with Jeremy D Johnson
– Event Note –
The adage that “how we shout into the woods is how the echo will sound” is undoubtedly accurate—and the woods are the world. Everything that happens to us, then, is only the answer and echo of what and how we ourselves are. And the answer will be an integral answer only if we have approached the integral in ourselves.
Jean Gebser
Join an online cohort exploring the structures of consciousness, a laboratory in living the “poetics of the future."
When we move from abstraction to embodiment, from idea to realization, a creative process is taking place in us, but it is also taking place with the world; a refashioning of self-and-world. To move from the possible to the actual, to embody a new mode of being and thinking in daily life — isn’t this intention behind an integral philosophy? To transform humanity’s relationship with the whole? How might we, as individuals, achieve this? How does one live integrally in daily life?
More poignantly for this moment: how do we live this question of integrality during the heavy now of planetary crisis?
This year, many integral practitioners and scholars have felt this inquiry acutely. They recognize something important about this historical moment: that even if we don’t consciously live this question, the question is already living us in manifold ways.
The very conditions of the planet seem to be asking, from all sides: how do you, human beings, how do you wish to participate in the reality of the planetary? How do you relate to the Other, to which you find your fates entangled? Because you are becoming planetary whether or not you wish it or are ready for it. New senses emerge, new modes of thinking and time must be brought forth in you. So how will you participate?
Each step, each breath, in our lives is an invitation to become, to follow new lines of flight and pathways of creative participation, to re-structure our sense-making with such “big questions,” which even in the midst of a “meta-crisis" must also be lived and not merely thought in the subtlest, most intimate of ways; our being-in-the-world and our breathing, dreaming, waking rhythms, our inhabiting time.
In other words, in order to participate in this planetary reality — and not merely think about it — we must learn to inhabit the radical present, the present as the poetics of the future.
Inhabiting Time with an Integral Phenomenology
This course is designed to be an exploratory praxis and sense-making cohort oriented around the integral phenomenology expressed by German-Swiss philosopher and intellectual mystic Jean Gebser (1905-1973), and influenced by the extended “tradition" of the integral milieu (Sri Aurobindo, Mirra Alfassa, Peter Kropotkin, Teilhard de Chardin, William Irwin Thompson and Ken Wilber).
Drawing primarily on an experiential investigation of the “structures of consciousness” (the archaic, magic, mythic, mental, integral), participants will work with a sense-making praxis intended to cohere and integrate — to "render transparent” — the history of consciousness as it lives in them.
Phenomenological exercises, offered in the accompanying course guidebook and pre-recorded lessons, will invite participants to investigate their own lived phenomenology (how the world is experienced through their own senses).
According to Gebser, our consciousness holds a multiplicity of sense-making expressions. We can inhabit time and world magically, mythically, mentally, and, as participants will hopefully cohere: integrally in the spiritual present.
Through developing an experiential, self-directed praxis of dynamic oscillation and fluidity between the complementary structures of consciousness, the intention behind this course is to invite a certain openness — a radiant clarity and equanimity — as a precondition to an integral consciousness in daily life. To become radically present to the poetics of planetary becoming.
Join your instructor, Jeremy D Johnson, author of Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness and the forthcoming Fragments of an Integral Future: Essays on Reclaiming Time, Climate Poetics and Planetary Thinking for this online intensive and cohort.
This course will offer a guidebook/syllabus, five pre-recorded lesson modules, and seven live Zoom calls with featured guests, exploring our innate integrality and cohering the emergent integral ontology—the poetics of the future in the spiritual present.
All work, the genuine work which we must achieve, is that which is most difficult and painful: the work on ourselves.
Jean Gebser
