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Approaching the World of Ideas
And so we begin this year a journey together that is nothing less
than astonishing and breathtaking in its capacity to evoke wonder
as we study the history of ideas and how they have changed the
world and how we view ourselves. I think it is good to start the
beginning of this year with an overview of how I teach and the
approach I will be taking to this wonderful world of ideas it is my
privilege to share with you this year. First, what I am most
interested in is wisdom. That is what philosophy means after all,
and it is what I look for and try to present. It is important to state
this up front because while I try to bring a balanced approach to
my work, I will often fail because a balanced approach is a critical
approach and I hate to criticize what I love! Meaning, I love the
philosophers and ideas we will study and so I emphasize how
amazing they are and I don’t always do a good job showing where
they failed. However, I am somewhat saved by the fact that in a
sense philosophy is a critical task by its very nature. Why?
Because every one we will study is trying to improve on and
answer the thinkers who have gone before. But this improvement
can be done from a place of arrogance (“How could they possibly
think that?”) or from a place of appreciation (“Oh, now I can
understand why they thought that way at that time”). I try to teach
from a place of appreciation.
Background
During the last week of Gentrain last May I gave a lecture on my
favorite philosophy that is called Integral Philosophy and several
people mentioned that they would appreciate it if I did something
earlier in the year rather than in the last week and, well, I can’t do
it much earlier than today, my first lecture. So here I go! Today I
want to talk about the evolution of human consciousness, but I will
do it in such a way that I will be able to present at the same time an
integral approach to the philosophy and religion of the people’s
and cultures we will study. I can do this because Integral
Philosophy is developmental. And another way of talking about
developmental is to talk about evolution. In other words, the
universe itself seems to be developing. One aspect of this universe
is human psychology. Integral philosophy takes a large part of its
approach to philosophical ideas from the studies of developmental
psychology.
Developmental psychology has learned that every child who is
able to grow to maturity safely and in a wholesome way passes
through certain distinct and recognizable stages. The interesting
thing is that when this knowledge became known, anthropologists
started noticing that humans as a whole seem to have passed
through these same stages historically. In other words, every child
in the process of growing up recapitulates the entire human
journey! And so this means we can gain insight into the nature of
philosophical ideas form the study of both psychology and
anthropology.
Another way of looking at this is to realize that over great periods
of time humans have changed. And I don’t mean historical time in
the sense of written history. Because in that amount of time we
have not changed that much. But we have changed and one of the
first signs of that change was the birth and rapid growth of
philosophy. That is a sign of change in human consciousness. At
one point there does not seem to be much philosophical thought
and then all of a sudden there it is! What happened? I would like to
suggest that something changed in human consciousness that is
historically as recognizable as a change a twoyear old makes
when it can suddenly do something that was totally impossible the
day before. Another way of looking at this is to say that philosophy
is a way of viewing the world. For example, it puts much stress on
viewing the world rationally and even develops rules of logic to
make thinking clear and precise. But there are other ways to view
the world. Today I want to take us on a rapid journey from the
beginning until the birth of rationality as seen in philosophy. And
then for the rest of this course we will be looking at a much smaller
span of time, but fascinating because we have documentation to
help us understand what was happening. In the process I hope you
will catch on to how you can approach the world of ideas from an
integral perspective.
The Big Bang
When I said I wanted to start with the beginning I meant the very
beginning. Let’s start with the Big Bang, approximately 14 billion
years ago. “When our universe first came into being, all of space
was filled with subatomic particles. Through the force of gravity
and over millions of years, these congealed into atoms of
hydrogen, filling space with that gas. At that time, hydrogen was
the only gas that existed. Gravity pulled together clouds of
hydrogen, and caused them to collapse into themselves and
become very hot from the pressure. This heat “ignited” these
clouds with the fire of nuclear fusion, and stars were formed.
