last twenty-some-odd years
at venues such as the San Francisco Jung Institute, CIIS, the Napa
Valley Writer’s Conference, and (in German) sessions of the International Rilke Society in Europe and the United States. In addition to
two full-length collections of poetry and many poems published in
literary journals, I have published two book-length translations in28
cluding my just published translation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus,
as well as (in 2011) a seven-hundred page book on Rilke titled In the
Image of Orpheus: Rilke—A Soul History, which includes an entire
chapter on Rilke’s Spanish/El Greco experience. I have only recently “discovered” Gebser and have been deeply moved to find such a
profound and comprehensive thinker whose vision originates in the
poetic ground of being, and whose understanding of Rilke resonates
with my own.
The Integral Skeptic
Gebser and Metaphysics
‘For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon
our views about them’.—Thich Nhat Hanh
Orienting question: In what ways might Gebser’s work be legitimately
criticized? I am challenging a metaphysical interpretation, or reading of
Gebser, and I think there is some peripheral, at least, metaphysics in The
Ever-present Origin (EPO). Did Gebser intentionally add or reinforce/renew metaphysics? (The only reference to metaphysics in EPO is to metaphysical literature.) What he does focus on is idealism (and its contrasting
duality, materialism). Idealism is the Platonic sense that there is some pure
form (primal image). Gebser says both idealism and materialism miss the
“sense” of mythic soul through its symbolization in which both aspects of
the polarity must be appreciated, EPO, 212). Idealists and materialists (or
today “meaning in people” or “meaning in the world”) take turns being on
top, but miss the fulcrum on which they teeter (EPO, 213). “…the primal
image and its likeness are no longer a polarity, but a duality ‘united’ in the
idea, the third component, the synthesis above both” (EPO 257). Perhaps
it is this ideal third component that is above, rather than concrete and
grounded, as in integral. This is also the language of phenomenological
philosophers such Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.
There is certainly a German sense of order in Gebser’s major work,
of ordering the chaos of the cosmos, giving a nice chart of descriptors.
Phenomenologically he is describing the invariants as he and others have
known them, he is exploring the field of civilizational categories of experience, civilizational-universal phenomena. But his attempt to order
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and provide invariants gives an opening for linear chartist/with elaborate
graphs of re-presented and idealized experience (Wilber).
The paper will sketch out briefly what metaphysics meant for the
ancients, for the heyday of philosophy, and for moderns beginning with
Nietzsche—though Nietzsche carefully lays the ground for an integral
awareness that is multi-performative, an field that integrates the multiple
perspectives that he observes in the modern world.
I will deal briefly with terms related to metaphysics, such as ideology—where it begins and its relation to metaphysics. This will be, for the
most part, a phenomenological sense of metaphysics, how it might be
grounded, or not, in lived experience and the lived world—the mental
-rational (perhaps the efficient mental) and cosmic integral. But I also
want to contrast the rational-mental with recent research into the mythic.
The Singer of Tales (Alfred B. Lord), would suggest that the oral tradition
of mythic awareness—not to nail this down as some-thing, a consciousness—was an excellent foil for understanding the metaphysical as a development of rational awareness. I have found The Singer of Tales profound
in its comparative distinctions between the mythic oral mode and the rational literate. Lord presents evidence for what he calls the “oral narrative
poet”, a phenomenal description of the everpresent creative per-(multi)
formance of the narrative poet. Then he applies it to Homer to show that
his was not a literate work but a truly oral, creative storytelling.
Metaphysics was then, for Gebser, the ideal bridge for the duality of
the mental, and particularly the deficient rational. I think his intent was
to surpass the ideal of metaphysics, but maybe not—this is the challenge
for an integral skeptic.
Michael W. Purdy, PhD (Ohio University; MA Kansas State; BS
SUNY) is Emeritus Professor, College of Arts and Sciences, Governors
State University (il). He is co–editor with Deborah Borisoff (NYU) of
Listening in Everyday Life: A Personal and Professional Approach (2nd
ed.), University Press. He has authored articles for the International
Journal of Listening, and Integrative Explorations Journal (and was editor), among others. His publications include: ‘Listening and Qualitative Research’, in Listening and Human Communication in the 21st
Century (Blackwell, 2009); ‘Listening and the Non–Technologized
Self ’ in Cultura De Guatemala (U. Landivar, Guatemala City) and
‘Transparency and communication: Dialogue in financial reporting
and media communication’ in Communication, Comparative Cultures
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and Civilizations (Hampton, 2008). He has two articles appearing in
The International Journal of Listening in 2015. His interest in listening
and dialogical communication has integrated his writing across various areas from listening and media to intercultural communication
and philosophy.
The Interrupted Irruption of Time
Towards an Integral Cosmology,
with Help From Bergson and Whitehead
Gebser suggests that the world-constituting reality of time first irrupted into Western consciousness with the publication in 1905 of Einstein’s
special theory of relativity. This was the first indication of an emerging
mutation from the three-dimensional, Copernican world of the mental
structure into the four-dimensional world of the integral structure. My
presentation will critically examine Einstein’s role in this evolutionary initiation by situating his concept of a space-time continuum within its early
20th century context. While Einstein’s relativity theory played a central
role in the 20th century revolution in physics, revisiting the debates he
was engaged in with thinkers like Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead reveal that his perception of time was still obscured by the residue of
the mental structure’s spatializing tendency. As Gebser remarked, we are
“compelled to become fully conscious of time—the new component—not
just as a physical-geometric fourth dimension but in its full complexity”
(EPO, 288, 352). During his controversial debate with Bergson in Paris in
1922, Einstein argued that the former’s understanding of time as “creative
evolution” was merely the subjective fantasy of an artist, and that, as a
hard-nosed scientist, he was concerned only with the real, objective time
made manifest by the geometrical reasoning of relativity theory. Bergson,
for his part, argued that Einstein had mistaken a particular way of measuring time (i.e., clock-time) for time itself. Whitehead’s meeting with
Einstein shortly after this debate with Bergson, though not as public, was
no less significant. Whitehead similarly argued that the philosophical implications of Einstein’s brilliant scientific theory must be saved from Einstein’s faulty interpretation. My presentation will review these early 20th
century debates about the nature of time in light of Gebser’s prophetic
announcement of the birth of a new structure of consciousness. More
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than a century after Einstein’s theory was published, mainstream scientific
cosmology still has not fully integrated the immeasurably creative character of qualitative time. I will argue that Bergson and Whitehead’s largely
neglected critiques and reconstructions of relativity theory help show the
way towards the concrete realization of Gebser’s integral structure.
Matthew David Segall, ABD, is a doctoral candidate in the
Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. His dissertation focuses on the role of imagination in the philosophy of nature, especially as exemplified in the work of Alfred North Whitehead
and Friedrich Schelling. He has published journal articles and books
on a wide range of topics including ecology, economics, the interplay
of science and myth, and the significance of psychedelics for participatory theory. He blogs regularly about these and other cosmic topics
at footnotes2plato.com.
Approaching the Origin
The Diaphonous Body
and Classical Chinese Medicine
The Classical texts of Chinese Medicine, especially the Su Wen, Ling shu
and the Warring States period Shang Han Lun, describe the highest aspiration of the physician as perceiving the manifestation of phenomena
from incipient or unseen states taking form in the world and the body.
Traditionally Yin and Yang, the dark and light, were the principal means
for the perception of this unfolding. Underlying the application of these
concepts to medicine is the Han and pre-Han corpus of proto-Daoist philosophy, as articulated in the Yi Jing, Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi. Applying
Gebser’s concept of Diaphany as that which “renders Yin as well as Yang
transparent or diaphanous” creates a means not for seeing Yin/Yang in the
world, but rather viewing the world through Yin/Yang. Indeed, even this
view can be transcended when directly perceiving Yin/Yang as the very
breathing of the cosmos, dissolving dualities into the constant ebb and
flow of the continuum that invites one into the springing forth of the
origin in our embedded consciousness. This is the leap that both returns
one to the origins of Chinese medicine, and orients one to the immediate,
ever-present emerging origin itself.
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Following close examination of the principles underlying Classical
Chinese medicine, especially through the dynamic between three Yin and
three Yang (pivoting, opening, and closing through bian and hua) this
presentation will explore correlations between the organizing principles of
Chinese applied philosophy (medicine), and Gebser’s philosophy of the
origin. I will demonstrate how conceptions of the body in Chinese medicine, with its view of myriad pathways of animation, illustrate the relational, rhizomic unfolding of physiology and consciousness alike. In so doing,
I will be making a case for Chinese medicine as a vehicle for embodying
the emergence of an integral aperspectival consciousness.
Brandt Stickley, MS, LAc is an Assistant Professor in the School
of Classical Chinese Medicine at the National College of Natural
Medicine (NCNM) in Portland, Oregon and Visiting Faculty at Pacific Rim College and Dragon Rises College of Oriental Medicine.
He received his BA from Cornell University, and MS from the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine. He teaches a series of
courses in Classical Chinese Medical Psychology, Pathology, and traditional mentorship, and is active in the formation of the Integrative
Mental Health program at NCNM. He is Director of Acupuncture at
Outside In (Portland), as well as maintaining a private practice, writing, and travelling to teach Shen-Hammer Pulse Diagnosis.
Towards a Geometry of the Aperspectival World
Throughout The Ever-Present Origin, Jean Gebser refers to projective,
non-Euclidean geometry as a manifestation of an emerging, integral
consciousness. A significant development in the history of mathematical
thought, projective geometry has remained largely a field explored only by
trained mathematicians, and has yet to find its way into wider spheres of
culture. Since geometric conceptions are fundamental to our current understanding of space, time, and the forces that work within them, if we are
to free ourselves from a perspectival, rational structure, we must reconsider
the geometric premises such a structure is built upon.