“Deep within the heart of one of those early stars, nuclear fusion
reactions caused two hydrogen atoms to combine into a helium
atom, producing the second element in existence and releasing
huge amounts of heat and light from the atomic reaction. The
pressures were so great that the process didn’t stop there. Atoms of
helium burned/fused into larger and heavier atoms, and every
element we know of in the periodic table eventually came to fill
the core of the stariron, carbon, gold, boron, oxygen, and the
dozens of others.
“As this process continued, the core became heavy with these new
elements and began to cool, causing the color of the star to shift
toward red, and the outer edges of the star to expand. Over the next
few hundred million years, the star continued to balloon until a
critical point was reached where it no longer could hold itself
together, and it exploded, spewing the matter created in its core out
over billions of miles of space and destroying almost everything
within its immediate vicinity. This process is called a supernova,
and signals the death of a star.
“This is where all the matter of our world (except hydrogen) came
from: it was created in the heart of a star. Not only that, the star
had to die for those elements to reach us.
“After the star exploded, some of the matter it threw out into space
was drawn together by the force of gravity and formed huge clods
of physical material. The larger of these became what we call
planets, and they began the process of cooling down (our Earth
took about five billion years). Flying through space, most were
captured by the gravitational pull of another, stillliving and
burning star, and began to orbit their new host. From their new
sun, they derived warmth, which in the case of the earth drove the
process of photosynthesis and led to the life we see around us, as
the elements created in the death of a fardistant star were drawn
up into plant and animal matter.
“[Have you ever wanted to touch a star?] Look around and realize,
as you do, that everything you see is matter that was created in the
heart of a star, was blown out into black, empty space when that
star died, and has come to be accumulated here as what we call
planet Earth and everything on and in it. Not only is the matter
around you starstuff, but you are, too. There is not a single cell in
your body that is not made of matter formed in the heart, and then
the death, of a distant and nowextinct star (The Last Hours of
Ancient Sunlight, pp. 261263).”
So we have found ourselves on a planet with life, both plant and
animal. Now we must pick up the story and see what we can
understand about human development and the beginning of
conscious, and thus thoughtful, life.
Human Evolution
No one is sure when humans first distinguished themselves as self
conscious beings, but we have the gist of a general story. And it
seems to me that if the history of 14 billion years is a history of
development and evolution throughout the universe then evolution
must exist in humans, which means that human cultures must also
evolve. Is there any evidence for this? First we had insensate and
lifeless atoms and then vegetal life, then simple animal forms, and
then higher animal forms. Finally about 5 million years ago we
have the first hominids.
Jean Gebser writes of four general stages that he called archaic,
magic, mythic, and mental/rational. Other people call them by
other names and you can divide these stages up in any number of
ways. What we call them is now so important as the fact that they
exist and can be studied and so I want to briefly look at these
stages because it will help us understand the story we will be
telling this year in Gentrain.
The archaic stage is the stage of our earliest human ancestors. This
is where people were mainly concerned with survival and lived as
hunters and gatherers. Instincts are very much alive as they are in
animals. A distinct self is barely awakened or sustained. Rather
than a focus on the individual there is a focus on the small group.
Archaic men and women lived their lives “immersed in the
subconscious realms of nature and body and initially experienced
themselves as indistinguishable from the world that had already
evolved to that point. People’s worldnature, matter, vegetable life
and animal bodyand people’s self were basically undifferentiated,
embedded fused and confused.
“With self and other confused, with inner experience and external
natural world undifferentiated, with no true capacity for true
mental reflection or verbal representation, this whole period must
have been an experience of a time before time, a story before
historywith no anxieties, no real comprehension of death and thus
no existential fears. This archaic structure is especially evident in
the universal myths of a Garden of Eden, of a time before the “fall”
into separation and knowledge and reflection, a time of innocence”
(Up From Eden, pp. 2223).
Now you will notice that this is the same thing that all babies have
to go through as they grow up. They are literally one with their
mothers and even after birth it takes awhile for babies to
distinguish their mothers from themselves. They seemed merged
with their world and we can watch in fascination as consciousness
and awareness grow and eventually become selfconscious. Some
of you might be able to recall when you first thought of yourself as
yourself!
Archaic folks came to inhabit our planet three to six million years
ago and it may very well be that they are our ancestors until about
200,000 years ago. “This dawn period represents the great
transition from mammals in general to men and women in
particular, and stand further as the great subconscious ground out
of which the ego would eventually emerge” (Up From Eden, p.
28). This was the time of stone and bone tools and eventually the
use of fire.
The magic stage is the next stage and it started about 200,000 years
ago. “As individual humans began to emerge from archaic
consciousness consider what they faced: For one, they were
beginning to awaken to their own separate existence, with all the
potentials and all the perils therein. Humans began to awaken to
his vulnerability, his finiteness, and his incompleteness. The self
was now separate from the natural world. Thus there arose,
sometime in the dim past of prehistory, the awakening of a
defended selfinhere versus the worldoutthere. At this early
stage, then, although the self is distinguished from the natural
environment, it remains magically intermingled with it. The
logical, verbal, and conceptual mind is not yet developed. Since
the mind is not yet developed, it does not have the capacity to
differentiate itself from the body. The self is a bodyself” (Up
From Eden, pp. 4042).
Everything is interconnected and this leads to the magical view of
the world. People in a magical world “very commonly believe that
between the object and the image of it there is a real connection
and that it is accordingly possible to communicate an impression to
the original object through the copy or image” (Up From Eden, p.
48). Thus you can draw a picture of an animal and stab the picture
before a hunt and then you will be able to kill the animal during the
hunt. This is also a stage we see in young children. It is a time
when the images of our dreams seem as real to us as the rest of our
lives, sometimes more real. This time of magic consciousness
lasted until about 12, 000 years ago, when the next stage, the
mythic, began.
The mythic stage coincides with one of the most significant
changes ever to occur to humans and this was the birth of
agriculture and the world of civilization that we recognize and
where we really pick up the story here in Gentrain. And of course
it takes these early mythic folks thousands of years to develop
what we recognize today, but in terms of cosmic history it is a
blink of the eye before the great civilizations of the ancient world
in Sumer and Egypt find their way into the history books.
With the growth of consciousness came an increased awareness of
time and of death. Buying time was a way to avoid death and
planning for a future was a way of buying time. And what held
these groups of people together. Stories! Stories was how people
made sense of their world and found answers to questions about
where they came from and where they were going. Stories of a
common creator, for example, allowed small tribes that may have
been wary of each other to come together into larger groups and
build the great civilizations of the ancient world. This was not
always a smooth process and we have a record of this in the Bible
as the 12 tribes of Israel try to unite into one larger country with a
shared story of rescue from slavery in Egypt. If you know that
story then you will know that the process is not an easy one. I will
be talking more about this mythological process next week so I
don’t want to say too much about it today. And I will be talking for
the rest of the year about the last stage, the mental/rational so I will
not say too much about it either except to introduce it.
If the mythic stage started about 12,000 years ago the mental stage
started about 3,000 years ago and really came into its own during
the Axial Age (another upcoming lecture). What is this age? It is a
virtual explosion of mental and cultural consciousness, “infinitely
richer and more sophisticated than any of its predecessors. Starting
around the sixth century BCE, we have the extraordinary
emergence of the “axial sages”Zoroaster, Buddha, Socrates and
Plato, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Moseswhose insights clearly showed”
(The Eye of Spirit, p. 61) that humans were on the verge of yet
another momentous change in consciousness. From the mythic
world we enter the rational world, the world of philosophy and
ideas, the world we will explore for the next 9 months!
And so we conclude a 14 billion year journey from the Big Bang to
our modern world. An integral approach will embrace it all and
seek to understand it as a most vast and amazing drama, a mystery
drama, the mystery of mysteries. And philosophy is one attempt to
engage with this mystery that we all find ourselves involved in, the
mystery of life and its meaning. I am so pleased to share this
journey with you again this year.