Projective geometry gives us that possibility. In general, it can be seen,
not as a study of forms and their properties, but of the processes and lawful relationships out of which all forms emerge. These processes necessitate
that we participate, with our thinking, in order to grasp them. To study,
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or rather, do projective geometry is to recreate these lawful relationships in
our imagination. As we do this, we can become aware of how our Euclidean/Cartesian conception of space arises out of our projection of a fixed
perspective, a perspective which assumes a framework by which measurability is possible. In so doing, we free ourselves from this perspective, and
instead attend to that which is true (invariant) regardless of perspective.
In a geometric sense, the threshold of the rational, measurable world
is infinity. We have mostly been taught to think there is nothing there
(parallel lines shall never intersect, so sayeth the commandment), nor anything beyond. Projective geometry, having well established the veracity of
infinite elements (point, line, and plane), is thus a pathway by which we
can supersede the rational boundaries, while still preserving the quality of
mathematical clarity, that crowning achievement of the mental structure
of consciousness.
By taking the audience on a participatory journey into the archetypal
processes of geometry, this presentation will demonstrate how the practice
of geometry can be a potent means of becoming aware, and integrating
the mental structure.
Jeremy Strawn just earned an MA in Philosophy, Cosmology, and
Consciousness at CIIS, his research being the intersection of projective
geometry and the evolution of consciousness. He has spent the greater part of his working life either teaching, mostly high school science
and math, or farming. He also earned a BS in Biology from Humboldt State University, becoming familiar with the modern scientific
paradigm so as to better effect its usurpation. His working hypothesis
is that a revolution in our geometric imagination is indispensable to
achieving integrality, and is currently writing an experiential guide
with that purpose in mind. He resides in rural Sonoma County, California, and is currently enthralled with the Inklings.
Holotropic Breathwork and Jean Gebser’s
Analysis of Miracles at Lourdes
This paper intends to explore the similarities and differences between Holotropic Breathwork and Jean Gebser’s description and analysis of miracles
at Lourdes (EPO, pp. 162-165). “The power which was individually lacking
in the afflicted hands flows from the healthy hands with which they are
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united.” “When the suppliant reemerges from the depths of meditation
and returns to his rational wakeful consciousness, he brings along from
the magic depths his recovery and health.” Is there a non-material medium through which this transfer happens? Some candidates might be the
Tibetan Bardo, the Catholic Purgatory, Robert Monroe’s Locale II, Jung’s
Collective Unconscious, and Teilhard de Chardin’s Noosphere. Assuming
that such a medium is an envelope of the Earth and came into existence
during the evolution of the planet, I will contextualize Gebser’s mutations
of consciousness in Teilhard’s evolution of consciousness throughout geologic time and speculate when the medium began.
With this “big picture” view in mind, I would like to ask why healing
is necessary in the first place. A new born baby is the image of pure innocence. When does this new child need healing? A physically defective hand
needs physical healing, but that kind of healing doesn’t seem to be what
Stanislav Grof had in mind when coined the neologism ‘holotropic’, that
is, tending towards wholeness. And, finally, is healing an individual issue
or is it a collective phenomenon? Using Teilhard’s word, does the noosphere need healing? To help answer that question I will discuss Teilhard’s
view that energy has tangential and radial components and that an Omega
point is drawing the noosphere to convergence.
Peter Weston, MS, is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Mathematics Department at UMass Lowell, teaching primarily Calculus
II and III. He began his career in education teaching mathematics
and coaching basketball for twelve years at the high school level. After earning a Master’s degree he taught Computer Science for twenty-five years at the college level. At the age of eighteen he entered the
Xaverian Brothers, a lay Catholic teaching congregation, where for
twelve years he pursued his interest in spirituality. His favorite author
is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, who transformed Christianity for
him. He began a PhD program at Saybrook University in 2005 where
he encountered Jean Gebser and The Ever-Present Origin in a Nature
of Consciousness course. He has participated in over fifty Holotropic
Breathwork sessions over the past nine years. He recently founded
The NouSchool, a non-profit seeking to support self knowledge and
creativity in young adults.
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We are Eternally Chinese
Mythic Identity in Outbound Chinese
Exchange Students
This paper applies ethnographic methods to student writings in university
classes taught in the People’s Republic of China in 2014 to understand
the construction and performance of personal and national identity. The
study applies Gebser’s Consciousness Structures to an analysis of 90 student papers to understand how the Chinese students’ expressed personal
and national identity dwells largely in the magical and mythical realms.
S. Dave Zuckerman, PhD (University of Oklahoma, 2003) is
Professor of Communication Studies at California State University,
Sacramento, and a past-President of the International Jean Gebser
Society. Dave has taught in the US, Canada, Germany, Belgium,
China, and, as a Fulbright Scholar, in Finland in 2013. Dave Zuckerman teaches in the areas of terrorism, international communication,
and intercultural communication, and is co-author, along with Eric
Kramer and Clark Callahan, of a Gebser-based textbook in intercultural communication. Dave has a healthy consulting practice, dealing with business and government clients around the world, and has
presented more than sixty papers and presentations around the globe
over the past fifteen years.
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